Excesses of the Emergency is a much battered cliche, but a post-Emergency excess—in both senses of the word—for which no Shah Commission is possible is the flood of books on it. These have come in all shapes and sizes and they do not please, as Keats said poetry should, ‘by a fine excess’. The worst of them are badly written ephemera and very much a scissors and paste job that could be forgiven only on Dr Johnson’s dictum that a man was never more innocently occupied than when making money. The better ones are barely acceptable as necessary preliminary documentation of a dark period in our national life.
mergency Trivia
N.S. Jagannathan
TWO FACES OF INDIRA GANDHI Uma Vasudev , , pp.,
THE JUDGEMENT THE JUDGEMENT , , pp.,
ALL THE PRIME MINISTER’S MEN Janardan Thakur All published by Vikas, 1977, pp., 30.00 each