Nayantara Sahgal

Nayantara Sahgal (born 10 May 1927) is an Indian writer in English. Her fiction deals with India’s elite responding to the crises engendered by political change; she was one of the first female Indo-Anglian writers to receive wide recognition. She is a member of the Nehru-Gandhi family, the second of the three daughters born to Jawaharlal Nehru’s sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit.
Sahgal attended a number of schools as a girl, given the turmoil in the Nehru-Gandhi family during the last years (1935-47) of the Indian freedom struggle, wherein her father would die in prison while Nayantara and her sister Chandralekha were overseas attending college. Her uncle Jawaharlal Nehru too was in and out of prison, as a political prisoner, in the 1930s and 1940s.
Though part of the Nehru-Gandhi family, Sahgal developed a reputation for maintaining her independent critical sense. Her independent tone, and her mother’s, would lead to both falling out with her cousin Indira Gandhi during the most autocratic phases of Mrs. Gandhi’s time in office in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. Indira Gandhi canceled Sahgal’s scheduled appointment as India’s Ambassador to Italy within days of her return to power. Not one to be intimidated, Sahgal would (in 1982) write a scathing, insightful account of Gandhi’s rise to power.