A more docile writing

The Emergency left behind a culture of self-censorship in our writers and artists

On June 25, 1975, India came under a period of internal emergency declared by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi — 21 months during which fundamental rights, including freedom of expression, were suspended. Press censorship was officially declared. While many newspapers accepted the governmental injunction of voluntary censorship, newspapers like The Statesman and The Indian Express defied the draconian measures.

What should concern us today is not the imposition of restraints on expression and the resistance to it, but the impact it has left on the artistic and literary scene in India. How did artists and writers respond to the state's interference in artistic freedom? Was the government's tendency to suppress free speech a temporary phase that went away with the Emergency? Are artists and writers today freer?

The Emergency was a period that writers and artists tended to avoid during or after its time. Its impact was felt in films (like Satyajit Ray's Hirak Rajer Deshe or Shaji N. Karun's Piravi) and scattered works of literature, mainly poems. But this did not breed a literature of trauma like the Partition did, and we find few examples of literary works that were banned or suppressed. Barring a few novels, the Emergency failed to anguish the novelist into expression, especially in the Indian languages. The novels that immediately spring to mind are all in English — Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance, and Nayantara Sahgal's Rich Like Us being prominent. Rahi Masoom Raza's Katra bi Arzoo, published in 1978 in Urdu, dealt with the pain of the ordinary person who felt betrayed by a beloved leader. Andhakaranazhi, published in 2011 in Malayalam, is a recent addition to this meagre literature.

Literary docility was on show during the Emergency. Writers like Amrita Pritam and Harivansh Rai Bachchan, good friends of Indira Gandhi, published a joint statement in support of the Emergency. The National Writers Forum under the leadership of Shrikant Verma also welcomed the measure. One would have expected a vigorous critique of an anti-democratic move from the likes of Mulk Raj Anand, but he too was silent.

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