Gemma Scott
School of Humanities
The home as a site of resistance: Women’s narratives of India’s
emergency, 1975-1977
2015 marked the fortieth anniversary of Indira Gandhi’s declaration of a State of
Emergency in India. This anniversary sparked a spate of journalism and writing on
these events, building on increasing levels of historical attention paid to this period of
authoritarian rule in the last decade. Yet women remain almost completely absent
from this existing literature. Scholars have failed to consider how women, in groups
or as individuals, engaged with the Emergency, either in support or opposition. This
poster begins to address this gap by displaying women’s narratives of resistance to
Emergency rule that foreground the home as a central space in the geography of this
resistance. It draws on interviews conducted with women in Delhi and Mumbai
(2014) who engaged in oppositional activities during 1975-1977. Presenting extracts
from these interviews, the poster allows for an exploration of a reoccurring trend,
whereby women located much of their underground activism in this domestic space,
a space located outside of the frame of existing scholarship. The poster begins to
articulate women’s voices, challenges notions of resistance in this period that fail to
include women’s experiences and expands our understandings about what
constitutes a space of politicised resistance.
Postgraduate Conference 2016
Page 47