It is not easy to be a biographer's subject, ever perhaps, but certainly if the life to be written is Nayantara Sahgal's (in picture). "It's the personal that I have a problem with," she said. Yet she was on stage with Ritu Menon, her biographer, at Kolkata Literary Meet on Sunday, taking part in a conversation with Jayabrato Chatterjee.

Sahgal, 88, who stressed again that the reports of her agreeing to take back her Sahitya Akademi award, which she returned to protest the murder of rationalist writers and the lynching of a Muslim man at Dadri, are a "lie", has not read Menon's book. Out of Line, published in 2014, was delayed and there was a personal loss, which stopped Sahgal from reading it. Now she does not want to any more as the idea of going through the events of her life again seems to bring her pain.

Yet she herself has written quite often about her own life and the conversation she was taking part in was called 'A Lifetime, A Nation'. It is was if she did not mind looking at herself as an example of the political as the personal, and not the other way round, but what compelled Menon to take up the writing of Sahgal's biography, was this scintillating coincidence of a new nation, a woman's life and a writing career.

The life was striking in itself. Sahgal, born in 1927, the daughter of freedom fighters Ranjit Sitaram Pandit and Vijaylakshmi Pandit, Jawaharlal Nehru's sister, grew up unlike other children. As her parents spent their lives "in and out of jail", she and her siblings wore khadi and travelled in third class compartments. Most important, they were forbidden to cry in front of the police as their parents were being taken away. So little Nayantara hid in the bathroom and cried. "My childhood left me with certain scars," she admits. But the tumult, added to her environment, also lifted her out of the ordinary.

She and her sister were sent to Wellesley College in Massachusetts, US, at Madame Chiang Kai Shek's suggestion. Among their local guardians was singer Paul Robeson. Sahgal was looked after closely by writer Pearl S. Buck and her husband. Buck had later written toVijaylakshmi: "She (Nayantara) cannot be happy in simplicity. No one thing or person will satisfy her complexity".

A novelist, Sahgal would also go on to be the "first woman political columnist in English in India". "It coincided with a transition in her personal life and that coincided with a change in Indira Gandhi's political life. The party split," said Menon. Extremely unhappy with her marriage, Sahgal had gone through a divorce and would be "living in sin".

Two men shaped her, she insits, her father and uncle, Jawaharlal Nehru. Her uncle used to write to her from jail, telling her to read - Ariel, a biography of Shelley by Andre Maurois, or Don Quixote, or his own writings. "I owe everything" to these two men, said Sahgal. Not the Nehru-Gandhi women, who included Vijaylakshmi and Indira Gandhi.

For Menon, the challenge was "how to relate her writing to the literary", while not losing sight of the political. And how to deal with certain parts, or the mother who is not mentioned. "I have left out almost 80 per cent of the personal," Menon said reassuringly. But she expressed a little regret about having to leave out the bit about Vijaylakshmi.

Sahgal said Vijaylakshmi was a wonderful mother, "but I do have to emphasise my close relationship was with my father". Vijaylakshmi, however, trusted Sahgal's political judgment, and joined Sahgal as she "vigorously opposed" Indira Gandhi, who had once regarded Nayantara as "her favourite younger cousin", for her authoritarianism and the Emergency. "I was defending the Nehru values", democracy, Sahgal said.

As the session concluded, Sahgal distributed a hand-written note in which she had clarified her reasons for never having taken her Sahitya Akademi award back.

"Let me make it clear that I have in no way 'reconsidered' my decision. My protest... continues against the continuing attacks on freedom of expression," it said.