Happy Birthday to the Award-Winning Author Nayantara Sahgal

Nayantara Sahgal is an Indian writer who writes in English. She was awarded the 1986 Sahitya Akademi Award for her English novel Rich Like Us. Let us wish her a very happy birthday.

Nayantara Sahgal was born on 10 May 1927. She is a member of the Nehru–Gandhi family, the second of three daughters born to Jawaharlal Nehru’s sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit. Nayantara Sahgal’s father Ranjit Sitaram Pandit was a barrister from Kathiawad. He was arrested for his support of Indian independence and died in Lucknow prison jail in 1944, leaving behind his wife (Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit) and their three daughters Chandralekha Mehta, Nayantara Sehgal, and Rita Dar. 

Sahgal attended a number of schools as a girl, given the turmoil in the Nehru family during the last years (1935–47) of the Indian freedom struggle. Ultimately, she graduated from Woodstock School in the Himalayan hill station of Landour in 1943 and later in the United States from Wellesley College. She has made her home for decades in Dehradun, a town close to Landour where she had attended boarding school.

Though part of the Nehru family, Sahgal developed a reputation for maintaining her independent critical sense. Her independent tone, and her mother’s, led to both falling out with her cousin Indira Gandhi during the most autocratic phases of the latter’s time in office in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. Nayantara Sahgal was awarded the 1986 Sahitya Akademi Award for her English novel Rich Like Us (1985). On 6 October 2015, Sahgal returned her Sahitya Akademi Award to protest what she called “increasing intolerance and supporting right to dissent in the country”, following the murders of rationalists Govind Pansare, Narendra Dabholkar, and M. M. Kalburgi, and the Dadri mob lynching incident.