Gyan Prakash is the Dayton-Stockton Professor of History at Princeton University. His many books include Mumbai Fables: A History of an Enchanted City (Princeton), Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India, and Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton). He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
"Emergency Chronicles is perhaps the most comprehensive scholarly
examination yet of the Emergency. Looking back more than four
decades after Indira Gandhi stunned India and the world by
suspending democracy, historian Gyan Prakash argues forcefully
that this was no momentary distortion in India's democratic record
or a nightmare that came from nowhere and vanished without a trace,
leaving only its villains and heroes."---Ajoy Bose, India Today
"Gyan Prakash’s outstanding new book is the first historical
narrative of one of the most important crises of democracy in the
modern world. . . . The meticulous detail of Emergency Chronicles
exposes a shameful chapter in India’s democratic history."---Rana
Mitter, Financial Times
"[An] acute analysis of the sudden collapse of democracy in India
in the mid-1970s."---Pankaj Mishra, New York Review of Books
"The chronicles themselves are fluently and persuasively recounted
as a narrative history of the awful excesses inflicted on
individuals and communities by and during the Emergency."---Mani
Shankar Aiyar, Indian Express
"Gyan Prakash’s excellent study . . . offers a genuinely riveting
account of the decades leading up to the imposition of the
emergency."---Priyamvada Gopal, Times Higher Education
"Gyan Prakash’s Emergency Chronicles is perhaps the first work of
historical scholarship on the subject, and Prakash, who is a
historian at Princeton University, has deftly dealt with the
subject, not only bringing out the larger historical context, but
also peppering his narrative with some good fictional work and
cinema produced during the times."
*Financial Express*
"[Prakash] puts Emergency in perspective."---Sandeep Sinha, The
Tribune
"Prakash manages to tell the tale with the charm of a raconteur,
and this should make it easy for generations of readers born long
after 1975 to get a vivid, sepia-tinted picture of socialist India
as well as the nationwide public unrest of those years."---Parsa V.
Rao Jr., Gateway House
"What sets [Emergency Chronicles] apart is [Prakash’s] effort to
take back the cause-and-effect chain right up to the debates in the
Constituent Assembly where ‘draconian’ measures were enshrined in
the constitution."---Siddharth Singh, Open Magazine
"Reading Emergency Chronicles is like entering a beautiful
superstructure of ideas created with lucid writing and incisive
arguments with a sprinkling of historical anecdotes."---Utpal
Kumar, Sunday Guardian
"A valuable work."---Ben Margulies, LSE Review of Books
"Prakash has written a valuable work, which embodies important
lessons and certainly speaks to contemporary issues. Emergency
Chronicles reminds us that the horrors of our histories do not
emerge from the clear blue sky, but from long traditions of
(mis)rule. The book also warns us that democracy is a game played
by equals – or else a rigged game, where someone is always
threatening to take the ball and go home."---Ben Margulies,
Democratic Audit UK
"A meticulously researched book which is likely to find a space in
the book shelves of scholars and observers of Indian
politics."---Ayan Guha, Democratization
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