Brewing Resistance

Decolonisation in 1947 promised a better life for India’s peasants, workers, students, Dalits and religious minorities. However, social justice remained a distant dream even in the 1970s. These diverse groups fought and mobilised movements to achieve what was promised at independence, and in response, the ruling government under the leadership of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended the Constitution, declared Emergency and, with it, curtailed civil liberties. The hope of decolonisation 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 resistance movement against the Emergency that brewed in New Delhi’s Indian Coffee House. Created by British plantation owners to weather the empire-wide export commodity surplus crisis of the 1930s, the 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, the Indian Coffee House became more than an economic intervention into the processes of capitalism and empire-it transformed into a radical space where politically and artistically driven intellectuals of various persuasions and viewpoints gathered to resist the Emergency. Based on newly uncovered evidence and oral histories of the people who mobilized the movement against the Emergency, this book fills a major lacuna in the sphere of academic writing on one of the most shocking and darkest chapters of India’s democratic history–