For years she has been writing. Her work has always had the profundity of a river in the plains and just as many ripples. Little wonder, not everybody has found her easy to read. However, those who have read her have come back more enlightened for the effort. There is an equanimity to her words that sits easy and naturally with those on the other side of 40. Blessed with a lineage that has allowed her a ringside view of modern Indian history, post-Independence, Nayantara Sahgal has used the privilege well. A few years ago, she penned a book on her “mamun”, Jawaharlal Nehru. The book, “Civilizing a Savage World”, caught the attention of many when Nayantara turned up at the first edition of The Hindu lit fest in Chennai. It was a not-so-frequent evening out for Nayantara, who is not known to be a regular on the lit fest circuit. She made an exception though, to talk of Nehru, her “third parent”, the man for whom secularism was a religion. She talked of him softly, calmly, then she turned a shade wistful when talking of contemporary, more materialistic times, lamenting, “I feel like an alien from another planet.” Every word was lapped up by the literati. For book lovers that evening, she was the queen, and not just somebody who was a non-participant observer in the unfolding drama of our history.
For years though, Nayantara Sahgal has been written about too. There has been a lot of interest in what she has to say, about Nehru, about Indira Gandhi, and of course, Rahul. But not very many have sought to know the woman behind “the viewer from the wings”. This is a gap which has just been artfully bridged by Ritu Menon, often given credit as a feminist publisher. In fact, such has been the attention on the founder of Women Unlimited, an associate of Kali for Women, that the author in her has been in danger of being overlooked. Quietly, Ritu has reminded book-lovers — and not just authors — that she is around. Her book, “Out of Line: A literary and political biography of Nayantara Sahgal” (Harper Collins) initially appeals for attention, then cajoles you, nudges you to go on, before finally turning out to be a work that is a fine amalgam of the personal and the political. In fact, if you read on, you realise that Ritu’s is that rare piece of storytelling that throws up nuggets along the way without so much as a ripple. For instance, she writes in depth about the failure of Nayantara’s marriage, a relationship about which even the then Prime Minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, was concerned. Nayantara though insisted that she was sorry the PM was distressed but that her marriage was her business. Forthright as always. A little later, she talks openly about her divorce with Gautam. “Back home that evening she told Gautam that she signed the divorce petition, ‘done the deed that you wanted me to’. He broke down and wept, took her hand and sobbed,” as Ritu writes of Nayantara’s emotionally debilitating divorce in the book.
She also writes frankly about the relationship between Tara Sahgal and Bunchi Mangat Rai, who “wrote upwards of six and a half thousand letters to each other over a three year period.” They were passionate, intimate; the letters being not just a means of communication, they were a medium to know each other better. Bunchi wrote, “I want and crave nakedness between us, the whole of what you can give, and I want to unload the whole of what I can give.” Nayanatara and Bunchi were to go on to have a successful marriage for many decades. He was her anchor as she took on her cousin, Indira, when the Prime Minister turned autocratic. She had to pay a price for her bravery though she remained defiant, all along maintaining a fine line between her love for her maternal uncle and her opposition to his daughter.
Ritu too walks the fine line with grace and dexterity. With her poise and polish, not to forget her insight, she reveals layer upon layer of Nayantara’s life, making sure to keep space for her columns, her novels, her works of non-fiction, besides of course, her feisty personal and political battles. And in the end manages to convince us why we needed to know Nayantara in the first place.
