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Literary Review
In Conversation
Shaped by politics
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Nayantara Sahgal on how her sensibility was shaped by the experience of growing up in the Nehru family during the freedom struggle. RAJNISH WATTAS
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Photo: V.V. Krishnan
Ringside view: Nayantara Sahgal.
On a cold December night in Chandigarh, I am ushered into a book-lined study with a crackling logwood fire. Nayantara Sahgal, gracious and stately, dressed in a Kashmiri firhan, greets me warmly. We are at her house in Chandigarh. Her famous maternal uncle, Jawaharlal Nehru, named it Anokha while on a visit. Its unique design now belongs to Chandigarh’s heritage as it was designed by French architect Pierre Jeanneret, Le Corbusier’s close associate .
Sahgal has published nine novels and eight works of non-fiction. One of the first Indian writers in English to make a mark on an international readership, she won the Commonwealth Prize (Eurasia) in 1986 for Plans for Departure, while Rich Like Us won the Sinclair Fiction Prize in 1985 and the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1986, besides many other accolades. Born into the “first family” of Indian politics — the Nehrus — Sahgal saw “at firsthand India’s emergence as an independent nation under the Prime Minister-ship of Jawaharlal Nehru and her cousin Indira Gandhi.” As the voice of intellectual uprightness, she has also been the vice-president of People’s Union For Civil Liberties (PUCL).
Nayantara Sahgal has recently been in the news with the re-launch of her first book Prison and Chocolate Cake along with her colonial period novel Mistaken Identity. She has also written an essay in the latest Ruskin Bond-edited anthology of writings on Doon valley, Once upon a Time, an intimate recall of her Doon days. Excerpts…
How do you feel about the re-launch of your first book Prison and Chocolate Cake along with Mistaken Identity?
I am glad Harper Collins chose these two books to launch their perennial series in India. I wrote Prison and Chocolate Cake because I didn’t want the special magic of that time to disappear without a trace. I also felt I owed it to my three parents — the third being my uncle, Jawaharlal Nehru — to recapture this whole experience and keep it alive rather than just let it become an event in a history book. For readers today, especially the young, it’s remembering the love and laughter and high ideals that went into my parents’ contribution to the non-violent fight for freedom. The other book, Mistaken Identity, is about many things: the conspiracy trials of the 1920s, the decadent zamindari system in the U.P… I think of it as an offering to my Hindu-Muslim culture, and I think it has a growing relevance in the present climate of all kinds of religious madness.
Your childhood years were spent in Allahabad’s historic Anand Bhavan, in the Nehru family fold. Any memorable episode you would like to recall?
For a child, the most memorable episodes were frequent partings from my parents, which had to be cheerful as the family code did not permit us to cry in front of the police who came to arrest our parents. As memorable were releases from prison and the ecstasy of being together again.
You published your first book in your twenties; how did it come about? And who were the writers that inspired you then?
I had written Prison and Chocolate Cake for family and friends and had not thought of publication but my mother showed it to an agent in America and it was immediately accepted by Knopf and by Gollancz in London. Independence and the end of empire were fairly recent events and there was also great interest in the book for its human portrayal of Gandhi and Nehru, and the family’s part in India’s modern history.
No particular writer influenced my writing when I first began. At the time, my “influence” came from the atmosphere around me, and books like my uncle’s Glimpses of World History and his autobiography, because they gave me an exciting alternative view of the world, quite different from what I was taught in school. Later, my fiction grew out of the historical and political consciousness shaped by these, and the novels that moved me most were touched by a similar sensibility — Graham Greene’s, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s and Isabel Allende’s, among others.
Most of your books have a political/social upheaval as a backdrop…
My novels have political backgrounds because politics happened to be my natural material. It was not something “out there”, happening in the country. It affected our family life at home.
Your book Storm in Chandigarh is a fascinating account of the world’s biggest experiment in architecture; and also has superb descriptions of the new architectural idiom the city was trying to create. Yet, nearly six decades after its inception, it has rarely featured as a backdrop or inspired any other major literary engagement. Why?
Chandigarh inspired me because my husband and I were building a house there when it was growing as the new capital of Punjab; also because — at a personal level — my marriage started coming apart on the Chandigarh scene, and both these happenings produced the novel. You ask why Chandigarh hasn’t inspired other novels, as have Lucknow and Kolkata? These two cities have old histories and cultures. They have a “past”. Chandigarh as yet has no past in the sense of history.
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