ABSTRACT
The degree to which the criticism is personalised varies as well and in fact seems to correspond to temporal distance from the Emergency. Midnight’s Children is a highly personalised attack on Indira Gandhi. It was written and published while Indira Gandhi was still alive and engaged in discursive battle over the meaning and definition of the Emergency, forming a lasting cultural counter-memory of the period. Considering the state of affairs in many countries across the globe, including another large democracy, the United States, novels examining the crisis and demise of democracy in the world’s largest democracy in the 1970s can be seen to have great contemporary relevance. The Emergency novels, especially Midnight’s Children, have also strongly influenced Indian English writing. It is possible to argue that after the disillusionment caused by the Emergency, realist conventions were no longer “sufficient” to depict Indian history and to present social and political criticism in novels.
