PK SREENIVASAN was waiting to write this book ever since we met first in Chennai. Back then in early 1980s, we were rookies on our newspaper jobs in the city and close enough to the political trauma that shaped this book.
Sreenivasan was still in college when Indira Gandhi declared internal Emergency, an unusual national project that suppressed the public and silenced the press for 21 months in the mid-1970s. People threw out the regime at the first opportunity when elections came. The press broke its silence with no less vengeance. The pent-up anger and needless pliancy exploded into weeks of exuberant journalism. The dust settled eventually to reveal a surprise.
News journalists typically reluctant to stretch beyond the daily/weekly deadline were actually sitting down to write book-length long form. Was it OV Vijayan who remarked that the censor turned out to be a better motivator than editors? Once official censorship lifted, the blacked-out immediate past became doubly visible and newsworthy.
Sreenivasan still in his twenties was too young and unprepared to churn out quickies. More, he was in his first city, which like your first love could be overwhelming. He came to southern India's biggest metropolis from Thiruvananthapuram, then no more than a charming old-world big town. Chennai wasn't just another big city driven by money and power. There was a third emotive engine at work. Much of southern cinema got done here and some powerful political images were crafted in these makeup rooms. Three chief ministers -MG Ramachandran, N T Rama Rao and J Jayalalithaa - came from these studio floors.
This unique mashup of politics and cinema was an onlooker's delight. But for a journo posted to report the synergy, it was an unenviable task. Sreenivasan had a publisher who was greedy for Chennai, simply devoured all that the city offered. The media house was an early beneficiary of the post Emergency magazine boom. Apart from its flagship daily, Kerala Kaumudi, the group was running a series of periodicals, from literary to filmy to a niche one exclusively featuring short stories. Can't get more niche than that. The result was that multiple editors were chasing Sreenivasan for Chennai stories.
This young man on a Lambretta scooter was single handedly filling more pages than the most organised of news desks. Endless deadlines left him with little time for the dream book. Add to this his boundless fraternity. Sreenivasan was the helpline for anyone from Kerala who needed anything in Chennai. And there was no stopping the needy from flocking to this megalopolis - at once a railway town, a port town, an educational hub and a medical destination.
Over the years, the book came up less and less in our conversation. Everyone moved on and the Emergency of the mid 1970s became distant history, a formal text bookish account in cold print. At least two new generations came and went with no living memory of it. A factual recount became increasingly harder to attempt. But then that needn't have deterred Sreenivasan. He was always clear he would do fiction, for good reasons.
Bare facts would hardly depict the organised cruelty the police perpetuated in a place like Kerala that was hailed as a third world model for high social indices. Distinguished economists like Amartya Sen were already joining the dots between developmental and democratic values. (He demonstrated how free press could alert and prevent famines).
If so, how could a socially advanced Kerala be policed so harshly? Such questions went unasked. The attempt then was to locate the Emergency regime's excesses wholly in the northern states. The common wisdom was that the south was more softly governed, give or take a Snehalatha Reddy in Karnataka or a Rajan in Kerala. Sreenivasan refused to engage with the narrative and shifted to fiction mode.
In any case, when you are writing about young people chained to the legs of a police officer's desk for as long as four days in a safe house in the middle of your progressive good-looking town, you have only imagination to go by. There is no verifiable fact and the cops aren't dumb enough to leave evidence. Sreeni's faith in fiction would have been further strengthened by the surreal city of Chennai, where he spent the long gap years between the Emergency and the book.
For the reader, the wait is worth it. The book couldn't have come at a better time. The country just voted to show enough disapproval of ten years of what has been widely seen as undeclared Emergency. The decade carried the supreme irony of Emergency's opponents in power normalising almost every excess that went with the Indira era.
Read on and you will find this flashback fast-forwarding into the present.
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