Love And Censorship

By Setting Her Love Story in the Time of the Emergency, Author Srishti Chaudhary Does Something Altogether Novel

- Ajoy Bose

The most striking thing about Srishti Chaudhary’s Once upon a Curfew is its subject— a love story set in the time of the Emergency. Period romances in India usually stay away from political events of the contemporary era and this must indeed be one of the very rare ones to use as a backdrop those traumatic 19 months in the mid-1970s when democracy was snuffed out. It is, therefore, quite compelling for someone who lived through and wrote on the travails of that period to find the plot unravelling around horrors imposed by the Emergency regime, such as forcible sterilisations and mass incarceration of dissenting leaders and activists.