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Prison and Chocolate Cake Mistaken Identity
IT was often said that the class of 1943 at Woodstock would go far. And so it happened with Nayantara Sahgal whose life has been entwined with India’s socio-political culture. Her method is thorough. The energy prodigious. And the ideas for freedom and liberation obvious in her writings which are deeply coherent to her emancipated family background. The recent republication of her two books Mistaken Identity and Prison and Chocolate Cake took my mind back to a conference at the University of Canterbury in England, where I first had the opportunity of hearing her views on ‘New Writings in English’ in 1989. Nayantara spoke emphatically about the "schizophrenic imagination", an idea resounding in the notion of hybridity and inbetweeness that becomes popular in the theory of the 90s: "There are powerful winds blowing through English literature. English is being assaulted by cross-currents of racial experience, by a vast expansion of its frame of reference, by new uses of imagination and language." As I reexamine her works, I see how her preference has always been for a story that is kaleidoscopic with a polyphony of voices presenting a multiple point of view. The two works that she has chosen for the re-launch represent voices from history, a history she and her family have experienced first-hand reflecting India’s freedom struggle. Prison and Chocolate Cake is striking for the human portrayal of Gandhi and Nehru as well the significant contribution of the Nehru family to India’s Independence. It is the history of India’s struggle against the British which she has never forgotten. As a young girl she cherished dreams of a free India and always remembered the words of her uncle Nehru, "Wherever in this wide world there goes an Indian, there goes a piece of India with him, and he may not forget this fact or ignore it. It lies within his power to bring credit or discredit to his country. `85" Right from her days at Woodstock School, she has been overwhelmed by the tumultuous events before Partition when many of her family members suffered at the hands of British dominance. Prison and Chocolate Cake is a memoir, both heartrending when it speaks of the death of her father or the repeated visits of her mother Vijayalakshmi Pandit and her uncle Jawaharlal Nehru to prison, and joyous when it speaks of the family closeness, reunions and frequent picnics in the hills. Despite unhappy moments when the sisters were sent abroad during the upsurge of the Indian national movement where some kind friends took care of them, or days spent on an ocean liner on their way to America, the book is underpinned with a sense of affection for her closely-knit family, especially for her uncle and her illustrious mother. Prison and Chocolate Cake is indeed one of her favorite books: "I wrote Prison and Chocolate Cake because I didn’t want the special magic of that time to disappear without a trace. I also felt I owed it to my three parents—the third being my uncle, Jawaharlal Nehru—to recapture this whole experience and keep it alive rather than just let it become an event in a history book. For readers today, especially the young, it’s remembering the love and laughter and high ideals that went into my parents’ contribution to the non-violent fight for freedom." Similarly, Mistaken Identity is a tragi-comedy replete with revolutionary fervour and the passing away of monarchy foregrounded against British India. History is neatly juxtaposed with fiction. It emphasises the conspiracy trials of the 1920s as well as the corrupt zamindari system in Uttar Pradesh. Nayantara is of the view that it is "an offering to my Hindu-Muslim culture, and I think it has a growing relevance in the present climate of all kinds of religious madness." Upper-class life and the decadence of a dissipated life of a small raja becomes the story that is skillfully used to depict the eventful years of freedom struggle and colonialism, of the disparity between the treatment given to British prisoners and Indian. Whereas the white criminal gets a decent breakfast and a clean toilet, the Indian convict goes without a decent meal or clothes. Politics thus comes to Sahgal naturally. She has lived and breathed politics. One remembers Italo Calvino’s words here: "Literature is necessary to politics above all when it gives a voice to whatever is without a voice, when it gives a name to what as yet has no name, especially to what the language of politics excludes or attempts to exclude." She has already edited letters of Nehru to his daughter and his sister which are of immense historical value and give a broad picture of Nehru from his days in Trinity College to the time of his leadership of the national movement. In her personal life, Nayantara had parted from her first husband because she was ignorant of the dominating ways of men. She had only been accustomed to seeing free women in her family and this freedom was intrinsic to her consciousness. Likewise, the women characters in her novels gradually move out of subservience to acts of resistance. Her life and her work indeed is underpinned by a deeply felt critical examination of the politics of her times, a struggle where words and action combine to produce a deep sincerity and a dream for a free India.
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