No regret for attacking Indira Gandhi, says Nayantara Sahgal

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The Sahithya Akademi winner and the niece of the first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Ms Nayantara Sahgal, said that the time had come for people to hurt others’ feelings.

“Let people be upset,” she said. “If we had stopped hurting the feelings of others, we would still be burning widows on flaming pyres,” she added.

Nayantara Sahgal was in converstion with Mr Sanjoy Roy of Teamwork Films on the topic “Narrating the Political” at the Hay Festival here on Thursday.

The session was sponsored by Deccan Chronicle. Ms Sahgal still has vivid memories of the emergency period when she was merciless with her cousin Indira Gandhi.

“I was defending the legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru. But it also meant going against Indira,” she said. “I suffered in a variety of ways. But I had never regretted doing what I had to do.”

A new work of hers was dropped by a publisher. A plan to film a novel of hers too was dropped for want of producers. “And at a dinner party a pro-government lawyer accosted me and told me that I would be in trouble if I do not stop writing,” she said and added: “If I had not been brought up in a non-violent way I would have displaced his jaw bones right at that moment.”

Jawaharlal Nehru was her great hero. “The ideals he set were my ideals,” she said. “Those who followed him did not have his acumen or selflessness,” she added.