Rants and nymphomaniac kutiyas

I'm reading university vice-chancellor Vibhuti Narain Rai's deeply sexist comments on women writers: "There is a race among women writers to demonstrate who is the greatest prostitute", "feminist discourse has reduced to a grand celebration of infidelity". (More here: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/Textual-violence/654764)

He's under pressure to resign now, with women writers (including the redoubtable Krishna Sobti) and womens' rights activists demanding that he be sacked.

It's the language Narain Rai uses that interests me: he calls a character in a book by a Hindi woman writer a "nymphomaniac kutiya", quips that another writer's autobiography should have been called How Many Times in How Many Beds. Behind the classic, well-worn terms of abuse--prostitute, nymphomaniac--are the equally classic male, misogynist fears, of women going out of control, owning their sexuality, stepping out of line. All of his criticism, so to speak, is focused on sexual politics and freedoms. I'm not sure he would have made his remarks if he'd realised how glaringly it displays the anxieties and the fears of men like him: how do we handle these women who refuse to know their place?

In 1979, the writer Mridula Garg was charged for "obscene writing", because her protagonist in Chit Cobra was a self-aware woman who explored her various freedoms, including sexual freedom, with an absolute lack of guilt. It was the absence of guilt that was offensive; what was telling was that for decades afterwards, Hindi male writers often spoke of Garg disparagingly, as the woman who "writes about sex", even though her work covered far wider feminist terrain.

Ritu Menon and others explored the persistence of censorship--informal, but powerful--when it came to womens' writing in The Guarded Tongue: "What is it that women can't write about? There is a pause... Religion, politics, sex. You then wonder: what is there left to write about?"

One way of dismissing a woman writer is to say that her only subject is sex; she is twice-damned, for being a "loose woman", and for having such a narrow mind. I love the way Ismat Chughtai fought back when she was on trial for writing about a lesbian affair in her famous short story, The Quilt. Here's her account of the trial:
"There was a big crowd in the court. Several people had advised us to offer our apologies to the judge, even offering to pay the fines on our behalf. The proceedings had lost some of their verve, the witnesses who were called in to prove that “Lihaf” was obscene were beginning to lose their nerve in the face of our lawyer’s cross-examination. No word capable of inviting condemnation could be found. After a great deal of searching a gentleman said, “The sentence ‘she was collecting ‘ashiqs ’ (lovers) is obscene.”
“Which word is obscene,” the lawyer asked. “‘Collecting,’ or ‘‘ashiqs’?”
“The word ‘‘ashiqs,’” the witness replied, somewhat hesitantly.
“My Lord, the word ‘‘≥shiqs’ has been used by the greatest poets and has also been used in na‘ts. This word has been given a sacred place by the devout.”
“But it is highly improper for girls to collect ‘‘ashiqs,’” the witness proclaimed.
“Why?”
“Because ... because ... this is improper for respectable girls.”
“But not improper for girls who are not respectable?”
“Uh ... uh ... no.”
“My client has mentioned girls who are perhaps not respectable. And as you say, sir, non-respectable girls may collect ‘ashiqs."
“Yes. It’s not obscene to mention them, but for an educated woman
from a respectable family to write about these girls merits condemnation!”
The witness thundered.
“So go right ahead and condemn as much as you like, but does it merit legal action?”
The case crumbled."

In 'The Past Is Another Country', Taslima Nasreen speaks of her belief that Islam is anti-women, of her brushes with the fundamentalists, and of the importance of being a "fallen woman". The easiest way to discredit a woman writer, or womens' writing in general, is to call it obscene, to set yourself up as Narain Rai did, as a morality cop.

Ismat Chugtai had the right answer so many decades ago. Some of us are girls who are not respectable, who are in many ways, out of place, out of control. And much as we make men like Narain Rai, who is, incidentally, a former IPS officer, uneasy, even angry, we aren't that easily brought back into line.

The BS column: Ebooks and Wylie's War

What Gutenberg really did when he invented the printing press was simple: he changed the relationship between book and reader. It’s often forgotten that pre-Gutenberg, you were either a patron—able to afford to commission your own manuscript, copied painstakingly by scribes from an exemplar—or a privileged member of the Church, or, more commonly, just a listener.

What the arrival of the e-book has done is to change the relationship between publisher and reader, and the rising screams of distress you’ve heard over the last decade has been the response of the publishing industry, in general. Statistics support the idea that the e-book, and e-reading, are not passing fads, despite the nostalgia many of us have for the scent and feel of the printed page. The Kindle and the iPad are game-changers, and every significant trend indicates that e-readers will rule the markets over the next decade, even in relatively slow-adopting countries like India.

The problems before the publishing industry are complex. The customer wants e-books cheaper, arguing that s/he isn’t getting a paper book, and should pay significantly less. The author wants a better cut, arguing that publishers don’t have to carry the distribution and warehousing costs involved with print. There are aggressively unpleasant wars over monopolies: will Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Google end up owning digital rights, which e-reader will rule the market? Publishers, battling piracy issues, stuck in a model of geographical territories and royalties inherited in the 15th century, have been under siege for a while now.

This week, one of the UK’s top agents, the notoriously aggressive Andrew Wylie, promises to change the rules of the game in drastic fashion. Wylie has started Odyssey Editions, an initiative that will sell the digital versions of some of the greatest modern classics—from Updike’s Rabbit series to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children to Nabokov and Hunter Thompson. Wylie is offering better terms to authors, though he’s angered many who would otherwise encourage the growth of digital publishing by agreeing to a monopolistic deal with Amazon.

Odyssey Editions books will be available exclusively via Amazon’s Kindle store, which would be the equivalent of telling a buyer of a print book that he can only buy from Waterstones and only read his book in selected locations. This part of the deal makes absolutely no sense, and Wylie needs to consider the precedent he’s setting. But the fact that he’s offering authors a significantly larger percentage of profits for their work, and that readers will get their ebooks at a realistically cheap price is what’s upsetting some of the biggest names in publishing. At present, Random House has announced that they will not do new business with the Wylie Agency—which represents some of their top authors, including Rushdie—until the matter is resolved. Bluntly, expect pistols at dawn.

If Wylie had been acting in isolation, the publishing industry might be able to brand him as a maverick—there’s a reason why he’s called The Jackal, after all. But whenever the e-book debate comes up, it’s a good idea to take a look at what Japan’s doing, because trends in that nation tend to anticipate what will be happening in the rest of the world a year later.

Earlier this month, one of Japan’s hottest authors, Ryu Murakami, announced that he would publish his new book, A Singing Whale, as an ebook download in conjunction with the iPad. Murakami’s readership in Japan and elsewhere is huge—he may not be as well-known as the other author with the same surname, Haruki Murakami, but he is a highly-regarded, bestselling author. His defection from Kodansha, his print publisher, to epublishing is significant. It was foreshadowed by the decision Stephen King made years ago to release some of his books online before they were made available in print. While moving straight into ebook format and bypassing print won’t work for all authors, if it works for a significant set of influential writers, you’re looking at a game where the rules have changed beyond recognition.

It’s worth noting that the Japanese tech giant Sharp has plans to open an ebook store in Japan that will challenge the Amazon monopoly on ebookselling. And that in the world of e-readers, applications like the Nook, which promises to convert the Android phone into an e-reader, have just been launched. This debate is no longer about the ebook versus the printed book; realists need to accept that ebooks are already here and that despite the massive industry problems, e-readers have converted customers far more easily than anticipated.

What Wylie’s done this week with Odyssey Editions is to expose the fact that the modern printed-book publishing industry is a dinosaur. By and large, excluding a few innovative firms, publishing has treated ebooks like a version of print—in terms of design, pricing, distribution and author’s royalties. Wylie may not be redrawing the map the right way, but he has made his point. The old maps for the industry just aren’t going to work any more.

The BS column: Mapping Asia

The definition of South Asia is not permanently fixed,” publisher and writer Urvashi Butalia observed recently. Neither, by implication, is the definition of what puts the India in the term “Indian writing”, and in different ways, three separate Indian/ Asian prizes are looking for new ways to populate the shelf of South Asian literature.

For the Vodafone Crossword, now over a decade old, the battle over the years has been twofold. How do you identify a writer as Indian? And how do you find the right balance between encouraging new, or local, writers and not penalizing those who have done well in markets outside India? These may seem like esoteric questions, but the results are reflected in the prize shortlists—and that, whether the general reader is aware of the processes involved or not, determines whether a literary prize will stand or fall in the long run.

Historically, prizes that have pushed an ideological or political agenda haven’t done well. The only test of whether a literary prize is working as it should or not isn’t reflected in the number of struggling writers it supports or honours; any prize, from the Pulitzer to the Crossword, will ultimately be judged by whether it consistently yields good reading lists.

The Crossword opened up the prize a few years ago to writers who could be considered Indian—William Dalrymple being the most prominent example—by dint of length of stay in the country, or some evidence of Indian origin. The problem with this sort of criteria, as the Crossword and other literary prizes have discovered, is that it turns the prize administrators into a quasi-customs office, with the job of scrutinizing the passports of writers—and this doesn’t work. This year, Dalrymple wasn’t eligible to be considered in the non-fiction category, since he’s not an Indian citizen. I understand the dilemma the Crossword faces, but the result is that their shortlists risk being slanted in one direction or the other: either too insular or too inclusive.
(A full list of shortlisted Crossword titles is available here.)

The Man Asian Literary Prize is, similarly, moving past the teething troubles of the early years. One of its aims, and a noble one, was to encourage emerging, talented writers who hadn’t been published yet. The outcome of accepting unpublished manuscripts for consideration, though, was that the gap between the announcement of the winners/ shortlisted authors and the availability of their books became a gulf.
The memory of the general reader is short; most of us want to buy books the moment a shortlist is announced. This year, the Man Asian has moved back to accepting only books that are already published—which should give it a more reader-friendly list. The criteria for defining the Asianness of the writer remains the passport and the nationality, which, given the massive geographical spread, could lead to fascinating but very eclectic shortlists in the future.

The recently announced DSC Prize for South Asian literature has a much smaller focus—the restriction to the subcontinent rather than to the entire Asian continent makes it narrower, but also makes it more likely that the shortlists will feature books with common themes and interests. More controversial is the decision to define South Asian literature by content, rather than by nationality—if your book has a South Asian setting or South Asian characters, it qualifies. This will lead to some confusion; Asian authors who write about other times and places will be left out, and you could theoretically have a shortlist that features six Asian books, but not a single Asian writer.

Over time, though, both the DSC and the Man Asian prize could help us come to a better understanding of what Asian fiction is, as a category—if such a beast exists. It’s as complex as trying to define what makes an Indian novel Indian, and perhaps it will be as much fun.

Tailpiece: Sarita Mandanna’s Tiger Hills illustrates a point about the dangers of getting what’s known as the Bastard Child comparison wrong in the blurb. (This refers to the an overworked blurb-writer/ reviewer cliché: “X novel reads like a cross between William Faulkner and William Styron”; “If Bret Easton Ellis and Judith Krantz had offspring, this book would be their firstborn” etc.) Tiger Hills, one of the most-hyped debut novels of this season, drew pre-publication comparisons to Gone With The Wind and The Thorn Birds.

I can say with some confidence that this two-generation family historical saga set in Coorg starring an impossibly beautiful, willful heroine, an impossibly romantic tiger hunter and an impossibly annoying faithful husband with not one but two deep, dark secrets resembles neither Margaret Mitchell’s deathless bestseller nor Colleen McCollough’s equally indestructible forbidden-love pulp epic. It is, however, the child of The Far Pavilions and House of Blue Mangoes, as midwifed by Jodi Picoult, which will doubtless appeal to many readers. Just don’t expect Scarlett and Rhett in the Coorg hills.

(Update: Over at The Complete Review, MA Orthofer quite rightly points out that the "massive geographical spread" of the Man Asian Prize is limited to a relative handful of countries--he counts just 23. Here's his take:

http://complete-review.com/saloon/index.htm#qs9)

Book review: Collected Stories, Hanif Kureishi

Collected Stories
Hanif Kureishi
Faber & Faber,
Rs 850, 671 pages
(Published in the Business Standard, July 13, 2010)



For a generation of Americans, John Updike was the writer they came of age with, and then followed into the plains and plateaus of middle age. Hanif Kureishi, for a certain generation of British Asians, has become their Updike, the uber-cool, edgier version who understood the rebellious years and then hung around long enough to chronicle the slow, unglamorous but not unrewarding slump into middle age.

A few decades ago, it would have been blasphemy to compare Kureishi with someone as mainstream, as firmly establishment, as Updike. This was the man who began his career writing pornography, who blew our minds with My Beautiful Laundrette, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid and The Buddha of Suburbia. Kureishi wasn’t just the guru of the new multicultural, globalised novel, he was its bad-ass, strutting, swaggering poster boy. “At the deepest level, people are madder than they want to believe,” he writes in Something To Tell You, and it’s this insight that he brought to his explorations of relationships, the new melting pot of Britain, marriages, intimacy, love, desire and fanaticism.

“The cruelest thing you can do to Kerouac is to re-read him at thirty-eight,” Kureishi wrote in The Buddha of Suburbia, but it’s not a dictum that applies to his own work, especially the stories included in this compendium. Collected Stories covers the writing years from 1997 to 2007 and includes work from Love in a Blue Time, Midnight All Day, The Body and eight new stories. This is late Kureishi, the mellowed, autumnal observer of love and decay rather than the impassioned rebel of the early years. The cruelest thing you could do to Kureishi would be to read these stories before you turn thirty-eight.

“I used to like talking about sex,” says the narrator of Blue, Blue Pictures of You. “All of life, I imagined — from politics to aesthetics — merged in passionate human conjunctions… . I did, at one time, consider collecting a ‘book of desire’, an anthology of outlandish, melancholy and droll stories about the subject.” What a book this would have been, if Kureishi had brought himself to write it; but instead, Kureishi country turns out to be a more familiar, if still complex, world. The stories from Love in a Blue Time have dated better than Midnight All Day, and while The Body retains something of the force of Kureishi’s grand talent for subversion, its speculations about the future of desire, and a race of “wax immortals” who possess new bodies, have been overtaken not just by science fiction but by avatars, robots and other modern paraphernalia.

In his short stories, Kureishi allows himself an intimacy and an openness that can be absent from his longer fiction, where he is always an observer of desire, of break-ups, love and its fault lines — rarely a participant. There is nostalgia here, and regret mixed in with the rebellion: this is the territory of middle-age, populated by therapists (perhaps the ultimate inaccessible lovers of our time), the ebbing of desire, and the frustrations of apparently fulfilled desire. If rebellion has failed — or, more accurately, remains the domain of the young — there is always art, and political engagement; but both are as transgressive, and as elusive, and as unsatisfactory, as desire.

The stories that work best are his earlier work: the classic My Son The Fanatic remains a stark exploration of the gulf between those who are capable of faith, and the fanaticism of deep, implacable belief, and those who are helplessly wedded to reason. Perhaps the best of the most recent work is the brutal Weddings and Beheadings, where the narrator films beheadings “common in this war-torn city, which is my childhood home”. It’s a short story, just three pages long, but it is essential reading for anyone interested in our culture of the violence of media voyeurism: “To make it work on television, it helps to get a clear view of the victim’s eyes just before they cover them.”

Taken as a whole, Collected Stories is not a monumental work. Too many of the stories here have not dated well, or remain fixed to a particular place and a particular time; the London of Kureishi’s youth, so startlingly different and emblematic of the shifting politics of Britain, has been replaced by other Londons, other Britains. And far more than his novels or his films, his short stories expose the very limited range of Kureishi’s writing. But you’ll still read this for his insights, for their precision and wry wisdom: “We are unerring in our choice of lovers, particularly when we require the wrong person. There is an instinct, magnet or aerial, which seeks the unsuitable. The wrong person is, of course, right for something — to punish, bully or humiliate us, let us down, leave us for dead…”

For those of us who have aged and greyed almost alongside Kureishi, or at any rate, in his energetic, angry, peripatetic wake, Collected Stories will still be an essential addition to the bookshelves, despite its limitations. We need Kureishi’s worn gaze, and his cynical but heartfelt reminder: “Thank God, even now I am capable still of rebelling against myself.”

The BS column: Imagining Shivaji

It was in 2003-2004 that a minor academic work by the scholar James Laine set off a fierce, orchestrated campaign of political protests that led to the state banning of a book, threats to the author and other Shivaji scholars and the ransacking of the BORI library in Pune by members of the then little-known Sambhaji Brigade.
In the wake of the recent Supreme Court judgement overturning the ban on Laine’s Shivaji, two things are very clear. The first is that the Shivaji case is no longer about free speech, but about complex political reactions. And the second is that the Shivaji case goes beyond just free speech and free expression; at the heart of Laine’s continuing travails is the question of what we’re free to think and explore in contemporary India.

The Supreme Court judgement turns on an apparently minor point: can an act (Section 153A) that invokes the possibility of censorship in cases where religious sentiments may be hurt apply to a great historical figure who is, however, neither a prophet nor a God? The Maharashtra government was forced to admit that Shivaji, however great a Maratha hero he might be, is not a religious figure, and the state ban on the publication of James Laine’s Shivaji was overturned on this technicality.

The judgement has caused a political storm. Various rightwing Hindutva parties have protested and threatened violence; Maharashtra Chief Minister Ashok Chavan has announced that his party shares “public sentiments” on the sanctity of Shivaji and may not endorse the SC judgment. This is a red herring: given the track record of Indian publishers and booksellers, few of them are likely to demonstrate the moral courage required to put the James Laine book back in stores.

In this debate, free speech is invoked only cursorily; and the phrase “offended sentiments” is reflexively, thoughtlessly invoked—in 2010, the Laine case is all about the political battle, not the censorship issues.

The ostensible reason for the protests and the thuggish violence that led to the 2004 ban on the book was a brief section in Laine’s work that reported the “naughty” tradition of speculation on Shivaji’s parentage. But what was really at work was a question of ownership of the Shivaji legend and franchise. James Laine asks: “Can one imagine a narrative of Shivaji's life in which, for example: Shivaji had an unhappy family life? Shivaji had a harem? Shivaji was uninterested in the religion of bhakti saints? Shivaji's personal ambition was to build a kingdom, not liberate a nation?”

These points were pounced upon as evidence that Laine was a “sensationalist” historian, seeking more readers. But when we speak of defending free speech, it is this question that is really at the heart of current free speech and censorship debates in India.

Political parties often frame free speech in strictly negative terms: no one should have the right to offend or harm the sentiments of an (undefined) public. The alternative to this line of thinking would be: “Everyone should have the right to engage in debate, intellectual exploration or questioning, however uncomfortable this process of debate may be, so long as it is not malicious.”

Few political parties in contemporary India have ever thought deeply about the implications of curtailing—or supporting—free speech, which is why we’ve seen a process of death by deification where it comes to understanding the lives and times of our national leaders.

If you look more carefully at Laine’s argument, it gives you a better understanding of the ban, the violence, and the current unrest after the Supreme Court judgement. What Laine, in his naivete, is really asking is this: are we free to step away from a rigid, politically defined way of looking at a great historical figure, be it Shivaji, Nehru, Sardar Patel or Mahatma Gandhi, and examine the more human, and to him, more complex and rich, narrative around that figure?

Gandhi is an exception: in his inconvenient fashion, the Father of the Nation aired his life with such ruthless honesty and such thoroughness that he is impossible to sanitise beyond a certain point. But with other historical figures, especially those being claimed by the Hindu rightwing as Shivaji currently is, the answer to that question is a blunt no. We’re not free to imagine the life of Shivaji within the perspective of his own times, or to see him as a human subject to human biases—because that open narrative is directly threatening to the present-day mythology of Shivaji.

And this is what makes the Laine case so crucial. The Supreme Court has upheld free speech, if on a technicality. Political parties, in contrast, are unlikely to see the importance of allowing the imagination and contemporary scholarship to remain free. Step away from Laine for a moment: the larger question is, are we free to write, or imagine, an honest, questioning history of some of the most important historical figures in India? At present, the answer to that is, unfortunately, no.

The BS column: Fifty years of Mockingbird

There is no real way of measuring the books we love the most. It’s like measuring the love one has for family and friends: there will be different choices for every stage of your life, and different degrees of attachment. As every reader knows, reading is intensely personal, and the books you love change you and stay with you in ways that even a lover will not. But if there’s one book that comes up every time we talk about the books we love, that would be To Kill A Mockingbird, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.

The American classic is one of those rare books that is both for children and for adults, and I am an unrepentant Mockingbird fan, resistant to the revisionist views that see an underlying current of racism or moral superiority in Harper Lee’s story. Reading it as a child, I was beguiled by how well Harper Lee understood the way children think and feel; as an adult, as many of us are, I was drawn into her vivid analysis of racism, prejudice and moral courage.

“When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow….When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them, we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident. I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem, who was four years my senior, said it started long before that. He said it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out.”

That’s Scout’s voice, the sure voice of a child recollected by an adult, that will guide us through the intricacies of the politics of Maycomb County, the morality and blindness of the law, growing up, and the competing forces of prejudice and justice. The moral compass of the book is Scout and Jem’s father, the lawyer Atticus Finch: “The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.” The case at the centre of the book concerns the alleged rape of a white woman by a black man, Tom Robbins, and as Atticus takes up his defence, we see the reactions of Maycomb County from the point of view of Scout, who has a child’s instinctive sense of unfairness.

It’s not the content, however, that drives the continuing popularity of To Kill a Mockingbird. Harper Lee based her account of the Tom Robbins case on a real event, and her reportage is in that sense an accurate snapshot of the way prejudice worked in the South. Nor is it the mystique that surrounds Lee herself; she never wrote another book after To Kill a Mockingbird, and in her most recent “interview” with The Daily Mail, all she said was that she had to go and feed the ducks on the lake. Lee turned her back on a certain kind of writing life; the woman who once helped Truman Capote research his riveting, pathbreaking book, In Cold Blood, and was an amused observer of the New York literary world retreated into a normal, if very private, life back home.

None of this can explain the hold that this book has on so many readers across the world. It’s not the easy appeal of the Coelho-esque bestseller, with its ready-to-digest, unthreatening wisdom, or the purely cerebral joys of the Borgesian or Nabokovian bestseller at the other end of the scale. In its fiftieth year, Mockingbird has been attacked for reflecting a kind of hidden conservatism, for not being subversive enough; or been excoriated by critics who see Lee’s great novel as a superior work of pulp fiction rather than true literature, whatever that may be.

For readers like me, it is easier to understand Mockingbird’s appeal than to explain it. I go back to this book, along with a small handful of classics, not just to admire its craft and precision, but as a kind of touchstone: the way I respond to Lee’s story of childhood, injustice and inner strength with the passing years shifts and changes, reflecting shifts in my own personal values over the years.

The person who understood the pull of To Kill a Mockingbird best may be Charles J Shields, who spent years researching the book and the author for his unauthorized biography of Harper Lee, Mockingbird.

“I have come to believe,” he writes, “that Harper Lee was inspired by love to create her great novel—love for the world of the South, for her little town, for her father and her family, and for the values she found among the people she most admired.” And perhaps, unfashionable as this analysis is, it is the best explanation for why we love To Kill a Mockingbird as much as we did fifty years ago.

The BS column: the Emergency in fiction

Many years after 1975, I had the opportunity to see some of the posters that Indira Gandhi’s Congress used as propaganda for The Emergency. They came from the same school of writing as the Soviet Union’s Mother Russia propaganda, as though Mrs G’s department had taken creative writing classes from Glavlit and the GRU: “The Nation is on the Move! Emergency for a Stronger and More Prosperous Future!” And, ominously: “You Too Have a Role In The Emergency!”

35 years later, some of the Indian fiction written around the Emergency is iconic, some forgotten—and some still unpublished. A new graphic novel, Delhi Calm, attempts to recapture the days of the Turkman Gate riots and deaths, but it’s better journalism than literature. Here are some of the old classics:

Katraa Bi Arzoo, Rahi Masoom Raza: Written in 1978 in the immediate aftermath of the Emergency, Rahi Masoom Raza’s searing, raw novel has not yet been translated to the best of my knowledge. You can’t leave this off a list of Emergency novels, though: Rahi Masoom Raza wrote this in a kind of white heat of rage, drawing on his experiences of Allahabad during the demolition-and-censorship years. His protagonist, Desh, offers initial resistance. By the end of the book, Desh has been reduced to a man who parrots one phrase over and over again, “Srimati Gandhi zindabad!” and will, like the country he stands for, be crushed under the wheels of a truck.

The Dark Dispatches/ The Night-Shift Reporter, Nirmal Verma: In his elliptical and evocative Raat Ka Reporter, Nirmal Verma never referred directly to the Emergency, choosing instead to depict the paranoia and confusion of the times through an internal journey into the mind of a journalist. This remains brilliant, if not always accessible for most readers.

Rich Like Us, Nayantara Sahgal: Perhaps Sahgal’s best-known novel, this took a wide sweep from the India of the 1930s to the darkness of the 1970s. Sahgal was one of the first writers to make the point that Sanjay Gandhi’s vasectomy programme affected chiefly those from the poorest and lowest castes—racial purity via sterilization. But it was Sahgal’s understanding of the politics of Delhi’s ruling classes, and how that filters into every aspect of our personal lives, that drove this novel.

Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie: It is sometimes forgotten that Rushdie has the instincts of the best journalists, investigating Turkman Gate during the Emergency, Trilokpuri in the aftermath of 1984. Midnight’s Children will remain perhaps the iconic novel of Emergency—and independent India—of all time, with its unforgettable portrait of Indira Gandhi as the Widow, her hair white on one side, black on the other. “…The Emergency, too, had white part—public, visible, documented, a matter for historians—and a black part which, being secret macabre untold, must be a matter of us.” Indira Gandhi took him to court for libel in the case of Gandhi vs Rushdie, and he had to delete a section that speculated on the death of her husband, Feroze Gandhi, from future editions of the book. As Rushdie’s protagonist Saleem Sinai notes, “Mother Indira really had it in for me.”

A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry: Eschewing Rushdie’s magical realism for a far more plain story-telling style, A Fine Balance was Mistry’s attempt to record the effects of the Emergency on the lives of people like us. As two tailors struggle for survival, they meet Dina and her nephew Maneck, and the unlikely quartet try to find “the fine balance between hope and despair”. With characters like Beggarmaster and a series of dramatic plot flourishes, including the forcible sterilization of the two tailors, A Fine Balance was excessively sentimental, but it remains a respectable documentary of the times.

Bedtime Story, Kiran Nagarkar: Performed a few times but never formally published, Nagarkar’s play Bedtime Story is one of the greater works to come out of that time. He used the Mahabharata as a way to understand the cold justification of violence and the doublespeak of that era, with the Chorus as a Nazi war criminal retelling four episodes from the epic. The censor board demanded an initial 78 cuts, which would have castrated the play with the efficiency of any of Sanjay Gandhi’s sterilization camps; performances were disrupted by right-wing parties for almost two decades. “As with most controversial writing,” said Nagarkar with some bitterness, “it became controversial mostly because nobody had read it.”