Prison and Chocolate Cake is the first of two early memoirs by Nayantara Sahgal, first published by Alfred A. Knopf (New York) and Victor Gollancz (London) in 1954, and includes her childhood experiences of her family during the Indian independence movement in the 1930s and '40s.

Prison sentences for several family members became more frequent and Sahgal's memories of them increasingly unpleasant as she was expected to stay composed and not show her distress.

Nayantara Sahgal, an educated, widely-travelled member of the Indian elite of the 1940s, is the daughter of the classic scholar Ranjit Sitaram Pandit, and former ambassador to the United Nations Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, niece of India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and cousin of India's third prime minister Indira Gandhi.

[1] The title Prison and Chocolate Cake comes from an incident in the early 1930s[2][3] which Sahgal describes as her earliest political memory, one day at tea when she was age three.

[11] The book includes Sahgal's memoirs, accounts of her sisters Gita and Chandralekha, and that of her family during the Indian independence movement.

[3] Sahgal begins the story in 1943, mid-World War II when she was in her teens, and en-route to the United States to complete her education.

On the ship, she hears experiences from Polish refugees from Russia, and US soldiers returning from the Pacific War, one of who was surprised that she could be Indian, as she spoke English like he did.

Sahgal, as a young child, wanting to be old enough to go to prison too, was expected to be proud, not show sorrow, but hold a stiff upper lip; crying was in secret, she writes.

In a series of letters she discusses with her father, then in prison, several political topics including whether India should help Britain, non-violent disobedience and communism.

[13] W. F. Whyte in International Affairs noted Sahgal's letter (age 12) to her father in 1939 as she tried to understand the concept of non-violence at the onset of the War.

[14] The reply she received from her father in Lucknow prison, Whyte says, "reads today like a pertinent footnote to history"[14] Historian Jeanne d'Ucel appreciated the author's sense of humour throughout the book.

[16] In 1990, Sahgal stated in an interview that she would not write any further autobiographies[6] but then published Relationship (1994) and Point of View: A Personal Response to Life (1997).