In her fascinating monograph, Genres of Emergency: Forms of Crisis and Continuity in Indian Writing in English, author and professor Ayelet Ben-Yishai examines the relationship between fiction and history through the novels centering around the Emergency in India—a drastic instance of president Indira Gandhi’s imposition of power. Tracing the ways that this period continuously resurfaced in literary works, Ben-Yishai uses genre and textuality to consider how writing is not only a reflection of the world, but an active force that moves through it. In this interview, she gives her insight on this central thought, and also discusses the fundamental structure of global crises, the dangerous concept of inevitability, and some of India’s most important titles.
Katarzyna Bartoszynska (KB): Could you tell us about Genres of Emergency?
Ayelet Ben-Yishai (ABY): Genres of Emergency is about what might be the most momentous political event that contemporary readers have never heard of. In June 1975, Indira Gandhi, the third Prime Minister of India, imposed a State of Emergency throughout the country in response to what she called a “conspiracy” against her. Convicted of corruption and threatened by a growing opposition and mass demonstrations, Gandhi acted ruthlessly. Basic civil liberties were suspended, thousands were detained without trial, censorship imposed, and corruption reached new heights. Surprisingly lifted after twenty months, the Emergency became an anomaly in India’s democratic history—and was all but forgotten for many years, except, significantly, from literary fiction.
A group of novels in English, written about the period in the late twentieth century, thus forms my corpus for Genres of Emergency. Why, I wondered, did these novels return to the Emergency, long after it ended and was forgotten? There are of course different answers to this question, but overall, I would say that going back allowed the authors of such fiction to think about the ways in which the Emergency was both a one-off anomaly, and of a piece with the longer arc of Indian history and politics: a crisis for sure, but also in continuity with India’s past and future.
KB: The book was written during a different emergency: during the height of the COVID pandemic and lockdown. Did those conditions shape the argument at all, or did you find yourself noticing how your argument addressed or diagnosed that present? Did those resonances seem different from the ones you have just described?
AYB: COVID-19 brought a renewed consideration of states of emergency, employed variously world-wide to combat the global health crisis. In many of these countries, India and Israel prominent among them, the emergency measures sat far too easily with ongoing erosions of democratic government and governance. The severe limitations to individual and collective rights carried out for the sake of public health seemed oddly in keeping with those already in place in the name of “security” or “public safety.”
As I was revising my chapters and coalescing them while under lockdown at home, the connections between my research and my surroundings came fast and strong. Refracted in the pandemic emergency, it became clearer in my study that emergencies worldwide are not only similar to past emergencies, but that they are constructed on a template of “emergency”: a structure within which an emergency could be comprehended despite its ostensible singularity. In other words, emergencies are unprecedented, but need to be recognizably so.
In short, just as the Emergency was comprehended through the literary and non-literary genres in which it was written, so can states of emergency—as events and political/legal constructs—be understood in terms of genre. They are, after all, construed through a similar structure or template, with variation in the details of each iteration. Whether in the form of suspensions of civil liberties (the “bitter pill” that the nation must take for its own good); fear-mongering against enemies from without or within; or prioritization of public safety and convenience (like the “trains running on time”), states of emergency are predicated on a series of tropes that mediate the unprecedented and the always-already.
My work on the book thus allowed me to analyze the world around me. I even wrote an op-ed for an Israeli paper, comparing Indira Gandhi and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, showing the ways they used an ostensibly neutral “State of Emergency” to advance their own political interests and long-standing politics.
KB: Although it’s hard to ignore how your book connects to the present, the topic is India in 1975-1977, and I don’t want to lose sight of that; I wonder if there are specific things that you see as not transferable to another context, that are really specific to this particular moment, or culture?
ABY: Thank you, this is important, because while thinking about emergency-as-genre allows it to seem like a portable concept, the whole point of the crisis-and-continuity argument is that every emergency needs to be thoroughly historicized to understand how it is both exceptional and non-exceptional in its own contexts.
And so, rather than just saying that the state of exception has become “the new normal,” which has by now become a cliché in itself, I address the various historical contexts and processes through which it needs to be understood and which it in turn can further explain. Building on existing scholarship, I argue, for example, that the neither-left-nor-right opposition to the Emergency was pivotal in legitimizing the fringe elements of this Hindu right, paving the way to the rise of today’s BJP government. I also show how the mass forced sterilization campaign, which is often seen as emblematic of the Emergency, was in fact a continuation of a long-standing globally-funded project of population control. Relatedly, the Emergency was central to family and class politics in India, revealing that there were individual elite families that need to be guarded and preserved and lower-class families of populations that need to be limited and curtailed. It also reveals the stakes of the Emergency for the rising English-speaking Indian middle class. In one final example, my readings of the novel allow us to talk about the Emergency not only as an event and as a crisis but also as a figure for the corrupt chronic condition of Indian democratic society and culture in the late 20th century, with major implications today.
KB: You say in the introduction that your study “can serve as a paradigm for thinking about emergencies world-wide via the genres—literary and not literary—in which they are written.” It is impossible for me, re-reading it these last few weeks, not to think about it in relation to various political emergencies of the present. Could you say a little about the connections you’re noticing?
ABY: My previous book, on Victorian law and literature, was about precedent, about the ways that we bring our examples of our past to bear on our present. States of emergency—the subject of my present book—are an interesting variation on this theme because they are ostensibly unprecedented.
The question of unprecedented political emergencies brings us to our present crisis in Israel/Gaza. I wish to speak about it with care, both because it is ongoing and shifting all the time, and because I speak of it from a very personal and very painful place. As an Israeli, I am in anguish about the people and places decimated by Hamas’ attack on October 7. At the same time, I am paralyzed by my feelings of shame and complicity in the senseless carnage that Israeli has unleashed on Gaza.
The first thing I learned from my research is to look beyond the singular crisis that this undeniably is, and to see it also as part of an ongoing historical and political reality. The current deadly violence is not, in fact, either a singular moment of crisis, nor an inevitable result of a two-sided “conflict” in which we must line up to take sides. It is deeply embedded in a complex historical context, inextricable from occupation of Palestinians by Israel, with its attendant apartheid regime and ethnic cleansing.
The second thing is to realize that once a crisis is identified or declared, it brings about a series of seemingly inevitable actions and reactions. In the Israeli context, this means even more “airstrikes,” more deaths, more hyper-militarization in the name of “deterrence” and “restoring quiet.” (Here I am not addressing those who are calling openly for full-scale genocide and ethnic cleansing, though those of course exist as well, and have their own precedents and templates.) These reactions further normalize the crisis as neutral, allowing us to be swept up in the logic of inevitability, rendering us helpless, and giving ever more power to those who have brought us here in the first place.
And so, as a citizen and as a scholar, I know that the violence today, and the occupation of which it is part, has a history and a politics which are man-made and can thus be unmade. We have to do everything in our power to resist the logic of inevitability by stopping the war on Gaza right away and bringing the hostages, prisoners, and soldiers home. We can only do that if we shift our gaze—not from our pain but through it—beyond our singular moment of crisis to understand its continuities with the past and thus to imagine a different future.
KB: This is also, in really interesting ways, a book about genre. Could you explain how you’re arguing for a new understanding of what a genre is?
ABY: My argument about genre took a while to come together. It began somewhat arbitrarily when I needed to write a grant proposal and organize it into chapters, and I realized that most Emergency fiction written in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s was written in one of four genres: realism, epic, allegory, and thriller—or in strong relation to one or more of them. This organization allowed me to see that the authors of Emergency fiction take the conventions of genres seriously, and that they used them to make political interventions.
This is not to say that they followed the genre conventions faithfully. Rather, I show that they used these conventions of as ways to reference previous instances of their respective genres from various cultures and languages, and in this way to incorporate their histories and contexts.
In other words, genre has history baked into its form; it is not just a formal category or literary trend, but indexes previous iterations of the form, condensing historical knowledge and perspective, and asking that its newest iteration be read in light of its predecessors. Genre can thus function as a malleable, historically-saturated form which affords Emergency fiction a uniquely effective form of historicization.
KB: Some of the texts that you analyze are primarily of academic or historical interest. Others, such as Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, or Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, are quite famous and probably familiar to readers. Could you say a little the less well-known books you discuss, and which ones you’d recommend?
ABY: One of the best things about this project was that, because I read and analyzed every Emergency-related novel published in English in the twentieth century (or all those that I know of), I could avoid the trap of writing about the “greatest hits” of the Indian Anglophone canon yet again. After all, there is an immense amount of cultural knowledge embedded in texts that did not, for various reasons (political and/or aesthetic) become “important.” I think it also allows us postcolonial critics to question our own predispositions and preferences for certain kinds of forms and themes that we identify, say, as subversive. It may also allow us to assess the intellectual costs of such preferences.
The three novels I would recommend can be located across the high/low brow spectrum. First is The City and the River, a stunning and complex allegory written in 1996 by Arun Joshi, one of India’s most highly-regarded and enigmatic writers, whose work is not widely-known. The novel is reminiscent of medieval or early modern allegorical texts, telling a timeless tale for the sake of moral and political instruction, and implicitly offering those who learn its lessons a chance—small as it may be—at redemption, all while maintaining a cynical view of this prospect. And yet it is also the most modernist of the novels, a tale of philosophical alienation and reflexive literariness. Other than its obvious references to the Emergency, the novel is rife with allusions—philosophical, religious, historical, but primarily literary—ranging from “The Emperor’s New Clothes” to A Passage to India, from the Mahabharata to the Bible. It is an intense, beautiful read. I highly recommend it.
Second is a novel written by the writer perhaps most associated with the Emergency, Indira Gandhi’s cousin and political foe, Nayantara Sahgal. A Situation in New Delhi was written just before the Emergency and published immediately after its end. Its two realist narratives tell the story of a small circle of the Delhi political and establishment elite contending with political changes from within and without. Sahgal’s realist prose tells a good story and is fascinating in revealing the closed social and political world of which she was an intimate part.
Finally, Manohar Malgonkar’s The Garland Keepers is a boilerplate political/spy thriller, which takes place—almost incidentally—in a very thinly disguised Emergency period. Here, led by an all-knowing, all-powerful, sexually omnipotent guru, the debauched son of the (significantly genderless) “Great Leader,” and his ruthless caucus of corrupt lackeys—the novel’s eponymous “garland keepers”—spare no one standing in the way of their international money-laundering scheme. The bad are not only bad but also everywhere, and no one is to be trusted. Facing this utter uncertainty, Superintendent Vishram Lal, the lone righteous cop/secret agent—armed with professionalism, training, integrity, and pluck (as well as a loyal “girl” or two)—goes rogue and manages to outwit and overcome the agents of political and economic corruption. It’s a fast-paced, fun read, and really smart.
KB: Could you recommend some of your favorite Indian fictions? I’m especially interested in your recommendations of writing from earlier in the 20th century, because I think people tend to be more familiar with writing from the 1980s on.
ABY: Always a difficult question. I’ll name four classic novels which are little-known outside of India, and which have had a long-lasting impact on me:
One of my favorite novels to teach is Mulk Raj Anand’s 1940 Across the Black Waters. Anand is well known for his 1935 Novel Untouchable, and if you haven’t read it, you probably should as well. Black Waters, far lesser-known, is about Indian soldiers in the British Army fighting in the French trenches during WWI. By turns funny and tragic, it is a stunning novel, all the more for being written in English by an Indian writer in Spain, on the eve of WWII.
The next two novels are classics of Hindi realism, both available in English translation. Premchand’s 1936 Godaan [translated as The Gift of a Cow] tells the harrowing story of a peasant struggling to subsist in rural India. There are interesting political critiques of the novel and Premchand’s work, but one should really read the novel first. Yashpal’s 1958-60 Jootha Saach [literally “Untruth-Truth,” translated as This is not that Dawn] is a sweeping historical novel, following a large cast of characters from pre-1947 Lahore, through the calamities of Partition, to post-Independence Delhi. It is long, but gripping—the best Partition novel I have read.
Finally, written originally in Bengali, is Mahasweta Devi’s Hajar Churashir Maa, [translated as Mother of 1084], a heartbreaking account of a mother whose son, was killed by the state, on the background of the Naxalbari uprising.. It’s a story about brutality, about the politics of revolution and the politics of motherhood. It has not left me since I first read it.
Ayelet Ben-Yishai teaches postcolonial and Victorian literature at the English Department at the University of Haifa, where she specializes in the history and theory of the novel. A comparatist by training, she writes on the intersection of law and literature, especially in Common Precedents: The Presentness of the Past in Victorian Fiction and Law (Oxford, 2013). More recently, Genres of Emergency: Crisis and Continuity in Indian Writing in English (Oxford 2023), conceptualizes new ways of imagining the relationship between politics, history, and genre. Her teaching, research, and way of being in the world often overlap, allowing her to think and write about the political and discursive problems of complicity.
Katarzyna Bartoszyńska is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Literatures in English and the Program of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Ithaca College. She is the author of Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland, and Theories of World Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press: 2021). She is also a translator, most recently, of Zygmunt Bauman’s Culture and Art, and Sketches in the Theory of Culture (Polity, 2021: 2018).
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