India on their minds
By: Menon, Ritu
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Material type: 
BookPublisher: Seminar Description: 746, Oct, 2021: p.58-63.
In:
SeminarSummary: ‘The main character in my novels has always been India,’ Nayantara Sahgal said to me. We were sitting on the verandah of her home, overlooking the garden, in Dehradun, discussing her writing. An India that she called ‘a glittering aspiration’; newly independent, blindsided and knocked sideways by Partition, yet aspiring to secularism, pluralism, diversity and equality. And democracy.
Every one of Nayanatara’s eleven novels, from A Time to be Happy to The Fate of Butterflies, is about India, tracking the country’s journey from pre-Independence through the development decades of the 1950s and 1960s, the Emergency of the mid-1970s, to the slow but steady rise of right-wingism right up to the present, with the prospect of a Hindu Rashtra in plain sight. The events that take place, the men and women who chart the country’s course, the trials and challenges, experiences and encounters, are familiar and immediately recog-nisable to those of us who grew up, and grew into maturity, as midnight’s children.
There is history, and then there are stories, which more often than not, trump history. We instinctively think Nadine Gordimer and Doris Lessing and J.M. Coetzee when we think of South Africa, in the same breath as we think of Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu. Novelists write their countries just as historians and revolutionaries do, they just write them differently. – Reproduced
| Item type | Current location | Call number | Vol info | Status | Date due | Barcode |
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Articles
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Indian Institute of Public Administration | 746, Oct, 2021: p.58-63 | Available | AR126376 |
‘The main character in my novels has always been India,’ Nayantara Sahgal said to me. We were sitting on the verandah of her home, overlooking the garden, in Dehradun, discussing her writing. An India that she called ‘a glittering aspiration’; newly independent, blindsided and knocked sideways by Partition, yet aspiring to secularism, pluralism, diversity and equality. And democracy.
Every one of Nayanatara’s eleven novels, from A Time to be Happy to The Fate of Butterflies, is about India, tracking the country’s journey from pre-Independence through the development decades of the 1950s and 1960s, the Emergency of the mid-1970s, to the slow but steady rise of right-wingism right up to the present, with the prospect of a Hindu Rashtra in plain sight. The events that take place, the men and women who chart the country’s course, the trials and challenges, experiences and encounters, are familiar and immediately recog-nisable to those of us who grew up, and grew into maturity, as midnight’s children.
There is history, and then there are stories, which more often than not, trump history. We instinctively think Nadine Gordimer and Doris Lessing and J.M. Coetzee when we think of South Africa, in the same breath as we think of Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu. Novelists write their countries just as historians and revolutionaries do, they just write them differently. – Reproduced
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