Nayantara Sahgal's selected works: reflections of Indian history, post colonial politics and change

Abstract

Nayantara Sahgal, one of the major Indian post-colonial writers, is hinged to history through the overlapping temporality of her life-period on a happening era, the genealogical circumstances of her birth, her academic inclinations as a student and literary engagements as a writer. Cradled in the lap of history, Sahgal watched the spectacle of the Indian Freedom Movement unveil in the courtyards of her family home, and grew up thinking that going to jail was a career. Endowed with a sharp critical acumen, imaginative sensibility and moral intelligence, the writer churned the abundant soaked-in impressions of landmark events in her mind to create a vast oeuvre of eighteen published works which includes nine of her wellacclaimed novels. Nurtured on the wholly lived-out political philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi and her maternal uncle, Jawaharlal Nehru, on a daily basis, the political overtones of almost every decade of the bygone century are encapsulated with scrupulous realism in her literary corpus. In the past, while the gender issue, that is an intrinsic part of her humanism, had been isolated for heavy feministic criticism, her historical experience, political insights and literary response to the frenetic social change taking place in an inchoate nation have been inadequately treated. Even as a woman writer the critic has been wary of her famous genealogy and overlooked her impeccable credentials as a unique literary artist. This research project traverses through the autobiographical, fictional and non-fictional works, as well as some addresses and interviews of Sahgal, to scrutinize them in the light of the new theoretical insights, to add fresh hermeneutic dimensions to the existing ones, by focusing on the historical and political framework of the creative works.It also examines her subtle posture as a veteran vanguard of contemporary cultural thought and vigilante of political practices in the context of her historical representations of Indian society.