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Abstract
Nayantara Sahgal is the author of nine Novels, ten works of non-fiction and wide-ranging literary and political commentary. She has received the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Sinclair Prize and the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize.
The Novel “Mistaken Identity” is an elegant, adroitly constructed, mordantly written story of the playboy Bhushan singh, son of the Raja of Vijaygarh. He is arrested and thrown into jail and charged with treason.
The Novelist successfully depicts the British officers’ partial Judgements, tortures of Indian National Activists and the prison rules.
As news of violent world events penetrates the prison walls – civil war in Turkey, the rise of Mussolini, Gandhi’s Dandi March, mass arrests, the death of hunger-strikers in Lahore – Bhushan discovers that fate has played a cruel trick on him.
The present paper is an attempt to bring out the story of a love and obsession that brilliantly summons up the turmoil of India in the twilight years of empire.