It is suggested that the writers address especially the middle class in India, exposing their complicity by silence in allowing the oppression of the poor in the authoritarian state, and hoping to raise interest in safeguarding democracy and ensuring that India does not slide into authoritarianism and such excessive measures ever again. Drawing on Jenny Edkins’ discussion of “trauma as betrayal”, the book examines five major, prize-winning novels by Salman Rushdie, Shashi Tharoor, Nayantara Sahgal and Rohinton Mistry as born out of the cultural trauma of the Emergency, that is, the betrayal of the Nehruvian idea of India and democracy by Indira Gandhi. The Emergency and the Indian English Novel: Memory, Culture and Politics interrogates the construction of cultural memory of the Emergency in Indian English novels of the 1980s and the 1990s, and examines what aspects of the Emergency are remembered, how these are represented and what the impact of that remembering is.
Despite the official culture of forgetting, several notable Indian English novelists wrote about the Emergency in their novels, offering parallel histories that counter the official narrative presented by Indira Gandhi and her government, and remembering the part of the Emergency which was suppressed and silenced. In the 1980s and the 1990s, there was little incentive in India for remembering the Emergency (1975-1977), a period of authoritarian rule by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. But the British government criticised him and dropped his policies during the drought of 1943, leading to countless fatalities. During the 1873-'74 famine, the Bengal lieutenant governor, Richard Temple, saved many lives by importing and distributing food. So, authorities removed boats (the region's lifeline), and the police destroyed and seized rice stocks. Mr Churchill also pushed a scorched earth policy-which went by the sinister name of Denial Policy-in coastal Bengal, where the colonisers feared the Japanese would land. As imports dropped, prices shot up, and hoarders made a killing. Churchill turned down fervent pleas to export food to India, citing a shortage of ships-this when shiploads of Australian wheat, for example, would pass by India to be stored for future consumption in Europe. This would have kept nearly 400,000 people alive for an entire year. India exported more than 70,000 tonnes of rice between January and July 1943, even as the famine set in. Bengal famine resulted from food scarcity caused by large-scale exports of food from India for use in the war theatres and consumption in Britain.
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