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Abstract
In the increasingly urgent public debates on India’s democracy, the Emergency (1975–77) is emerging as an important interpretative site: an exceptionally violent episode marked as a one-off crisis that also allows for an ongoing renegotiation of a modern Indian polity and culture. Manohar Malgonkar’s The Garland Keepers (1980), a little-known, fast-paced and highly entertaining political spy thriller, provides one entry point to situate the Emergency within its larger geopolitical and historical contexts of colonial rule, Partition, the Cold War and India–Pakistan relations. The article demonstrates that the crisis of the Emergency functions simultaneously as exceptional and non-exceptional, unexpected and yet familiar. Attention to narrative form and the various genealogies of the spy thriller and in India allow for an exploration of the relationship between genre and politics. I argue that even popular genres carry political meaning, revealing the tense negotiations between crisis and continuity, ultimately critiquing both the one-off Emergency and the iterative emergency of ongoing corruption.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Eitan Bar-Yosef, Pallavi Rastogi, Sangeeta Ray and Jenny L. White for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay; to Anne Blackburn, Kavita Daiya, Rotem Geva and Sutanuka Ghosh for inviting me to present this work to audiences at Cornell University, George Washington University, Hebrew University and Jadavpur University, respectively; to the Cornell Society of the Humanities at Cornell University and its ‘Corruption’ fellows, especially Rahul Mukherjee and Robert Travers, for insightful conversations; to Marina Rimscha for teaching me Hindi; to Areage Okab and Jenny Wale for research assistance; and, finally, to the anonymous reviewers for the journal for their enthusiastic engagement and helpful comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Gyan Prakash, Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019): 377.
2. Manohar Malgonkar, The Garland Keepers (New Delhi: Rupa Publications, 2013 [1980]).
3. Emma Tarlo, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of India’s Emergency (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003): 19.
4. Raita Merivirta, The Emergency and the Indian English Novel (Delhi: Routledge India, 2019).
5. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2006 [1980]); and Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance (New York: Vintage Books, 2001 [1995]). For an extended study of Emergency fiction that incorporates these novels as well as others in a study of the genre, see Ayelet Ben-Yishai, Genres of Emergency: Crisis and Continuity in Indian Writing in English (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023). For additional scholarship on Emergency fiction, see O.P. Mathur, Indira Gandhi and the Emergency as Viewed in the Indian Novel (New Delhi: Sarup, 2004); Jaya Nandita Kasibhatla, Constituting the Exception: Law Literature and the State of Emergency in Postcolonial India (unpublished PhD Thesis, Duke University, 2005); Pranav Jani, Decentering Rushdie: Cosmopolitanism and the Indian Novel in English (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2010); Ayelet Ben-Yishai and Eitan Bar-Yosef, ‘Emergency Fictions’, in Cambridge History of the Indian Novel in English, ed. Ulka Anjaria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015): 162–76; and Merivirta, The Emergency and the Indian English Novel.
6. Ben-Yishai and Bar-Yosef, ‘Emergency Fictions’.
7. Scott McCracken, Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998): 10.
8. Nels Pearson and Martin Singer, Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World (Farnham: Routledge, 2016): 1–2.
9. Yumna Siddiqi, Anxieties of Empire and the Fiction of Intrigue (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007): 139.
10. And, adding another layer to the crisis-and-continuity tension that I trace here, this coalition was crucial to the rise and reinvention of Right-wing radicalism in India and the consequent rise of the BJP, which ironically traces its roots to anti-Emergency activism. Indeed, both sides of the growing political divide in India today claim Emergency abuses to justify their political stances: the Left points out the increasingly troubling similarities between Gandhi’s Emergency rule and the current Modi sarkar (government), and the Right, responding to charges of anti-democratic measures, coyly points out that the Emergency was, in fact, carried out by the Congress Party Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.
11. Michael Denning, Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller (London: Routledge, 1987): 15.
12. Tabish Khair, ‘Indian Pulp Fiction in English: A Preliminary Overview from Dutt to Dé’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 43, no. 4 (September 2008): 59–74; 61.
13. Malgonkar, The Garland Keepers, 123–24.
14. John le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (New York: Penguin Books, 2013 [1963]).
15. D.R. Sharma, ‘Manohar Malgonkar and the Satpura Code’, Quest, no. 100 (March–April 1976): 51–58; 54.
16. Ibid., 57.
17. Denning, Cover Stories, 33; the British thrillers, the global literary context for Malgonkar’s later fiction, also place India’s Emergency within a global Cold War politics, as attested by the novel’s international money-laundering ring.
18. Francesca Orsini, ‘Detective Novels’, in India’s Literary History: Essays on the Nineteenth Century, ed. Stuart Blackburn and Vasudha Dalmia (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004): 435–82.
19. Ibid., 448.
20. Malgonkar, The Garland Keepers, 192–93.
21. Ibid, 194.
22. Uma Parameswaran, ‘Manohar Malgonkar as a Historical Novelist’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 14, no. 2 (1975): 329–38; 335.
23. Sharma, ‘Manohar Malgonkar’, 57–58.
24. Denning, Cover Stories, 65.
25. Denning quotes Andrew Tolson, who writes that ‘the modern bureaucratic career lacks any modern justification, and where the moral authority is undermined, “duty” and “self discipline” lack recognisable meaning’: Denning, Cover Stories, 130.
26. Malgonkar, The Garland Keepers, 195.
27. Ibid., xi.
28. Ibid., xii.
29. Sanjay Srivastava, ‘Thrilling Affects: Sexuality, Masculinity, the City and “Indian Traditions” in the Contemporary Hindi “Detective” Novel’, Interventions 15, no. 4 (November 2013): 567–85; 571.
30. Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1998); and Kavita Daiya, Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender, and National Culture in Postcolonial India (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2011).
31. See, for example, Tarlo, Unsettling Memories.
32. Prakash, Emergency Chronicles, 54.
33. The title of Le Carré’s second George Smiley novel, The Looking-Glass War, has become a potent metaphor for the long-term India–Pakistan conflict: John le Carré, The Looking Glass War (London: Penguin UK, 2013 [1965]). In Amitav Ghosh’s post-Partition novel, The Shadow Lines, the narrator describes the lines separating Calcutta and Dhaka as ‘our looking glass border’ (233). Like Malgonkar, and less than a decade later, Ghosh returns to Partition to try and understand his own post-Emergency historical moment: Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2010 [1988]).
34. Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
35. Orsini, ‘Detective Novels’, 466.
36. Jisha Menon, The Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan, and the Memory of Partition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); and Shyam Benegal, ‘Secularism and Popular Indian Cinema’, in The Crisis of Secularism in India, ed. Anuradha Dingwaney Needham and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007): 225–38; 230.
37. In the 2013 reprinting of the novel, the epilogue was inadvertently omitted, so that the novel ended with Rajguru’s downfall and deportation rather than with his resurgence. Surprisingly, this printing mistake reveals that the different endings do not make a difference in the novel’s meaning.
38. Malgonkar, The Garland Keepers, vii.
39. Elaine Freedgood, ‘Fictional Settlements: Footnotes, Metalepsis, the Colonial Effect’, New Literary History 41, no. 2 (November 2010): 393–411; Malgonkar, The Garland Keepers, 160.
40. Denning, Cover Stories, 46.
41. Ben-Yishai and Bar-Yosef, ‘Emergency Fictions’, 166.
42. John Reynolds, Empire, Emergency and International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017): 5.
43. Manohar Malgonkar, Spy in Amber (New Delhi: Hind Pocket Books, 1971); compare also to Nirmal Verma’s Raat Ka Reporter, a Hindi thriller set in the Emergency (published in English as Dark Dispatches, 1994): Nirmal Verma, Dark Dispatches (Raat ka Reporter) (Harper Collins, 1994 [1989]).