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 THE EMERGENCY AND THE
INDIAN ENGLISH NOVEL

Raita Merivirta’s The Emergency and the Indian English Novel is a

significant contribution to the study of Indian English fiction. It per-
suaded me to rethink some of my ideas about a group of novels I
thought I knew well.
Ralph Crane, Professor of English, University of
Tasmania, Australia

This book examines the cultural trauma of the Indian Emergency

through a reading of five seminal novels. It discusses the Emergency
as an event that prompted the writing of several notable novels
attempting to preserve the silenced and fading memory of its human
rights violations and suspension of democracy.
The author reads works by Salman Rushdie, Shashi Tharoor,
Nayantara Sahgal and Rohinton Mistry in conjunction with government
white papers, political speeches, memoirs, biographies and history.
The book explores the betrayal of the Nehruvian idea of India and
democracy by Indira Gandhi and analyses the political and cultural
amnesia among the general populace in the decades following the
Emergency.
At a time when debates around freedom of speech and expression
have become critical to literary and political discourses, this book will
be of great interest to scholars and researchers of English literature,
cultural studies, postcolonial studies, media studies, political studies,
sociology and history.

Raita Merivirta is a postdoctoral research fellow at the School of

Languages and Translation Studies at the University of Turku, Finland.
She is the author of The Gun and Irish Politics: Examining National
History in Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins (2009) and a co-editor of
Frontiers of Screen History: Imagining European Borders in Cinema,
1945–2010 (2013).
The Emergency
and the Indian
English Novel
Memory, Culture and Politics

Raita Merivirta
 First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2019 Raita Merivirta
The right of Raita Merivirta to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN: 978-1-138-31298-2 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-28574-5 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
T o t h e mem o ry o f A ngus
M cD o nal d ( 1 9 6 2 – 2 0 1 3 )
 Contents

Acknowledgements viii

1 Introduction 1

2 Midnight’s Children: preserving memories for

“the amnesiac nation” 37

3 Safeguarding democracy in The Great Indian Novel105

4 Family ties: nepotism and corruption in Rich Like Us149

5 The Repressive State Apparatus in Such a Long

Journey and A Fine Balance186

6 Conclusion 239

Bibliography 247
Index 261

vii
 Acknowledgements

This book evolved out of my PhD thesis at La Trobe University, Mel-

bourne. The research for the doctoral thesis was carried out whilst I
was supported by a La Trobe University Postgraduate Research Schol-
arship and a La Trobe University Tuition Fee Remission Scholarship.
The writing of the book itself was funded as an Endeavour Research
Fellowship, awarded by the Australian Government’s Department of
Education and Training. I also received funding from the Emil Aal-
tonen Foundation and the Oskar Öflund Foundation. I finished the
book while working as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Univer-
sity of Turku. To all these institutions and funding bodies, I owe many
thanks.
I particularly want to thank Sue Thomas, who has been a truly
important mentor. Her support and encouragement have been instru-
mental in making this book come to life. Thanks are also due to
Abdulrazak Gurnah, Ralph Crane and Neil ten Kortenaar for their
comments on the thesis and the anonymous reviewers for their com-
ments on the book manuscript.
I thank my friends and family for their love and support.
Chapter 2 contains some ideas and a small amount of material that
appeared in “‘A Collective Fiction’: The (De)construction of Nehru-
vian India in Midnight’s Children” in Critical Insights: Midnight’s
Children, edited by Joel Kuortti, 136–150 (Ipswich, Massachusetts:
Salem Press/Grey House Publishing, 2014), which have been repro-
duced with the permission of Grey House Publishing.

viii
 1
Introduction

“We have no memory in this country. Just amnesia.” [. . .]

“Listen, listen,” he repeated, reading and pacing. “‘Today,
the papers are talking about the supposed political rebirth
of Mrs Indira Gandhi; but when’ . . .” he paused to smirk at
Toby, “‘but when I returned to India, concealed in a wicker
basket, “The Madam” was basking in the fullness of her glory.
Today, perhaps, we are already forgetting, sinking willingly
into the insidious clouds of amnesia; but I remember, and will
set down’  .  .  . so on and so forth. But look at that phrase,
Toby: ‘the insidious clouds of amnesia.’ That is what gets this
place time and again. It never learns from the past; it just
keeps forgetting. Look at the Emergency, that’s what Rushdie
is referring to. . . . Nine years ago. The year you were married.
I remember. And less than a decade later . . . ?”
“Forgotten. It is true.”
“A lifetime away. The witch is back in power, turning her
evil eye to Punjab this time, which is already in flames, and
no one says a thing. No one even remembers. It’s maddening.
[. . .]”
[. . .]
“And I’ll tell you something, Toby. There’s nothing benign
about this amnesia. It conceals some pretty awful things. I don’t
want to make some Santayana-like pronouncement about the
price people who refuse to remember the past eventually pay.
But, let me say this much to you: there is nothing benign about
this amnesiac fog, nothing benign at all.”
Aatish Taseer, The Way Things Were (2015)

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) introduced Indian history

for the first time to many of the novel’s non-Indian readers and started

1
 Introduction

a veritable boom of Indian English writing that was geared towards

examining and evaluating the history of twentieth-century India and
presenting social and political criticism. For approximately 15 years,
from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, Indian English novelists mani-
fested an interest in Indian national politics and history and a return
to examining the idea of India in their novels. Harish Trivedi (2000,
217) has called this trend “the Rushdie-Stephanian international Indian
novel-as-history,” the shift away from which was marked in 1997 by the
publication of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things.1 In addition
to the “Rushdie-Stephanian” history novels, a number of more tradi-
tional realist Indian English novels which focused on historical topics
were published. The reasons behind this history trend are most likely
manifold, but the social and political developments in India would seem
to be a central factor. As Viney Kirpal (1990, xx) points out,

historically, politically, the 1970s were one of the most tur-

bulent years in Indian history. The role of the 1970s in shap-
ing the new Indian consciousness has been exceptional. The
1980s novel is the direct result of the events that occurred in
the 1970s and the early 1980s.

These events include the disillusionment caused by the “State of Emer-

gency” (26 June 1975–21 March 1977), which subsequently featured
either directly or indirectly in several Indian English novels of the
1980s and the 1990s. These novels include Rushdie’s Midnight’s Chil-
dren, Raj Gill’s The Torch-Bearer (1983), Nayantara Sahgal’s Rich
Like Us (1985), O.J. Vijayan’s The Saga of Dharmapuri (in Malayalam
in 1985, in English in 1988),2 Manohar Malgonkar’s The Garland
Keepers (1986), Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel (1989),
Arun Joshi’s The City and the River (1990) and Rohinton Mistry’s A
Fine Balance (1995). Interestingly, the Emergency seems to have fea-
tured mainly in Indian novels in English in the 1980s and the 1990s –
novels written in other Indian languages did apparently not deal with
the topic, with few exceptions in Hindi.3
The (State of) Emergency, declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi
(or by Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, President of India, at her order) on the
grounds that “a grave emergency exists whereby the security of India
is threatened by internal disturbance,”4 was a period of autocratic rule
in India, during which the press was censored,5 judicial procedures
and democratic rights, such as freedom of assembly, were suspended
and opposition politicians arrested. Tens of thousands of people were

2
 Introduction

detained without trial, and many were tortured. Elections were sus-
pended and the constitution amended. It is, however, best remembered
for slum clearance campaigns and forced sterilisations overseen by
Indira Gandhi’s younger son Sanjay Gandhi, who held an unofficial
seat of power next to his mother.6 After the end of the Emergency,
Indira Gandhi and the Congress Party had a political interest in forget-
ting it. In social anthropologist Emma Tarlo’s (2003, 19) words, “as a
moment of national shame, a blot on India’s democratic record, the
Emergency has been built more as a moment for forgetting than as
one for remembering.” Significantly, while the public culture was one
of forgetting in the 1980s and the 1990s, perhaps even in the 2000s,
“many eminent Indian English novelists chose to focus on the Emer-
gency either as the main theme, or as a part of the more comprehensive
sweep, of one of their most significant works” (Mathur 2004, 124). I
suggest that these novelists, by constructing literary counter-memory
of the period in their novels, challenged Indira Gandhi and the Indian
state’s official version of the Emergency which, during the Emergency,
claimed that the purpose was to safeguard democracy and benefit the
poor (by removing poverty), and afterwards, downplayed the atrocities
committed and worked to obliterate the memory of the period. Rush-
die (1992a, 14) has, in fact, stated: “Writers and politicians are natural
rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they
fight for the same territory. And the novel is one way of denying the
official, political version of truth.” How Indian English novelists chose
to deny the official, political truth about the Emergency and remember
it otherwise, constructing an enduring counter-memory, is the topic of
this book. I examine how cultural counter-memory of Indira Gandhi,
her politics and the Emergency was constructed and mediated in Indian
English novels of the 1980s and 1990s for the Indian middle classes as
well as for the lucrative Western market and its Euro-American read-
ers. I examine the novels in question as social and political criticism,
as efforts at constructing and keeping alive the cultural memory of the
Emergency in a time of official “amnesia.”
In the time of state-aided forgetting, Indian English Emergency lit-
erature functioned as “a medium of remembrance” (Erll and Rigney
2006, 112), or a “medium of cultural memory,” that is, a medium
“which create[s] and mold[s] collective images of the past.” These
novels produced and preserved cultural memories of the Emergency.
I refer here to Marita Sturken (1997, 9), who argues that “cultural
memory is produced through objects, images, and representations.
These are technologies of memory, not vessels of memory in which

3
 Introduction

memory passively resides.” According to Birgit Neumann (2010, 334–

335), novels

configure memory representations because they select and

edit elements of culturally given discourse: They combine the
real and the imaginary, the remembered and the forgotten,
and, by means of narrative devices, imaginatively explore the
workings of memory, thus offering new perspectives on the
past. Such imaginative explorations can influence readers’
understanding of the past and thus refigure culturally prevail-
ing versions of memory. Literature is therefore never a simple
reflection of pre-existing cultural discourses; rather, it proac-
tively contributes to the negotiation of cultural memory.

The medium of the novel, and the novel in English, which is widely
accessible in India as well as globally, is significant here. These liter-
ary representations of the Indira Gandhi years shape our understand-
ing of the Emergency and offer a counter-narrative, a counter-memory
to the official state one. This book examines these representations of
Indira Gandhi and her years as Prime Minister, the cultural memory of
the Emergency as constructed in the following major, award-winning
Indian English novels: Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981),
Nayantara Sahgal’s Rich Like Us (1985), Shashi Tharoor’s The Great
Indian Novel (1989), and Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1995).
Mistry’s first novel, Such a Long Journey (1991), also portrays Indira
Gandhi’s India but is set in 1971. However, as Priyamvada Gopal
(2009, 119) writes, it “is also a novel of the Emergency as the culmina-
tion of an ongoing erosion of the democratic and socialist principles to
which Nehru had, rhetorically at least, committed himself.” Therefore,
it is included in the same cycle of novels and examined in this book.

Obliterating the memory of the Emergency

Emma Tarlo (2003) suggests that there have been three consecutive
master narratives about the Emergency. The first was the official and
dominant narrative spread by Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay as
well as politicians, bureaucrats, officials and journalists in the highly
censored environment during the Emergency. Until January 1977,
when she unexpectedly announced a general election to be held in
March that year, Indira Gandhi, as the head of state, controlled the
official, public discourse on the Emergency through government

4
 Introduction

propaganda and censorship of the press. The official state narrative

was printed in newspapers, government pamphlets, posters, hoardings,
stickers, books and seminar proceedings as well as phrased in slogans
and broadcast on the radio. According to the official narrative, the
Emergency was necessary in the face of the threat made against democ-
racy by the JP movement (see Tarlo 2003, 21–54).7 The Prime Minis-
ter explained that “the emergency is the direct consequence of various
factors and the opposition front’s announced designs to paralyze the
Government and the open and hidden preparations they were making”
(Gandhi 1984, 182), stated that “We were not happy to declare emer-
gency, but we had to under the compulsion of circumstances” (Gandhi
1984, 200), and remarked that “what has been done is not an abroga-
tion of democracy but an effort to safeguard it” (Gandhi 1984, 192).
Indian historian Bipan Chandra (2003, 2) notes that both JP Narayan
and Indira Gandhi “justified their actions by appealing to democracy”:

The main justification given by JP for his movement was that

it aimed at ending corruption in day-to-day life and politics,
whose fountainhead was Mrs Gandhi, and to defend democ-
racy which was threatened by her authoritarian personality,
policies and style of politics. Her continuation in office, he
said, was “incompatible with the survival of democracy in
India.” Mrs Gandhi’s primary defence of the Emergency and
her main criticism of the JP movement was that its disruptive
character endangered India’s stability, security, integrity and
democracy. “In the name of democracy it has been sought to
negate the very functioning of democracy,” she said on the
morrow of the Emergency.

The official narrative remained dominant until early 1977 as the heavy
censorship stopped almost all material critical of the Emergency, the
government and/or Indira Gandhi from being published in India.
A new master narrative of the Emergency appeared soon after
the general election of March 1977, in which Indira Gandhi lost her
seat and the Congress its majority position. Resentment against the
Emergency and Indira Gandhi was expressed in a number of quickly
produced books, ranging from political exposés and prison memoirs
to public judgements (Tarlo 2003, 33–34). They were concerned with
expressing what could not have been expressed during the months of
heavy censorship. Indira Gandhi’s biographer Katherine Frank (2002,
418) notes that “Indira Gandhi bashing was now not only safe but

5
 Introduction

also intellectually fashionable. These books ran the gamut from barely
literate innuendo and gossip to polished intellectual assaults.” This
new master narrative, dominant in 1977–1978, presented Indira Gan-
dhi as tyrannical and corrupt, while JP Narayan was portrayed as the
people’s hero, leading the masses in non-violent protest. According to
Tarlo (2003, 35), all the accounts were of the view that “Indira Gandhi
declared the Emergency in order to stamp out opposition voices which
she could no longer control by democratic means.” Tarlo (2003, 31)
argues that the post-Emergency literature of 1977–1978 was “con-
cerned primarily with remembering the Emergency in such a way that
it can not and will not be forgotten.” I argue that Midnight’s Children,
written during and after the Emergency, is, like the political exposés,
memoirs and public judgements, concerned with remembering the
Emergency and challenging Indira Gandhi’s officially sanctioned ver-
sion of it. Rushdie (1992a, 13–14) has written:

I must say first of all that description is itself a political act. The
black American writer Richard Wright once wrote that black
and white Americans were engaged in a war over the nature of
reality. Their descriptions were incompatible. So it is clear that
redescribing a world is the necessary first step towards chang-
ing it. And particularly at times when the State takes reality
into its own hands, and sets about distorting it, altering the
past to fit its present needs, then the making of the alternative
realities of art, including the novel of memory, becomes politi-
cized. “The struggle of man against power,” Milan Kundera
has written, “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

Rushdie has taken issue with autocratic regimes and their tendency
to produce official, singular “truths,” histories and propaganda in his
novels on India and Pakistan. In Midnight’s Children, he redescribes
the Emergency from a perspective contrary to the official state one.
Midnight’s Children is a political novel written to challenge the official
narrative, and it is examined from that perspective in this book.
After Indira Gandhi’s re-election in 1980, a third Emergency mas-
ter narrative, in Tarlo’s (2003, 53) view, “took over and ultimately
effaced both of the narratives that preceded it,” as Indira Gandhi
worked actively to rehabilitate her image in India and abroad, and to
sweep the memory of the Emergency under the carpet. Furthermore,
Tarlo suggests, Sanjay Gandhi’s death in a plane crash in June 1980
removed the most controversial person and the biggest villain of the

6
 Introduction

Emergency from the equation. The rehabilitation was made complete

by Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, which, in Tarlo’s (2003, 53)
words, “transformed any lingering shadow of dictatorship into a halo
of self-sacrifice whilst at the same time establishing Rajiv’s legitimate
right to rule.”
Indira Gandhi’s endeavour to obliterate the memory of the Emer-
gency included, apparently, a serious effort to suppress and destroy all
the official evidence, including the Shah Commission Report, of the
Emergency and the excesses and crimes perpetrated by the govern-
ment as well as Sanjay Gandhi and his coterie. The Shah Commission
was a Commission of Inquiry headed by Justice J.C. Shah set up by
the succeeding Janata Party government in September 1977 to investi-
gate Emergency excesses. It produced three reports; the final one was
published in August 1978. Nayantara Sahgal (1983, 202) points out
that the report “had been printed in eleven regional languages. Mrs.
Gandhi’s government stopped its distribution and sale, endeavouring
to insure [sic] that a public record of the Emergency would be oblit-
erated and the consequences of suspected criminality buried.” Tarlo
(2003, 53) mentions that “the Congress Party is suspected of having
bought up most copies of the Commission’s final report in order to
prevent its circulation,” whereas Frank (2002, 429) suggests that “the full
tape-recorded proceedings of the Commission have [also] vanished.”8
As Frank (2002, 430) puts it, the report is “a treasure trove of evidence
for Sanjay Gandhi’s illicit power in the period leading up to and dur-
ing the Emergency [.  .  .] it is not surprising that Indira Gandhi had
all copies of the Report withdrawn as soon as she regained power in
1980.” The report does not only present the evidence of Sanjay Gan-
dhi’s wielding of power and inflicting of suffering on ordinary people.
It also passes judgement on him, as the following (lengthy) extract
from the Shah Commission’s Interim Report II (1978, 119) shows:

Shri Sanjay Gandhi held no responsible position in the admin-

istrative set up of Delhi. It is surprising that he should have
wielded such enormous powers without being accountable to
any one. [. . .] Here was a young man who literally amused
himself with demolishing residential, commercial and indus-
trial buildings, in localities after localities without having
the slightest realisation of the miseries that he was heaping
on the helpless population who had no recourse by way of
any administrative avenue for redress of grievances or even
to the courts which were successfully side-tracked by devious

7
 Introduction

means. In the view of the Commission the manner in which

Shri Sanjay Gandhi functioned in the public affairs of Delhi in
particular is the single greatest act of excess committed dur-
ing the period of emergency for which there is no parallel nor
any justification for such assumption of authority or power
in the history of independent India. While the other acts of
the excesses may have been in the nature of acts committed
by functionaries having some shadow of authority acting in
excess of their powers, here was a case of an individual wield-
ing unlimited powers in a dictatorial manner without even the
slightest right to it. If this country is to be rendered safe for
future generations, the people owe it to themselves to ensure
that an irresponsible and unconstitutional centre of power
like the one which revolved round Shri Sanjay Gandhi during
the emergency is not allowed to come up ever again in any
form or shape or under any guise.

The Shah Commission had no authority to convict but was only a

“fact finding” inquiry. Furthermore, Morarji Desai’s government fell
before it had time to act on the findings of the commission. The Shah
Commission Report seems not to have been widely available in India
until 2010, when former Indian MP Era Sezhiyan, in response to the
growing interest in the Emergency documents reported in Indian
newspapers, reproduced it in 2010, using an original copy he found
among his own old records and books (Sezhiyan 2010).9 Furthermore,
the Emergency records and documents should have been released after
25 years had passed, according to Public Records Rules (1997), but it
took some highly publicised Right to Information (RTI) applications
in 2010 before they were finally released.10
In August 2010, The Times of India asked in its report where the
public records of the Emergency were after an RTI application con-
cerning the proclamation of the Emergency on 26 June 1975 had been
sent to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) in February 2010. The
PMO transferred the request to the Ministry of Home Affairs, which
reported in April that the records “may be available in the National
Archives of India,” as they were more than 25 years old and therefore
no longer available in the Ministry. The National Archives of India
replied that the files could not be located (Menon 2010a). An exten-
sive search ensued, and in early September 2010, The Times of India
reported that “some documents and records pertaining to the procla-
mation of Emergency in 1975, which were earlier said to be missing,

8
 Introduction

have suddenly resurfaced” (Menon 2010b). Three months later, in

December 2010, The Times of India wrote:

The reams of documents given to Devasahayam [who made

the original RTI request] betray extraordinary attempts to
distance Indira Gandhi from much of the illegal decisions
responsible for Emergency and its excesses. Though the sig-
natures of other dramatis personae, President Fakhruddin Ali
Ahmed downwards, are available on the Emergency records,
there is none of Indira Gandhi herself in any of them. The
omission of Indira Gandhi’s signature is most glaring in the file
relating to the manner in which she had bypassed the Cabinet
while asking Ahmed to sign the Emergency proclamation late
in the night on June 25, 1975. While the original proclama-
tion bearing Ahmed’s signature is available, there is only a
typed copy of the PM’s “top secret” letter that had recom-
mended imposition of Emergency under Article 352 of the
Constitution. According to the file, the copy of Indira Gan-
dhi’s historic letter was obtained by the home ministry from
the President’s Secretariat. The original letter signed by Indira
Gandhi was probably taken out of the file at some point and
kept away in her personal papers, which are in the control of
her family.
(Mitta 2010)

Six months later, in June 2011, the Central Information Commission

ordered the President’s Secretariat to make public all the documents
on the declaration of Emergency as “there was ‘immense’ public inter-
est in disclosure of the materials and documents” (Indian Express
2011). The Shah Commission of Inquiry records – thousands of docu-
ments collected by the Commission in 1977–1978 – were also made
available in 2010 and are now held in the National Archives of India.
In her book Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in
Delhi (2003), for which she recorded the live memory and unwritten
stories and experiences of the urban poor subjected to slum clearances
and forcible sterilisations, Emma Tarlo notes that in 1996, the Emer-
gency had “slipped out of public discourse” and was “remembered, if
at all, for the extent to which it has been forgotten” (21). She adds that
in Delhi, a city of monuments, the Emergency has been forgotten, “its
forgetting [.  .  .] imprinted in the capital’s landscape” (23). She refers
to the exhibition at 1 Safdarjang Road, the former residence of Prime

9
 Introduction

Minister Indira Gandhi, which has been turned into a popular museum.
The exhibition at 1 Safdarjang Road “encourages us to forget the Emer-
gency, which features as little more than an empty hollow” (53). At
Dujana House, which used to be a well-known family planning clinic
in Delhi where forcible sterilisations took place during the Emergency,
Tarlo met men who told their memories of the period. She writes:

Their memory is more collective than personal, but it is not

public. No official attempt has been made to publicly inscribe
the memory of the Emergency at Dujana House. It is a place
empty of connotations to those who don’t know.
(Tarlo 2003, 55–56)

There is no statue to the sterilised or even a simple memorial plaque.

Indeed, there have been no institutionalised sites of memory for the Emer-
gency. Furthermore, Tarlo (2003, 2) has argued, “while literary writers
have been keen to evoke and, at times, embellish the horror of such atroci-
ties, politicians and dominant political parties have been equally keen to
deny their reality and suppress their memory.” This is confirmed by the
well-known Indian political psychologist and cultural critic Ashis Nandy
(1995b), who noted in an article in The Times of India in 1995 that
“enormous political effort has gone into wiping out the Emergency as a
live memory.” As discussed previously, as the memory of the Emergency
was suppressed in India, several Indian English writers chose to focus on
it in their novels in the 1980s and the 1990s, thus, I argue, contributing
to keeping the cultural memory of the Emergency alive in these decades.

Remembering the Emergency

Paul Ricoeur (1999, 9) has discussed the “ethico-political problem” of
whether there is a “duty to remember.” He asserts that

a basic reason for cherishing the duty to remember is to keep

alive the memory of suffering over against the general ten-
dency of history to celebrate the victors. [. . .] We need, there-
fore, a kind of parallel history of, let us say, victimization,
which would counter the history of success and victory. To
memorise the victims of history – the sufferers, the humiliated,
the forgotten – should be a task for all of us.
(Ricoeur 1999, 10–11)

10
 Introduction

I argue that the Emergency novels examined in this study are parallel
histories that counter the history presented by Indira Gandhi and her
government and remember the part of the history of the Emergency
which was suppressed and silenced, so that it would not be forgotten.
Ricoeur reminds us that “it is always possible to tell in another way.
This exercise of memory is here an exercise in telling otherwise, and
also in letting others tell their own history” (9). This telling other-
wise is similar to Rushdie’s redescribing the world. It rescues what was
silenced and forgotten, and gives voice to the victims rather than to the
victors. The novels tell the story of the Emergency in a way that also
remembers the sufferers and the humiliated of the Emergency.
The fact that they were successful in their effort to preserve the
memory of the Emergency depended on their success as novels, on
their ability to interest readers and please critics. Birgit Neumann
(2010, 339) discusses “the reality-constituting character of media”
and suggests that “the appropriation of the past is also limited by
conditions of medial dissemination and that the question as to whose
memory versions will prevail in the fight for historical definitional
power depends on the memory-cultural effectiveness of the specific
medium of memory.” Indira Gandhi’s officially disseminated narra-
tive about the Emergency was effective as was her later rehabilitation
of her image and the silencing of the Emergency. However, one can
argue that the award-winning Emergency novels by Rushdie, Sahgal,
Tharoor and Mistry with their global readership have been memory-
culturally quite effective in their fight against forgetting the Emergency
and/or against presenting it as necessary and beneficial. As Astrid Erll
(2008, 395) notes, novels have “a potential for memory-making. This
potential has to be realized in the process of reception: Novels and
movies must be read and viewed by a community as media of cul-
tural memory.” Unread books do not make memories. She emphasises
that the novels’ reception has to be a collective rather than an indi-
vidual phenomenon: “What is needed is a certain kind of context, in
which novels and films are prepared and received as memory-shaping
media”. I suggest that in the context of the dearth of other (new) rep-
resentations of the Emergency in English in the 1980s and the 1990s,
the Emergency novels by Indian English writers were prepared and
received as memory-shaping. As Tarlo (2003, 44) writes, by 1980,
the Emergency had “ceased to be either journalistic coup or schol-
arly preoccupation.” Indian English novelists kept writing about the
Emergency when newspapers and scholars did not. Furthermore, these

11
 Introduction

novels have strongly impacted cultural memory, I argue, also because

of their artistic medium and literary quality. Erll (2011, 155) notes
that “clues to such an ‘effective presence’ of literary texts in memory
culture are provided by public debates as well as bestseller lists, forms
of institutionalization such as their being added to school or university
curricula, and the use of literary quotes in everyday speech.” The four
Indian English writers whose work I have chosen to examine in this
book – Rushdie, Sahgal, Tharoor and Mistry – all wrote their Emer-
gency novels for a global audience,11 even if they addressed the Indian
middle class specifically, and with a political purpose in mind.
Midnight’s Children, Rich Like Us, The Great Indian Novel, Such
a Long Journey and A Fine Balance all appeared in mass-market and
were commercially successful; they are all also still in print. They all
won prestigious literary awards for their authors and received criti-
cal acclaim from critics and scholars: Midnight’s Children won the
Booker Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1981. It was
awarded the “Booker of Bookers” Prize in 1993 and the “Best of the
Booker” Prize in 2008. Rich Like Us won Sinclair Prize for best novel
in 1985 and the Sahitya Akademi Award for best novel in English in
India in 1986. The Great Indian Novel won the Federation of Indian
Publishers’ Hindustan Times Literary Award for the Best Book of
the Year in 1990 and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the Best
Book of the Year in the Eurasian Region in 1991. Such a Long Jour-
ney won the Governor General’s Award, the Commonwealth Writers
Prize for Best Book and the W.H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel
Award; it was shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize and for the
Trillium Award. A Fine Balance won the 1995 Giller Prize; it was
shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1996. They are staples of univer-
sity curricula, and numerous scholarly studies have been written on
them. I suggest that globally, their representation of the Emergency
has had a great impact.
The novels’ role as memory-shaping medium is obviously restricted
to the English novel-reading audience – in India and elsewhere. Hun-
dreds of millions of Indians do not know English, and its users belong
overwhelmingly to the educated, urban and more privileged classes
of Indian society. English in India is, as Meenakshi Mukherjee (2004,
168) puts it, still “the language of power and privilege. It is not a lan-
guage that permeates all social levels or is used in subaltern contexts.”
Furthermore, the medium of the novel has been influential mainly
among the privileged English-speaking middle class, whereas “the
masses” have been more strongly influenced by radio, television and

12
 Introduction

Hindi film. What Timothy Brennan (1990, 56) writes about the novel
and developing countries in general, applies in India’s case as well:

For under conditions of illiteracy and shortages, and given

simply the leisure-time necessary for reading one, the novel
has been an elitist and minority form in developing countries
when compared to poem, song, television, and film. Almost
inevitably it has been the form through which a thin, foreign-
educated stratum (however sensitive or committed to domes-
tic political interests) has communicated to metropolitan
reading publics, often in translation.

It is highly unlikely that the Emergency novels have been memory-

shaping for the Indian urban poor, who were the targets of the sterili-
sation and slum clearance campaigns, as they are likely to engage with
different forms of remembering the Emergency. Diana Taylor (2003,
19, 20) has discussed memory in terms of the “archive” and the “rep-
ertoire.” The “archival” memory comprises “documents, maps, liter-
ary texts, letters, archaeological remains, bones, videos, films, CDs, all
those items supposedly resistant to change,” whereas the “repertoire”
“enacts embodied memory: performances, gestures, orality, move-
ment, dance, singing – in short, all those acts usually thought of as
ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge.” The novels are part of the
“archival” memory of the Emergency and are most likely memory-
shaping for people for whom the “archive” is accessible.
Indian writers in English come from the privileged strata of Indian
society: their fiction is what Khair (2001, ix) has called “Babu Fiction,”
the “Babus” being defined as “middle or upper class, mostly urban (at
times cosmopolitan), Brahminized and/or ‘westernized,’ and fluent in
English.” However, Khair (2001, ix) notes that the vast and heteroge-
neous majority of the Indian population are “non-Babus” and “Coo-
lies,” the latter described by Khair as “non-English speaking, not or
not significantly ‘westernized,’ not or less Brahminized, economically
deprived, culturally marginalized and, often, rural or migrant-urban
populations.”12 Trivedi (2006, 163) points out quite emphatically that
Rushdie’s “intended reader is clearly a Westerner and not an Indian,
for many of his habitual stylistic devices do not work equally well for
someone who knows any Hindi or Urdu.” Neil ten Kortenaar (2004a,
8) writes that the implied author of Midnight’s Children is “an English-
speaker addressing fellow cosmopolitans.” He goes on to note that Sal-
eem’s “English-language audience is aware of and interested in cultural

13
 Introduction

difference, and willing to be educated about India. They are familiar

with the names Nehru and Gandhi, Ganesh and the Quran, but must
have Hindi/Urdu translated for them.” Furthermore, non-Indian read-
ers who may not have any knowledge of Indian history are given suf-
ficient background information (Kortenaar 2004b, 232). Pranav Jani
(2010, 6) notes that “the production and consumption of the Indian
English novel generate cosmopolitan spaces, in which authors who are
linked to both India and the West communicate with other English
speakers, whether they are Indian elites or foreign readers.”
Sahgal, Rushdie, Tharoor and Mistry are, in their cosmopolitanism,
all typical examples of Indian novelists in English. They all come from
upper-middle-class homes, attended English-medium schools, finished
their higher education abroad and find English to be the language of
their choice – or not even a choice at all – in writing.13 The English lan-
guage has practically taken on the role of their first language. Rushdie
spoke English from the age of five at school and at home as his parents
made an effort to speak it there as well. He said in an interview in
1983 that he could have written in Urdu only if he “went back [to the
subcontinent] and lived there and allowed the language to emerge,”
but that he would have needed then also to learn classical Arabic and
Persian (Craven, Heyward and Hueston 1985, 124). Sahgal’s mother
tongue is Hindi, but she is completely bilingual and considers “English
not as a second, but as one of her first languages,” so much so, in
fact, that she “never thought about the fact that she writes in English”
(Gupta 1990, 157). Furthermore, Sahgal (1997, 26) says she had not
consciously chosen English as her medium but

it happened that way because I had the reading and reference

for it over a large number of years. It was most natural for me
to write in English. I thought that some time I would write in
Hindi, too, but I had not reckoned then with time or with the
urges and pressures of style.

Tharoor’s “parents were both born in Kerala of Malayali parents,

speakers of Malayalam,” but Tharoor “was born in London, brought
up in Bombay, went to high school in Calcutta, attended college in
Delhi and received [his] doctorate in the United States.” He visited
Kerala only with his parents during their annual trips home and
writes: “I could not have written my books in Malayalam because I
cannot write my own mother tongue” (Tharoor 1998a, 67, 71–72).

14
 Introduction

Mistry speaks Gujarati, Hindi and some Marathi but says: “English is
technically my mother tongue” (Singh 1993, 208).
The Indian middle-class audience appears to have been important
to these Indian English novelists, as much of their political message
concerns that class. Rushdie (1992a, 20), for instance, has said that “in
the case of Midnight’s Children I certainly felt that if its subcontinental
readers had rejected the work, I should have thought it a failure, no
matter what the reaction in the West.” Rushdie is asking his Indian
readers to remember the Emergency and everything that took place
during it, and to think about the role and responsibility of the middle
class in Indian society. Tharoor, who lived outside India from 1975 to
2008, has made India exclusively the subject of his books. He has said
that he writes “for anyone who will read me, but first of all for Indians
like myself” (Tharoor 2003, 247) and explained further:

I am often asked why, despite my international career, I have

set all my books so far in India. The answer is simple. My for-
mative years, from the ages of three to 19, were spent growing
up in India. India shaped my mind, anchored my identity,
influenced my beliefs, and made me who I am. India matters
immensely to me, and in all my writing, I would like to matter
to India. Or, at least, to Indian readers.
(Tharoor 2001)

It is clear from Tharoor’s fiction and non-fiction alike that he has wanted
to participate in and contribute to discussions on Indian history, society
and politics even when he was living abroad, and therefore his writing
is first and foremost addressed to “Indians like himself.” The Emergency
figured prominently especially in his earlier writing, since it was such a
significant event for his political consciousness, something which will be
discussed in more detail in Chapter 3. Sahgal has always been strongly
engaged with Indian politics, and as her novels are political as well, it
is only natural that she addresses fellow Indians in them, even if she
has always been cosmopolitan and also has an international audience
in mind. Mistry chose to write about Dalits in A Fine Balance and has
stated: “I don’t think these people have been represented enough in fic-
tion. Most fiction is about the middle class; perhaps because most writers
are from the middle class” (Mazzocco 1997). A Fine Balance is written
by a middle-class author and it addresses the middle class, but its subject
is the oppression of the Dalits – by both the age-old caste system and its

15
 Introduction

practitioners, but also by the state machinery, in which the middle class
is complicit by allowing, and even making, the state machinery to work
the way it does and did, especially during the Emergency.
Though Tarlo (2003, 2) has written that the Emergency has been
“uncomfortable ground for historical, political or sociological anal-
ysis,” and Pranav Jani (2010, 35) that the period has been “rela-
tively understudied and even minimized,” it should be noted that
some research had already been conducted on the Emergency by e.g.
political scientists (Kothari 1989; Jalal 1995), and some analytical
articles appeared in for instance in Economic and Political Weekly
in India (e.g. Puri 1985; Kaviraj 1986; Puri 1995) by the time Tarlo
was writing her book – and some more has been done and under-
taken since then. Bipan Chandra’s In the Name of Democracy: JP
Movement and the Emergency (2003) was published in the same year
as Tarlo’s book. Mary E. John (2014, 625, 626–627) argues that the
Emergency has not been “a suppressed or silenced topic” but that
“a number of scholars, political scientists and legal theorists being
rather prominent among them, have offered extensive reflections on
various aspects related to the Emergency.” As John notes, aspects of
the Emergency have been examined by political scientists and legal
theorists, in addition to which there have been studies on the family
planning policies of the time (e.g. Gwatkin 1979; Vicziany 1982,
1982–1983; Chadney 1988; Connelly 2006); but not much histori-
cal work has yet been done on the topic, though, for example, Indira
Gandhi’s biographers have also dealt with the Emergency. Indian
historian Ramachandra Guha said that one of the most important
challenges in documenting contemporary Indian history is “the lack
of density of sources,” especially as people in India are “careless
and paranoid about record.” Guha sees that “there are major gaps
in the historical understanding of post-Independence India, [. . .] in
the history of the fifties, sixties and seventies, the decades in which
the nation was shaped” (Indian Express 2016). The Emergency has
been one of these gaps, since the official files were unavailable for
several decades. The situation began to change rapidly after 2010,
as the central government’s files have become available and several
historical articles and some books have already been published (e.g.
Clibbens 2014; Williams 2014; Lockwood 2016; Paul 2017; Rao
2017; Scott 2017).
However, even in 2010, a commemorative two-volume history of
the Congress Party, Congress and the Making of the Indian Nation,

16
 Introduction

published to honour the 125-year history of the party, seemed intent

on downplaying the Emergency and merely stating the obvious and
well-known “facts.” It certainly does not analyse the period in any
significant way or draw on any (new) sources. The Emergency is
described as follows in it:

The period of the emergency saw the suspension of nor-

mal political procedures and fundamental rights, arrests
of the leaders of the Grand Alliance, and enforcement of
press censorship and strict discipline. Extreme communal
and leftist organizations were banned. More than one lakh
people were arrested over the 19 months of the Emergency.
Powers of the judiciary were reduced drastically. Unlimited
state and party power was concentrated in the hands of the
Prime Minister.
Vast sections of the population welcomed it initially since
general administration improved. But, civil rights activists
took exception to the curbs on freedom of expression and
personal liberties. Unfortunately, in certain spheres, over-
enthusiasm led to compulsion in enforcement of certain pro-
grammes like compulsory sterilization and clearance of slums.
Sanjay Gandhi had, by then, emerged as a leader of great sig-
nificance. It was due to his support to family planning that
the government decided to pursue it more vigorously. He also
promoted slum clearance, anti-dowry measures and promo-
tion of literacy but in an arbitrary and authoritarian manner
much to the annoyance of the popular opinion.
(Indian National Congress 2010, vol. II, 116–117)

The passage does not assign any blame on Indira Gandhi; it does not
in fact even mention her. It is written in a passive voice, as if everything
had happened on its own, or as sanctioned by a collective will. In con-
trast to the absence of Indira Gandhi in this passage, Sanjay Gandhi
is mentioned, and he is presented as authoritarian. The blame for the
compulsory sterilisation programme is put on the “over-enthusiasm” in
“certain spheres,” as well as on Sanjay Gandhi in this official party his-
tory. The Congress Party led a coalition government at the time of the
publication of this history and seems to have had an interest in keep-
ing up this view of the Emergency. However, as Rebecca Jane Williams
(2014, 487) has shown in a recent article based on archival research

17
 Introduction

on the Shah Commission files, “the central government had explic-

itly endorsed coercion and compulsion in the N[ational] P[opulation]
P[olicy] of 1976.” She points out:

the evidence contained within the files suggests that the abuses
of the Emergency-era family planning program were not sim-
ply a result of ‘excess,’ or the personal influence of Sanjay
Gandhi, but a product of the combination of a demographic
discourse with a modernizing impulse.
(Williams 2014, 477)

However, to put matters in perspective, it is important to bear in

mind that the victims of the great trauma of the Partition of 1947 – the
1 million people who were killed, the 10–12 million who were dis-
placed and the up to 75,000 women who were abducted and raped –
were also not officially commemorated with monuments or public
memorials for decades afterwards in India or Pakistan (Saint 2010,
32). The first Partition museum opened in August 2017 in India, fully
70 years after the event. Tarun K. Saint (2010, 7) writes that

the question of coming to terms with partition violence in the

public domain was generally downplayed, even as the task of
nation-building was prioritised in its aftermath. Nationalist
historiography in both India and Pakistan displayed a marked
silence about the reciprocal violence during the partition.

Nadia Butt (2014, 18) notes that

in both India and Pakistan, the partition of India in 1947 and

the subsequent atrocities [. . .] are treated in state-sponsored
school, college and university books as dark memories that
need to be either suppressed or forgotten; however, if remem-
bered at all, they should be described in grand terms, which
ironically means ignoring the individual loss during these crit-
ical moments in South Asian history.

Ananya Jahanara Kabir (2002, 246) has interestingly argued that “in
the absence of public rituals and spaces of mourning sanctioned by
the nation-state, Partition narratives [such as novels and films] present
alternative, albeit contested sites for such mourning.” Similarly, Saint
(2010, 46–47) points out that “due to the long absence/suppression

18
 Introduction

of an archive of first generation survivor testimony, family memory

in South Asia became the primary vehicle for the inscription and
transmission of memory” and argues that “this submerged archive
is often reconstituted and reinterpreted through literary modes of
remembrance,” thus emphasising the role of literature as a medium
of remembrance in the South Asian context. He calls this “fictive” or
“surrogate” testimony and points out that “such fictional representa-
tions may serve as an antidote to official narratives about the past”
(Saint 2010, 47). In the same vein, Butt (2014, 18) argues that South
Asian “novels of transcultural memory, however, show us both sides
of the story [of Partition] in order to re-collect, document and preserve
what the ‘dominance of a singular history’ seeks to dismiss or erase.”
Transcultural literary memory functions here as counter-memory

since it not only resurrects silenced as well as forgotten his-

tories, but also challenges the more dominant “national,”
state-sponsored histories. It is through transcultural memory
in fiction that the reader gets the “other” side of the story or
“other” memories; in short, “alternative” memories.
(Butt 2014, 18, emphasis in original)

Similarly, I argue, the novels on the Emergency resurrect the silenced

history of the period and challenge the state-sponsored version of the
Emergency era and the silence that followed Indira Gandhi’s re-election
in 1980.
Whereas Rushdie wrote Midnight’s Children during and immediately
after the Emergency in an effort to counter the official state narrative about
it, the other four novels were written in the 1980s and the 1990s during
the period of official forgetting. All the novels were written as social and
political criticism, as representations of the past, seeking to bring about
transformation in Indian society. As Aleida Assmann and Linda Shortt
(2011, 3) emphasise, “it is never the past itself that acts upon a pres-
ent society, but representations of past events that are created, circulated
and received within a specific cultural frame and political constellation.”
They argue that as representations of the past are “disseminated by the
mass media as interpretations or official definitions of historical events,
representations are a powerful element in the construction, contestation
and reconstruction of individual and collective memories” (Assman and
Shortt 2011, 3–4, emphasis in original). All the novels examined in this
book are such influential representations of the past, powerful elements in
the construction of the cultural counter-memory of the Emergency.

19
 Introduction

The Emergency fictions as novels of trauma and memory

The Emergency was a turning point in Indian politics, a dras-
tic departure from Nehruvianism and a time of disillusionment
with the postcolonial state. Pranav Jani (2010, 35) notes that “the
Emergency period and its aftermath represented India’s break from
the early phase of decolonization, in terms of both socioeconomic
and ideological trajectories.” For many Indian novelists writing in
English who emerged in the 1980s, the Emergency seems to have
been a defining experience, or at least a strongly influencing factor.
Many of these writers – being Nehruvians themselves – had taken
Indian democracy for granted and were now horrified by its erosion.
Shocked and appalled, they examined this betrayal of Nehruvianism
and democracy in their novels. They wanted to expose the corrup-
tion, to let the whole world know and remember, for the memory
of the Emergency had started to fade already in the late 1970s and
early 1980s. Ashish Nandy (1995b) noted in the mid-1990s that “all
memories [of the Emergency], however, have not faded. To some like
me, those memories constitute simultaneously major trauma, marker
of a threshold in Indian politics, and a deep scar on the self-definition
of independent India.” The Emergency fiction manifests similar senti-
ments. The Emergency as described by Nandy, and as expressed in
the Emergency novels by Indian English writers, bears a similarity to
what Ron Eyerman (2001, 2) calls “cultural trauma,” that is, “a dra-
matic loss of identity and meaning, a tear in social fabric, affecting a
group of people that has achieved some degree of cohesion.” For Indi-
ans who had become a nation during the independence struggle led
by Gandhi and who had then lived in Nehruvian India where there
was purportedly “unity in diversity,” and especially for those Indians
who belonged to the educated, English-speaking, urban elite and had
faith in the Nehruvian idea of India, the Emergency appears to have
been a cultural trauma.
Jawaharlal Nehru had advocated “unity in diversity,” “a model
committed to protecting cultural and religious difference rather than
imposing a uniform ‘Indianness’” (Khilnani 2001, 167). In The Dis-
covery of India (1946), which can be seen as one of the founding docu-
ments of the Indian political nation, Jawaharlal Nehru describes the
unity of India as follows:

Though outwardly there was diversity and infinite variety

among our people, everywhere there was that tremendous

20
 Introduction

impress of oneness, which had held all of us together for ages

past, whatever political fate or misfortune had befallen on us.
[. . .] I was also fully aware of the diversities and divisions of
Indian life, of classes, castes, religions, races, different degrees
of cultural development. Yet I think that a country with a long
cultural background and a common outlook on life develops
a spirit that is peculiar to it and that is impressed on all its
children, however much they differ among themselves.
(Nehru 2004, 51–52)

Ancient India, like ancient China, was a world in itself, a cul-

ture and a civilization which gave shape to all things. Foreign
influences poured in and often influenced that culture and
were absorbed. Disruptive tendencies gave rise immediately
to an attempt to find a synthesis. Some kind of a dream of
unity has occupied the mind of India since the dawn of civi-
lization. That unity was not conceived as something imposed
from outside, a standardization of externals or even of beliefs.
It was something deeper and, within its fold, the widest tol-
erance of belief and custom was practiced and every variety
acknowledged and even encouraged.
(Nehru 2004, 55)

Tharoor (2008, 130) has noted that his “generation (and Rushdie’s)
grew up in an India where our sense of nationhood lay in the slogan
‘unity in diversity.’ We were brought up to take pluralism for granted.”
Rushdie (1992a, 16) confirms this when he says: “I am a member of
that generation of Indians who were sold the secular ideal. One of the
things I liked, and still like, about India is that it is based on a non-
sectarian philosophy.” Both Rushdie’s and Tharoor’s non-fictional
descriptions of the Indian nation and nationalism reveal a deep com-
mitment to a Nehruvian idea of India. Rushdie (1992d, 44) writes that
this “India-idea” is

based on the most obvious and apparent fact about the great
subcontinent: multitude. For a nation of seven hundred mil-
lions to make any kind of sense, it must base itself firmly on
the concept of multiplicity, of plurality and tolerance, of devo-
lution and decentralization wherever possible. There can be
no one way – religious, cultural, or linguistic – of being an
Indian; let difference reign.

21
 Introduction

Tharoor (2007, 13–14) praises “the idea of an ever-ever land –

emerging from an ancient civilization, united by a shared history,
sustained by pluralist democracy. [. . .] The whole point of Indian-
ness is its pluralism: you can be many things and one thing. You can
be a good Muslim, a good Keralite, and a good Indian all at once”
(Tharoor 2007, 14). Tharoor’s, like Rushdie’s, idea of India – as
“a secular pluralist state” – is unabashedly Nehruvian. It is to a
great extent the same idea that founded modern India. Their early
novels are illustrative examples of the prevalence of Nehruvianism
in Indian English novels of the 1980s and 1990s. Both writers do,
however, also present criticism of Nehru and his India, even as they
largely embrace it.
Sahgal is also by and large guided by Nehruvian ideals in her writ-
ing. She wrote about the newly independent India in her childhood
memoir, her first published book:

My country was inextricably bound up with my uncle’s ideal

of it. I had sensed this as a child. Now I was convinced of it.
His was the India with which I wanted to associate myself and
in which I wanted to live.
(Sahgal 1954, 212)

This is reflected also in Sahgal’s later writing. Her view of Indian his-
tory with layers of cultures echoes Nehru’s view as explained in The
Discovery of India:

Altogether, it would be truer to say that what possesses me is

a sense of history, rather than politics. It is that layer-upon-
layer of social/religious/cultural composition that has made
us what we are, and brought us to where we stand today, that
interests me.
(Sahgal 1989, 82)

Sahgal also subscribes to a secular idea of the Indian nation very close
to that of Nehru:

[T]here’s no difference between Hindu and Muslim. We are

one, from the gut. It’s not that we partake of each other, we are
each other. This is what India means. Secularism not only has
a chance, secularism has been bred into our bones – through

22
 Introduction

the national movement in modern times, and centuries ago

through being good neighbours, living side by side, sharing
each other’s festivals.
(Salgado 2004, 140)

Sahgal’s novels draw on these Nehruvian nationalist assumptions and

ideals. Of the four novelists whose works are examined in this book,
Mistry is no exception in his Nehruvian orientation – he, too, spent his
childhood in Nehruvian India and seems to have been sold the secular
idea as well. He has said in an interview:

What keeps India together, I think, is the idea of India as a

secular nation where different languages, different cultures
can co-exist peacefully. Or not so peacefully, sometimes. That
is the idea. The encouraging thing is that poll after poll, even
in villages where illiteracy can be very high, when people are
asked, how do you identify yourself? They identify themselves
as Indians.
(Smith 2002)

Rushdie, Sahgal, Tharoor and Mistry share the Nehruvian ideals of

pluralistic, secular and democratic India and blame Indira Gandhi not
only for undermining her father’s legacy and Indian democracy but
also for the rise of communal conflicts in India. This constitutes a cul-
tural trauma expressed in the “Emergency novels.”
A cultural trauma is, in Neil Smelser’s definition,

a memory accepted and publicly given credence by a rel-

evant membership group and evoking an event or situation
which is (a) laden with negative affect, (b) represented as
indelible, and (c) regarded as threatening a society’s exis-
tence or violating one or more of its fundamental cultural
prepositions.
(quoted in Eyerman 2001, 2)

The relevant membership group here is the one suggested by Priyam-

vada Gopal (2009, 65), that is, the “many writers and intellectuals
[to whom] the Emergency came to signify the final betrayal of the
legacy of the freedom struggle, its idea of India and of those like Gan-
dhi who symbolized it.” This betrayal amounts to a cultural trauma

23
 Introduction

for many Indian intellectuals and writers. Jenny Edkins (2006, 109)
has argued:

It seems that trauma is more than a shock encounter with bru-

tality or death; in an important sense, trauma is the betrayal
of a promise or an expectation. Trauma can be seen as an
encounter that betrays our faith in previously established per-
sonal and social worlds.

I argue that the Emergency appears as such a trauma in the fiction of

these Indian English novelists. The Emergency was a betrayal of the
expectation or promise of the Nehruvian idea of India and democracy.
Drawing on Edkins’s discussion of “trauma as betrayal,” I examine the
Emergency novels as born out of a trauma.
Edkins argues that “the form of political authority that the nation
represents is intimately tied up with, and made possible by, the way
in which it invokes its memories, and with what it remembers and
why.” She explains that public remembrance of e.g. wars and famines
is “fundamental to the production and reproduction of centralized
political power” (Edkins 2006, 101). According to Edkins, trauma
disrupts settled stories of the nation: “Centralized, sovereign political
authority is particularly threatened by this. After a traumatic event
what we call the state moves quickly to close down any openings
produced” (107). Edkins may have had very different examples and
cases in mind, but I suggest that some of her ideas can be applied to
the Emergency in India. Even though the government itself brought
about the trauma of the Emergency, once it realised that its measures
had brought about the trauma, the government tried to patch things
up and produced a narrative to support its political authority in a
situation in which authoritarianism was about to be abandoned for
democracy again. After calling a general election for March 1977,
Indira Gandhi’s government, on recognising the unpopularity of the
family planning programme, tried to distance itself from the family
planning measures it had sanctioned. Williams has shown that a narra-
tive of “excess” was created in which the abuses of the family planning
programme were attributed to “the ‘excessive’ actions of lower-level
government officials” and to state governments rather than the central
government. Williams (2014, 487) argues that even the Shah Commis-
sion “adopted and consolidated the narrative,” even as it condemned
the “excessive” actions. This narrative is still alive and well, as seen

24
 Introduction

with the Congress history described earlier. Furthermore, as was dis-

cussed previously, the Emergency was not publicly remembered by the
Indira Gandhi government that began its work in 1980, nor by the
subsequent Indian governments of the 1980s and the 1990s. Quite
the contrary, it was actively forgotten and its memory suppressed. As
Tarlo (2003, 22) writes:

Forgetting, like remembering, can be public as well as private.

Whilst public memory is triggered off by collective symbols
that often take on physical form, public amnesia operates
through producing absences or substitutes; absences which
serve to discourage the construction and survival of memory,
and substitutes which serve to redirect memory along alter-
native routes. Public forgetting is a subtle process, not least
because we tend to forget what it is we have forgotten.

The Emergency had proved unpopular and had led to the deseating
of Indira Gandhi’s government in 1977. To strengthen her own and
her government’s political authority, Indira Gandhi chose to dismiss
and even deny the Emergency “excesses” such as forcible sterilisations.
Most effectively, the government chose not to remember, so that both
Indira Gandhi and the Congress government could continue to draw
on their earlier, democratic credentials.
However, as I have already argued, Indian English novelists, having
been raised in Nehruvian India and having taken its secularism and
democratic institutions for granted, experienced the Emergency as a
trauma and, in the face of the government’s attempt to close down the
opening produced by it, made an effort to preserve the memory of it.
In Edkins’s (2006, 108) words,

some people want to try to hold on to the openness that trauma

produces. They do not want to forget, or to express the
trauma in standard narratives that entail a form of forgetting.
They see trauma as something that unsettles authority, and
that should make settled stories impossible in the future.

The Indian English novelists who wrote Emergency fictions did not
want to forget, nor did they want the Indian nation to forget. These
Emergency novels construct cultural memories of the period. They are
designed to keep the memory of the Emergency alive so that especially

25
 Introduction

the middle class would not forget. Furthermore, as Edkins (2006, 101)
suggests,

memory is central not only to the production of these forms

of power but also to their contestation: certain types of mem-
ory, the memory of catastrophic events, for example, provide
specific openings for resistance to centralized political power.
Ways of remembrance then are not only a site of political
investment but also a site of struggle and contestation.

Preserving the memory of the Emergency functions as resistance to

Indira Gandhi’s political power, and any centralised political power in
India that threatens democracy and civil and even human rights. The
Emergency novels therefore become a site of struggle and contestation.
They also aim at reminding the readers of the Nehruvian idea of India
in the 1980s and 1990s when communalism, and especially Hindu
nationalism, was on the rise.
The writers address the middle class in India – their peer group, which
is also the population group that is most likely to read their writing, but
also the group whose action is needed to transform Indian society – to
shake them a little, to become engaged in safeguarding democracy and
ensuring that India does not slide into authoritarianism ever again, but
also to remind their readers of the inequality of Indian society, hoping
to inspire commitment to transforming it. These are political novels of
memory, written to make an impact on Indian society. Writing about
reconciliation and peaceful co-existence after traumatic events, Ass-
man and Shortt (2011, 4) assert that memory is “a powerful agent of
change. Accredited with the power of transforming our relationship to
the past and the ability to revise former values and attitudes, memory
can create new frames of action” (emphasis in original).
But the Emergency novels are addressed not only to the Indian mid-
dle class but also to the global English-reading audience, especially in
the West, and not only because of the lucrative Western market for
novels. As Rushdie argued in 1985, “the leaders in the West, too, [. . .]
played their part” in covering up (the memory of) the Emergency:

This has been particularly noticeable in the period since 1979,

when the Janata Party’s disintegration let Mrs Gandhi back
into power. Her major aim in the following years was to
achieve a personal rehabilitation, to obliterate the memory
of the Emergency and its atrocities, to be cleansed of its taint,

26
 Introduction

absolved of history. With the help of numerous prime min-

isters and presidents, that aim was all but achieved by the
time of her death. She told the world that the horror stories
about the Emergency were all fictions; and the world allowed
her to get away with the lie. It was a triumph of image over
substance. It’s difficult to resist the conclusion that the West –
in particular, Western capital – saw that a rehabilitated Mrs
Gandhi would be of great use, and set about inventing her.
(Rushdie 1992e, 51)

Rushdie points out how Western leaders and Western capital benefitted
from turning a blind eye and conveniently forgetting what took place
in India during the Emergency months. He has therefore addressed the
West with his novel as well as the Indian middle class. Midnight’s Chil-
dren denies the official version of the Emergency and makes its read-
ers face and contemplate another version of the events – also in the
West. This other version came with potential to make Western readers
question the received and media truths about such events, especially
of events taking place in formerly colonised countries, and to think
about how Western leaders and businesses may have an interest and
a real share in conveniently forgetting the inconvenient “truth.” This,
then, could potentially lead to political change. Astrid Erll (2011, 155)
argues that literary works of memory, and their

representations of historical events (such as wars and revolu-

tions) and characters (such as kings and explorers), of myths
and imagined memories can have an impact on readers and
can re-enter, via mimesis3, the world of action, shaping, for
example, perception, knowledge and everyday communica-
tion, leading to political action (emphasis in the original).

I suggest that this is a central purpose of the Emergency novels. This

book therefore examines literary representations of the Emergency,
and Indira Gandhi’s (imagined) memories of the period, in the five
Indian English novels to find out how these novels attempt to shape
perception about the Emergency.
Midnight’s Children ushered in a new era of Indian English writ-
ing and introduced magical realism and postmodern playfulness
into the Indian novel in English, which had previously been char-
acterised mainly by the conventions of classic fictive realism. Many
other writers, especially novelists who are graduates of Delhi’s highly

27
 Introduction

prestigious St Stephen’s College, such as I. Allan Sealy, Shashi Thar-

oor and Khushwant Singh, took up and developed the Rushdiesque
style in their history novels. The Great Indian Novel, for example,
is, as Chelva Kanaganayakam (1995, 111) notes, “very much a post-
Rushdie work, one that is noticeably different from the realism of
earlier writers.” However, the realist Indian English novel did not dis-
appear with the grand breakthrough of magical realism. Many estab-
lished Indian English novelists, such as Nayantara Sahgal, continued
to employ the realist mode in their fiction, though Sahgal (1988, 100)
herself notes that Rich Like Us, her first novel after the Emergency,
“came out different in scope, style, and structure from those before
it” since “nothing is ever the same again after an experience such
as the emergency.” The 1990s actually witnessed a new rise of real-
ist Indian English (historical) fiction: Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy
(1993) and Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey (1991) and A
Fine Balance (1995), for example, were critically highly acclaimed
as well as popular novels. A Suitable Boy examines Nehruvian India
in the early 1950s when hopes for and expectations of the new state
still ran high. Such a Long Journey and A Fine Balance are set in the
1970s and chart the decline and betrayal of Nehruvian India and
post-Independence ideals and expectations. Mistry’s – and Seth’s –
historical novels, like earlier Indian English fiction that tackled Indian
history, utilise the fictional conventions of classic realism familiar
from an older European tradition. Mistry has in fact been compared
to Dickens, George Eliot, Balzac and Victor Hugo, and his writing
has been described as akin to nineteenth-century novels. Mistry (in
Gokhale 1996, 3) himself has said that he was trying to write like
Chekhov, Malamud, Bellow and Turgenev. Suzanne Keen (2000, 31)
notes that Mistry “make[s] workable in the contemporary period
models of realism Victorians used for writing social fiction, political
fiction, novels exposing the Condition of England.” Seth and Mis-
try have invigorated the mode of realism that Rushdie felt had not
left writers much to explore. Sahgal, of course, has consistently been
writing realist novels, going on to win prizes for them in the 1980s,
after the breakthrough of magical realism, proving thus that the real-
ist novel had not met a dead end.
Postcolonial criticism often assumes classic realism’s relation to his-
tory to be very different from that of magical realism. While postcolo-
nial magical realist novels, such as Midnight’s Children, are often seen
as subversive and resistant, “the critical expectations about the form
[of realism] often hold that,” as Laura Moss (2000, 158) writes, “it

28
 Introduction

is a reinforcement of conservative, specifically imperialist, ideology.”

Mistry’s novel successfully takes issue with the set-up of the politi-
cal nation and the body politic which relegates the poor and dispos-
sessed to the margins, thus countering the argument that “the realist
novel is ill-suited to represent the subaltern experience because of the
genre’s roots in the project of Western nation-building” (Kane 1996).
As Carter (1992, 297) points out, the latter sort of view can lead to
“a massive overstatement in which all realisms become one essential
realism.” I agree with Carter as well as with Moss (2000, 159), who
argues that realism is capable of “political and social engagement in
postcolonial contexts.” Sahgal, for one, is a realist writer whose fiction
is socially and politically engaged as well as subversive and resistant.
Her novels are informed by feminist concerns and deal with women’s
issues, such as Indian women’s striving for more equal and recipro-
cal marriage in patriarchal society. Furthermore, her fiction presents a
critique of Eurocentrism, for her novels contain “the non-message that
Europe is not the centre of the world” (Sahgal 1990, 19). Keen sug-
gests (2000, 37) that Seth and Mistry “remind us that the adoption of
realistic modes can itself serve oppositional purposes, to the language
and literature associated with the Empire, to the modes favored by
postcolonial theorists, to the nation-building with which realism is so
often associated.” In their novels, Sahgal and Mistry have used a realist
mode for oppositional purposes, for political and social engagement
and for effectively constructing a cultural counter-memory, as they
have dealt with the cultural trauma of the Emergency.

Indian writing in English

Midnight’s Children made Indian English fiction known more widely
in the world, thus paving the way for the other Indian English writers
who started writing in the 1980s and 1990s and made Indian English
literature a global phenomenon. As Bishnupriya Ghosh (2004, 50)
remarks, such writers as Salman Rushdie, Vikram Chandra, Amitav
Ghosh and Arundhati Roy “render India ‘communicable’ to a global
audience, acting as cultural translators who cater to a global market
for world Englishes.” Harish Trivedi (2006, 156), despite his critique
of Rushdie in his role as an “authentic” voice and interpreter of India
to the West, nevertheless writes that

the space India occupies in the Western literary world has

been considerably enhanced through his representation of it.

29
 Introduction

For many Western readers, in fact, Rushdie speaks for India in

a way which seems not only representative but authoritative,
and his version of India is often taken to be the “real” India.

In the same vein, Katherine Frank (1996, 247) suggests that

over the years [. . .] Rushdie has evolved into “Pandit Rush-
die,” an authority who can be reliably counted upon to inter-
pret events in the subcontinent for certain constituencies in
the West. It could even be argued that in writing Midnight’s
Children Rushdie single-handedly brought the history of
twentieth-century India to the West.14

As these comments testify, (new) Indian literature in English occupies

an interesting position as a literature that is both celebrated and
contested – contested because it is sometimes seen as inauthentic com-
pared to Indian literature written in other Indian languages, and cel-
ebrated especially in the West, where it is the Indian English literature
that is best known and representative of the voice of India. Transla-
tions from Indian vernacular languages have as yet not made such a
breakthrough or raised as much interest in the West.
With India’s various ethnic groups, languages, religions, castes, com-
munities and regional differences, invoking authentic and/or essential-
ist notions of national identity seems misplaced. What would count
as “authentically” Indian or as a “true” representation of India? As
Edward W. Said (2003, 272) notes in Orientalism,

the real issue is whether indeed there can be a true representation

of anything, or whether any and all kinds of representations,
because they are representations, are embedded first in the lan-
guage and then in the culture, institutions, and political ambi-
ence of the representer. If the latter alternative is the correct
one (as I believe it is), then we must be prepared to accept the
fact that a representation is eo ipso implicated, intertwined,
embedded, interwoven with a great many other things besides
the “truth,” which is itself a representation.

Indian English writing is certainly “implicated, intertwined, embed-

ded, interwoven with” a great many things that come with, for exam-
ple, the educational, economic, social, regional, religious and gender
backgrounds of the writers, but that is equally the case with literatures

30
 Introduction

in Indian vernaculars. I suggest that Hindi or Tamil literature cannot

automatically be seen as more authentically Indian than Indian English
literature for these literatures, too, are embedded in the language,
culture and politics of their writers. The reader should, however, be
aware of the cultural background of the work of fiction in question
and of what it is a representation.
The status of recent Indian English novels as dominant representa-
tions of India has elicited varying reactions from (Indian) critics
and scholars, often warning against, in Ghosh’s (2004, 18) words,
“the unguarded treatment of privileged cosmopolitan writers as the
spokespeople for India” (emphasis in original). This warning may be
necessary – as Sumanyu Satpathy (1998, 282) writes, V.S. Naipaul’s
three books on India were “touted as indispensable” for anyone with a
serious interest in India “and of course everything that Salman Rushdie
has had to say on India in fiction or nonfiction is lapped up by the
Western media as gospel truth.” Vinay Lal and Ashis Nandy (2007,
xiii) point out that “the Indian novel in English has [. . .] become so
much a part of global culture that people might be forgiven for think-
ing that English-speaking Indians set the cultural and political agendas
of the nation.” Rushdie (1997, x) himself aggravated many Indian crit-
ics and writers when he suggested in a foreword to an anthology of
Indian writing from 1947 to 1997 that

the prose writing – both fiction and non-fiction – created in this

period by Indian writers working in English, is proving to be a
stronger and more important body of work than most of what
has been produced in the 16 “official languages” of India, the
so-called “vernacular languages,” during the same time; and,
indeed, this new, and still burgeoning, “Indo-Anglian” litera-
ture represents perhaps the most valuable contribution India
has yet made to the world of books (emphasis in original).

Unsurprisingly, Rushdie’s claim has been fiercely disputed in India,

where novels written in English are sometimes seen to be problematic,
or inauthentic, not just because of their use of the old colonial tongue
and an “alien” language, but also in terms of their representations of
Indian reality. Tharoor (2003, 245, 247), for example, says that he has
often been asked for whom he writes and feels that “there is an unspo-
ken accusation implicit in the question: Am I not guilty of the terrible
sin of inauthenticity, of writing about my country for foreigners?”
His reply to the question is that “I write for anyone who will read

31
 Introduction

me, but first of all for Indians like myself, Indians who have grown
up speaking, writing, playing, wooing and quarrelling in English, all
over India.” Tharoor (2000, 46) argues that he shares with the new
Indian novelists writing in English “an urban upbringing and a pan-
national outlook on the Indian reality. I do not think this is any less
authentically ‘Indian’ than the worldviews of writers in other Indian
languages.” Gopal (2009, 2–3) notes that

[a] denunciatory tendency, often noticeable in writers and crit-

ics who themselves work primarily in English, will insist on
the inauthenticity of (other people’s) Anglophone writing, its
distance from the ‘real concerns’ of most Indians and its being
in thrall to the critical fads and fashions of Western academia.

Makarand Paranjape (2000, 96), for instance, argues that recent

Indian novels in English “evad[e] a direct and meaningful engagement
with contemporary reality. There is a preoccupation with style and
narrative technique, not with content and theme.” He adds that these
novels “occupy a rather problematic terrain; their dual allegiance ren-
ders them susceptible to all sorts of mimetic distortions. They inscribe
India, but for the West, hence becoming middlemen between two
cultures.”
It is, however, noteworthy that Indian English literature nowadays
has an increasingly strong position in India among the country’s vari-
ous literatures. Aijaz Ahmad (2008, 75–76) has pointed out that the
cosmopolitan English-speaking intelligentsia in India tends to see only
the literary texts written in English as national documents and all else
as regional. The reason for this may be partly historical and have its
roots more in non-fiction than in fiction. Among India’s multitude of
languages, English and Hindi are the two national/official languages.
In addition, the Constitution of India recognises 22 official scheduled
languages, which are the official languages of one or more Indian states.
Most of these languages are rooted in one region of the country, and
even the most widely known of them, Hindi, is spoken “only” by about
40 per cent of the population of India. English, on the other hand, is
spoken across the country. As Ahmad (2008, 282) remarks, English
“has simply become, for better or worse, one of the Indian languages,
even the key professional language and certainly the main language of
communication between the schooled sections of the different linguis-
tic regions” (emphasis in original). Furthermore, most of independent
India’s “founding” texts, such as the Indian Constitution and Jawaharlal

32
 Introduction

Nehru’s The Discovery of India, were written in English. Neelam Sriv-

astava (2008, 7) suggests that “the post-Independence political and
administrative conceptualizations of the nation-state at a pan-Indian
level came to be constructed exclusively in the English language.”
In publishing, English is more than an equal to India’s indigenous
languages; Aijaz Ahmad (1996, 277) has noted that already in the
mid-1990s, as much as 40 per cent of all publishing in India happened
in English, and only the United States and the United Kingdom pub-
lished more English books than India. Indian English novels are one
significant part of the English-language publishing in India. It seems
undeniable that English occupies a special position in India. Perhaps it
is unsurprising, then, that English is, as Ahmad (2008, 75–76) argues,
no longer seen as one of the Indian languages but “as the language of
national integration and bourgeois civility” and Indian English writing
is then seen to constitute “the central documents of India’s national
literature” (emphasis in original).15
Many of the post-Midnight’s Children novels also take a national
approach; they are pan-Indian in outlook. They focus on India at the
national level, representing India to Indians who read English, as well
as to a wider audience outside India’s borders.16 Gopal (2009, 13)
suggests that the Indian English novel has, from its inception, been
“deeply engaged with the idea of India, perhaps much more so than
other literatures of the region.” Mukherjee (2004, 199–200) has noted
that Indian novels in English are geared towards constructing and rep-
resenting “a clearly defined and recognizable India,” whereas novelists
writing in Indian languages seem to tackle more local and particular
issues. Indian novelists who write in English have “a greater anxiety to
appear ‘Indian,’” representing as they do India to international as well
as national readership. This makes them an ideal vehicle for preserving
and presenting national cultural memories.

*****
This book interrogates the construction of cultural memory of the
Emergency in Indian English novels of the 1980s and the 1990s, and
each chapter examines one novelist’s writing and questions what
aspect of the Emergency is being remembered, how it is represented
and remembered and what the effect of that remembering is. The nov-
els are read in parallel with other representations of the period: gov-
ernment white papers and Indira Gandhi’s speeches of the Emergency
era, examples of the post-Emergency literature, memoirs, biographies
and historiography.

33
 Introduction

The second chapter examines Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, the

first Indian English novel about the Emergency, as a political indict-
ment and cultural counter-memory. The novel is read allegorically,
with Saleem representing the Nehruvian, democratic state. Saleem
finally finds the long-longed-for meaning for his life in pickling and
thus preserving his memories for his son Aadam – and the nation of
India. I argue that Saleem offers his life story as a testimony, as a counter-
narrative to the official narrative of Indira Gandhi’s India. With his
reminiscing, his testimony, Saleem addresses the “nation of forgetters.”
Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel is the subject of the third chapter.
The novel, much like Midnight’s Children, describes Indian twentieth-
century history since the beginning of Mahatma Gandhi’s campaign.
This chapter focuses on the post-Independence part of the novel and
especially on the Indira Gandhi years, arguing that the novel is an
examination of the development of Indian democracy and a scathing
political critique of Indian leaders and their (ab)use of power, culmi-
nating in Indira Gandhi’s Emergency.
The fourth chapter looks at Nayantara Sahgal’s Rich Like Us and
examines it as social and political criticism. Sahgal has been very vocal
in her opposition to Indira Gandhi in the 1970s and early 1980s and
had published newspaper articles and books – Indira Gandhi: Her
Road to Power17 and in A Voice for Freedom (1977) – that criticise her.
Rich Like Us is Sahgal’s “Emergency novel” and is read in this chapter
as such, with the focus on the problem of the committedness of the
civil service in Indira Gandhi’s administration as well as on Sanjay
Gandhi’s Maruti scandal and related political corruption.
The fifth chapter discusses Rohinton Mistry’s two novels, Such a
Long Journey and A Fine Balance, as explorations of the political
scandals of the Indira Gandhi government in the 1970s, the first one
of the Nagarwala money scandal and the latter of the Emergency with
a special focus on history from below. A Fine Balance zeroes in on the
experiences of the urban poor during the Emergency and represents
slum clearances and forced sterilisations most memorably. This chap-
ter examines the political context of these novels and argues that the
novels indict the Indian middle class for their complicity in the policies
that continue to oppress the poor.

Notes
1 The so-called Stephanian novels are novels written by graduates of Delhi’s
St. Stephen’s College. These novelists include Vikram Seth, I. Allan Sealy,

34
 Introduction

Shashi Tharoor, Amitav Ghosh, and Rukun Advani, among others. Maya
Jaggi noted in 1997: “Roy, a 37-year-old woman, was muscling in on what
was, until now, largely a fraternity of younger, internationally-known and
prize-winning Indian authors writing in English: Salman Rushdie, Vikram
Seth, Rohinton Mistry, Vikram Chandra, Amitav Ghosh, Upamanyu Chat-
terjee, I Allan Sealy, Shashi Tharoor. Yet The God of Small Things is dis-
tinguished not only by its author’s sex, but by its rural, southern backdrop
and only oblique engagement with history or with India as a theme” (Jaggi
1997).
2 O.J. Vijayan’s The Saga of Dharmapuri is a political allegory of India in
the early 1970s. Vijayan began writing his hard-hitting political satire in
Malayalam in 1972, and it was to be serialised in a magazine in 1975; it
was, however, pushed to March 1977 due to the Emergency. The novel
appeared in book form in 1985 and was translated into English by the
author himself in 1988.
3 I am relying on O.P. Mathur (2004, preface) and Chandran (2017, 138–143)
for this information. O.P. Mathur, former Professor of English from Banaras
Hindu University who contacted professors of other Indian languages to
find out if there were any Emergency novels in languages other than English,
concludes: “it seems to be true that it was primarily the Indian English
writers who voiced in fiction the strong resentment of the nation against
the Emergency” (Ibid. 118). Furthermore, many of the Indian English writ-
ers of the Emergency novels were living abroad, in Britain, Canada or
the United States, at the time of the Emergency, and in most cases also at
the time of writing these novels. The exceptions in Hindi include Katraa
Bu Arzoo by Rahi Masoom Raza (1978, not translated into English) and
Dark Dispatches by Nirmal Verma (original Raat Ka Reporter, trans-
lated into English by Alok Bhalla, 1993). The situation has changed in
the twenty-first century with new Emergency novels published in at least
English, Malayalam and Tamil. There have also been some Indian films on
the topic.
4 Text of the proclamation of the Emergency by the President on 25 June
1975 (printed in Government of India 1975b, 7).
5 On the censorship of the press during the Emergency, see Sorabjee (1977).
6 Slum clearance and family planning campaigns were not new or unprec-
edented but were accelerated during the Emergency. Furthermore, as the
Interim Report II of Shah Commission of Inquiry (1978, 85–86) states,
“It appears that in their hurry to implement the demolition programme,
neither the DDA nor the MCD took the precaution in a number of
cases of following even the basic minimum procedures laid down in the
Delhi Development Act, Delhi Municipal Corporation Act and other
relevant laws.” E.g. “it was necessary that in every case of demolition,
proper notice was required by law to be issued. But it was found that in
practice no notices were issued before the buildings were demolished.”
“The demolition operations were carried out like a blitzkrieg in utter
disregard of the human problems involved. Alternative accommodation
sometimes was provided, but more often only open plots of land were
allotted. These plots were so small that no construction suitable for
residential purposes could be made.” “The Commission visited some of

35
 Introduction

the areas of rehabilitation and found that even the basic amenities were
wanting.”
7 Jayaprakash Narayan, or JP Narayan (1902–1979), was a Gandhian inde-
pendence activist and a Socialist leader. He led the opposition to Indira
Gandhi in the 1970s, advocating a programme of social transformation
which he called “total revolution.” The movement started in Bihar but
soon spread in North India, developing into a movement for the dismissal
of Prime Minister Gandhi.
8 Sahgal (1983, 202) noted already in 1982 that 300 tapes of the hearing
had vanished from the Home Ministry.
9 See also Hewitt (2008, 165). Sezhiyan cites in his introduction rumours
on the Internet that there were no extant copies of the report in India.
Rebecca Jane Williams (2014) has reported that she had found copies of
the report in the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.
10 The RTI Act was passed in 2005. Indian citizens can request the release of
government information through written application. When I visited the
Indian National Archives in January 2009, none of the Emergency records
were available.
11 Sahgal, too, though she is perhaps the most “Indian” of the writers whose
novels are examined in this book – the others have either left India perma-
nently and are often considered as British/American and Canadian writers,
or, in the case of Tharoor, lived abroad when he wrote his novels – writes
also for a global audience. Sahgal does some public speaking in Hindi, but
she writes only in English, because this means that she can “be read all
over the Commonwealth and North America” (Gupta 1990, 157). Mistry
has said that “the world is my audience. At least, I wish it” (Hancock
1989, 146).
12 Khair (2001, 10, 12, 33) points out that this is of course only a rough
socio-economic and discursive division. Between “Babu” and “Coolie”
classes there is the growing class of upstart-Babus/cultural Coolies who
are middle-class and literate in one or more Indian languages other than
English.
13 Tharoor (2003, 247) has argued that “no writer really chooses a language:
the circumstances of his upbringing ensure that the language chooses him.”
14 See also Kortenaar (2004b, 232).
15 To make a comparison, the renowned Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe
(1994, 429) has noted: “A national literature is one that takes the whole
nation for its province and has a realized or potential audience through-
out its territory. In other words a literature that is written in the national
language. An ethnic literature is one which is available only to one ethnic
group within the nation. If you take Nigeria as an example, the national
literature, as I see it, is the literature written in English; and the ethnic
literatures are in Hausa, Ibo, Yoruba, Efik, Edo, Ijaw, etc., etc.”
16 Even critic and writer Pankaj Mishra (2000), who is otherwise critical of
Indian English fiction, notes that Indian English novelists have produced
“the only pan-Indian literature we have, writing in English.”
17 Partly published in a different form in India as Indira Gandhi’s Emergence
and Style (1978).

36
 Midnight’s Children

forget the period of autocratic rule. Midnight’s Children brought the

Emergency to the limelight again in 1981 and was followed by other
Indian English novels, which kept the memory of the Emergency alive
in an official culture of amnesia.

Notes
1 Rushdie (1992a, 14).
2 Rushdie has said of himself soon after the publication of Midnight’s Chil-
dren: “I am a lapsed Muslim, which is to say you still define yourself by
the thing you’ve lapsed from. I am not a believer in any formal sense but
I am shaped by that thing, and I am interested in Islam and its history,
which I’ve studied. In that sense, yes, I’m a Muslim” (Craven, Heyward
and Hueston 1985, 125).
3 All subsequent references (henceforth abbreviated as MC) are to the fol-
lowing edition of the novel: Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (New
York: Penguin Books, 1991).
4 Madame Rama, “Duplicate Copy,” August 1975, Salman Rushdie papers, Stu-
art A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.
5 The revision of the second draft is dated 27 November 1979 and the
whole draft is catalogued under this date. Midnight’s Children, Typescript,
27 November 1979, [4 of 4], Salman Rushdie papers, Stuart A. Rose Man-
uscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University. The library
also holds a Revised photocopy of typescript, dated 20 January 1980.
6 Prime Minister Nehru’s memorable speech, delivered from Delhi’s Red
Fort at the stroke of midnight when India became independent, began:
“Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes
when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very
substantially. At the stroke of midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India
will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely
in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends
and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed finds utterance” (quoted in
Tharoor 2008, 15).
7 The Cabinet Mission visited India between March and June 1946 to nego-
tiate the transfer of power to Indians. Discussions were held with the lead-
ers of the Congress Party and All-India Muslim League about framing a
new constitution for India and forming an interim government. The nego-
tiations fell through in July 1946 and the popular agitation for Pakistan
began with a ‘Direct Action Day’ on 16 August 1946.
8 Jani refers to Chandra, Mukherjee and Mukherjee (1999).
9 The Congress Party’s senior right-wing state and regional leaders, includ-
ing and perhaps most importantly the Congress President K. Kamaraj
(President of Indian National Congress 1963–1967, and President of Indian
National Congress (O) 1967–1971), were collectively known as the
“Syndicate.”
10 See Frank (2002, 267). The quote is from Indira Gandhi’s letter in Dorothy
Norman, ed., Indira Gandhi: Letters to an American Friend 1950–1984
(San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,1985), 96–97.

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 Midnight’s Children

11 The “kitchen cabinet” consisted of a core group of people, mainly left-wing

intellectuals, close to Indira Gandhi. They discussed policies before they
were presented to the cabinet and guided many of her political decisions.
12 During Indira Gandhi’s prime ministership, judges as well as civil servants
were expected to “be ‘committed’ to the policies and philosophy of the
government in power” and especially to the Prime Minister herself (Guha
2008, 497).
13 Unlike the rest of the Left, the Communist Party of India (CPI) supported
Indira Gandhi and the Emergency. On the relationship between the CPI
and the Emergency, see Lockwood (2016).
14 Lathi is a stick that is commonly used by the police in South Asia to con-
trol crowds.
15 Bipan Chandra (2003, 24) writes: “The poor, constituting the major
political base of the Congress, especially since 1971, having been further
politicized during 1969–1972, remained steadfast in their support to the
Congress and Indira Gandhi. They felt that the right-wing opposition par-
ties did not offer any real alternative solutions to their existential prob-
lems. Despite the incompleteness of the 1950s land reforms in many states,
the failure to enforce land ceiling legislation, the continued social discrimi-
nation against and oppression of the Harijans and other lower castes, the
inadequacy of the poverty alleviation schemes, and the failure to check
shortages of essential commodities and the spiralling rise in prices, the
rural poor still accepted Indira Gandhi as their champion and continued
to support her, though more passively than before. The same was true of
women and the minorities.”
16 Indira Gandhi was “hailed by Atal Behari Vajpayee as the incarnation of
the goddess Durga” after the successful Bangladesh war in 1971 (Dhar
2000, 223).
17 M.F. Husain, the famous Indian artist, actually painted a triptych of Indira
Gandhi during the Emergency depicting her as Durga or Kali.
18 Bandh is a Hindi word which means “closed.” Bandh is a form of protest
in South Asia, a general strike declared by a community or a political
party. Gherao, a Hindi word meaning “encirclement,” is a protest in which
workers prevent employers leaving a place of work until demands are met.
19 Narayan first spoke of Total Revolution in a public speech on 5 June
1974.
20 Rashtriya Svayamsevak Sangh (“National Volunteer Association”), com-
monly known as RSS, is a Hindu nationalist, paramilitary-style group. It
was founded “to defend Hindus against ‘threatening Others’” (Jaffrelot
1999, 50).
21 Allahabad High Court Judge Jag Mohan Lal Sinha found Indira Gandhi
guilty of two counts of campaign malpractice out of 52 charges brought
against her on the petition filed by Raj Narain, the candidate she had
defeated in the 1971 election, and barred her from running for or hold-
ing any elective office for a period of six years. The more serious charges,
such as bribery, illegal soliciting of votes and use of religious symbols,
were dismissed. The charges she was convicted on were minor technical
offences: “the illegal use, during the election campaign, of the services of
Yashpal Kapoor, a gazetted government servant, who had resigned from

103
 Midnight’s Children

the government service but his resignation had not yet been accepted by
the President and gazetted, and the erection of a dais (platform) by police
officials from which Mrs Gandhi spoke, and the supply of electricity for
the relay of her elections speeches. The latter two were long-standing prac-
tices for the sake of the prime minister’s security” (Chandra 2003, 64).
22 Rushdie’s short story “The Free Radio” deals with the sterilisation cam-
paign of the Emergency. The story was originally published in Atlantic
Monthly but is also included in East, West (1994), a collection of short
stories by Rushdie.
23 See for example Dayal and Bose (1977, 36–65); Ved Mehta (1978, 117–
119); Shah Commission of Inquiry (1978, 96–101, 120–139). The Shah
Commission report (1978, 96) states: “On April 13–14, the DDA com-
menced the demolition operations clearing the Dujana House transit camp
and shifting the 80 families living there. [. . .] As the area of demolition
speedily increased there was considerable panic and resentment amongst
the residents and this culminated in the riot in the Turkman Gate area
resulting in the death of at least six persons due to Police firing.”
24 Saleem’s term: “Ectomy (from, I suppose, Greek): a cutting out. To which
medical science adds a number of prefixes: appendectomy tonsillectomy
mastectomy tubectomy vasectomy testectomy hysterectomy” (MC 521).
25 For Indira Gandhi’s “bitter pills” speech, see Gandhi (1984, 228).
26 Frank draws on her interviews with Indira Gandhi’s Principal Private Sec-
retary P.N. Haksar, Gandhi’s cousin Nayantara Sahgal and Indira Gan-
dhi’s closest Indian friend, Pupul Jayakar.
27 Price quotes Friedrich Nietzsche’s, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of
History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 59–123.
28 Sahgal (1983, 249) notes that the article is based on “departmental records
of the CBI [Central Bureau of Investigation], the IB [Intelligence Bureau]
and the Finance Ministry.”

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 D e m o c r ac y i n T h e G r e at I n d i a n N ov e l

his readers of the ongoing nature of the battle of Kurukshetra, of the

need to safeguard democracy. Furthermore, V.V. draws attention to
“the American news sources about India that came to me” through
the diplomatic services. He notes that “the Western, and specifically the
American, media,” having at first condemned the suspension of con-
stitutional rights, arrest of opponents and the censorship of the press,
later got used to the Emergency and “began to see virtues in it: indus-
trial discipline, more openings for US business, decisive action on the
population front, no more of the stultifying slowness of the ‘soft state’
that developing India had been.” Eventually, “American reporters came
to see India as no different from other autocratic non-Communist
regimes which they had covered without outrage.” V.V. took this as “a
pointed lesson in the limitations of the neutral and objective foreign
correspondent” (TGIN 384–385). Though he never directly says so,
this seems to be a further reason to write his memoir: to share his
reflections and memories of the Emergency and the events leading to it
with a wide audience, comprising not only (middle-class) Indians but
American and other English-language readers as well. V.V.’s memoir
of Indian twentieth-century politics is not “neutral and objective” but
highly political and critical.

Notes
1 Tharoor (1998a, 35).
2 Tharoor has “no difficulty in saying openly that [he is] a believing Hindu.”
But he is also quick to point out that “it is possible to a great extent to
speak of Hinduism as culture rather than as religion (a distinction the
votaries of Hindutva reject or blur)” (Tharoor 2007, 20, 25).
3 Published outside India as Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to
India.
4 All subsequent references (henceforth abbreviated as TGIN) are to the
following edition of the novel: Shashi Tharoor, The Great Indian Novel
(New York: Arcade Publishing, 1993).
5 Ganapathi is a South Indian version of the name Ganesha; Rushdie notes
that “Ganesha’s elephantine nose, and dubious parentage, prefigure [Sal-
eem’s] own” (Rushdie 1992b, 25).
6 To explain this central term of both the Mahabharata and The Great
Indian Novel, Tharoor has added “A Note on Dharma” in his novel. Tha-
roor describes dharma as an untranslatable Sanskrit term that is difficult
to explain thoroughly but offers, among other definitions, one by P. Lal: a
“code of good conduct, pattern of noble living, religious rules and obser-
vance,” taken from the glossary of Lal’s transcreation of the Mahabharata.
For a discussion of dharma, see Heimann (1937, 68–70).
7 In Rajagopalachari’s version of the Mahabharata, Kunti describes Dhuryod-
hana as “wicked and cruel. He seeks to kill Bhima since he wants to rule

147
 D e m o c r ac y i n T h e G r e at I n d i a n N ov e l

the kingdom.” Vidura agrees but warns Kunti: “if the wicked Duryodhana
is accused or blamed, his anger and hatred will only increase” (Rajagopal-
achari 1999, 41–42).
8 Tharoor writes in India that “Pluralism is a reality that emerges from the
very nature of the country; it is a choice made inevitable by India’s geog-
raphy and reaffirmed by its history” (Tharoor 1998a, 9).
9 Guha, drawing on Haksar papers, confirms this, writing that Indira Gandhi
chose to present herself as a socialist and cultivate progressive alliances on
the advice of her principal secretary, P.N. Haksar (Guha 2008, 436).
10 See also Hewitt (2008, 120–121). It is noteworthy that Kapoor claims in
her book that Ray had, “along with Law Minister H.R. Gokhale, Con-
gress president D.K. Barooah and Bombay Pradesh Congress Committee
bagman Rajni Patel, conceived of the idea of an internal Emergency and
mass arrests of political opponents back in January that year [1975].” As
proof of this, she refers to a letter written by Ray to Indira Gandhi, which
has come to her possession. She demonstrates that a plan for arresting
the Prime Minister’s political opponents and putting out expressions of
dissent had been hatched in early January 1975, almost half a year before
JP urged the police and armed forces not to obey “illegal and unconsti-
tutional orders” and declaring a satyagraha to compel Indira Gandhi to
resign (Kapoor 2015, 4–6).
11 See Indira Gandhi’s broadcast to the nation, 1 July 1975 (in Gandhi 1984,
357–360).

148
 F a m i ly T i e s

rhetoric of the Emergency as well as against the narrative of the middle

class who did not object to the authoritarian rule.

Notes
1 Nayantara Sahgal in a personal interview to Menon in October 2008
(Menon 2014, 230).
2 Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit (1900–1990) headed the Indian delegation to the
United Nations between 1946 and 1968, and became the first female presi-
dent of the United Nations General Assembly in 1953. She served as India’s
Ambassador to the USSR in 1947–1949, to the United States in 1949–1951,
as high commissioner to Britain in 1955–1961, and as governor of Maha-
rashtra in 1962–1964. Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit was elected to the Lok Sabha
three times, first in 1952, and then in 1964 and 1967 from Phulpur, Jawaha-
rlal Nehru’s former constituency. She held office from 1964 to 1968, when
she resigned having had a strained relationship with her niece Indira Gandhi.
3 All subsequent references (henceforth abbreviated as RLU) are to the fol-
lowing edition of the novel: Nayantara Sahgal, Rich Like Us (New Delhi:
HarperCollins Publishers, 1999).
4 Sahgal (1983, xiii) writes: “It became obvious after 1969 that Mrs. Gandhi,
who saw herself as a humanist and a democrat, did not in any real sense
partake of the democratic faith her father had held and served.”
5 The number of acres of farm land sold to Sanjay Gandhi vary from 291 (Sah-
gal 1983, 95) and 300 (Guha 2008, 469) to 405.24 (Vinod Mehta 1978, 58)
and 445 (Bhargava 1977, 34; Rawla and Mudgal 1977, 89). Bhargava gives
10,000 rupees per acre as the compensation price, Mehta 11,776 rupees per
acre. All writers agree on the crookedness of the deal, however.
6 See also Sahgal, Indira Gandhi, 95. P.N. Haksar, the Prime Minister’s Prin-
cipal Secretary from mid-1967 to 1973, was a very influential person in
Indira Gandhi’s decision-making process. Frank (2002, 314) writes: “Indira
trusted Haksar’s intelligence and judgement implicitly and completely. From
1967 to 1973, he was probably the most influential and powerful person in
the government. It was also Haksar rather than the Cabinet Secretary who
was the most important civil servant in the country.” Haksar advised Indira
Gandhi against favouring her son by granting a lucrative government con-
tract to him and advised that she should send him away from Delhi until the
Maruti scandal died down. Indira Gandhi responded by allowing Haksar’s
contract to expire in September 1973, whereas previously it had been auto-
matically renewed. P.N. Dhar followed Haksar as the Principal Secretary,
serving in the job from 1973 to 1977. Frank (2002, 353) notes that “Haksar
was the last of Indira’s coterie prepared to question or stand up to her. No
one did now – except Sanjay Gandhi himself.”

185
 Such a Long Journey and A Fine Balance

take a severe blow. Regarding the rise of communalism and commu-

nalist conflicts in India, the trauma of betrayal is ongoing, while the
trauma of Emergency itself is a past experience to be remembered and
learned from.

Notes
1 Mistry in the Oprah book club discussion of A Fine Balance (Oprah’s
Book Club 2002a).
2 The collection was published in the United States in 1989 titled Swimming
Lessons and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag.
3 During her stay, Greer had also worked with a family planning centre and
visited slums.
4 See, for example, Piciucco (2001, 156). In a newspaper article on Mistry,
Firdaus Gandavia, a Parsee writer and teacher based in Bombay, is quoted
on saying that Mistry is out of touch: “He is stuck in the groove of the
70s when he left India and went to Toronto. His concerns seem distant
to anyone actually living in Bombay; so much more has happened in the
meantime.” Mistry’s Canadian literary agent, Bruce Westwood, says: “his
books are still set in the Bombay of his youth, reinvented with perfect
recall. At times he seems to have idealised it into a childhood paradise, like
Nabokov’s Russia” (Lambert 2002).
5 All subsequent references (henceforth abbreviated as Journey) are to the
following edition of the novel: Rohinton Mistry, Such a Long Journey
(London: Faber and Faber, 1991).
6 There are about 100,000 Zoroastrians or Parsis worldwide and most of
them live in India (Mistry 2006, 257). According to another estimate (Rose
2011, 1), there are 130,000–150,000 Zoroastrians in the world today.
7 All subsequent references (henceforth abbreviated as Balance) are to the
following edition of the novel: Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance (London:
Faber and Faber, 1997).
8 As was discussed in the previous chapter, many of Indira Gandhi’s most
trusted advisors were Kashmiri Brahmins (like the Nehrus): P.N. Haksar,
Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister; T.N. Kaul, Foreign Sec-
retary, later Indian Ambassador to the United States; P.N. Dhar, Economic
Adviser to the Prime Minister’s Secretariat, later her Principal Private Sec-
retary; D.P. Dhar, Indian Ambassador to the USSR, later chief of the Plan-
ning Commission; B.K. Nehru, Ambassador to the United States, High
Commissioner to Britain.
9 Sahgal (1983, 67) explains a procedural change was introduced “in the
conduct of this election. Up to now each ballot box had been separately
counted at the end of polling. This time ballot boxes from several polling
stations were mixed, resulting in a lapse of time, sometimes of days, before
counting could begin. The reason given was that no one should know
how a particular area had voted. This innovation had been considered
and rejected by the Election Commission in its report on the fourth gen-
eral election. The change in procedure, which involved a change in rules,
should have been placed before Parliament for scrutiny. It was, however,

237
 Such a Long Journey and A Fine Balance

introduced after Parliament had been dissolved and the notification for
the election had been made.” The lapse of time between casting and count-
ing the votes would have allowed the initially invisible stamp to emerge on
the ballot.
10 The article appeared originally in The New Republic, 7 and 14 August
1976.
11 All references (henceforth abbreviated as Garland) are to Manohar Mal-
gonkar, The Garland Keepers (New Delhi: Rupa Publications, 2013).
12 The author’s note in the novel states that “the Emergency, which forms the
background for this story, is not the 1975–1977 Emergency, but a fictional
one,” but the “coincidences” are clear.
13 Indira Gandhi in a radio broadcast on 26 June 1975 (printed in Govern-
ment of India 1975b, 7).
14 Borooah in Government of India (1975b, 66).
15 Fuss or commotion.
16 See also Chandra (2003, 205).

238
 Conclusion

novels of the 1980s and the 1990s is an engrossing question, and a

topic for another study.

Note
1 P.N. Dhar (2000, 144) explains that “the prime minister’s office [PMO]
assists the prime minister in his capacity as the head of government. The
party expresses its policy preference in broad terms at election time, in the
form of manifestos, but it is the prime minister’s task to convert them into
concrete policies, adjust them to the prevailing circumstances, and imple-
ment them through the administration. It is in this field that the PM’s office
plays a crucial though intangible role.”

246
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