Renowned Novelist and Journalist, Nayantara Sahgal whose fiction presents the personal crises of India’s elite amid settings of political upheaval turns 95 on May 10.
Sahgal's first book Prison and Chocolate Cake (1954) was an autobiographical memoir about her youth amid the Nehru family, according to the Britannica.
She then turned to fiction, often setting her stories of personal conflict amid Indian political crises. In her fourth novel, 'The Day in Shadow', the protagonist is an educated divorcee struggling in India’s male-dominated society.
Sahgal's mother, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, was the daughter of Motilal Nehru and sister of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.
In 1986, the novelist was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award (a literary honour) for her English novel, 'Rich Like Us'.
Nayantara Sahgal's Education
Sahgal attended a number of schools as a girl, given the turmoil in the Nehru family during the last years (1935–47) of the Indian freedom struggle.
Ultimately, she graduated from Woodstock School in the Himalayan hill station of Landour in 1943 and later in the United States from Wellesley College (BA, 1947), which she attended along with her sister Chandralekha, who graduated 2 years earlier in 1945.
She also stayed in Dehradun for decades, where she attended a boarding school.
Nayantara's daughter, Gita Sahgal is also a writer and journalist who writes on issues of feminism, fundamentalism and racism.
In 2015, Nayantara Sahgal returned her Sahitya Akademi Award to protest what she called "increasing intolerance and supporting right to dissent in the country".
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