Prelude to the Emergency: Domestic and Global Politics in The Lowlands and The Lives of Others

Abstract

For centuries, the written word has continued to bear witness to historical and political events, with novels that offer a fictitious rendering of documented reality, capturing the collective imagination of readers. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance are often identified as the groundbreaking English-language novels, whose narratives are set in part or in whole against one of the dark periods in Indian democracy, the “State of Emergency” issued by the Indira Gandhi government in India (1975-1977). This paper is less about the Emergency per se, instead it explores the prelude to this illiberal state mandate, the Naxalite-Maoist insurgencies of the early 1970s as narrated through fictitious characters in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowlands and Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others. These 21st century works delve into the long-lasting impact of the Naxal movement on middle-class families in Calcutta who are drawn into the vortex of violent radicalism; consequences of which continue to reverberate decades later. This paper departs from general literary analyses by fleshing out domestic and global underpinnings of the Naxal movement including the countermeasures from the State that arguably laid the groundwork for the Emergency period and state-mandated violence and repression in the name of law and order in the 1970s.