Early Years
Sai Paranjpye was born on 19 March 1938 in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh to Russian Youra Sleptzoff and Shakuntala Paranjpye. Sleptzoff was a Russian watercolor artist and a son of a Russian general. Shakuntala Paranjpye was an actor in Marathi and Hindi films, in the 1930s and 40s, including in V. Shantaram's Hindi social classic, Duniya Na Mane (1937), and later became a writer and a social worker, nominated to Rajya Sabha, Upper House of Indian Parliament and awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1991.
Sai's parents divorced shortly after her birth. Her mother raised Sai in the household of her own father, Sir R. P. Paranjpye, who was a renowned mathematician and an educationist and who served in 1944-47 as India's High Commissioner in Australia. Sai thus grew up and received education many cities in India, including Pune, and a few years in Canberra, Australia. As a child, she used to walk up to her uncle, Achyut Ranade, a noted filmmaker of the ’40s and ’50s, up Fergusson Hill in Pune, who would tell stories as if he were narrating a screenplay. Sai took to writing early in her life: Her first book of fairy tales, Mulānchā Mewā (in Marathi), was published when she was eight.
Paranjpye graduated from the National School of Drama (NSD), New Delhi in 1963.
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