Quote by Nayantara Sahgal: “Truth is not always comfortable. But it is always necessary.”

There is a strong human impulse to avoid uncomfortable facts — about ourselves, about history, about institutions we belong to. But discomfort is the price of accuracy. Truth does not become less true because it is hard to hear. Avoiding it only delays and compounds the consequences.

Sahgal wrote in the late 1980s as India was processing the aftermath of the Emergency period under Indira Gandhi and the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. Indian democracy faced serious strains, and writers and intellectuals were navigating the line between patriotism and political critique. Her essays consistently argued for unflinching honesty in public life.

Indian novelist and political writer, niece of Jawaharlal Nehru, whose fiction and essays have engaged critically with Indian politics, democratic decline, and authoritarianism since independence. She returned her Sahitya Akademi Award in 2015 in protest against rising intolerance in India. Her novel Rich Like Us won the Sinclair Prize in 1986.