Nayantara Sahgal

Nayantara Sahgal born on 10 May 1927 in Allahabad,United Provinces of British India. She is an Indian writer in English. she was one of the first female Indian writers in English to receive wide recognition. She is a member of the Nehru-Gandhi family, the second of the three daughters born to Jawaharlal Nehru's sister, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit.
She was awarded the 1986 Sahitya Akademi Award for English, for her novel, Rich Like Us (1985), by the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters.

Her father Ranjit Sitaram Pandit was successful barrister from Kathiawad and classical scholar who translated Kalhana's epic history Rajatarangini into English from Sanskrit. He was arrested for his support of Indian independence and died in Lucknow prison jail in 1944, leaving behind his wife and their three daughters Chandralekha Mehta, Nayantara Sehgal and Rita Dar. Sahgal's mother, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, was a daughter of Motilal Nehru and a sister of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.

Sahgal has been married twice, first to Gautam Sehgal and later to E.N. Mangat Rai, a Punjabi Christian who was an Indian Civil Service officer. Rai died aged 87 in 2003 in Dehradun, where Nayantara and he had lived for several decades, in the house once owned by her mother. Selected collection of letters exchanged between Nayantara Sahagal and Rai was published in the book "Relationship".

Though part of the Nehru family, Sahgal developed a reputation for maintaining her independent critical sense. Her independent tone, and her mother's, led to both falling out with her cousin Indira Gandhi during the most autocratic phases of the latter's time in office in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s.

Gandhi cancelled Sahgal's scheduled appointment as India's Ambassador to Italy within days of her return to power. Not one to be intimidated, Sahgal in 1982 wrote a scathing, insightful account of Gandhi's rise to power. On 6 October 2015, Sahgal returned her Sahitya Akademi Award to protest what she called "increasing intolerance and supporting right to dissent in the country", following the murders of rationalists Govind Pansare, Narendra Dabholkar and M. M. Kalburgi, and the Dadri mob lynching incident.