India-Books/Politics
Madhusree
Chatterjee
New Delhi
Politics and
literary consciousness have been a response to a whole set of conditions which
have influenced the growing up years of noted writer, thinker. columnist and
petrel Nayantara Sahgal, grounded in the
history, collective imagination and cultural sensitivities of an evolving India
- placed in the wider context of the times.
In a new
biographical volume of short essays, "The Political Imagination: A
Personal Response to Life, Literature and Politics", Sahgal muses on a
wide range of subjects that touches on the political, cultural, environmental
and personal engagements with eminent personalities to identify a nebulous
contour of a contemporary India that is changing each passing minute, in a
desperate attempt to find its place on the complex geopolitical map of the
world.
Sahgal
contexts her arguments of a new India in the perspective of the Nehruvian model
of growth, which is inclusive, plural and at the same time post-modern -
ensuing in the decades after Independence, when the country built its first
edifices of development and culture to script a new indigenous language, moving
away from the yolk of European templates.
Sahgal
expounds on the new ethos arising out of the confluence of the east and west
which makes political notions and creative imagination border-less. "I
don't believe that in due course that we will not come back to a more civilised
way of thinking. Why should we not see that nothing is static forever.
Individuals change, nature changes, matters change ...," Sahgal said,
defending a changing India. And its changing perception across the globe from
the days when the "bulk of the Americans did not know where India
was" and when "the sari was branded a native Indian costume" to
a globalised country with a definite national signature in the 21st
century.
"When I
was a child, the Indian postage stamps carried the pictures of the English king
and the queen. I remember asking my father very forlornly, Bapu, will the
English king's picture be always on the stamp. (I must have been six or seven
then). The empire was then immovable, unshakable. Everyone believed that
England will rule the world. Father said there will come a time when the
English will not be there on the stamps. If you believe in change; change comes
about," Sahgal said at the launch of her biographical essays in the
national capital on Aug 1. Her personal interface with the freedom struggle was
her father Ranjit Sitaram Pandit's commitment to the fight and his eventual
death caused by the numerous prison terms. Her political convictions were
crafted and contoured by uncle Jawaharal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of an
independent India and mother Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, a foreign service officer,
who was India’s first envoy to Moscow.
Nayantara
however careened to a different trajectory, pitch-forked by a rash marriage to
Gautam Sahgal, a Punjabi businessman of means
She became a critic, a watch dog
of a India that became aggressive after her affectionate “mamu” (Jawaharlal
Nehru) made way for daughter Indira. And thereon.
Sonia is a
balm of sobriety to Indira’s strident dynasty promotion of the 1970s-1980s, she
said at the launch of her book.”She (sic Sonia) did not put Rahul at the helm”,
unlike Indira, “who propelled for sons”.
“I admire her greatly for the way she took up the challenge. She did not
even know the language of India. but she travelled the langrh and breadth of
India (more than Manmohan Singh),,,”Sahgal was expansive in her praise.
Personally,
Sahgal looked at India with the eye of a student educated in America (Wellesley
College) - refreshing, uncluttered and candid about the flaws in the
system.
The writer,
who has authored nine novels and 10 works of non-fiction, is often described as
the fore-runner of the modern Indian novel in which she addresses the concerns
of the middle class, the decadent aristocracy, women struggling to emerge from
the confines of male dominated outposts and the political brass. In a chapter,
"Narrating the Political", the Sahgal explains the importance of the
"political" in the written work- which encapsulates the
"political imagination in her narratives".
"The
world is what we see from where we stand. Writing comes out of that context-
but in a hundred different ways. You and I may be a part of the same era and
environment, yet we may react to it very differently and write from radically
different point of views. Our choice of subject, the way we describe it and
from what point of view makes writing a political act... Writers have through
the cloistered act of writing stepped into controversies, taken sides, made it
clear that this is right or wrong not as polemics and propaganda but by
fashioning the truth as they see it into the stuff of people's lives...,"
Sahgal says about political engagement in literature.
A section
devoted to "Fighting the Emergency" brings out Sahgal's involvement
with politics as a writer and a journalist. It was a period of stumbling blocks
for the fiery Sahgal, who found her vitriolic columns against then Prime
Minister Mrs Indira Gandhi's imposition of emergency gagged by a
"wary" government and her publishing commissions cancelled. The
section is made of a series of missives and articles that Sahgal wrote to
castigate the "suppression" of the citizens' democratic freedom in
1975.
In a letter
to R.S. Kelkar, the then secretary of the Sahitya Akademi, the apex body of
literary activity in the country, in 1976, Sahgal said "... the question
of free expression and free circulation of ideas is crucial to a free society.
I should have thought that nothing could be as important as this to the Sahitya
Akademi which is concerned with writers and their work. Your failure to bring
this issue to the notice of the President convinces me that the Sahitya Akademi
does not concern itself with free expression. Indeed it seems willing to be a
servile body, an obedient servant of dictatorship....I regret I cannot serve on
any committee that is so lost to self-respect as to remain silent on the
censorship that is strangulating India today".
Biographer
Ritu Menon sees two distinct phases in Nayantara Sahgal's writing - one before
1967 and the other after her "divorce". "The break in her
personal life made a change in the way she wrote," says Menon, the author
of Sahgal's biography, "Out of line: A Literary and Political Biography of
Nayantara Sahgal.
The
anecdotal biography that opens with 21-year-old Tara Pandit's marriage to
Punjabi businessman Gautam Sahgal, says Sahgal's early novels like "A Time
to Be Happy", 'From Fear Set Free" and "Prisons and Chocolate
Cakes" were the creative expressions of memories, realities and an urge to
become something beyond "housewife and mother".
It was as
her uncle Jawaharlal Nehru described, "One cannot ignore the domestic
sphere, but a wider activity gives more meaning to life". The post-1967
novels were elegiac laced with bitterness, regret, cynicism - and a sharp
political understanding of the key issues confronting the times. They were
Sahgal's encounters with maturity and insights into the socio-political maneuverings
of the Nehru-Gandhi era.
{Both the
books have been published by Harper Collins-India)
