Darkness at dawn, the declaration: Exploring Emergency through Midnight’s Children and The Great Indian Novel

Abstract

Darkness at dawn, the declaration, this paper of mine will be presenting the dawn of june 25,
1975, the day on which internal Emergency was declared by the ruling Congress party
government reducing the Union government of India into a unitary government, its tyrannical
attitude ceasing the rights of people, the freedom of press resulting into mass scale rebellion
by the opposition and finally ending the totalitarian government in 1977 after facing the
oppression of almost nineteen months. This was the period of India’s democracy when
democracy was replaced by autocracy and I will be viewing this dark era with two novels of
contemporary India presenting political thinking in literature, Midnight’s Children (2006) by
Salman Rushdie and The Great Indian Novel (1993) by Shashi Tharoor. An interesting
parallel drawn between the Modern India’s Emergency of 1975 and Ancient India’s
Mahabharata is what we see in Shashi Tharoor’s novel. I will be including references from
several newspaper clippings and speeches of that time and also television shows showcased
much later after the Emergency presenting the realities and the plight of people who were left
on the margins. People were not only crippled by their actions but also by their thoughts
which reduced them to mere subjects.