HUMANIZATION OF POLITICAL RHETORIC IN NAYANTARA SAHGAL'S NOVELS WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO A TIME TO BE HAPPY AND RICH LIKE US

Among the women novelists in the Indo-Anglian literary scene Nayantara Sahgal occupies a distinct place. Her novels reflect the changing patterns and human values through the aspirations and conflicts of her characters. Sahgal has been chiefly hailed as a political novelist but there are other important aspects to her novels. The chief concern of this paper is the humanization of political rhetoric in Nayantara Sahgal’s novels with special reference to her novels A Time to be Happy and Rich Like Us. In her attempt to humanize the political rhetoric, Nayantara Sahgal has employed various modes of Projection. Politics in the novel has to integrated with the patterns of life traced. Thus politics in Sahgal's novels is Presented through the medium of living men and women and their actions. Ms. Sahgal has also used psychology to engraft her humanitarian concerns on an essentially political framework. The political theme of the attainment of freedom is linked with the women's search for freedom in the personal realm. The most crucial aspect of freedom Sahgal's protagonists valiantly strive for is freedom from an orthodox, outdated view of Hinduism. Sahgal relates the political ills the nation is afflicted with to a lop-sided interpretation of Hinduism. We can also see that Nayantara Sahgal's Protagonists invariably use a Gandhian idiom in espousing their humanitarian commitment. Politics rather becomes the external manifestation of internal issue. Ms. Sahgal has succeeded in linking the personal and political not only by showing the same forces at work in the two realms but also by presenting the political as the extension of the personal.