Political Philosophy and Condition of Women in Nayantara Sahgal’s Novels: An Insight

An important part of Nayantara Sahgal’s A Situation in New Delhi serves as a kind of transitional work between her later, more obviously political and historical fictions and her first four, mostly domestic books. Naturally, politics has always been a part of Sahgal's fiction, whether it's in the form of characters like Kalyan Sinha in This Time of Morning, who is clearly based on Krishna Menon, or more broadly in novels like Storm in Chandigarh, which use the linguistic division of the Indian Punjab as a metaphor for the way the country treats women. Nayantara Sahgal skilfully used the device of a divorce settlement to convey the exploitation and loneliness of an unsupported Indian woman.