TY - BOOK AU - Plys,Kristin Victoria Magistrelli TI - Brewing resistance: Indian Coffee House and the Emergency in postcolonial India SN - 9781108490528 AV - HN687 .P69 2020 U1 - 303.48/40954 23 PY - 2020/// CY - Cambridge, United Kingdom, New York, NY PB - Cambridge University Press KW - Indian Coffee House KW - Political activity KW - History KW - 20th century KW - Protest movements KW - India KW - Political participation KW - Democracy KW - Politics and government KW - 1975-1977 N1 - Includes bibliographical references and index N2 - "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"-- ER -