Includes bibliographical references and index.

This book examines the cultural trauma of the Indian Emergency through a reading of five seminal novels. It discusses how the Emergency was an event that led to a prodigious outpouring of novels trying to preserve the forgotten horrors it wreaked on people and institutions of the country. The author reads works of Salman Rushdie, Shashi Tharoor, Nayantara Sahgal and Rohinton Mistry in conjunction with government white papers, political speeches, memoirs, biographies and history. They further explore the betrayal of the Nehruvian idea of India and democracy by Indira Gandhi and analyse the political and cultural amnesia among the general populace, in the decades following the Emergency. At a time when debates around freedom of speech and expression have become critical to literary and political discourses, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of English literature, cultural studies, post-colonial studies, media studies, political studies, sociology, history and for general readers as well