Nayantara Sahgal, the second daughter of Vijaya Laxmi Pandit and the child of a rich heritage was highly influenced by the freedom struggle politics and learnt to accept many unusual happenings as matters of normal occurrence. Her all novels not only constitute an impressive segment of the Indian English novels but also sum up the saga of India’s struggle for freedom and its changes it has brought about in the traditional social set-up in India. Although Sahgal is unique in her artistic sensibility as well as in her particular manner of projecting national and historical consciousness. She also reflects the consciousness of change and the strange and sudden ways in which it has come to shape the character of individuals and the temper of the collective life as well as the competing structures of human values and human destiny. The major legacy of cultural change in modern India has been the new political sense containing in itself a feeling for the past as well as an awareness of the future as both dramatise in the personality of the present. The climate of ideas that one encountes in her novel exemplifies cross-cultural imagination. Her work has a strong realistic base and reflects not only her personal values but also the changing values of a society for the first time to both freedom and power. She stresses the need for morality in political life and in natural or real freedom. She has opinion that socalled progressive policies cannot be imposed on people without destroying something of values in them. This is also not justifiable from the moral point of view. Changes should be based on the mass urge and need. Democratic methods are the best ways of providing the requisite amount of validity for social change. She writes : The human being is the only material we possess in abundance and for whose moulding in character, behaviour and ideals we ourselves are totally responsible and not dependent upon others. (The National Circus, 7)
Assistant Professor, Department of English, M.S.Y. College, Gaya
