Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 2 Issue 2 | Page 45

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private binaries, and allows us to refocus historiography’s lens to bring alternative narratives
into the frame.
One of the central ways in which my oral histories speak to this element,
foregrounding individual subjectivities and relating personal experiences to broader
Emergency events, is through women’s discussions of the Emergency in relation to affect, to
their emotions. Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the central role of emotions in
people’s movements and mobilisations.23 My participants often stressed, for example, a
sense of fear and uncertainty, feelings that are not measurable or perhaps ‘reliable’ in any
empirical sense. I could not measure the scale of this fear or corroborate it in any way.
Nevertheless, this fear and other emotive, subjective responses were a ‘fact’ of many
women’s narratives in their moment of reflection and utterance. Moreover, women’s
articulations of these feelings provide rich details and personal insights that could not be
garnered through other methodologies.
Professor Uma Chakravarti worked as a teacher at Miranda House College, Delhi
University, during the Emergency period. As well as narrating the repressive impacts of the
Emergency and the attempts to negotiate this within Delhi University, Uma dwelled on hers
and others’ emotional responses. She noted feeling ‘deeply disturbed’ by Gandhi’s
imposition and the events that followed. She elaborated:
I do remember that it was a very depressing time. One would go to sleep with a
pit in the stomach and get up in the morning with a pit in the stomach. The only
bright light for us [Uma and her husband] was that we adopted our
daughter…she was the only one that made us feel that there was anything
worthwhile in life, otherwise it was such a bleak, bleak time. It was felt very
deeply by us.24
Uma illuminates the emotional impact of the Emergency on her and her family, something
that could not be gleaned from conventional documentary or archival material. The
connection between Emergency politics and this familial memory reminds us that people did
not experience these events in a vacuum; rather, they are inextricably connected to people’s
private emotions, familial and social relationships and subjectivities. Uma’s description of this
period as ‘depressing’, as one that affected her very deeply, also informs our understandings
of her involvement in resistance activities and the underground movement.
Another key way in which these oral histories re-frame the Emergency through an
assertion of personal experiences is in their spatial referents. Reflecting on the nature of
memory, Portelli asserts that ‘in memory, time becomes place,’ whereby recollected pasts

23

See for example, Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements ed. By Jeff Goodwin, James
M. Jasper and Francesca Polletta (London: Chicago University Press, 2001).
24
Uma Chakravarti, Interview with Author, October 2014.