|
Literary Review
RETROSPECT
Fighting for a cause
NIMI KURIAN
|
Nayantara Sahgal’s books have a subtlety and sensitivity that comes with practice.
|
Prison and Chocolate Cake; Mistaken Identity; Nayantara Sahgal; HarperCollins; Rs. 295 each.
“Our earliest association with politics was far from unpleasant. One day, when I was about three years old, we had chocolate cake for tea. ... It was a rich, dark cake, chocolate through and through, with chocolate swirls on top. While we were at tea, a group of policemen arrived at the house. When Lekha asked why they had come, Mummie explained that they had come to take Papu to prison, but that it was nothing to worry about, that he wanted to go. So we kissed him goodbye and watched him leave, talking cheerfully to the policemen. We ate our chocolate cake and in our infant minds prison became in some mysterious way associated with chocolate cake.”
This excerpt from Nayantara Sahgal’s Prison and Chocolate Cake, published in 1954 is autobiographical, giving the reader a glimpse of a favoured life. A member of India’s first family, her book takes you through the hig
hs and lows of their lives. Prison for them is no mean event. It is an achievement, a statement of purpose.
Sahgal’s uncle was Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister and Indira Gandhi her cousin. Her mother Vijayalakshmi Pandit was India’s first woman cabinet minister, the world’s first woman ambassador and the first woman president of the United Nations General Assembly, and later governor of Maharashtra.
An enlightening incident is recorded of her first days at Woodstock. Word gets around that her parents are in jail. An eight-year-old classmate questions her about whether her parents are in jail. While she is still thinking of an answer he continues, “What for? Did they steal something?” She is shocked by the question, so far removed is she from the common understanding of why a person is sent to prison!
Privileged life
Meeting Paul Robeson, Hellen Keller, Pearl Buck and Dorothy Norman, spending time with them, chatting with them are narrated with a casualness that only comes with privilege. “Dorothy’s gracious home became home to us…” she writes.
In the very centre of the freedom movement, patriotism or fighting for a cause comes naturally. Sahgal says, she, her sisters and her parents wore only khadi and in the evening when they went for walks they also wore little Gandhi caps. Naturally, they stood out and they were laughed at too! But Sahgal is not affected. She continues to wear the cap saying, “If mamu can go to jail because of it, I can keep mine on my head!”
The narrator of Mistaken Identity is the son of a zamindar; a man who has no ambition, no inclination to work, never having worked. Landing in Bombay from America, his girlfriend Sylla’s persuasiveness causes him to change plans. He does not go on immediately to Vijaygarh, staying on to act in Sylla’s dramatised version of the Scarlett Letter. Finally, many days later, when he is on board the train to Vijaygarh, he is arrested on a false charge of sedition. Sahgal skilfully weaves the story between the life of the upper class and that of prison. It is the 1930s, and she brings in the revolutionary fervour of the times.
Vivid descriptions
She describes life in prison vividly, bringing to the fore the differences between a European prisoner and an Indian political prisoner. She depicts her female characters as forceful people who do not actually conform to the norms of society. Sylla especially is a rebellious heroine, who throws caution to the winds and is a strong personality to contend with. Written in 1988, Sahgal’s concept of emancipation has reached its heights with Sylla.
Mistaken Identity is a more experienced rendition than Prison… bringing with it a subtlety and sensitivity that comes with practice.
Sahgal lives and works in an elite environment and her characters portray that lifestyle. The conversations are easy and free flowing as she thinks and writes in English. She writes with an ease about politics and political figures that comes from first hand experience. Having spent most of her early years at Anand Bhawan, her ideas and images are shaped by the political events that took place almost in front of her.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
|
