Cinema and the Indian National Emergency

Parichay Patra is Assistant Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Jodhpur, India. His research interests include transnational associations of cine-politics and the dictatorial regimes of the long 1960s.Dibyakusum Ray is Lecturer in English, Philosophy and Cultural Studies at the Indian Institute of Technology, Ropar, India. He is author of Postcolonial Indian City-Literature: Policy, Politics and Evolution (2022). He is head of the centrally funded project on the archiving of lost media elements during the Indian National Emergency, 1975-77, in collaboration with Royal Holloway College, UK.

Revisiting a critical event in political history, this brilliantly curated volume traces the figuration of the Emergency in Indian cinemas. A refreshing diversity of voices illuminates this dark period while tracing its afterlives and new avatars in contemporary media re-articulations.

• ContributorsList of Illustrations Acknowledgements ForewordVinzenz Hediger IntroductionDibyakusum Ray & Parichay Patra1. The Fear of CinemaAshish Rajadhyaksha2. Not by Emergency Alone: An Unending Saga of Political Repression and Content ControlSomeswar Bhowmik3. State: A Patron and a Tyrant: Indian Film Society Movement in ‘Emergency’ TimesAmrit Gangar 4. The Emergency, FFC/NFDC, and New Cinema in India (1970s)Sudha Tiwari5. Between a Logo and a Memo: State-Sponsored Documentary Films During the EmergencyRitika Kaushik6. Memories and Mixed-Media: The Event and the ArchiveVinayak Das Gupta & Ananya Juneja7. ‘A Unique Indian Revolution’: S. Sukhdev, the Films Division and the EmergencyVikrant Dadawala8. The Emergency and Its Media AfterlifeRanjani Mazumdar9. In Defense of a Not-So-Political CinemaParichay Patra10. From ‘dictatorship’ to dictatorship: the dynamics of alien and ‘legitimized’ authoritarianism in 1980s popular Hindi filmsDibyakusum Ray 11. The Long 1970s: Anjan Dutt as Archive, Some InterfacesKaushik Bhaumik