Description

Fifty years on, the Indian Emergency of 1975–77 has been written about by politicians, by journalists, and by judges. It has been written about almost not at all by the millions of ordinary Indians who actually lived it.

In this monumental, deeply human history, Devesh Khanna sets out to recover what every previous Emergency book has somehow missed: the texture of those twenty-one months as they were experienced inside the average Indian home. Drawing on five years of fieldwork across nine states, over 400 oral history interviews, and newly declassified district-level archives, Khanna assembles the first true people’s history of the Emergency.

Here is the Muzaffarpur sterilisation camp as remembered by the men who were dragged into it. The Delhi slum demolitions seen through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old girl who watched her father’s tea-stall reduced to splinters in twenty minutes. The Andhra rice riots. The censored newsrooms of Mumbai and Madras. The quiet middle-class families who, terrifyingly, found themselves grateful for the trains running on time. The lawyers who resisted. The judges who did not. And the long, complicated decades of family silence that followed, after democracy was restored and the country agreed, by mutual unspoken consent, to look away.

Magisterially researched and humanely written, *The Year India Almost Broke* is the Emergency history this nation has waited fifty years to read.

An essential book for every Indian under fifty.