Book Extract | 50 Years of the Indian Emergency: Lessons for Democracy by Peter Ronald deSouza & Harsh Sethi

Book Extract

Excerpted with permission from the publisher 50 Years of the Indian Emergency: Lessons for Democracy,‎ Peter Ronald deSouza & Harsh Sethi (Eds.), published by ‎ Orient Blackswan.

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Throughout modern history, incarceration has served as the nursery for introspections and ruminations on life and politics. Most famously, Antonio Gramsci penned his thoughts on Italian history and on the conditions of hegemony in capitalist societies, in his Prison Notebooks. Nehru wrote Glimpses of World History for his daughter Indira and his classic nationalist text The Discovery of India in British jails. Understandably, such writings dealt primarily with the public and institutional conditions of politics and society. But imprisonment also produced deeper reflections on freedom. Arthur Koestler, writing about his imprisonment in Spain during the Spanish Civil War said, ‘I have never been so free as I was then’. Facing death, ‘we were free—men without shadows, dismissed from the ranks of the mortal; it was the most complete experience of freedom that can be granted a man’ (1942, 203–04). The revolutionary Bhagat Singh used his experience of incarceration to think expansively on the boundaries of freedom. Hindi novelists in the 1930s and 40s focused on the experience of imprisonment to identify freedom not just in the public sphere of politics but also in the familial and private sphere of love and intimacy.

This essay explores such reflections on freedom during the twenty-one months of Indira Gandhi’s 1975–77 Emergency regime that locked up over 110,000 political leaders, activists and ordinary citizens. I ask if the experience of being placed behind bars stimulated introspection on the meanings of freedom not only in terms of institutions, not simply as matters of legal and political status, but also as something more profound? Did this introspection produce a greater dedication to democracy and the value of equality in the sense that Ambedkar had in mind? Did the discourse on freedom stop at the door of party politics, or extend to explore its existential meanings? I ask these questions with regard to the remarkable set of letters exchanged between the socialist leader Madhu Dandavate (1924–2005) and his wife Pramila Dandavate (1928–2002).

‘Writing letters is a hugely calming activity in the loneliness of the prison. These letters are meant for other people of course, but they are also a great way to hear oneself think, to hear oneself sort out one’s own feelings and thoughts.’ This was Madhu reflecting on letter writing in one of his letters to Pramila, his wife and comrade in politics. Madhu, a Member of Parliament elected from Maharashtra, was arrested on 26 June and lodged in Bangalore jail for eighteen months. Pramila was taken into captivity on 17 July 1975, and was held in the Yerawada Central Prison, near Pune. During their time apart, the two wrote to each other weekly, exchanging nearly two hundred letters.

Politics is understandably prominent in the Dandavate prison letters. Both were seasoned political activists. Madhu became politically active in the 1942 Quit India movement, which brought the socialists, including JP, to the public stage as an inspiring new force. While earning graduate and postgraduate degrees in physics in Bombay, Madhu was drawn to the socialists. When they parted ways with the Congress after independence and formed the Socialist Party in 1948, he joined them. He taught as a professor of physics while participating in political activities. In 1971, he was elected to the Parliament from a Maharashtra constituency, a feat he went on to repeat for five consecutive terms.

Pramila was also a political activist, who found her socialist calling first in the Rashtra Seva Dal, an organisation of volunteers founded in the 1940s by Sane Guruji, a revered figure in Maharashtra. It promoted social change, secularism and a decentralised socialist agenda. Participation in its activities brought her into the circle of socialists in Bombay, including Madhu. With senior socialist leader S. M. Joshi acting as the matchmaker, she married Madhu in 1953 and became his partner in politics. Elected in 1968 to the Bombay Municipal Corporation, Pramila made her mark in the fiery protests by women against price rise in the early 1970s. As thousands of women took to the streets, shaking their wooden rolling pins to remonstrate the rising cost of food, a trio of leaders – Mrinal Gore, Ahilya Rangnekar and Pramila Dandavate – emerged as the face of this new militant movement. Not surprisingly, all three women were put behind bars during the Emergency.

Given this background, politics was the language of communication between the couple. Aware that their letters were censored, they exchanged information about arrested colleagues in code. Being placed behind bars was ‘getting married’, Indira was ‘mother-in-law’, her son Sanjay Gandhi was ‘the prince’, satyagraha was ‘going on pilgrimage’, and Jayaprakash Narayan (JP) was ‘Prabhavati’s husband’. They were forthright in their opposition to the Emergency and Indira. Their imprisonment did not bend them. They were confident that the propaganda disseminated by the censored and controlled newspapers could not forever place a lid on the truth. Madhu assured her of it by quoting Emile Zola: ‘If you shut up the truth and bury it under ground, it will but grow and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts, it will blow up everything in its way.’

Prison made Madhu and Pramila draw from their intellectual resources to sustain their defiance. The letters frequently drew on writers, poets, philosophers and political leaders to articulate the couple’s steadfast defence of freedom. Their intellectualism was rooted in their background of having grown up in educated Maharashtrian brahmin families. Madhu’s father was a civil engineer and his mother was a social worker. His grandfather was a man of literature, who translated classical Sanskrit works into Marathi, and the household library contained literary works and the writings and speeches of Gandhi, Nehru and other nationalist leaders. Surrounded by books, Madhu developed an early aptitude for the world of ideas, which the college years in Bombay developed further. He read Marx, who kindled his interest in social justice that was to stay with him for the rest of his life. So did his interest in literature and classical music, both Hindustani and Western. Like him, Pramila also grew up in an educated family. Her father was a well-known gynaecologist, and she completed her high school in Bombay. An interest in art led her to complete a graduate degree from the famed J. J. School of Art. She became a teacher in an art school, and also plunged into politics that brought her into the company of socialist intellectuals including Madhu.

It was no accident that the Dandavates’ intellectualism led to a commitment to socialism. Maharashtra boasted a long tradition of the intelligentsia’s involvement in social reform. It was here that Jyotiba Phule in the nineteenth century and B. R. Ambedkar in the twentieth century had mounted sweeping critiques of caste hierarchy. While these offered radical challenges from below, brahmin intellectuals such as M. G. Ranade and G. K. Gokhale pushed for change from above, conjoining nationalism with social reform. Notwithstanding this spectrum of ideological and political positions, Maharashtra’s intelligentsia enjoyed a rich history of engagement with social critique. The Dandavates were heirs to this tradition. So were several other leading socialists, who were also Maharashtrian brahmins. But so also were numerous right- wing ideologues, including Savarkar, the RSS founding members, and Gandhi’s assassin, Nathuram Godse.

The Socialist Party was an organisation of intellectuals. This was both its strength and weakness. Ideas, not opportunism, drove the commitment to socialism. But differences over ideas and principles produced bitter conflicts. Since its founding in 1948, the history of the socialists in India is riddled with splits and mergers. But in times of adversity, such as imprisonment, intellectualism was a source of strength. Early in her imprisonment, Pramila wrote that she was devouring one book after another. After reading an inspiring Marathi book by P. Narhar Joshi titled The Great Prison, she wrote:

Whenever great people have been arrested, it has proved to be a boon for mankind. Excellent literature, poetry as well as thought were born in prisons. Great people have always been ready to undergo any test, to face any challenge in order to be able to stand by what they believe in, their commitment in life and for upholding the truth. No power in the world can curb their energy. The book filled me with tremendous enthusiasm. I do have some experience when it comes to prisons. But this book has inspired me doubly. I feel like there is some meaning to my life. Nana, I am a simple and small human being. But you are truly made of the stuff of the great people. I am certain that you won’t just read but that you will also write. This forced vacation will give birth to great, eternal literature through you, I am sure of it.

As if on cue, Madhu told her that after two and a half months of research he had finished drafting two chapters of a book on Marx and Gandhi. It was not ‘great literature’ but it was a comparative analysis of the two paths to revolution, one based on class struggle and the other on individual change in human beings. Speaking of the experience of writing, Madhu wrote: ‘Amidst the roses on the table and the champa [frangipani] flowers on the trees, the pen moves in speed and smoothly.’ Then he quotes from Byron’s Don Juan:

There’s music in the sighing of reeds There’s music in the gushing of a rill There’s music in all things, if men had ears Their earth is but an echo of the spheres.

Madhu had found in Byron a way to identify even in the confines of the prison an underlying and universal human spirit expressed in the musical rhythm of the pen on the page, in the blossoming of flowers. All was not lost. He tried to lift Pramila’s spirit:

‘Your last letter had a shadow of sadness over it. You said that our home and life together would be completely destroyed by the time we get out of here. And you don’t know if you have the strength and persistence to do it all, all over again. Your comment felt exceedingly hopeless to me. We have always carried our life together on our backs. As long as our spine is in place, who can possibly touch our life together?”

There was nothing wrong with their spines. As their exchanges make clear, there was no question of resigning to the Emergency’s suppression of democracy. But incarceration sparked reflections on the broader goals of JP’s Total Revolution. Pramila would often return to it, exploring its meanings. Clearly, it meant something more fundamental than the usual institutions of democracy – party politics, elections, freedom of the press, etc. She wrote: ‘Our society needs a cultural revolution in the true sense.’ She wrote this while decrying religious observances as counter-revolutionary, and casting doubts on those activists who mouthed the slogan of Total Revolution while espousing religious ideologies. For her, revolution in a ‘true sense’ implied breaking free from religion; it meant a culture unbounded by religious dogmas and rituals.

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Peter Ronald deSouza & Harsh Sethi (Eds.), 50 Years of the Indian Emergency: Lessons for Democracy,‎ Orient Blackswan, 2025. Pb. Pp. 376

This volume marks the fiftieth anniversary of one of the defining moments of Indian history. It examines the Emergency and its aftermath from diverse perspectives – political, historical, legal, economic, philosophical, experiential and cultural, among others. Bringing together leading scholars and writers, it explores how the Emergency transformed Indian polity, and shaped law enforcement and penal practices, the media, student movements, judicial responses, subaltern politics and literary expression, and examines why analysis of the Emergency is still relevant to political discourse in India today.

The extract published here is from the chapter “Many Meanings of Freedom: The Dandawate Prison Letters” by scholar Gyan Prakash. It is about a set of letters exchanged between the socialist leader Madhu Dandavate (1924–2005) and his wife Pramila Dandavate (1928–2002).

‘. . . a probing and kaleidoscopic reassessment of the origins, . . . the book prompts us to reconsider the multiple dimensions and layers of a compacted historical period and the many frameworks that continue to influence our understanding of it. . . .’ Srinath Raghavan, author of Indira Gandhi and the Years that Transformed India

Peter Ronald deSouza is Senior Research Associate, African Centre for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science (ACEPS), University of Johannesburg, and Trustee of the Institute of Social Studies Trust. He was Director, Indian Institute of Advanced Study (IIAS), Shimla, for two terms (2007–13).

Harsh Sethi worked as Consulting Editor of the monthly Seminar for two decades. Earlier he was with Sage Publications as Acquisitions Editor. He also held positions of Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, and Deputy Director at the Indian Council of Social Science Research.