Building Global Sisterhood in Post-Colonial India in Nayantara Sahgal’s Rich Like Us

Abstract

This paper examines the representation of global sisterhood between Rose, a working-class British immigrant woman, and Sonali, an upper class Indian female civil servant, in Nayantara Sahgal’s Rich Like Us. The novel centers on the Emergency, India’s period of political upheaval from 1975 to 1977 when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency across the county. Rose and Sonali are both searching for their true identity and independence in a rapidly changing India. I argue that this cross-cultural relationship expresses the author’s perspective of the new Indo-British experience in postcolonial India. These two women that Sahgal calls “twin souls” build their bond based on their common marginalization within patriarchal upper-class India by sharing emotional conflicts against unfair treatment. However, this solidarity of privileged women fails to garner any meaningful change in postcolonial India when it excludes subaltern voices from the narrative by repeating the same mistake patriarchical society imposes on them.