I can’t really claim I had a well-developed political understanding at the age of six years when the Emergency was imposed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1975. But I do have a visceral political memory of the times, the black cloud of suffocation as well as the spirit of defiance. That I should have such a clear recollection of the politics of the times is entirely due to the way politics was always central to our family. 

If the freedom struggle politicised our family, future generations carried that understanding into post-colonial authoritarianisms. The centrality of politics to our worldview was sharpened by my mother’s work as a journalist and seeped into everyday life. Conversation at home was peppered with references to political developments, and my grandmother, who had been incarcerated by the British for her part in the freedom struggle (by then both her parents were in jail), was particularly pithy in her scathing comments on the Prime Minister – ‘Mrs G’, as she was known in our house – and her many political depredations. 

But the memory of the days of the Emergency owes its sharpness to the very specific workplace my mother was then employed in – the Indian Express – a newspaper that was front and centre in the media resistance against the Emergency. As the child of a single parent, I spent vast amounts of time in the Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg office of the newspaper, travelling with my mother, Modhumita Mojumdar, each morning during holidays. Entire school vacations were spent in her shared office space, my presence tolerated with benign affection by her colleagues. In the way that children imbibe and have an astute understanding of their milieu, instinctual rather than intellectual, I understood the Emergency and had a clearly felt sense of its injustice.

It was that tangible sense that flooded me when I walked into the exhibition of cartoons marking the birth centenary of the Indian Express’s cartoonist of those times – Abu Abraham. A sense of politics, but also oppositional journalism, tied in with the smell of newsprint, ink, and the long-lost letterpress. The centenary exhibition that is travelling, will now open at the India International Centre in Delhi on November 6, following its inauguration by another stalwart dissenter, historian Romila Thapar.

The 1975 Emergency remains a pivotal moment in India’s post-colonial history, the apex of an elected leader’s growing authoritarianism, a dark chapter against which Indians would compare all future excesses. It exacted a terrible price from many, but was also a time of preferment for those who became collaborators, their competitive jousting for new ways to express loyalty echoing eerily in these times. This stark divide – between those who fell in line and those who resisted – was perhaps seen most clearly in the sphere of journalism, the nature of the medium making it public and visible. 

In a phrase that would continue to haunt Indian journalism, LK Advani – the then president of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh – would tell journalists, “You were asked only to bend, but you crawled.” The verdict, however, was not completely fair. Many journalists were in jail, and for the thousands of column inches of print that served as propaganda – print being the only non-government media at that time – there were also those who used every inch of uncensored space to report on reality and published blank newspaper pages and columns to protest against censorship. Amongst the foremost of them was The Indian Express – and the biting satire of its cartoonist Abu Abraham is a significant part of that storied history. 

Whatever the elisions at that time, the Emergency is no longer an unexamined period in India’s political course. Dozens of books, hundreds of articles, research papers, and academic tomes have mapped every aspect of its political trajectory. It has been captured in theatre plays, films, and music, and in the current political climate, it has evolved into a veritable cottage industry of its own. But in the line drawings of Abu – in an exhibition curated by the cartoonist’s daughters to mark his centenary – we are brought close to the moment with an immediacy that is more than memory. In the yellowing sheen of newsprint, the imprints of the stamp of the censor, there is a tangible recall of those days, tactile and palpable, and the sharp sense of the fierce intellectual community of opposition that stood against the depredations on our democratic fabric. 

Interestingly, Abu’s role as a biting satirist of the Emergency was not inevitable in the early years of his career. The cartoonist’s candid comments about his own life – he also wrote regularly, if not prolifically – have been excerpted as part of the exhibition and allow us to track the course of his political journey.