The Emergency in an Indian Village
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8373924 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lee I Schlesinger (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1977 |
| Volume | 17 |
| Issue | 7 |
| Pages | 627-647 |
| Publication date | 1977-07-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Asian Survey (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0004-4687 • E-ISSN: 1533-838X |
| Publisher | University of California Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2643410 |
| OpenAlex | W1966216829 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
IT IS EASY to forget that India remains, among other things, a land of villages. The press, anchored in the Indian metropolises, reported the state of Emergency in the cities, where its immediate impact was most apparent and where the population that is most fit to complain or opine quotably resides. In ignorance, cosmopolitan observers presumed that the rural seventy or so per cent were not much affected by the Emergency rhetoric and programs, or that they tacitly accepted, even supported, them. But these presumptions were baseless and false. I shall describe in a series of anecdotes and observations the impact of the Emergency in a small part of the Indian countryside. I had the privilege to be conducting field work in a Maharashtrian village in Satara District during 1975 when the Emergency began, and in 1976 I observed the rural scene from the district town (I departed India at the end of November 1976 and thus have no firsthand knowledge of events related to the 1977 elections). I do not argue that the major impact of the Emergency was in the villages rather than in the cities, nor that what happened in the village I observed was typical of rural India at large or even of western Maharashtra. I wish merely to raise some issues that may help to explain this complex, if not mysterious, watershed in the history of modern India, if in fact it was a watershed
Economic growth · Economics · Geography · Ignorance · Political science · Politics · Population · Privilege (computing · Rhetoric · Rural area · Sociology · State of emergency · Work (physics · Demography · Engineering · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies
| Citations per year | 0.12 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1984 - 2024 (41) |
| Highly cited | No |