Gita Mehta (née Patnaik; 12 December 1943 – 16 September 2023) was an Indian-American[1] writer and documentary filmmaker.

[5][9] Mehta's first book, Karma Cola (1979), took a shot at the western audience that believed that they could obtain instant spiritual enlightenment by going to India and finding a guru.

In Raj (1989), a fictional work, Mehta focused on the story of a princess of two Indian princely states.

Her second fictional work, A River Sutra (1993), was a collection of short stories that interpreted Indian life for a western audience.

[8][12] Speaking about her work in an interview with Publishers Weekly, she said: "I wanted to make modern India accessible to Westerners and to a whole generation of Indians who have no idea what happened 25 years before they were born.