ALIENATION IN THE NOVELS OF NAYANTARA SAHGAL

Nayantara Sahgal, an outstanding novelist in Indo-English Fiction, was born on May 10, 1927 at Allahabad. She is the daughter of Mrs. Vijaylakshmi Pandit and Raniit  Sitaram Pandit. Her mother was the first Woman President of UNO. Sahgal is the niece of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of free India.
Navantara graduated from Wellesley College, Massachusetts State, USA. Thereafter, her marriage with Gautam Sahgal ended in divorce because of lack of mutual understanding. Later, she found in Mr. Mangat Rai, an ICS Officer, an understanding companion. Since then, she has been living with him at Dehradun. Nayantara has emerged as a fiction writer with her autobiography “Prison and
Chocolate Cake” 1954). There are eight novels in her literary canon. Her maiden novel “A Time to Be Happy” 419581 pertains mainly to Gandhian Movement of the forties. It was followed by “This Time of Morning” 119651, which racapitualtesthe political events in India in the last years of Nehru’s Prime Ministership. In her second piece of autobiography “From Fear Set Free”, her life during post-independent India has been portrayed. Her next novel “Storm in Chandigarh” 11969) reflects historical and political events that are interpreted in artistical manner. “The Day in Shadow” (1972, is the most personal of her novels. “A Situation in New Delhi” (1977) shoots her forth into a wider phase of her creative career and she rises from personal to universal. “Rich Like Us” J_9851 re -inforcedher position as she was honoured with the Sinclair Prize for Fiction, and
Sahitya Academi Award for the same novel. Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for the Eurasia region was awarded to her for “Plans for Departure” (1986). Her last but not least novel “The Mistaken Identity” (1988) is a widely acclaimed work. All of these novels present a rich and profound study of human relationships and the consequent alienation, which is a state of human feeling of isolation where one gets estranged from social norms and even from one’s own self; one feels oneself as a non-entity. Sahgal’s characters go through vicissitudes of human relationships and feel desperate, lonely and deserted This leads them to alienation. My endeavour is to treat this unexplored aspect in the novels of Nayantara Sahgal.
Jasbir Jain in his book “Nayantara Sahgal” has madeevery effort to trace a broad survey of the novels of Mrs Sahgal, but leaves the proposed aspect unexplored.Neena Arora in her book “Nayantara Sahgal and Doris Lessing: A Feminist Study in Comparison” has compared Mrs Sehgal with Doris Lessing only from the feminist viewpoint. This work also does not provide a comprehensive study of alienation in the novels of Nayantara Sahgal. Hence there is a need for the proposed topic to be explored.