I was surprised to receive two of Nayantara Sahgal’s books for review. I then discovered that these books are being re-published now. Sahgal was a familiar name for my parents’ generation, pre and post-Independence Indians.
The mystique of belonging to the Nehru family— Sahgal is the daughter of Vijayalakshmi Pandit— must have aroused the curiosity of that time.
Prison & Chocolate Cake is a memoir first published in 1954. It recounts the author’s early life in Anand Bhavan, the Allahabad home of the Nehrus. It captures the tumultuous times of the Independence struggle, seen through the eye of a young girl who witnessed the comings and goings of people such as Mahatma Gandhi, Maulana Azad, Sarojini Naidu and other legends to Anand Bhavan. It also portrays the lives of the inmates, including young the Nayantara, who frequently saw her parents Vijayalakshmi and Raja Sitaram Pandit and her uncle Jawaharlal being taken to jail.
Nayantara and her sister Chandralekha were sent away to the USA in 1943 to further their education. While the book talks of their stay in that country, what might make it interesting for people of my generation are glimpses of life in the palatial Anand Bhavan, and vignettes of the various Nehru family members. I read about the tragic end of Mahatma Gandhi’s life and Nehru’s reaction from a very different perspective— from up close, from the inside.
There is a certain naïveté in this book— perhaps the young Nayantara’s idealism coming across— which captures the belief of millions of Indians that all would be well once India gained her Independence. Sadly, this is not true. Both books have very interesting appendices at the end where there are sections devoted to the author, her work, and a brief interview. In this Sahgal says, “Today, I would write a very different book. Re-reading it now, the tone and telling of it strike me as being impossibly optimistic and idealistic…how could it come out like this when it was about emotional strain and tragedy…repeated hardships of jail sentences…” But in a way, the very optimism of this memoir makes it that much more interesting.
The second book, Mistaken Identity, is a work of fiction that was first published in 1988. Set in the India of the 1920s, the book deals with the life of Bhushan Singh, the playboy son of a rich landlord in North India. The book begins with the adult Bhushan returning from the United States.
On the way from Bombay to his home in Vijaygarh, he is arrested by the police on suspicion of being part of the revolt against the British Indian Government. (This was the time Bhagat Singh and Lala Lajpat Rai were beginning the very first battles against the British.) Thrown into a dingy district jail, Bhushan awaits ‘justice’ along with other small-time Indian political prisoners.
As the days stretch into weeks and months and years, the book travels back and forth in time, to Bhushan’s early life in his father’s sprawling ‘palace’, and his early love. Brought up as a Hindu, his affair with a Muslim girl throws the entire province into riots.
On the surface of it, that would seem to be the story. But if one peels it like one would an onion, there is religious fundamentalism, emancipation of women, the sycophantic efforts of small-time Rajas to please their British masters just to obtain titles, and above all, a love story.
If there is a fault, it is just that the solitary thoughts of the protagonist are at times a little too long-drawn— but then, somebody who was awaiting ‘justice’ from the British in the jails had all the time in the world! The quantum jump in the author’s felicity in written English from Prison & Chocolate Cake is striking. If she was direct in prison, Sahgal goes off into various directions in Mistaken Identity, weaving in and out of a labyrinth of emotions, with so many layers of meaning in her sentences and a very deft handling of feelings.
These two books certainly help add many angles to those two important periods in India’s history— the 1920s, (when there were countless cases of ‘treason’ trials) and the 1930s until Independence.
