Rethinking powers of political: The national emergency and the J. P. movement in Rahi Masoom Raza’s Katra Bi Arzoo

Abstract

In this reading of Rahi Masoom Raza’s Katra Bi Arzoo (1978), the article proposes that the imposition of the National Emergency in India on 25–26 June 1975 should be perceived in the light of the politics of the preceding decades. The 1960s and early 1970s were riven by social movements such as the Naxalite movement, the women’s movement, and especially the J. P. movement. In highlighting this context, the article argues that Raza’s novel cognitively registers the making and unmaking of these sociopolitical movements to contest the dominant trajectories of Nehruvian developmentalism and its attendant processes of nation making. The fiction inscribes an alternative, performative aspect of the nation which has been marginalized by the grand rhetoric and dominant historiography of the nation state. Such an engagement will help locate the selected fiction in the interstices between ethics and politics so pertinent to the discourses on and around the social movements of 1970s. As Jessica Berman suggests: “Ethics as an attitude or activity within the sphere of community, rather than a set of common principles or a narrative domain, becomes essential to the ordering of our lives together, and to the ‘ensemble of human relations in their real, social structure’ that we might call politics” (2011: 25).