The image of political-and sectarian-torn India under Indira Gandhi's State of Emergency is countered by powerful metaphors of binding and union inspired by the subcontinent's millenial history of cloth-making. In Amitav Ghosh's debut novel The Circle of Reason, the old art of buti weaving becomes alternatively a sign of the new Mechanical Man and his ability to do or undo a fragmented India, and that of Art, that can create its own words and realities. Conversely, in Rohinton Mistry award-winning A Fine Balance, the havoc wrought in people's lives by the Emergency might seem to discard them like unwanted scraps of cloth, and yet the playful art of quiltmaking becomes a metaphor for the individuals' solution of joining their destinies in a meaningful patchwork.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.