Unsettling Memories

Focusing on India's "Emergency" of 1975-7, when democracy was temporarily suspended in favour of an authoritarian regime, this book explores the avenues through which this event is remembered and forgotten. Based on fieldwork and archival analysis, "Unsettling Memories" traces the experiences and perceptions of those men and women who were the targets of the infamous slum clearance and sterilisation campaign which converged to disrupt life in the nation's capital Delhi. Interweaving personal and official memories with a re-reading of resistance literature, Emergency propaganda and government files, and the author offers a complex narrative of the Emergency. This book should be of interest to anthropologists, historians and political scientists as well as anyone concerned with everyday violence, the ethnography of events and life among India's urban poor.