Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 2 Issue 2 | Page 41

32

forces united to contest her Emergency Government under the Janata Party, and in March
1977 she was defeated at the polls.2
Recent scholarship has moved away from the top down approaches that long
characterised political commentary on these events, often preoccupied with why Indira
Gandhi issued the declaration and what happened at the Central Government level.3
Historians Ramachandra Guha and Bipan Chandra’s recent works reorient this focus to
illuminate activities of the underground resistance movement.4 A shift towards histories from
below has also emerged, as other recent scholarship locates citizens at the centre of
Emergency histories. Anthropologist Emma Tarlo, for example, analyses the sterilisation
policies as implemented at the state level, touching on how these particular manifestations of
the Emergency impacted on people’s daily lives.5
Even within these recent trends, women are almost entirely absent from
historiography. Scholars have not considered how women engaged with the State of
Emergency, either in support or resistance, or how its various measures affected women
specifically; their voices remain largely unheard. Only a handful of women appear in broader
accounts of resistance.6 This absence is partly explained by lack of evidence and partly by
the accepted notion that the Emergency functioned simply as a turning point in, even a
catalyst for, women’s political engagement and protest. Feminist stalwart Vina Mazumdar,
for example, connected the post-1977 proliferation of women’s groups directly with the
Emergency and the climate of liberation that followed elections. She asserted, ‘it was the
shock of the national Emergency…with its suspension of fundamental rights of citizens that
was to reawaken the women’s movement from its two decade long slumber.’7
But work on women’s participation in social movements before 1977 brings
Mazumdar’s comments about a ‘slumber’ into question. Scholars have shown that women

2

For a more detailed account of events under Emergency see Ramachandra Guha‘s chapter
“Autumn of the Matriarch,” in India after Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy
(London: Macmillan, 2007), 493-521.
3
See, for example, Sudipta Kaviraj, “Indira Gandhi and Indian Politics,” Economic and Political
Weekly 21.38/39 (1986); Atul Kohli, The Success of India’s Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001).
4
Guha, India After Gandhi, 493-521; Bipan Chandra, In the Name of Democracy: JP Movement and
the Emergency (New Delhi: Penguin, 2003).
5
Emma Tarlo, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi (Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2003).
6
Ramachandra Guha’s chapter, for example, mentions the poor prison conditions in which two female
political prisoners were kept in reference to a protest march led by Manibhen Patel (daughter of
India’s first Home Minister Vallabhbhai Patel) in August 1976. See Guha, India after Gandhi, 499 and
505. Guha draws from collections of underground literature held in private paper collections in the
Nehru Memorial Library, New Delhi.
7
Vina Mazumdar, ‘Political Ideology of the Women’s Movement’s Engagements with Law’ in
Engendering Laws: Essays in Honour of Lotika Sarkar, ed. Amita Danda and Archana Parishar
(Lucknow: Eastern Book Co., 1999), 5.