ABSTRACT
Nayantara Sahgal was born in 1927 into one of India’s foremost political
families. The niece of Jawaharlal Nehru, daughter of Vijayalakshmi Pan-
dit and first cousin of Indira Gandhi, Sahgal’s writing has been informed
by her unique upbringing and by her espousal of the secularist political
ideals of the freedom movement. A stoic defender of the Nehruvian idea of
India, in both her fiction and her political writing she affirms the values of
cultural pluralism, religious tolerance and non-violence, and presents
them as having a historical home in the Indian nation. It is a stance that
has led her to openly criticize key political and cultural developments,
including Indira Gandhi’s Emergency Rule, Hindu fundamentalist
practices, and, more recently, the war against Iraq.
