Open events

In the 1970s Indian Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi suspended the constitution, and with it, civil liberties. The hope of decolonization that had turned to disillusion in the postcolonial period quickly descended into a nightmare. In this book, Kristin Plys recounts the little known story of the movement against the Emergency as seen through New Delhi’s Indian Coffee House based on newly uncovered evidence and oral histories with the men who led the movement against the Emergency. Created by British plantation owners to weather the Empire-wide export commodity surplus crisis of the 1930s, Indian Coffee House was occupied by its workers in 1946 and eventually transformed into a cooperative as part of an anti-colonial and anti-capitalist workers movement. By the 1970s, Indian Coffee House became more than an economic intervention into the processes of capitalism and empire— it was transformed into a radical space where intellectuals of various persuasions and viewpoints gathered to resist the Emergency.