Under Construction @ Keele 2016 Volume 2 Issue 2 | Page 47

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Again Pushpa asserted her primary role in these activities, her husband playing a minor part
by locking them in to help maintain the disguise of domesticity. Depictions of these and other
activities situate Pushpa as a central figure in Bombay’s resistance movement, her home an
important site for both hers and others’ activism. Her references to using ‘paper plates, not
making any sounds, not producing any flash’ underscore the personal risk she took in
opening up her home to these activities. As a potential site for resistance during the
Emergency period the home was also a target of its repression and surveillance.
This surveillance was another common thread throughout Pushpa’s narrative,
although she persistently depicted not simply her fear of this surveillance, but her negotiation
of it. Located near the college grounds, Pushpa’s house was affected when authorities
increased surveillance there ahead of Indira Gandhi’s scheduled visit to Bombay. The
evening before this visit, the College Principal sent for Pushpa. She recalled, ‘when I went
out and saw the jeeps I understood, and I was a little afraid because in my house there was
all of the material against Indira Gandhi that we were to use the next day for her visit. I
couldn’t send a message because they were right there.’30 In our discussion, Pushpa defined
this as one of her ‘close calls’ with authorities during her anti-Emergency activism. At the
Principal’s Office police questioned her, took a sample of her handwriting and placed her
under house arrest for the day of Gandhi’s visit. She told me: ‘it was only house arrest,
nothing happened’ and further stressed its ineffectiveness as she was still able to arrange for
distribution of anti-Emergency materials stored in her house.31 In any case, this concept of
house arrest loses some of its punitive impact given the emergence of Pushpa’s domestic
space as a highly politicised one and a hub of resistance activity.
This emphasis on the home as an important site of resistance recurred across other
women’s narratives. It was an important ‘spatial referent’ in these women’s accounts of their
Emergency experiences, in terms of both assertions of agency and engagement in
oppositional activism and their experiences of repression, surveillance and fear. Oral history
narratives are unique in their capacity to record such manifestations of Emergency politics
within private spaces and within personal relationships and subjectivities. Thus in this
instance, oral histories not only prompt us to reconsider whose voices count, or should be
heard, in the historiography of Emergency and resistance to it, but also to re-asses which
spaces count in mapping this resistance.
Conclusion
Susan Geiger situates not the interview, the moment of utterance for these unheard stories,
but ‘interpretation as the radical act in feminist scholarship’, given its strive to dismantle

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Ibid.
Ibid.

31