Includes bibliographical references and index.

This book recounts the little-known story of the resistance movement that brewed in New Delhi's Indian Coffee House against the state of Emergency in India in the 1970s. 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, it had 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 mobilised 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.