Love Letters, Stamps, Censors: The Emergency Years as Seen Through Mail

Newspapers, TV, and radio have told their stories, but the Emergency years are hardly scouted for in its mail. With hundreds of love letters and special family planning stamps, the country's post might, after all, be the decade’s most exciting witness.

Main Page of the Indian Herald, 26 June 1975 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

One scorching June morning in 1975, a radio broadcast, heard all over the country, announced, “The President has proclaimed an emergency. This is nothing to panic about”. These words were spoken by Indira Gandhi, India’s Prime Minister. The next day, her government would arrest Madhu Dandavate, a five-time Member of Parliament who took up the socialist cause. Twenty days later, they would take his wife, Pramila Dandavate, a mighty political activist. Separated over 800 km, the Dandavates now had just one way to talk to each other — post.

Love In The Time of Emergency

Over the next eighteen months, 200 letters travelled faithfully across two jails; Bangalore Central Jail and Yeravada Central Jail. Meetings, politics, and social reform had consumed the couples’ lives before the arrest. But in the solitude of their cell, Madhu wrote in a letter to Pramila, “The tranquillity has made it possible to immerse oneself in the memories of the last twenty-three years.”

In these 200-odd dispatches, they mulled over everything under the sun — love, politics, literature, philosophy — waiting for the day they would finally be together.

Carrying these weekly letters was India’s trusty carrier — the postal service. Newspapers, magazines, and the press took heavy blows under the Emergency Act. However, the country’s mail also carries a unique window into the decade’s turbulent politics.

**‘Small Family, Happy Family’: Population Control Stamps **

In the 60s-70s, India had already realised that postage stamps — despite their size — were a great way to send a message. During this time, the country’s growing population had become the decade’s pressing issue that ultimately followed into the Emergency years.

TV and radio had a limited reach, meaning the Indian government needed its Posts and Telegraphs Department more than ever. In the following months, stamps became India’s ‘little billboards’, which advertised the government’s ambitious family planning mission.

On small perforated sheets, the family planning stamp of 1976 was released featuring a happy couple and their two children—a son and a daughter— as well as the policy’s iconic vermillion triangle symbol.

Even the stamp’s brochure was supercharged with policy details — clinics, community mobilisation, non-official organisations, machinery, councils — all of which were trafficked into the 1976 issue, one of the biggest from the stamp series.

While the stamp’s brochure did stress the voluntary nature of family planning, a seedy underbelly of forced sterilisation drives was already taking over. But behind these politics, we also start seeing stamps less as neglected scraps of paper and as a medium that can reach, connect, and even communicate with millions of ordinary lives.

**Letters From a Prisoner **

Of course, stamps weren’t the only medium tied to the decade’s politics. Years after the Emergency, the capital was swept up in accusations of illegal mail search, with claims that officials had secretly targeted certain citizens. Although much of this is debated, the Emergency’s shadow over the decade’s letters was still very real for Rajashri Dasgupta:

“We had shrugged off the news when we first heard the Emergency had been imposed. What difference did it make to prisoners like us the withdrawal of rights?”

During this time, she describes how letters from home were censored more heavily than ever. Sometimes, whole paragraphs were blacked out. The replies they received became bleaker and words of encouragement were replaced with small talk about the weather. Even sending a letter had become harder, with prisoners having to bribe staff with twice as much to post their letters. Later, Dasgupta would be released; but her memories of the Emergency, closely tied to daily correspondence, show just how much mail meant to those who lived to see its struggle.

Today, letters, stamps, and mailboxes may seem like they no longer have a place in the world. But in their surviving archives, we get a window into the decade’s complex politics and even its ordinary lives. One such glimpse can be recalled from Pramila Dandavate’s love letters, where she teases her husband:

“Have you ever written letters to me so regularly in life before? I remember you would go away on long tours and wouldn’t write for months. [...] But now look at us! You write to me every Monday without fail. Thanks to the Emergency!”