Nayantara Sahgal

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Nayantara Sahgal (born 10 May 1927) is the second of the three daughters born to Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit and her husband Ranjit Sitaram Pandit.

She is a well-regarded writer in the English language. Her fiction deals with India's elite dealing with the crises related to political change. Her father was a successful barrister and classical scholar who translated 'Raj Tarangini' into English from Sanskrit. He died in Lucknow prison jail in 1944, leaving behind his wife Vijaylakshmi and their three daughters Chandralekha, Nayantara and Rita.

Though technically part of the Nehru-Gandhi family, Sahgal has had a reputation for maintaining her independent critical sense. Her independent tone, and her mother's, would lead to both falling out (with quite a thud) with her first cousin Indira Gandhi during the most autocratic phases of Gandhi's time in office in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. Indira Gandhi cancelled Sahgal's scheduled appointment as India's Ambassador to Italy within days of her return to power. Not one to be intimidated, Sahgal would (in 1982) write a scathing, insightful account of Gandhi's rise to power (see below).

Sahgal attended a number of schools as a girl, given the turmoil in the Nehru-Gandhi family during the last years (1935-47) of the Indian freedom struggle, wherein her father would die in prison while Nayantara and her sister Chandralekha were overseas attending college. Her uncle Jawaharlal Nehru too was in and out of prison, as a political prisoner, in the 1930s and 1940s.

Ultimately, she graduated from Woodstock School in the Himalayan hill station of Landour in 1943 and later from Wellesley College (B.A., 1947), which she attended along with her sister Chandralekha, who graduated 2 years earlier in 1945. She has made her home for decades in Dehradun, a town close to Landour where she had been in boarding school (at Woodstock).

Sahgal, who has been married twice, was latterly married to E.N. Mangat Rai, a Punjabi Christian who was a distinguished Indian Civil Service officer. Rai died aged 87 in 2003 in Dehradun, where Sahgal and he had lived for several decades, in the house once owned by her mother.

[edit] Books

Prison and Chocolate Cake (novel; 1954)
From Fear Set Free (novel; 1963)
Time To Be Happy (novel; 1963)
This Time of Morning (novel; 1965)
Storm in Chandigarh (novel; 1969)
Sunlight Surrounds You (novel; 1970) (with Chandralekha Mehta and Rita Dar i.e. her two sisters; this was the daughters' tribute to their mother)
The Day in Shadow (novel; 1971)
Indira Gandhi: Her Road to Power (novel; 1982)
Plans for Departure (novel; 1985)
Rich Like Us (novel; 1985)
Mistaken Identity (novel; 1988)
A Situation in New Delhi (novel; 1989)
Lesser Breeds (novel; 2003)