Tropes of exception: representations of the emergency in Indian writings in English

Thesis

This dissertation studies representations of the Indian National Emergency (1975–1977) which may feature either as the central focus or as an organising principle of narratives in the selected corpus of multi-genre Indian writings in English. Emergency literature notably traces continuities in Indian history to spotlight the crisis as a ‘state of exception’ meriting scrutiny both for parallels with prior colonial regimes and as a singular apparatus of institutional repression shaped by India’s unique postcolonial geopolitics. The dissertation argues that the selected texts portray the period primarily through the utilisation of a range of ‘tropes of exception,’ which includes, the repeated construction of subaltern figures in various contexts, the representation of the Emergency as a turning point for Indian democracy, the metonymic substitution of major political leaders for national history, and the depiction of the period as a time of political and social metamorphosis. In studying how key features of the Emergency register in this literature as exemplary iterative aesthetic devices, the dissertation finds in the selected texts a unifying critical premise in their tailoring of a reactive and antidotal response to the decline of Nehruvian secularism in postcolonial India. It argues that literary representations of the period furnish affective scripts that capture the essence and robust afterlife of the crisis, enabling a complex interaction with the ‘lifeworlds’ that once constituted it. Relatedly, the dissertation questions ‘representation’ by exploring the rifts between traumatic experiences of political crises and their remembrance through literary texts, to contemplate the uses and limits of such cultural production in eliciting empathy and negotiating difference. By examining how this literature stages numerous anxieties about social and political transformations in India after Independence, the dissertation argues that the Emergency connotes a paradigm shift in the operation of the political communities of the postcolony.

Authors: Casaba Somashekar, B

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-g2dzb6x4e
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Indian literature; emergency literature; tropes of exception; Indian emergency; states of exception; postcolonial literature
• Subjects: Indian literature; Politics and literature; Literature and history; Postcolonial criticism