ABSTRACT This article examines the way the Indian Emergency of 1975–77 is represented in Shashi Tharoor’s The Great Indian Novel (first published in 1989) as a watershed moment in the history of postcolonial India. Tharoor frames the crisis as a pivotal event that inversely mirrors the moment of Indian independence, and, thus, foregrounds the failure of the Indian state to deliver the promises of that euphoric time. The article argues that, compared to other texts in the corpus, Tharoor’s novel primarily uses gender as a focalizer of Emergency anxieties, recuperating the traumatized and stigmatized female body as a powerful “trope of exception”. Tharoor’s narrative represents the Emergency as a crisis that precipitates endemic social problems persisting in the longue durée of Indian pre-colonial and postcolonial history. Omnipresent in the country’s epic memory, and recurrently narrated in multiple modern retellings of the Mahabharata, these social ills are recaptured, yet again, in Tharoor’s novel in the form of a political allegory.

中文翻译：

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“错误的统治”：沙希·塔鲁尔的《伟大的印度小说》中的例外比喻

摘要 本文考察了 1975-77 年印度紧急状态在 Shashi Tharoor 的《伟大的印度小说》（1989 年首次出版）中作为后殖民印度历史上的分水岭时刻的表现方式。Tharoor 将这场危机视为一个关键事件，它反过来反映了印度独立的时刻，因此，突出了印度政府未能兑现那个欣欣向荣时期的承诺。文章认为，与语料库中的其他文本相比，塔鲁尔的小说主要将性别作为紧急焦虑的焦点，将受到创伤和污名化的女性身体恢复为强大的“例外比喻”。Tharoor 的叙述将紧急情况描述为一场危机，它引发了在印度前殖民和后殖民历史的漫长过程中持续存在的地方性社会问题。