Nayantara Sahgal was born in 1927 into a political family: her uncle, Jawaharlal Nehru, was India’s first Prime Minister; her mother was the country’s first ambassador to the U.N. and Indira Gandhi was her first cousin. Her unique upbringing informs both her fiction and her political writing, including her memoir, Prison and Chocolate Cake (1954), followed by a second volume of autobiography, From Fear Set Free (1962).
Sahgal has written from the perspective of a person belonging to the political establishment that led to India’s Independence and had to face the troubles and complexities of the postcolonial situation. She defines herself a novelist and a political journalist and it is easy to recognise the political background or ambience of her novels. As she declares: “Political and social forces shape our lives. How can we be unaware of them? I believe there is a ‘poetics of engagement’ where commitment and aesthetics meet and give each other beauty and power.”
The paper intends to examine how the writer enmeshes her life with the establishment of India as a nation and how the poetics of engagement is brilliantly explained in the autobiographical works. From her writing it is possible to perceive the hopes and fears of her generation in a crucial historical time, together with a critical exploration of India’s sociopolitical culture since colonialism. Sahgal is also able to create a groundbreaking voice for women’s issues in India, since she vividly discusses and questions the position of women within a traditionally patriarchal society.