Nayantara Sahgal is one of India's best-known writers and thinkers. She is the recipient of the Sinclair Prize for Fiction, the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. A member of the Sahitya Akademi's advisory board for English till she resigned during the Emergency, Sahgal served on the jury of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1990 and 1991. She has held fellowships in the United States at the Bunting Institute, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the National Humanities Center. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was awarded an honorary doctorate in literature by the University of Leeds in 1997. She is associated with the founding of the People's Union for Civil Liberties and served as its vice-president during the 1980s.
"the portrait's painted eyes held whoever's was looking into them from wherever the viewer sat...He was best remembered for the treason trial after the Great War and his defense of the sole survivor of the bloodbath below Victoria's statue in Company Bagh that has killed his three co-conspirators...his lawyer's chilling argument had whipped the mask off a ruling power whose law courts condemned men to death for following his own example. 'For the crime,' he had famously declared, 'of cutting their words to your music'."
