The Emergency and the Indian English Novel

Memory, Culture and Politics

Raita Merivirta

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000008630
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire historique

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.

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 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 manifested 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 traditional 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 turbulent years in Indian history. The role of the 1970s in shaping 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 Emergency” (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 Children, 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 featured 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 detained without trial, and many were tortured. Elections were suspended 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 forgetting 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 Emergency 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 readers. 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 literature 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 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 prevailing versions of memory. Literature is therefore never a simple reflection of pre-existing cultural discourses; rather, it proactively 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 literary representations of the Indira Gandhi years shape our understanding 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 culmination 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 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 democracy by the JP movement (see Tarlo 2003, 21–54).⁷ The Prime Minister 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 emergency, but we had to under the compulsion of circumstances” (Gandhi 1984, 200), and remarked that “what has been done is not an abrogation 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 democracy 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 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 Gandhi 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 “concerned 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 version 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 changing 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 politicized. “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 master 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 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 Emergency 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 government 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 investigate 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 obliterated 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 during 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 Gandhi’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 administrative 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 industrial 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 whic...