In October 1978, John Oliver Perry, a Professor of English at Tufts University, US, issued an advertisement in the Times of India and Hindustan Times calling for submissions of protest poems written in response to the Emergency. Voices of Emergency: An All India Anthology of Protest Poetry of the 1975-1977 Emergency, comprising 280 poems in 15 languages, came out five years later. It was a stupendous task that took the author four years, during which, “with a minimum of private American funding, I, … knowing no indigenous Indian languages, secured the cooperation of hundreds of Indian editors, translators, poets, academics, and social activists in pursuing this intercultural project.”
The Emergency was officially declared by President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, on the advice of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, under Article 352 of the Constitution, on June 25, 1975. It ended on March 21, 1977.
Reacting against the Emergency
Perry provides his readers with a list of what he calls “the outstanding facts about the Emergency.” These include arresting thousands of social and political activists; press censorship; the banning of strikes, demonstrations and meetings that supposedly posed a threat to the internal security of the nation; and Constitutional amendments that curtailed the freedom of the judiciary, bureaucracy, trade unions, academia, and indeed, the general public.
Perry defines protest poems...
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