Kishore Kumar To Dev Anand: Defying The Stage Fright Of Indira’s Emergency

The morning of 4 May 1976 arrived like any other for millions of Indians waking up to All India Radio. But something was missing. There was no familiar tune, no voice laced with playful ease and velvet defiance.

Kishore Kumar, the most popular playback singer of the time, had vanished from the airwaves. His songs were not just missing, they had been erased.

It was not an accident. It was an order.

This was the Emergency. And it was a crackdown not only against political parties or armed revolutionaries, but also against playback singers, film stars, theatre actors, and poets. A crackdown where the state did not just jail dissidents, but blacklisted musicians, burned satirical films, and banned movie stars from national television because they refused to clap hard enough.

The Emergency was not merely political, it was a paranoid project of cultural control, where even a refusal to sing at a government rally could get you erased from the nation’s airwaves.

The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, led by Vidya Charan Shukla, became a nerve centre for coercion. Doordarshan and All India Radio were retooled not as public broadcasters, but as propaganda machines to amplify the voice of the ruling regime, especially that of Sanjay Gandhi, the prime minister’s unelected and unofficial enforcer.

Filmmakers, singers, and actors were quietly summoned. They were asked — sometimes sweetly, often sternly — to sing songs about the 20-point programme, to perform at Youth Congress rallies, to act in state-approved documentaries, or simply to remain publicly grateful for the ‘discipline’ the Emergency had imposed. Refusal was not taken lightly. Non-cooperation meant non-existence.

Why did a regime armed with the Constitution, the police, and the press feel threatened by a Kishore Kumar song? Why did Indira Gandhi’s government direct its wrath at Dev Anand’s speeches or Manoj Kumar’s integrity? What kind of state fears the metaphor of a stage play?

This is not just the story of artists who resisted, but of a state that exposed its own insecurity by trying to subdue them. A regime that claimed strength yet could not tolerate satire, dissent, or silence.

Stories from the Cultural Coup

The call came from a Youth Congress functionary in Mumbai. Kishore Kumar was asked to perform at a rally and record a few promotional songs in support of Sanjay Gandhi’s 20-point programme. Kishore, known for his mercurial genius and disdain for sycophancy, responded in characteristic fashion: he refused.

That one refusal enraged V.C. Shukla. In retaliation, he issued verbal orders to scrub Kishore Kumar’s music from government platforms. From May to October 1976, Kishore’s songs were banned on AIR and Doordarshan — a total blackout. His voice, which once filled the airwaves with joy, wit, and romance, was now officially unwelcome in Indira's republic.

Kishore made no public statements. He neither apologised nor appealed. But the silence of his absence was louder than any protest song. Eventually, it was Mohammed Rafi, another playback legend, who reportedly intervened behind the scenes to get the ban lifted.

Even after the ban, Kishore Kumar never performed for any Congress event. He did not need to raise a fist or shout slogans. His refusal to sing was enough.

Few stars in Indian cinema embodied charm and optimism like Dev Anand. But behind the romantic hero lay a man of sharp political instincts and fierce independence. During the Emergency, Dilip Kumar and Dev Anand were approached by Shukla to lend their name and image to the regime’s cultural programmes. Anand refused. In response, Doordarshan stopped airing his films.

Then he did something rarer: he spoke out.

At a public rally on Juhu Beach, Dev Anand condemned Indira Gandhi’s government and referred to her and her son Sanjay as "dictators". His studio faced delays and scrutiny, and his film Des Pardes was nearly sabotaged through bureaucratic roadblocks.

But Dev Anand did not retreat. After the Emergency was lifted, he went further. He found his own political party, the National Party of India. Though the party was short-lived, it was a rare moment in post-independence India when a film star did not just flirt with politics, but attempted to reshape it in the name of democracy and conscience.

Supported by siblings and friends like Pran, Danny Dezongpa, Sadhana, and Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Dev Anand’s resistance was not loud, but it was consistent. He showed that stardom did not have to mean servility.

In the mid-70s, Shatrughan Sinha was one of Bollywood’s rising stars. Charismatic, outspoken, and unconventional, he was seen as a man difficult to tame, exactly what Sanjay Gandhi and V.C. Shukla attempted to do.

Sinha was pressured to campaign for the Congress Party, appear at Youth Congress events, and endorse the Emergency as a "corrective measure". He flatly refused.

The government responded by banning his films from Doordarshan. But that was not all. According to his autobiography, he was warned he could be falsely implicated in the Baroda Dynamite Case, a notorious conspiracy charge against opposition leaders like George Fernandes.

Shatrughan Sinha did not budge. Though he did not take to the streets, his refusal to cooperate, despite threats to his career and liberty, was its own form of rebellion. He survived the Emergency with both his career and conscience intact.

By the mid-1970s, Manoj Kumar was known not just as a leading actor but as Bharat Kumar, a filmmaker who blended nationalism with popular cinema. It was precisely this patriotic image that made the Emergency establishment approach him. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting requested him to direct a pro-Emergency documentary, scripted by none other than Amrita Pritam, the celebrated poet and novelist.

Manoj Kumar read the script and was aghast. He found it a betrayal of artistic and political integrity, and told Amrita so bluntly. In a rare act of personal remorse, Amrita burned the script, unable to defend what she had written.

The government retaliated with the familiar tactic: his films were unofficially banned from Doordarshan. But Manoj Kumar was not content to take the blow quietly. In a bold move rare for the time, he took the government to court, challenging the censorship and bureaucratic harassment in the legal arena.

And he won.

Manoj Kumar became the first Indian film personality to successfully challenge Emergency-era censorship in court. In doing so, he proved that resistance could come not just from the stage or the screen, but from the courtroom, a space the regime often assumed it had neutered. His case became a quiet yet powerful precedent, showing that even in those dark days, the law could be used to fight back.

Among all stories of Emergency-era artistic resistance, none is more tragic, or more forgotten, than that of Snehalata Reddy.

A talented actress, theatre producer, and civil liberties activist based in Bengaluru, Snehalata Reddy was not content with symbolic protest. She actively organised demonstrations, published resistance literature, and spoke out against the regime’s repression. Her activism made her a marked woman.

In 1976, she was arrested under the draconian MISA (Maintenance of Internal Security Act) on false charges. She was held in Bengaluru Central Jail for eight months without trial. Despite suffering from chronic asthma, she was denied proper medical care, even basic treatment. Her condition worsened under the brutal conditions of incarceration.

Madhu Dandavate, who was also in the same jail where Snehalata was imprisoned, writes in his memoir, "I could hear the screams of Snehalata from her cell in the silence of the night".

On 15 January 1977, Snehalata was finally released. Five days later, she passed away.

Her death did not make front-page headlines. It was not eulogised by the press. But for those who knew her, it was a quiet martyrdom — proof that the Emergency did not just silence art, it crushed the bodies of those who embodied it.

While Bombay's film world was being monitored and managed, Calcutta (now Kolkata) had its own theatre of resistance.

Utpal Dutt, already a titan of Bengali theatre, began writing and staging plays that used historical and allegorical settings to critique authoritarianism and state power. Productions like Barricade and Tiner Talwar told stories of resistance, betrayal, and tyranny — but everyone in the audience knew they were about Indira Gandhi and her cronies.

Dutt was arrested under MISA, spending several months in jail. But when released, he went straight back to writing and performing. His work was not subtle, it was defiant. He proved that theatre, more than film, could serve as a radical space in a censored republic.

Unlike Bollywood’s spectacle, Dutt’s art relied on dialogue, tension, metaphor, and courage. He turned the stage into a space where the State could not follow — a place where people could laugh, cry, and see truth without the mask of government scripting.

A Divided Industry

Not every artist chose to resist. Many, perhaps most, chose silence.

Some were afraid. Others were opportunistic. A few even believed that the Emergency had restored "discipline" and "order" to a chaotic democracy. In this environment of fear and favour, complicity was often rewarded with national awards, state patronage, or prime time on Doordarshan.

Prominent names like Raj Kapoor, Sunil Dutt, and Amitabh Bachchan maintained ambiguous or quiet stances. Kapoor, known for his Congress leanings, stayed out of the fray. Sunil Dutt, later a parliamentarian and Minister from the Congress, remained largely silent. Amitabh Bachchan publicly steered clear of controversy.

A letter to Filmfare in 1977 mentioned that the crackdown was, in fact, enabled by many industry insiders: “Remember all those photographs of Youth Congress rallies with Dilip Kumar smiling vacuously at Sanjay Gandhi?”

In some cases, film producers and music composers agreed to cut songs and dialogues that might offend censors. Scripts were reworded. Themes were softened. The state did not need to formally ban every work; self-censorship flourished.

This silence was not always cowardice. Sometimes it was calculation. Often it was survival. But whatever the motive, the absence of vocal solidarity from India’s most visible cultural figures gave the regime cultural legitimacy, or at least, left the field clear for state propaganda.

Yet, even in that heavy silence, the murmurs of resistance never fully died.

In 1977, just months before elections were announced, director Amrit Nahata made Kissa Kursi Ka — a biting satirical film mocking Indira and Sanjay Gandhi’s authoritarianism. The film was cleared by the censors, but Sanjay Gandhi’s men confiscated the negatives and prints, and had them burned at the Maruti factory in Gurgaon.

It was perhaps the most extreme act of cultural vandalism in independent India. Nahata’s work had been quite literally reduced to ashes.

But across the country, others were resisting in less visible ways. In Bihar and parts of Bengal, folk singers performed veiled critiques of sterilisation drives. In Delhi and Bombay, underground poetry collections circulated, full of metaphors about broken clocks, censored mirrors, and mute gods. Student theatre groups in Bangalore and Madras performed Chekhov and Brecht with subtle political overlays. Painters inserted quiet symbols of protest into abstract canvases.

These were not the icons of popular cinema. But they formed an artistic undercurrent that refused to surrender, even when pushed off the stage and into the shadows.

Lessons from the Failed Cultural Revolution

Half a century on, the Emergency still stands alone in Indian history for the formal, state-sanctioned strangling of cultural expression. Critics of today’s BJP-led government often wield the word “authoritarian” with casual ease, drawing glib parallels to 1975–77. Yet a sober look at the cultural landscape tells a very different story.

Despite fierce opposition to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP, there has been no government blacklist of artists, no blanket ban on films, songs, or television personalities. Actors and filmmakers who campaign openly against the ruling party — Swara Bhaskar, Prakash Raj, Anurag Kashyap, Vishal Dadlani, Naseeruddin Shah, and many others — continue to release movies, sign brand endorsements, host award functions, and broadcast their views across legacy media and social platforms. Films and shows that lampoon the government secure theatrical releases, OTT deals, and even national awards. Streaming giants brim with stand-up specials and web series skewering every arm of the state.

There are, of course, angry online backlashes, boycott calls, Twitter storms, and occasional police complaints — politically motivated or otherwise. Yet none of these amount to a centrally directed policy of cultural extermination. The CBFC’s cuts still fall short of the Emergency’s dictatorship of taste, where a single minister’s phone call could wipe an artist’s life’s work from public memory overnight.

The Emergency’s cultural censorship was not a side note, it was a symptom. A regime that felt threatened by a love song, a theatre script, or a film about its own heroes like Bhagat Singh and Chandrashekhar Azad, was not strong; it was deeply afraid. It wanted obedience dressed as art, applause masked as patriotism, and silence posing as national unity. It feared songs that were not commissioned, plays that were not scripted by the ministry, and actors who refused to act on cue. So it banned, bullied, and in some cases, broke them.

And yet, the regime failed. Kishore Kumar’s voice is eternal. Dev Anand’s charisma outlived his censors. While the names of V.C. Shukla and Sanjay Gandhi remain footnotes. The state could suppress frequencies, burn reels, and jail performers, but it could not dictate memory.

Fifty years on, the irony remains stark: the same state that declared an Emergency to "discipline" India ended up panicking in the face of poems and playback singers.

That is not strength. That is theatre. Badly staged, hastily written, and utterly forgotten — except by those who know that when the state turns against its artists, it is the state that ultimately loses its voice.