Constituting the exception: Law, literature and the state of emergency in postcolonial India (Shauna Singh Baldwin, Bapsi Sidhwa, Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, O. V. Vijayan)

Constitutions have a history of authorizing their own undoing. Nearly every modern democratic constitution contains within it the power to suspend the normal constitutional order in the event of a security crisis defined as a 'State of Emergency.' This dissertation focuses on the Indian experience of a constitutionally defined "state of emergency," that took place from 1975--1977. Drawing from sources such as the Indian Constitution, literature, political theory, ethnography and history, Constituting the Exception argues that constitutional emergency, rather than being a temporary crisis, is a constitutive exception that defines the postcolonial citizen as a figure that can only come into being once absolute security has been established.; I begin with an analysis of Partition as the formative state of crisis that the Indian state would memorialize through the construct of emergency, reading dismemberment as a trope for the process of becoming-citizen in Shauna Singh Baldwin's What the Body Remembers (1999) and Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India (1991). In the second chapter, I analyze the arguments over the incorporation of the emergency provisions in the Indian Constitution made in the Constituent Assembly Debates (1946--1949). The third chapter of the dissertation builds on this genealogy of emergency to trace the changes made to the Indian Constitution under emergency, from 1950 to 1977. I conclude with a reading of three major literary representations of emergency that register and rework the ambivalent conception of the citizen articulated under the Indian Constitution. The texts I consider, (Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance and O. V. Vijayan's The Saga of Dharmapuri and his short-story collection, After the Hanging) figure the citizen as a disintegrating body in response to the gradual erosion of rights regimes and the expansion of the "state of emergency" from the exception to the rule.