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173 On August 15, 1975, justalittlelessthantwomonthsafterherdeclaration of a state of Emergency, Indira Gandhi gave an Independence Day address at the Red Fort in Delhi. In it, she outlined a new vision for democracy and independence for the postcolonial nation, arguing, “Independence does not merely mean a Government by Indians. It means that the Government should be capable of taking independent decisions courageously.”1 Her assertion of governmental independence at once resonates with the event (after all, she is speaking on the twentyeighth anniversary of Indian independence) and describes a model of government curiously divorced from the people it claims to represent. Insofar as Gandhi references the relationship between the government and the people, it is as a paternalistic (or, as we will see, a maternalistic) one, claiming that “independence . . . offers us an opportunity to do our duty.”2 This duty is defined as “lift[ing] the people who had remained oppressed for centuries” in an effort to uplift the nation as a whole.3 In making this assertion Gandhi claims to be speaking and acting for the people in the same moment as she is disavowing democracy, a stance implied in the ambiguity of the sentence “Independence does not merely mean a government by Indians.” This sentence, aside from establishing the division between the people and the government, claims the government is acting in the people’s best interests—interests the people themselves may not be trusted to know.4 What for Indira Gandhi is an issue of representing the “people who had remained oppressed for centuries” (even while suspending the basic rights of democracy) is for her cousin, author Nayantara Sahgal, a specifically literary problem of representing subaltern agency and suffering. In her 1993 essay, “Some Thoughts on the Puzzle of Identity,” 5 SEVERED LIMBS, SEVERED LEGACIES Indira Gandhi’s Emergency and the Problem of Subalternity 174 severed limbs, severed legacies Sahgal poses the conundrum of national representation, asking, “But who, really, are ‘we’? At one end of the spectrum is a majority who still cannot write and have yet to write their experience. So present writing may well be an elite rehearsal for the more representative performance yet to come once these Indians—which means most Indians—can express themselves directly.”5 In recognizing that much Indian writing is simply an “elite rehearsal” in which a privileged few speak their own experiences at the expense of an underprivileged majority, Sahgal addresses the very issue of representation that Indira Gandhi would seem to eschew. Her confidence that there will come a time for a more “representative performance” when “most Indians” “can express themselves directly,” however, thrusts us squarely into debates about the possibilities and impossibilities of subaltern speech acts. Leaving behind the heady decade of nation building I surveyed in the previous chapter, in this final chapter I turn to the moment of that nationalism’s unraveling: Indira Gandhi’s period of Emergency rule (1975–77). In doing so I focus on the problem of subalternity that has implicitly animated Eugenic Feminism. Each chapter of this book has taken up different moments in U.S. and Indian nationalism, focusing at once on U.S. imperial anxieties about (and developmental management of) Indian others at home and abroad, and on Indian articulations of its own nationalist modernity in relation to its others. Throughout, I have concentrated on the imbrication of feminism and nationalism, suggesting that the concomitant management of reproduction and gender is central to these nationalist, and nationalist imperialist, projects. Underwriting all of this has been a concern for the ways in which subaltern subjects have been rendered dysgenic and thus unfit for national futurity. In taking up the Emergency in this final chapter, I examine how subalternity is mobilized as a critique of the nation-state in a postnational moment, looking first to Indira Gandhi’s populist rhetoric and self-positioning as Mother India, and next to Nayantara Sahgal’s critique of the Emergency in her 1985 novel, Rich Like Us. I ended the previous chapter with a discussion of the circulation of the Indian peasant mother in the United States, suggesting that this reimagined Mother India was a figure of the moment both at home and abroad because she had been transformed by the imperatives of development . By revolutionizing agricultural practices through modernizing gender relations, developmental modernity renders the peasant mother iconic precisely as an obsolescent subject of development. In this sense, [3.142.174.55] Project MUSE (2024-04-20 04:18...

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