Rethinking powers of political: The national emergency and the J. P. movement in Rahi Masoom Raza’s Katra Bi Arzoo

Redefining politics of language (Hindi/ Urdu) to contest politics of state

Rahi Masoom Raza was born in Gazipur, Uttar Pradesh. He completed his PhD in Urdu Literature from Aligarh Muslim University. He taught Urdu at Aligarh University for some time before he moved to Bombay where he worked as a screenplay writer in the Hindi film industry. He also wrote the screenplay and dialogue of the famous serial Mahabharata, based on the Hindu epic. Some of his other novels are Adha Gaon (1966, A Village Divided), Topi Shukla (1966), Himmat Jaunpuri (1969), Asantosh ke Din (1986, Days of Discontent), and Neem ka Ped (2003, Neem Tree).

Katra Bi Arzoo illustrates the life and experiences of people in an ordinary locality (katra) of Allahabad. The novel is a narrative of pain and betrayal felt by citizens of the nation during the Emergency. Raza illustrates the struggles of his characters Deshraj, Billo, Shahnaz, Badrul Nayab Machhlishahri, Asharam, and Prema Narayan among others, to suggest that people’s idealism for and hopes about the nation receive a jolt due to the structural crisis caused by the imposition of the Emergency. Asharam is a member of the Communist Party of India and works as a journalist. The novel relates how he shares an intimate bond with the residents of gali Dwarkaprasad (Dwarkaprasad Street) and thus visits the locality on a regular basis. During one of his visits, he spots that a new name, Katra bi Arzoo, has been inscribed on the street signage, displacing both the official nomenclature gali Dwarkaprasad as well as the unofficial one, that is, Katra Meer Bulaki. Asharam can sense that this name change is a subtle indicator of the people’s altered political preferences in the newly volatile political context. This marks a transition from a hitherto established cult-of-personality politics towards a kind of ethical democratic politics which recognizes people’s rights to equality and redistributive justice. ⁴ Most importantly, Katra bi Arzoo represents the idealistic yearnings of the people of this locality for a better life.

Asharam’s father Baburam is a former freedom fighter and a Congress member. He shuts his eyes to the corrupt politics of the Congress party because the high moralist tone of nationalist politics under the aegis of Mahatma Gandhi still rings loud in his ears. He suffers from a lack of political cognition in view of the altered contexts of post-independence India. This has implications for the personal relationship between the son and his father, as Baburam also starts to perceive Asharam as an enemy of the state.

Prema Narayan is Asharam’s girlfriend and an ardent follower of the Congress. The Emergency takes its toll on their relationship when the couple part ways because of their divergent political ideologies. Macchlishahri–Shahnaz and Deshraj–Billo are lower middle-class couples who work hard to improve their financial condition so that they can get married. The turbulent political crisis augured by the Emergency destroys their respective dreams of being able to afford a wedding and sustain a marriage.

I suggest that the novel becomes a means to critically assess the constraints of social structures. It insightfully captures the ways in which an ethical engagement with politics is jeopardized to suit the vested interests of those in power. Raza proposes an alternative politics of ethics vis-à-vis the hierarchical and oppressive state politics by re-articulating the linguistic and cultural exchanges between Hindi and Urdu. In doing so, he not simply illustrates the fuzzy boundaries between these languages but also contests their assumed affiliations with the Hindu and Muslim communities respectively. As mentioned, the katra begins to receive unwanted official attention when one of its denizens engraves the name Katra bi Arzoo on the street sign, which otherwise carries the actual name of the locality, that is, gali (street) Dwarkaprasad. The local police and administration assume this to be the code name for an organized conspiracy to topple the Indira Gandhi regime. Since Asharam is an outsider and a Communist Party of India (CPI) member, the police assume that he is fomenting rebellion among the locality’s inhabitants.

The police, however, do not register that the inhabitants of the locality had for a long time preferred to be known as the residents of katra Meer Bulaki. As the narrator states, “The residents of the locality had already engraved ‘katra Meer Bulaki’ on the street signage which carried the name gali Dwarkaprasad. Nayab Machhlishahri had engraved ‘katra bi Arzoo’ just below it. […] He had been observing since quite a few days how the residents of the locality, even as they were bereft of so many things, continued to nurture hopes and desires of a better life” (11). This seemingly minor anecdote further reveals the biases of the state towards any nomenclature that reeks of Hindustani or Urdu. The convenience with which it is forgotten that katra Meer Bulaki was deliberately erased from the street signage and replaced with gali Dwarkaprasad shows the systemic ways in which Urdu was demonized as the language of Muslims in post-Partition India. Raza seeks to challenge and break this naturalized association between a language and particular religious identities.

Raza uses the Hindustani language, rather than standard Hindi or Urdu, in his novels to delineate his Indianness. He wants to impart a sense of shared ownership of the nation’s cultural markers associated with Hinduism, such as the Ganges, the Ramayana, and the Mahabharata. As Gillian Wright states, “Raza strongly resented the opinions he found in the members of the Jan Sangh that as a Muslim he did not belong, was an invader and could not be a loyal Indian. He resented equally the hatred fanned by the supporters of Pakistan and their spiritual successors” (1993: 111).

Raza’s Katra Bi Arzoo, like Adha Gaon (a novel based on the Partition of India), was originally written in the Hindustani language using the Persian/Urdu script; it was later translated or transliterated into the Devanagari script of Hindi. He uses local dialects of eastern Uttar Pradesh, especially Bhojpuri, to imbue the varied characters present on his literary canvas with a greater emotional appeal. While in Adha Gaon, “social and political climbers take to Urdu or Hindi to promote themselves, and in the process become alienated from the village” (Wright, 1993: 118), in Katra Bi Arzoo, almost all characters, be they Hindus or Muslims, speak Hindustani/Khadiboli and Bhojpuri. The difference in the characters’ language is revealed in terms of their disparate educational and class/caste contexts. Those who are educated, such as Baburam, Asharam, Prema Narayan, Master Badrulhasan Nayab Machhalishahri, and the narrator speak Hindustani/Khadiboli. Meanwhile less educated characters like Deshraj, Billo, Itwari baba, Pehalwan, Shamsu Miyan mostly speak Bhojpuri.

However, this boundary between speakers of Hindustani/Khadiboli and Bhojpuri is not clearly demarcated but fuzzy. The former group of people often lapses into Bhojpuri while conversing with the latter group. Alternatively, such characters as Deshraj, who predominantly speak Bhojpuri, often combine both Khadiboli and Bhojpuri in their interactions with Baburam, Asharam, Master Badrul, and at times his wife Billo. For instance, consider this passage:

tum aaj se hamari patni aur hum tumhare pati. … pahile to hamari himmate na hoti rahi bhitar aaye ki. Bahar itni bheed rahi ki hum ka batayein. Sabke samne kaiyse aa jaate … matlab ii ki log ka sochte — sab jane ko pata hain ki aaj hamara tora byah hua hai. (76)

This translates into English as follows:

From this day, you are my wife and I, your husband. […] Earlier I could not muster the courage to enter our house. I cannot even explain how large a crowd there is outside the house. How could I have come in front of everyone? As in, what would have people thought? Everyone knows we are married now.

While the words “tum aaj se hamari patni aur hum tumhare pati” are in Khadiboli, the rest of the conversation happens in Bhojpuri. Deshraj initially feels shy to enter his house in front of the people of his community because of the obvious sexual implications marriage has for the newly wedded couple. This declaration in Khadiboli not simply affirms the marital status of Deshraj and Billo but also indirectly sanitizes their sexual relations within marriage.

More to the point, education also paves a way for linguistic and upward social mobility in society. In the novel, Shahnaz (Shamsu Miyan’s daughter) consciously switches to Khadiboli from Bhojpuri during their conversations with fellow characters because “she remembered that after a few days she would write her high school exams, and join the ranks of educated people in society” (80).

Raza uses Bhojpuri and Khadiboli languages to locate his characters within their specific geographical–linguistic and upwardly mobile class contexts rather than the dominant nationalist (community=language) context. For instance, when Shahnaz switches between Khadiboli and Bhojpuri in her conversations with Deshraj, he feels that “Shahnaz appears strange when she speaks Khadiboli. This new language sounds melodious, no doubt, but it does not sound intimate and familiar. Its speaker appears a stranger” (158). However, in Raza’s scheme of things, both languages belong to the spoken idiom only and Hindustani is not to be confused with Urdu.

Raza clearly states that Urdu is the language of Pakistan. For instance, he refers to Shamsu Miyan’s son, Abdul Haq, who leaves for Pakistan after the Partition and there finds himself reduced to living the deplorable life of a refugee. His ignominy as a refugee in Pakistan is aggravated by the fact that he is forced to abandon his mother tongue Bhojpuri and speak Urdu instead (44). This instance in the novel challenges the “flawed association of language with social roles and group identities like Hindi a language of Hindus and Urdu a language of Muslims” (Zaidi, 2015: 159). Gillian Wright rightly avers, “Raza is not always complimentary about Urdu, and also joined with Ismat Chughtai in advocating that Urdu be written in the Devanagari script” (1993: 115). ⁵ Like Chughtai, Raza also chooses to transliterate and translate his novels into the Devanagari script. For instance, Raza asserts in Os ki Boond (A Drop of Dew, 2004/1988: 27–28): “The relationship between language and script cannot be defined as a strong one. […] There is no mother script like a mother tongue because one does not need to learn a mother tongue like she learns a script. A mother tongue resides in our soul and we breathe it”.

Raza establishes, to borrow Sadaf Jaffer’s words (2015) “a critical distinction between Urdu as a written language […] and Urdu as a spoken heritage, which is alive and well in the Indian cultural sphere” (178). He identifies this spoken Urdu as Hindustani/Khadiboli in his novels, wherein characters across the communal spectrum use it in their daily conversations. Jaffer shows that “while decline of written Urdu in India, especially Uttar Pradesh, after independence was a consequence of a systemic ‘disestablishment of the language’” (2015: 179), spoken Urdu flourished. This is because many Indian languages continued borrowing their vocabulary and expressions from Urdu.

Moreover, the possible reasons which Jaffer outlines behind Chughtai’s apparent disregard for Urdu script can be extrapolated and applied in Raza’s case too. She argues that the Devanagari script becomes a site for minority writers to assert their national allegiance: “Arabic script is a visible marker of difference; among the most extreme Hindu nationalists, it is a marker of Muslim communalism rather than Indian identity. Thus, script becomes a site for the minority to prove its allegiance to the state” (Jaffer, 2015: 180). To take an example from Raza’s work, in Os ki Boond, one of the characters Vazir Hasan says: “There is nothing wrong in learning Hindi. However, I was thinking why cannot I speak my own language [zaban] and live in my country [mulk]? Are my credentials as an Indian [Hindustani] any less than Deen Dayal?” ⁶ (Raza, 2004: 31).

Writers like Raza “may indeed be responding to the context in which Muslims are marked as different due to the nationalist histories of India and Pakistan and the link between linguistic and religious nationalism among some Muslim groups” (Jaffer, 2015: 180). As explained above, Raza labours to expose the artificial linguistic and cultural divide between Hindus and Muslims that came into existence under the “exigencies of nation formation” (Zaidi, 2015: 159) in both India and Pakistan.

Raza’s contestation of Hindi–Hindu and Urdu–Muslim identifications establishes that the Urdu literary tradition in India did not succumb to the dominant Urdu literary tradition that flourished in other South Asian countries like Pakistan. For instance, in a paper published by the Islamic Research Institute, Islamabad, S. A. K. Kashfi and S. A. A. Akif define the Urdu literary tradition in undivided India and Pakistan within a narrow context of pan-Islamic themes. These include an articulation of Muslim political aspirations, the struggle for the liberation of Palestine, a desire to associate with a sense of universal brotherhood of Islam, and finally, the struggle against British imperialism, and for a separate homeland in India (2001: 551). In doing so, they ignore the rich and variegated cultural–linguistic exchanges that had otherwise marked the literary scene of Hindi and Urdu literature.

Even as Kashfi and Akif refer to the Progressive Writers Movement of the 1930s, they state that the movement mostly comprised left-leaning writers who though they “professed a broad universal, secular outlook towards life were nonetheless deeply involved with local political and social issues” (2001: 550). In a nutshell, they define Urdu literature as determined by an internationalist Muslim outlook caused by “adherence to Islamic values, including the unity of man, universe and God and freedom, equality and justice” (Kashfi and Akif, 2001: 550).

Alternatively, prominent Urdu writers in India like Premchand, Krishan Chander, Rashid Jahan, Rajender Singh Bedi, Qurratulain Hyder, Rahi Masoom Raza, and Ismat Chughtai, to name a few, have emphasized what Nishat Zaidi calls “the polymorphous imagination of Indo-Muslim ethos” (2015: 168). This is evident in, as Zaidi further states, “Urdu poets’ representation of their material reality including […] a seamless literary fusion of Hindu-Muslim religious sensibilities” (168). ⁷ Muhammad Hasan explains that such a quest in Urdu literature for Islamic identities can be “disingenuous” (qtd. in Zaidi, 2015: 169) as “Muslim denotes a much wider cultural domain than Islam. Islam was a set of beliefs but Muslims of different countries developed their own cultural identities in conjunction with their local environments” (Hasan, qtd. in Zaidi, 2015: 169).

Raza’s novels have to be located within this “polymorphous imagination of Indo-Muslim ethos”. The fact that Raza wrote the scripts for a popular television serial based on the epic Mahabharata shows how Raza has expanded the contexts of Urdu/ Hindustani literature. An article posted in The Wire states that Raza exerted strong will in the face of Hindu fundamentalists when they protested against his writing the dialogue for the serial, “I shall write the Mahabharata. I am a son of the Ganga [river]. Who knows about Indian civilization and culture more than me?” (The Wire, 2019: n.p.). On a similar note, the novel Katra Bi Arzoo is also the outcome of Raza’s strong creative will, which stands undefeated in the face of political excesses and state tyranny marked by the imposition of the Emergency.

Emergency: Political malaise or political urgency?

Raza reveals how Indira Gandhi’s aggressive politics is based on majoritarian notions of power, privilege, and high-caste status, which has grave implications for women, poor people, minority communities, and other marginalized groups. In her broadcast to the nation on 26 June 1975 when she imposed the Emergency, Indira Gandhi justified her decision in the name of maintaining law, order, and democracy in the country. ⁸ Emergency rule became a necessary tool, according to the government, to deal with J. P.’s declaration of “total revolution”, which aimed at destabilizing the nation from within. Alternatively, the novel highlights how both the authoritarian politics of Mrs Gandhi and the morality-based politics of J. P. could not alleviate the condition of the poor and marginalized. Raza illustrates this argument by representing the excesses of the sterilization diktat. Badrulhasan Nayab Machhalishahri, a character in the novel, is forcibly sterilized, along with an entire wedding party including the bridegroom, as they make their way to a wedding venue in Panipat. It is ironic that Badrul was supposed to present a poem in an upcoming mushaira (soiree), advocating nasbandi (vasectomy) in Islam. Instead, he gets picked up by police, who forcibly take him to a sterilization camp and reward him with 20 rupees for getting the surgery done. Through this incident, the author impresses upon his readers that the forced family planning policy was one of the most reprehensible measures followed by the government during the Emergency.

Rebecca Jane Williams (2014), in her research on family planning in India, highlights how sterilization had been a part of developmental policy measures and five year plans since the moment of national independence in 1947. ⁹ The Shah Commission report (1978), which looked into the Emergency’s excesses, also reveals that Indira Gandhi’s government forced the state governments, institutions, and governmental organizations to upscale the “pre-existing system of targets, incentives and disincentives” (qtd. in Williams, 2014: 476) to their employees, depending on their ability to get volunteers for sterilization. The statement clearly implies that a certain degree of force and excess had always been integral to the project of family planning in India.

However, Raza and the Shah Commission report do not probe this fact. As Williams demonstrates, this Malthusian discourse had deep roots in the project of modernity. Since poverty and population growth were considered to have negatively affected the economic development of the modern nation, the government assumed that family planning could become an easy tool to manage the growing fertility rate of the country. Williams further states that family planning was “envisaged as a technocratic fix for the problem of poverty in India” (2014: 474). Thus, it is no surprise that family planning found further relevance and greater push with the onset of the Emergency. “Although absent from Gandhi’s initial twenty-point economic program, family planning nevertheless became a key Emergency-era project by virtue of its already established position as a cornerstone of economic development” (Williams, 2014: 474). During the Emergency, the assumed economic gains became contingent on the diktat of forced sterilization.

The novel, however, does not offer a nuanced take on this diktat. It makes it appear as if forced sterilization happened only during the Emergency. By implication, that would mean that coercive family planning was a non-issue before the Emergency, which is obviously not the case. Raza avails his creative license to mix fact with affect. His attempt to reveal the ‘truth’ of the democratic crises is coloured by the assumption that poor people and minorities were subjected to forced sterilization only during the Emergency.

Alternatively, the state machinery has had a long history, along with the international funding agencies and drug companies, of victimizing lower-class and poor women by performing various contraceptive trials (involving Net-en and Depo Provera) on them as part of family planning programmes. Vineeta Bal, Vani Subramanian, and Laxmi Murthy (2008) argue that even as these injectable contraceptives were introduced on an experimental basis, they clearly amounted to illegal practices of the state as they did not leave any room for notions of informed consent. Thus, Raza’s smooth linkages between sterilization and the Emergency do not take into account the systemic exploitation of citizens, especially women, under the guise of family planning. Such an association harks back to the official narratives of sterilization and its excesses during the Emergency, only without contesting the Malthusian discourse of population control as a whole.

In so doing, the novel overlooks the systemic ways in which the middle classes were co-opted to contribute to the coercive project of family planning. For instance, while cash prizes were awarded for the best family planning work done by doctors, teachers, field workers, and voluntary organizations, disciplinary actions in the form of disincentives, fines, salary cut, and withdrawal of allowances awaited those government employees who failed to meet governmental targets. As Williams states, “In November 1976, central government servants were told to ensure that they had no more than three children after September 1977 or face the loss of maternity leave, accommodation and allowances that would only be restored upon production of a sterilization certificate” (2014: 486). These facts are equally significant when it comes to fully assessing the implications of the Emergency for the citizens of the nation.

Furthermore, J. P.’s politics, though begun on a positive note, failed to strike a chord with the actual sufferings of the poor and lower caste people. ¹⁰ Katra Bi Arzoo shows that the totalitarian regime of the Emergency subjected numerous innocent citizens like Deshraj to extreme torture, thereby mentally and physically impairing them for life. The novel further suggests that the Janata regime was no better than the previous regime of Mrs Gandhi. At the end of the novel, a truck carrying the victory procession of the Janata Party candidate Gauri Shankar Pandey runs over Deshraj and kills him. However, Deshraj is held responsible for his own death under the new dispensation: “An accident happened in Allahabad when a physically impaired man came under a truck during the victory procession of Janata Party MP Shri Gauri Shankar Pandey and died” (224). The incident is a larger comment on the unscrupulous power politics of the Janata Party, which came to power after the 1977 elections in India.

The newly elected government is equally prone to twisting truth and justifying it by resorting to unscrupulous means. The fact that Gauri Shankar Pandey conveniently leaves the Congress, after the Emergency, to join the Janata Party so that he remains in power, reveals the distortions of the system which even J. P.’s revolution could not alter. Rakesh Ankit (2017) has argued that the oppositional politics and unity of the Janata Party in the face of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency were not an inevitable construct. Instead, these oppositional parties were riven by their vested interests, which should be engaged with:

Jayaprakash Narayan gave the clarion call of “Total Revolution” and it was up to these groups of varying ideologies and interests to harness J. P.’s call with their organisational strength. But they […] came together in the manner and at the time they did, [and this] had little to do with their choosing, even less about high ideology, but was more about low political skulduggery, structural fault lines and individual pride. Instead of new image, ideals and ethos for tomorrow, the leaders had been trying to bring about an arrangement, a compromise. (Ankit, 2017: 41, 52)

Thus, once these disparate political parties came to power, they got involved in fighting over the booty, rather than offering any alternative to the ills of the socioeconomic and political system against which they had propounded their resistance and revolution.

The character of Gauri Shankar Pandey in the novel highlights how vested interests and fascination with power politics has led to an unethical engagement with politics in post-independence India. Pandey pays a journalist to sanitize or erase the fact of his father’s involvement in looting money from the government treasury during the 1942 agitation, so that his father could posthumously be declared a patriot. This action intimates that distortions of truth have long been integral to Indian politics. The novel expands on this instance by showcasing how the Congress appropriated the national media (newspapers, magazines, journals, and All India Radio) during the Emergency to control and manage the news and information which reached people.

This further makes a point about the political naivety of the lower and middle classes, who perceived the Emergency as ushering in a culture of discipline and development to India. Deshraj and Billo are not perceptive enough to realize the Emergency’s excesses. The couple believe the state-controlled newspapers, magazines, and radio when they praise the Emergency, without realizing that these media are under an obligation to praise the Emergency for their own survival: “While the newspaper and magazines have been reduced to being dumb institutions, the Akashwani (All India Radio) has turned into Safdarjung Vani [the residence of Mrs Indira Gandhi]” (187).

There is some suggestion that Deshraj and Billo are perhaps neither experientially trained like Itwari Baba — a beggar who sees through the empty slogan of garibi hatao (“Remove poverty”) — nor intellectually trained, as are Asharam and Prema Narayan, to discern and question the lies propounded by the government. Thus the torturous regime of the Emergency comes as a rude shock to this couple when Deshraj is arrested on suspicion of knowing the whereabouts of Asharam. Meanwhile Billo is duped into signing a paper that proposes to demolish their house in the name of beautification drive, giving them an alternative housing arrangement that does not exist except on paper.

Deshraj and Billo represent ordinary lower middle-class workers who seek to write their success story based on the ideas of hard work and upward social mobility that were expatiated during the populist tenure of Mrs Gandhi. For instance, Deshraj borrows a loan from the bank, under the tutelage of Congress loyalist Baburam, in order to open his own motor workshop. Since Indira Gandhi herself had suggested this measure for Deshraj, recommending it to Baburam in a written communication, Deshraj assumes that the prime minister is personally interested in his welfare and improvement. “He names the workshop Indira Motor Workshop” (96). One can analyse this instance in Raza’s novel via Arvind Rajagopal’s (2011) thesis that the Emergency played a crucial role in creating a socially upwardly-mobile class of consumers, who looked upon the said political crisis as a means of improving their fortunes.

Rajagopal discloses that few people protested against the Emergency owing to the charisma of Mrs Gandhi as the ruler of India. Alternatively, an emergent group of middle-class consumers endorsed Mrs Gandhi’s stringent policies during the Emergency, thinking they could facilitate their financial status in a “newly” disciplined country and economy. According to Arvind Rajagopal (2011):

Economic planning had existed before, but it had never been brought home in quite this way, seeking to incorporate citizens and staging campaigns to demonstrate that efficiency was indeed the watchword and that the government meant business in its attempt to set the economy right. Not “bread and circuses”, but the claim of a galvanized economy became the legitimation for the Emergency and, above all, a spectacle for collective edification. (1019–1020)

Shahid Amin (1988) outlines the procedures whereby the Congress party workers, as well as the caste panchayats and religious organizations of Gorakhpur tapped “pre-existing patterns of popular belief” (331) in order to construct an image of M. K. Gandhi as the mahatma or great soul. This was specifically aimed at inducting peasants and the common people in the nation-building consciousness of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In a similar way, Raza underscores how the Emergency, centred on the cult of Indira Gandhi, strengthened the coercive state apparatuses, unleashing an array of official lies. This had implications for the most basic rights of people, who found themselves stripped of legal protection against arrest and custodial torture. For instance, the urgency with which Inspector Ashfaqullah Khan lodges a false case against Asharam betrays how the smooth functioning of the Emergency is contingent on these lies.

Even as Ashfaqullah Khan knows that Asharam is innocent, he issues an arrest warrant against the young man in order to appease his seniors and seek their support for his career advancement. Asharam’s communist affiliations make it easier for Ashfaqullah Khan to falsely accuse him of brewing a rebellion against Indira Gandhi. Asharam too gets afraid of the torturous regime unleashed by the police and the Congress party. Unable to cope with his fear of custodial torture, Asharam decides to surrender, accepting all charges against him, even for crimes he has not committed. After all, Asharam has no choice. Even if he were to deny the charges, he would still be detained, questioned, tortured, and persecuted.

In fact, Asharam’s surrender to the police betrays how he has been living a life of lies and self-deception all this while. Try as he might to associate himself with the exploited and stand up for their rights, Asharam lacks skills in self-reflection. Since he has been born into an upper-caste and middle-class family, his experience and perception of oppression is limited. He confesses that “Deshraj has been his only prism to engage with the problems of the working class and dreams of revolution” (97). Here, Raza subtly critiques the failure of the Naxalite movement to bring the communist intelligentsia and labouring poor together on a common platform to contest the feudal, capitalist, and anti-poor stance of the nation state.

It is also imperative, in this context, to recall Mallarika Sinha Roy’s (2016) articulation of the hypermasculanized facets of the communist intelligentsia in India. She discusses how middle-class communist men were encouraged to de-class themselves and, through self-reflection, develop an association with exploited workers and peasants. However, this association was seldom achieved. Sinha Roy writes: “even though the middle-class communist intelligentsia considered complete identification with peasants and workers as their primary responsibility, their traditional perception of the exploited classes was marked by ‘an innate sense of estrangement and tacit condescension, which was difficult to overcome in theory let alone in everyday practice’” (2016: 6). Thus, even as Asharam is committed to the uplift of the labouring poor, his distance from their social practices and inability to empathize with their concerns highlights a “distorted sense of embodying revolutionary virtues” (Sinha, 2016: 6).

Ultimately, no amount of propaganda, alternative facts, lies, or even Asharam’s self-deception can erase the truth about systemic corruption and democratic crises during the Emergency. Asharam is responsible for sustaining the very system that oppresses him. After the Emergency is lifted, he abandons his political consciousness and convictions by standing amid the fray for the 1977 elections to Parliament on a Congress ticket. Through this incident, Raza exposes the fragile political affiliations of the middle-class intelligentsia who failed to connect with the actual concerns of working classes and peasantry in post-independence India.

By contrast, Deshraj chooses to keep his conscience intact and alive, even at the cost of his life. The police pick Deshraj up from the All India Radio office, where he goes to praise the Emergency, and put him in jail on the suspicion of knowing the whereabouts of Asharam. Even as Deshraj knows Asharam’s location and has the choice to betray him, buying his freedom from police torture, he decides not to do so. His conscience does not allow him to betray a friend. Consequently, Deshraj is brutally beaten and tortured to such an extent that he loses his sanity.

Inspector Khurshid Alam insists that Deshraj is aware of Asharam’s location. However, Deshraj denies this accusation every time the police beat him to elicit the information about his friend’s hideout from him. He refuses to acquiesce to the narrative of the police. After being brutally tortured, the only words he manages to speak are “Indira Gandhi ki Jai” (“Hail Indira Gandhi!”, 177). Through this incident in the novel, Raza not only critiques the inhumanity and brazen cruelty of the administration during the Emergency but also exposes the contemporaneous facade of economic and national development for what it is. The political vision of an economically developed and disciplined India was deeply embedded in a torturous regime of authoritarian will.

The way forward: Lessons from the revolution

The novel deploys the problematic of romantic revolution to engage with both the Emergency on the one hand and the limitations and strengths of J. P.’s “total revolution” on the other. Michael Löwy has defined romantic revolution as “the union between the precapitalist past and the socialist future mediated by the rejection of the capitalist present” (2016: 7). In the novel, Prema Narayan represents the grit and tenacity required to stand against the corrupt system. She is thrown out of her job as an announcer for All India Radio because she refuses to subscribe to the lies of Indira Gandhi’s regime. Prema grows so tired of being a mouthpiece of the government and encouraging empty praise from people in favour of the Emergency that she decides to speak a simple truth about the regime’s oppression. She announces during her news bulletin that an innocent man named Deshraj was brutally tortured in custody, resulting in the loss of his sanity. This truth costs Prema her freedom as she gets arrested; it costs her the control over her body as she is raped and tortured in custody; and it costs her dignity as a human being as she is also tortured by her fellow prisoners.

She decides to fight, write, and get her dignity back the moment the Emergency is repealed in 1977: “Prema shared her loss over Deshraj’s tragedy with everyone. She published his photo and wrote about the kind of gruesome torture he was subjected to […]. She looked in the eye of the world and narrated her own story fearlessly” (219). Through this plot strand, Rahi highlights that the deep ethical bonds of care constructed amongst people at times of crisis have the potential to overwrite the privileged discourse of the nation state. The ethics of care which determine Deshraj’s decision not to betray Asharam and which encourage Prema Narayan to share the suffering of Deshraj with the world, at the cost of her custodial torture, alert us to the possibility of building what Alok Bhalla (2016) calls “life-affirming, community-making futures” when human beings decide to extend sympathy and hope to each other in the most atrocious of times (238).

Simultaneously, the text opens up optimism around the finding of one’s own voice to respond to a social field marked by structural inequalities. Prema fights a battle at an individual level, which is significant in the light of initiating long-term change in society and the nation. As Jasbir Jain suggests, “real battles are carried on and fought at individual levels — bit by bit — until a dent is made in the value structures around oneself” (2011: 285). These small, everyday acts of resistance are as important as “total revolution” which intends to overhaul the structural distortions in the political system.

One needs to locate the merits of Jayaprakash Narayan’s total revolution in this context. He emphasized that a strong political will ¹¹ and revolution towards morals can contest the excesses of Indira Gandhi’s tenure. Ranabir Samaddar (2008) highlights that J. P. strongly believed that citizens cannot be reduced to voting puppets in the hands of the government. Every citizen, irrespective of rank, caste, community, and gender, has stakes in the functioning of the nation state, which cannot be taken away at any cost. J. P. advocated that the nation could not achieve true democracy unless there was a transfer of power and resources to the masses away from the hands of an elite few. His total revolution was a revolution working for the structural overhaul of the whole society and nation state.

It is imperative here to recall how the 1960s and 1970s were riven by social movements like the Nav Nirman movement, student agitations, peasant movement, naxalbari, and the rise of the women’s movement, which were intent on challenging the institutional and centralized character of the government. The movements’ participants raised their voice and political will against the representative government which had systemically refused to engage with society’s poor and marginalized sections. As such, J. P.’s movement was not an isolated and vague movement, as it is often represented to be. ¹²

Even as Raza rightly critiques J. P.’s association with the Janata alliance parties, which came together in an opportunistic union to replace Indira Gandhi at the centre, he misses out on engaging with some of the important historic–political lessons of J. P.’s thought. As Samaddar (2008) highlights, J. P. believed that the concrete fruits of democracy could be realized in terms of social welfare and the immediacy of democracy. This cannot be achieved simply by substituting one government with another. Alternatively, he focused on the politics of people, lokniti, wherein democracy could be realized and strengthened by “going closest to people, making people their own teachers” (Samaddar, 2008: 53). The eventualities of J. P.’s political collaborations cannot be translated into dilemmas in his larger political and moral thought: “sarvodaya (means morally consistent with their ends), rural reconstruction, sangharsh (confrontation against autocracy), janata sarkars (people’s organs for self-rule to be formed at the lowest level, and then moving upwards as alternatives to governmental organs), total revolution” (55). Even as Raza takes oppositional politics against Indira Gandhi for granted and betrays ambivalence in his engagement with J. P., his text is rooted in the same political will and socialist vision so passionately advocated by J. P. in his writings.

As this article has shown, Raza’s commitment to highlighting the discontents of labouring poor, working-class people, women, and minorities in his novel seems influenced by the socialist vision of J. P., sparking political reflection in his readers. In this light, it is pertinent to go back and engage with such alternative political voices, howsoever marginalized they may have been, to contest the modern capitalist tendencies of a profit-driven market system, class–caste inequality, systemic oppression, ecological destruction, and gross commercialization of all facets of life. In remaining alert to the socialist voices of the 1960s and 1970s, the novel emphasizes a need to negotiate received ideas around the repressive power politics associated with the Emergency. This could further facilitate a critical understanding of social movements which, even as they lost their glorious potential in the depths of the “emergent” ignominy of the 1970s, can strengthen the citizens’ potential to challenge the power-ridden institutions of the contemporary nation state.