Newsmaker: Nayantara Sahgal

A powerful voice of dissent from a Nehru

When writer and novelist Nayantara Sahgal, the 88-year-old niece of Jawaharlal Nehru, returned her Sahitya Akademi award to register her dissent against the growing environment of intolerance, it created quite a stir.

Sahgal, who has inherited her uncle's libertarian spirit and identifies herself as a Nehru (not a Nehru-Gandhi), in a public statement titled The Unmaking of India, said she was protesting the blatant murders of liberals Narendra Dabholkar and Govind Pansare, writer Malleshappa Madivalappa Kalburgi and more recently of Mohammad Akhlaq, a poor villager near Delhi, on suspicion of eating beef. She questioned Prime Minister Narendra Modi's silence, "about this reign of terror". She wrote: "We must assume he dare not alienate evil-doers who support his ideology."

Born in 1927 in Allahabad, Sahgal's childhood was spent in the family home, Anand Bhavan, deeply influenced by her uncle. With politics and history underlying most of her works, Sahgal was one of the select authors to be awarded the Sahitya Akademi for English writing for her novel, Rich Like Us, in 1986.

Much of her independent and critical voice can be traced back to her formative years: her father, Ranjit Sitaram Pandit, died in Lucknow as a political prisoner, while her mother, Vijaylakshmi Pandit (she was India's first ambassador to the United Nations), too was in the thick of the freedom struggle.

What contributed to her worldview were the years she spent abroad and in the company of "family friends" like novelist Pearl S Buck, the Roosevelts and painter Frida Kahlo. In Out Of Line: A Literary And Political Biography Of Nayantara Sahgal, her biographer, Ritu Menon, describes Sahgal as quite a head turner in those days.

Sahgal and her mother, Vijaylakshmi Pandit, had an infamous falling out with Indira Gandhi. Extremely critical of the Emergency and of her cousin's attempts to snuff out civil liberties, Sahgal wrote a scathing account in her works Indira Gandhi's Emergence and Style (1978) and Indira Gandhi: Her Road to Power (1982).

Veteran journalist Kuldip Nayar who has known Sahgal for long recalls: "Both of us were in the dog house during the Emergency." Describing her as a "reticent and private person", Nayar says: "When she feels passionately about something, she doesn't hesitate to raise the banner of revolt."

Sahgal's "independent and "feminist" views can be found in her work as well, as in her novel Mistaken Identity.

Among the awards that brought her international recognition were the Sinclair Prize (Britain) for fiction in 1985, and the Commonwealth Writers Award (Eurasia) in 1987. She was also a fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, Washington, from 1981 to 1982.

Along with being an authoritative literary figure, Sahgal was the vice-president of the People's Union for Civil Liberties, or PUCL. It was under her watch that PUCL became the first to investigate the 1984 anti-Sikh riots and subsequently brought out a detailed report.

It is no surprise, therefore, that an anguished Sahgal returned her Sahitya Akademi award citing the "silence" of the Akademi in the face of the current attack on artistic and creative freedoms.