The Emergency And The Indian English Novel

A Study Of The Indian Novels On Emergency - Includes Studie Of Quite A Few Important Novels On The Subject - A Chapter That Covers The Novels Of Salman Rushdie - Raj Gill - Nayantara Sehgal - Manohar Malgaonkar - Shashi Tharoor - O.P. Vijayan - Arun Joshi - Rohington Mistry - Balwant Gargi - Ranjit Gargi - Ranjit Lal - Also Covers Briefly Non-English Indian Emergency Novel - Index.

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, history and for general readers as well.

Genres of Emergency offers literary genre as a way to understand and negotiate the varied states of emergency and crisis that have become a fixture of our contemporary world. Building on a critical study of the literature written during and about the State of Emergency declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in India (1975 - 1977), the study establishes emergency and its genres as an important interpretative site: an exceptionally violent episode marked as a one-off crisis, which also functions as a locus for an ongoing renegotiation of a modern polity and culture. Reading a wide-ranging archive of English-language texts - from prison memoir to popular magazine, from high-brow literary fiction to boilerplate thriller, from the unrelentingly realistic to the mythically allegorical - Genres of Emergency traces the tension between crisis and continuity that these genres mediate. In addressing this tension, the authors of Emergency fiction take seriously the genres in which they write and use them to mobilize literary conventions as political interventions. More specifically, these novels use the conventions of realism, epic, allegory, and the thriller to reach back in time and across cultures and languages, invoking past iterations of these genres and histories and anticipating those to come. Combining literary criticism with cultural history, Genres of Emergency thus has implications for the study of literary genre, for the historical events that these genres recount, and for understanding the politics of literary form.

This volume provides a critical reading of Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956), Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others (2014) and Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance (1995) to provide a literary account of three fundamental moments in India’s history: the Partition of 1947, the Naxalbari movement, and Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. These novels provide literary interpretations of the ways in which feelings of fear and insecurity connected with ethno-religious rivalries, as well as with new power shifts in Indian socio-economic structure, gave a significant contribution to the formation of the political landscape in post-colonial India. More specifically, defying any kind of identitarian juxtaposition (be it related to ethnic belonging, religion, sexuality, or social class), the present work reads those three major novels in Indian English fiction to investigate how episodes of violence, in the first three decades after India’s independence from the British Empire, were enacted under the influence of cultural images and “affects” which legitimised different social groups to claim for themselves the right to prevail over others, or even take their lives. The volume starts with a reflection on the spreading of rumours during Partition in Train to Pakistan (1956) and their power to turn friendly communities into sworn enemies. The analysis proceeds then to discuss how the newborn government’s struggle to stifle the Naxalbari movement, as it described in The Lives of Others, was partly sustained by paranoiac feelings projected by the new metropolitan bourgeoisie on the people living in the rural parts of the country. The historical itinerary concludes with an analysis of A Fine Balance’s description of the two main political objectives of the Emergency: the “beautification” of India and the reduction of the country’s population. Both appear to be revealing moments of a predatory character present in the new Indian democratic institutions, transmitted as a kind of bodily contagion.

A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry’s stunning internationally acclaimed bestseller, is set in mid-1970s India. It tells the story of four unlikely people whose lives come together during a time of political turmoil soon after the government declares a “State of Internal Emergency.” Through days of bleakness and hope, their circumstances – and their fates – become inextricably linked in ways no one could have foreseen. Mistry’s prose is alive with enduring images and a cast of unforgettable characters. Written with compassion, humour, and insight, A Fine Balance is a vivid, richly textured, and powerful novel written by one of the most gifted writers of our time.