The Hoodlum Years refer to the years of terror and agony that India passed through in the early-mid 1970s and culminated in the Emergency. At the time Ashok Mitra contributed a series of sensitive essays to the Economic and Political Weekly that tellingly and powerfully portrayed the horror of those years. This volume contains a selection of these essays, written during 1972–75 and between January and April 1977.

The claustrophobic season of 1972–77, the author feels, ought to be remembered every now and then; there is otherwise a danger of our judgement being distorted by the familiar problem of forgetting.