"Indu will never arrest you, but Sanjay might". Vijaylakshmi Pandit's words of warning were taken at face value by her daughter who took up a prestigious Fellowship in the US for the duration of the Emergency.

When Nayantara Sahgal returned to India a few years later, she accepted the Janata government offer to make her India's Ambassador to Italy. It was an astute appointment, taking into account Nayantara's unique star qualities — combining political judgement with obvious literary skills — but it was not to be. After Indira Gandhi returned to office a short while later, one of her first decision after taking office was to cancel Nayantara's diplomatic appointment.

Not that Nayantara cares. She is more interested in the judgement of history, rather than in what jobs she might or might not have taken up in earlier years. First impressions are that her age (83) belies the formidable power she punches within a diminutive physical frame (about 5 feet three inches tall).

Over an extended lunch at London's famous Ritz. hotel, it becomes clear that some of the punch comes from the many books she has written, as well as from an illustrious family history that gave her an insider's view of South Asia's unfolding political drama, starting with the freedom struggle, the achievement of independence and much else that has followed.

As Mrs Pandit's daughter, Nehru's niece and Indira Gandhi's first cousin, she was uniquely placed to read and assess the personalities and issues with which India has interacted both before and after independence. But there is a human side to her memory that is both amusing to tell in recollection, as well as being politically significant. Take the story of how she first met Mahatma Gandhi.

"The first time I met him, he was conducting a prayer meeting at Anand Bhavan. I must have been four or five years old. My mother had given me a bouquet of flowers to give to Bapu and I thought she said "Papu", which is what I called my father and whom I adored, a very wonderful and handsome man.

"I was running towards him with the bouquet and she dragged me back. She said "Bapu" and pointed. I started screaming and said, "I'm not going to give him my flowers because he's so ugly." She was mortified, but he was delighted, patted my cheek and told my mother, "I hope she will always be as truthful."

Some of her other impressions, or recollections, faithfully blend into her latest book, 'Jawaharlal Nehru, Civilising a Savage World', that was launched at Delhi's Habitat Centre on Wednesday. The book is in fact a tribute to her beloved "Mamu", described after his death by ambassador Adlai Stevenson, a sometime US presidential hopeful, as "one of God's great creations in our time."

In his time Nehru was welcomed and lauded by many of the world's top leaders, ranging from Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser to US Presidents Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy, as well as Britain's Winston Churchill. It was Churchill who reversed decades of hostility to the idea of an independent India when he described Nehru as "The light of Asia."

Less well known is Nehru's close friendship at the time with China's then leader, Chiang Kai Shek, who lost the Chinese civil war to Mao and his communist supporters and was forced to retreat to the island of Formosa (present day Taiwan) where he set up his government in exile under the banner of his Kuomintang party.

It was a measure of his regard for Chiang that Nehru agreed to visit the Kuomintang-controlled city of Chungking, reciprocating a pre-independence visit to India by the Chinese leader and his wife. Mrs Chiang was so enamoured of Nehru and his family that she volunteered to get Mrs Pandit's older daughter, Chandralekha (Lekha for short) a place at an American college, Wellesley, in Massachussets. Nayantara was in theory too young to go to college, but clinging on to her sister's coat tails she somehow managed to get accepted as well.

"It's a long story", explains Nayantara. "Madame Chiang Kai Shek had been in India, Mamu had become friends with them. Then he visited Chungking at their invitation. Madame Chiang, a graduate of Wellesley, said she would help Lekha to get there (earlier when Lekha finished school in India, they wouldn't admit her to college without a guarantee she wouldn't take part in political activities, and she wouldn't give such a guarantee). That's how it happened. I went along with her. I wasn't college age, but they took me in."

Although Nehru subsequently recognised Mao's communist regime, severing all ties with Chiang, it is a fair bet that Mao never forgot or forgave Nehru's past links with his greatest personal enemy.

This was Nehru's first strategic miscalculation, although Nayantara will doubtless disagree, in dealing with the Chinese communists.

The second was his open-hearted welcome for the Dalai Lama and the third was his apparent willingness to look the other way when some CIA operatives used India as a transit point on their way to building up an American-funded and trained Tibet resistance army.

How Mao would have treated India if there had been no previous contact between Nehru and Chiang is for historians to judge. In its own way that issue is as important as Nayantara's decision to oppose what she describes as the authoritarian controls that Indira Gandhi tried to introduce following her landslide victory in the 1971 elections.

After that Indira "closed the doors" to Nayantara, subsequently prompting another warning from Mrs Pandit: "Keep a bag packed because the police come at night."