All in the Family: Nayantara Sahgal’s Indian Home

Abstract

Of all the authors analyzed in this book, Nayantara Sahgal stands, perhaps, in the closest relation to Jawaharlal Nehru. As his niece—the daughter of Nehru’s younger sister, Vijayalakshmi Pandit—Sahgal has a personal and deeply felt relationship with the former Prime Minister, and her memoirs, Prison and Chocolate Cake (1954) and From Fear Set Free (1962), offer a valuable insider’s account of the Nehru household during the nationalist struggle, from one of its youngest members.¹ Pandit, who was close to Nehru, was a successful politician and diplomat in her own right, having been, among other things, India’s ambassador to the United States and the first woman to chair the U.N. General Assembly.² Pandit, like Nehru, also wrote extensively about her experiences and nationalist activities.³ Any consideration of Nehru’s influence on contemporary novelists would thus be woefully incomplete without some examination of Sahgal’s work.