ABSTRACT
This chapter offers new insights into the history of India's Emergency by examining the state's use of photography. It analyses the ruling Congress Party's bulletin Socialist India, which regularly used photographs to depict the regime's popularity. The chapter proceeds with a close analysis of women-dominated images that appeared in its bulletin Socialist India. Jenifer Tucker and Tina Campt note that the use of photography in historical enquiry 'has become a topic of urgent intellectual and cultural history around the world', as methods of shaping historical narratives continue to change 'in ways that compel attention to the employment of photographs in historiography'. The photographs and their material context within the party's mouthpiece are historically informative and the latter complicates our analysis beyond what these images picture. The images are also significant for debates around the use of photographs as historical sources.
