‘Resisting erasure and bearing witness’: Representation of the Indian Emergency in Select Poems of Nissim Ezekiel

Abstract

Literary representations of the Emergency (c. 1975-1977), one of the controversial periods in independent India’s history, constitute a site of interpretation and negotiation of the Independence and the post-independence Indian polity. If Partition marks the incubation of incipient decay, the Emergency represents its peak contagion. Carolyn Forche in her anthology Against Forgetting: 20th Century Poetry of Witness (1993) has exhorted the poets to bear ‘witness’ to atrocities. Seamus Heaney said that a poem gives true peace only if ‘horror’ is satisfactorily rendered. Theodor Adorno wanted poetry to resist ‘erasure’. Ezekiel’s poetry resists an erasure of some of the aspects of ‘history’ which normally tend to be forgotten. Ezekiel was too conscious an artist to turn away from the contemporary events in the national life. For example, in the poem “Very Indian Poem in Indian English” one may catch clear echoes of the official slogan of the ‘20 Point Program’. Ezekiel’s volumes are replete with references to the ‘horrors’ of the Emergency that took the forms of violent displacements, arrests, forced ‘family planning’, all of which were done in the name of ‘progress’ and ‘modernization’. What we find in many of his poems is neither a picture of cohesion nor of historical continuity after the Independence but of crisis and exacerbation of the problems. Ezekiel in many ways questions the flagrant forms of institutionalized violence in ‘secular’ India. Nevertheless, the question of belonging to India remains an abiding concern and the feeling centre. This paper purports to explore some of these issues while focussing on how Ezekiel problematizes the question of ‘freedom’ vis-à-vis the Indian Emergency.