Like most women of her generation who stood up and spoke out early, Sahgal speaks precisely, even sternly, in her crisp, well-modulated idiom, despite her soft voice and the small, elegant figure she makes. Nehru's niece corrects me carefully as we walk through the lawns of the India International Centre in Delhi. The daughter of celebrated barrister Ranjit Sitaram Pandit and diplomat and politician Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit—the first Indian woman to hold a cabinet post—Sahgal found her own way to blaze forward as she chronicled the evolution of modern India. Later today, her latest book, The Political Imagination: A Personal Response to Life, Literature and Politics (HarperCollins India, 236 pages)—her twentieth—is to be launched in a conversation with political critic Ashis Nandy: a collection of letters, essays, addresses and lectures typically charged with her staunch political concerns. Simultaneously, a biography around her life and work will be released, describing how the author has, in the past, been charged with stepping 'Out of Line' (HarperCollins India, 400 pages), as the book is titled. Sahgal is one of the most respected pioneering Indian writers in English. The recipient of the Sinclair Prize for Fiction, the Sahitya Akademi Award (for Rich Like Us in 1985) and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and helped found the People's Union for Civil Liberties, serving as its vice- president during the 1980s. The author of nine novels and 11 works of non-fiction which chronicle young India's life and times, she has been likened to Nadine Gordimer and began a long career full of steady milestones in 1954. Prison and Chocolate Cake, a well-received memoir detailing the Nehru- Gandhi family's involvement with Independence and beyond, was published by no less than Alfred A Knopf in the US (and by left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz in England).

The Political Imagination: A Personal Response to Life

Grand Dame of Destiny