When the Emergency descends upon India in 1975, Srinivasa Rao is an ordinary Telugu lecturer in an ordinary college in Andhra Pradesh, whose greatest loyalties are to his family and the routines of everyday life. While he loves Telugu literature, he keeps a distance from revolutionary and progressive writers’ organisations and has never considered himself a political activist. Yet one midnight in 1976, the police arrive at his door, and he is taken to a detention camp without explanation. Why was he arrested and detained? Is it a story he wrote long ago? Is it his friendships? Is it his occasional attendance at progressive literary gatherings? Is it his signature on a petition against the college management protesting unfair conditions? The reasons remain inscrutable to the end.
Over nineteen harrowing nights, Srinivasa Rao secretly records his thoughts on smuggled scraps of paper, under stolen shards of light, creating an intimate diary of fear, uncertainty and endurance. As he witnesses arbitrary arrests, interrogation, humiliation and the devastation wrought by unchecked state power, he is forced to confront unsettling questions about justice, freedom and the cost of remaining silent.
Ampasayya Naveen’s landmark novel, Cheekati Rojulu, was first published in Telugu in 1978, soon after the Emergency ended. In Kalpana Kannabiran’s compelling English translation, Srinivasa Rao’s story crosses languages and generations, its unflinching meditation on state power and dissent resonating with unsettling force in the present.
