Mistaken Identity

The year' is 1929, India is torn by strikes, and the Britis Raj is close to panic: Bhushan Singh, the purposeless son of a minor raja is charged with treason and thrown into jail. As the months awaiting trial stretch into years, the apolitical Bhushan entertains his Communist cellmates with tail's or his world: or his veiled mother; of his very modern Parsec girlfriend; of the American flapper who taught him the Turkey Trot; of his forbidden boyhood affair which ignited two murderous Hindu-Muslim riots and led to his banishment abroad.

A complex work, Mistaken Identity is at once a family saga, a romance, a historical novel rich with India's cultural history; and, perhaps most keenly, a fable concerning the implacable workings of karma

Nayantara Sahgal is a novelist and political commentator who has published nine novels and eight works of non-fiction. One of the first Indian writers in English to make a mark on an international readership, she won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1986 for Plan for Departure while Rich Like us won the Sinclair Fiction Prize in 1985 and the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1986. Born into the first family of Indian Politics-the Nehrus- Sahgal saw at firsthand India’s emergence as an independent nation under the prime minister ship of her maternal uncle, Jawaharlal Nehru, and her cousin, Indira Gandi’s rise to power. She was a member of the Sahitya Akademi’s Advisory Board for English, till she resigned during the Emergency; she was a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, the National Humanities Centre and the Bunting Institute, USA. She has also served on the jury of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1990 and 1991. In 1990 she was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1997 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate for Literature by the University of Leads.