Exhibition: Crafting Subversion: Resistance and underground publishing in India

SOAS’s Brunei Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition by Pragya Dhital, ‘Crafting Subversion’ which explores underground print during the Indian emergency of 1975- 77, focusing on the cyclostyle printing and duplicating technology used to produce it (the ‘Gestetner’, after its Tottenham-based Hungarian-Jewish inventor). Originally invented for office work its potentialities were quickly seized by those involved in underground print production across the world, from zines to Samizdat.

The exhibition will include underground literature produced and collected by Ram Dutt Tripathi, a former BBC journalist who was imprisoned during the emergency, as well as material from Haringey Museum’s Gestetner archives and publications from UCL’s collection of cyclostyled alternative press, small magazines and poetry.

The exhibition emerges from Pragya’s research on the media censorship during the colonial period and the emergency, and interest in radical print and experimental literature.