Writing the Indian Emergency: Magical and Critical Realisms

Abstract

Indira Gandhi became the Prime Minister of India at a time when heavy sociopolitical discontent was on the rise due to the widespread conditions of poverty, hunger, inflation, and unemployment. Unable to tackle the situation and threatened by mass political mobilisations led by Jayprakash Narayan and by legal jurisdiction against her, Gandhi declared a national Emergency. This Emergency was marked by several “disciplinary” measures such as imprisoning thousands of people, gaging the press, and, most notoriously, mass sterilisation and slum clearance programmes. While there remains an astonishing paucity of historical-sociological works on this area, novelists have long engaged with the period and attempted to recover voices suppressed by the measures. This chapter will read three novels by Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children, 1981), Nayantara Sahgal (Rich Like US, 1985), and Rohinton Mistry (A Fine Balance, 1996), written immediately or much after the catastrophic event. It will argue that these novelists have used realism to represent the human struggle against the repressive machinery and the larger-than-life character of Gandhi. They have, however, employed notably different aesthetic modes. While Rushdie has used a magical realist mode which is mainly symbolic-descriptive in nature, Sahgal and Mistry have offered a cogent critique of the emergency. But, their critical realist mode is marked by an upper-class perspective (for Sahgal) or by a focus on the minor population (lower class, lower caste characters). Together these modes, the chapter argues, have constituted a dynamic case of Emergency realism in India.