Mistaken Identity is an intriguing novel, one that offers rare and moving insights into the intersection of personal and national destinies.
Nayantara Sahgal (1927– ) is a novelist and political journalist. As a member of the Gandhi family she says that, “Behind Nehru’s niece or Madame Pandit’s daughter has neither been a help nor a hindrance—it has simply been my inheritance and background—but being Mrs. Gandhi’s cousin as well as critic is another matter. It has given me a glimpse of how intolerant establishments reduce their critics to non-persons.”
Spanning four generations and chiefly set in the darkening universe of New Delhi during Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s Emergency (1976-77), Rich Like Us runs on the oddly parallel life tracks of two very different women. A time promising wealth for the corrupt, but terrifying with sterilization for the poor and jail for the critical, the Emergency changes forever the lives of both women. Sonali and Rose, one Indian, the other Cockney English, are deeply devoted friends. Because of her outmoded honesty, Sonali’s successful civil service career is terminated, waking her from her dream of a new India. For Rose, second wife of a Hindu businessman, the corruption of society sets the scene for the last episode of her long adjustment to her adopted home. Delicately insistent, Mrs. Sahgal demands that we see a changing nation through its own eyes. “Being Nehru’s niece or Madame Pandit’s daughter," the author has said, “has neither been a help nor a hindrance––it has simply been my inheritance and background––but being Mrs. Gandhi’s cousin as well as critic is another matter. It has given me a glimpse of how intolerant establishments reduce their critics to non-persons.”
The year is 1929, India is torn by strikes, the British Raj is close to panic, and Bhushan Singh, the purposeless but amiable son of a minor raja, is arrested on his train journey home to North India, mistakenly charged with treason, and thrown into jail. As the months of awaiting trial stretch into years, the apolitical Bhushan entertains his communist cell-mates with tales of his world; of his veiled and idiosyncratic mother; of his very modern Parsee girlfriend (she wears dresses); of the American flapper who taught him the Turkey Trot; of his forbidden boyhood affair which sparked off two murderous Hindu-Moslem riots and led to his banishment abroad. Around the mystery of his arrest and into his stories Sahgal infuses suspense, gentle irony, and a wealth of Northern India’s culture. Mistaken Identity is at once a family saga, a romance, a rich historical novel, and, perhaps most keenly, a fable concerning the implacable working of karma.
Mistaken Identity is an intriguing novel, one that offers rare and moving insights into the intersection of personal and national destinies.
