Kaaghaz

“Personal Perspective”

I hopped on a train at Andheri Station around 3 p.m. and headed south toward August Kranti Maidan (see Map 4 in Interlude III). A few stations short of Grant Road Station, a young woman bounds into the ladies’ compartment and leans against the handrail directly opposite from where I stand, adjacent to the open train door. She looks to me to be in her early twenties, and the bulky satchel slung over her shoulder suggests she’s come either from work or university; but wherever she may have come from, the hand-drawn placard tucked under her arm leaves little room for doubt about where she’s headed. I catch her eye and ask her if I can click a photo; she smiles brightly and displays her placard so that I can read it properly: “This is not a political fight; it is war against the Constitution” (see Figure 22). She tells me proudly (unprompted) that she’s a lawyer—presumably clarifying the significance of the words she’s chosen to write on her placard. She asks me to forward her the photo I’ve just clicked so she can post it on Instagram and send it around to her friends and professional groups. She gives me her WhatsApp number, which I save in my phone along with her name: Preety.

Preety is keen to talk and has plenty to say during the remainder of our southbound train journey to Grant Road Station. She lives with her parents, she tells me, not far from the protest venue at August Kranti Maidan. Many of her colleagues at the law firm where she works also left the office early today to join the protest. But most of them would join later—after dropping their things at home—whereas she was going to August Kranti directly from the office, which is why she’s alone and lugging her bulky bag with her. Her parents “don’t approve” of her going to August Kranti today, she tells me, so in order to avoid an argument she didn’t stop at home first. “My dad is against the protest,” she tells me. “He’s saying to avoid the area because there will be so many Muslim people coming in [to this part of the city].” She explains: “See, I’m a Hindu. I’m part of the religious majority here in India. My dad’s a businessman, and his whole circle is pro-BJP.” Preety’s native-sounding English and Marwari surname had already announced her socioeconomic and community background (elite class and dominant-caste Hindu),12 while her natural-dye kurta suggested something about her social milieu and liberal leanings. “For my dad,” she continued, “this protest is totally political, whereas for me, this has nothing to do with politics or with any party. This is strictly a constitutional problem. So as a lawyer,” she continues, displaying her placard for me again, “I want to say that this law, and the way that they are creating this divide—to me it’s unacceptable.”

Preety’s carrying a few extra pieces of blank cardboard and also some colored pens. “They’re for the others,” she explains. “Which others?” I ask. “For anyone!” She explains that there was some extra cardboard lying around the office, so she cut it up into placard-sized squares and is carrying it along. And she had stopped by a stationery shop on the way to the train station to pick up the colored pens. The stationer had given her the pens for free, she recalled with a smile, after she explained what they were for. Then she wrote up her sign, she tells me, “just like that,” while waiting on the platform for the train. Now she’s carrying the extra cardboard and pens along with her in case she runs into anyone who “also wants to write up a placard.”

Preety and I get down from the train at Grant Road Station and start together toward August Kranti Maidan, parting ways after a block or two after making plans to be in touch later that week—to exchange stories about our experiences of protest (more on that in a minute). Our train-crowd tributary soon merges with other streams (and then floods) of people converging from all directions onto the main thoroughfare—a sea of people, many, like Preety, toting handcrafted placards. On the train, Preety’s placard, cardboard, and markers had struck me as odd; after all, her placard would be legible only to someone standing within a few feet of her. Anyone within reading distance of her placard would necessarily be part of the crowd, and therefore presumably already in agreement with the anti-CAA message of the event (if not with her particular perspective regarding the act’s unconstitutionality). What’s the point of a placard, I’d thought to myself, drawing on my understandings from other crowds of which I’d been part, when the whole point is the crowd itself? But as the people pouring in from side streets merged with those along the main road heading toward August Kranti Maidan, and as our purposeful procession thickened into a merry multitude I found myself amid a sea of placards: individual, unique, and many—like Preety’s—handcrafted.

Our crowd-parade slowed to a crawl around a hundred meters short of the entryway to the protest venue at August Kranti Maidan. But still, most people’s directional orientation—and that of their placards—remained forward-facing, toward the official venue. This meant that in order to see what was written on the placards, one had to spin around to face the advancing wall of placard-carrying people. I spent a few hours like this (as did those around me), spinning in circles and allowing my eyes to roam, seeking out clever images, interesting critiques, witty remarks, all the while clicking photos of those that caught my attention with my mobile phone camera.

Awaaz

I milled about in the festive throng for a few hours, never reaching anywhere close to the entrance of August Kranti Maidan and its high-profile list of onstage speakers, including nonagenarian freedom fighter and staunch Gandhian, Dr. G G Parkeh—who himself had participated in the Quit India movement launched at this very site in 1942, and in whose name the official “call” for this particular event at August Kranti Maidan had been made over social media. But notwithstanding the reverberations of actual voices amplified from the stage (presumably the loudspeakers had been positioned to face the road so that those in the streets could hear), from where I stood outside the gates, words themselves were indecipherable. And this was not only because I never reached anywhere near the venue itself, but also because of the chanting and cheering of the placard-waving people assembled in the street, people who had gathered not—sabhaa style—as an audience-public for the onstage speeches but rather in order themselves to be “heard.” And participants “spoke,” moreover, not in a single “voice”—as a crowd—but rather, and as Preety had explained to me, as distinctive voices articulating “personal perspectives.” The stage-show with its star lineup of speakers seemed somewhat of a formality and an occasion (perhaps even a pretext) for people to articulate their individual critiques and takes—and through the assembled infrastructure of proximate bodies wielding thousands of mobile phone cameras attached to social media accounts, to have their individual voices amplified and circulated.

The digital posters that circulated on social media in advance of the August Kranti gathering had anticipated this. One poster (see Figure 24) features an image of a young woman, lips visibly sealed but holding a placard that reads “Our voice [awaaz/आवाज़] is sharper than your batons [lathi/लाठी].” The poster caught my attention for a few reasons, first for its use of awaaz—a word of Persianate origin that finds a place in many South Asian languages (here in Hindi).13Awaaz refers to both sound and voice—concepts that, as anthropologist Laura Kunreuther points out, tend in English to be counterposed.14 The language-centric notion of voice is theorized on the one hand as the site and substance of political subjectivity in a liberal democratic polity: individual citizens “voice” their opinions—whether through expression in a public sphere, over social media, or by casting a vote. Indeed, a second valence of voice for democratic theory lies in the notion that elected representatives “speak” on behalf of their constituents. And yet ironically (and on the other hand), as Kunreuther points out, metaphors of voice are often silent on the material-sonic qualities of political utterance—that is, on what political voice sounds like. And this is because the material-embodied notion of sound tends to be counterposed with the language-centered metaphor of voice: where individually reasoning political subjects have voices, sound is the messy material stuff of unreasoned and irrational masses and crowds. In contrast to this voice/sound binary, as Kunreuther points out in her ethnographic account of “what democracy sounds like” in Kathmandu, the word awaaz (awaaj in Nepali) simultaneously encompasses both discursive and sonic registers. Thinking with awaaz allows for attention to the way that “sound affects us in ways that often exceed words,” Kunruther demonstrates, and calls attention to the interconnections between “the rational and the affective,” the individual and the collective, rather than their presumed counterposing.15 This dual register of awaaz is on full display in the August Kranti Maidan invitation poster depicting the placard-carrying woman: the singularity of the figure conjures an individual (if multilingual) discursively reasoning voice, while the poster’s inscription “hamari awaaz” (our voice), as a collective (singular) noun, invokes the concerted roar of an assembled crowd—the very crowd that this poster-as-invitation seeks to conjure. Staying with awaaz—rather than, by virtue of translation to English, introducing an unhelpful voice/sound binary—the poster invokes awaaz’s affective and collective resonances (as sound) alongside its discursivity (as voice).

But the poster is still puzzling, posing a striking contrast between the text and the image: a lone woman, lips pressed tightly shut while displaying a hand-drawn placard reading “Our awaaz is sharper than your batons” (Tumhari lathi se tez hamari awaaz hai). While the girl herself is visibly inaudible (lips sealed), her placard references the sharpness of a collective and yet singular (united) “voice”—“our voice” rather than “our voices.” The comparative reference to the sharpness of “batons” identifies this singular/collective awaaz as that of a collectivity called into being by the circulating earlier-described images of lathi-wielding police attacking student demonstrators on university campuses—images whose resonance in this poster reemerge as a “focal point of attention” around which a collectivity might assemble.16

Let us consider another digital poster (Figure 25), this one featuring an artistic rendering that seems to anticipate a hoped-for scene:17 an assembled crowd communicating “personal perspectives” (as Preety put it) by means of one-of-a-kind, hand-drawn placards, all the while enlisting their mobile phones to produce images of one another’s “personal perspectives” for circulation and amplification over social media. At the center of the image is an open-mouthed young man, apparently speaking in words. The people around him train their mobile phone cameras on the speaking man, presumably producing images and videos. The artistic rendering of the speaking man appears metaphorical, since the affordances of the assembly’s communicative infrastructure—the flesh-and-blood numbers filling city streets, displaying hand-drawn paper placards for mobile phone cameras—was less amenable to audible speech than to written words. This occurred to me only months later, while I was sifting through my photo and video library from that day and came across a video I had shot with my phone—an effort to capture the energetically audible awaaz of the crowd, both in its general din and roar as well as in the sporadic outbreaks of call-and-response chanting. Indeed, notwithstanding the striking primacy of the visual in the sensory landscape that day, the gathering was most certainly audible as well, the general hum punctuated by occasional outbursts of singing and chanting—perhaps most notably (and ubiquitously) the well-known call-and-response chant “Azaadi!” (Freedom!), which was composed in 2016 by Jawaharlal Nehru University’s (JNU) former student union president Kanhaiya Kumar, who was among the anti-CAA protest season’s most vociferous spokespeople and sought-after orators.

Digression: “Azaadi!”

In accounting for the resonance and ubiquity of the “Azaadi!” chant during the 2019–20 anti-CAA protests, it will be helpful to attend briefly to the chant’s lively backstory. A few years earlier, in the spring of 2016, JNU’s student union president, Kanhaiya Kumar, gave a speech at an on-campus rally in commemoration of the two-year anniversary of the execution of Kashmiri separatist Afzal Guru18—a speech on the basis of which a sedition case against Kumar was registered for raising “anti-national slogans.” The charge was dropped when a magisterial investigation appointed by the Delhi government found the charges unfounded, and upon Kumar’s release on bail he gave another on-campus speech in which he encouraged his fellow students to “free the nation” from the divisive forces of Hindutva, and during which he sang a call-and-response chant punctuated by the repetition of “Azaadi!”:

Hai haq hamara . . . Aazadi!

[It’s our right . . . Freedom!]

Hum lekar rahenge . . . Aazadi!

[We will grab it . . . Freedom!]

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Bhukhmari se . . . Aazadi!

[Freedom from starvation!]

Punjivaad se . . . Aazadi!

[Freedom from capitalism!]

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Brahmanvaad se . . . Aazadi!

[Freedom from Brahmanism!]

Hai haq hamara . . . Aazadi!

[It’s our right . . . Freedom!]

When Kumar’s “Azaadi!” refrain again stirred up talk of sedition, Kumar explained that in calling for azaadi he was demanding “not freedom from India, but freedom within India”;19 and in any event, as supporters were quick to note, Kumar’s “Azaadi!” was an adaptation from a 1991 chant raised during the Women’s Studies Conference in Kolkata’s Jadavpur University.20

Although the “JNU sedition row” eventually died down, the catchy “Azaadi!” chant had a spirited afterlife, most famously making an appearance in the 2019 Bollywood blockbuster Gully Boy, which was released just a few months prior to the August Kranti Maidan protest where I recorded the crowd chanting “Azaadi!” (and more on that in a minute). Gully Boy is a story about the rise to fame of a young Muslim hip-hop star born and raised in Mumbai’s film-famous neighborhood Dharavi—itself renowned for its starring role in Danny Boyle’s 2018 award-winning film Slumdog Millionaire; the entanglement between the “Azaadi!” chant’s on- and off-screen lives are such that Gully Boy’s rendering of the chant even references Danny Boyle’s film in its lyrics.21Gully Boy’s storyline is loosely based on the lives of actual Mumbai-born hip-hop star Naezy (born Naved Shaikh), who grew up in a low-income, Muslim-majority Mumbai neighborhood (not Dharavi, but rather Kurla), and of another Mumbai-based hip-hop star, a Christian-born artist named Divine (born Vivian da Silva Fernandes). Not only are the lives of Naezy and Divine the inspiration for the film Gully Boy, but the duo actually wrote and recorded many of the songs that were featured in the film, including a wildly popular track titled “Azaadi” that borrows lyrics and phrasing directly from Kumar’s controversial 2016 chant. The Gully Boy version (written by Naezy and another Mumbai artist, Dub Sharma) is a reworked and much-toned-down version of Kumar’s fiery chant—the primary difference being that all references to Hindutva or of forms of caste-based oppression were removed.22 As Gully Boy writer-director Zoya Akhtar explained to the media in the days before her film’s release: “My story is about class, about feeling oppressed by your class. It is about economic disparity, the divide between rich and poor. It represents the point of view of my character and his engagement with the society, his socio-economic space and his anger. My film is not about the caste system or JNU.”23 Azaadi!’s popularity during the anti-CAA protest season is thus bound up both with Kumar’s high-profile involvement with the protest demonstrations as well as with the just-released film Gully Boy and its wildly popular soundtrack—once again demonstrating the recursivity between onscreen and offscreen worlds. And yet notwithstanding the chant’s film-fueled familiarity, the version I heard chanted during the 2019–20 protests was not the Gully Boy version but rather the one delivered by Kumar upon his release from jail—with its energetic critique of Hindutva, casteism, and communalism front and center.

In the video I recorded at August Kranti Maidan, the “Azaadi!” chant is audible before the shaky image finds the awaaz’s source. The video then zooms in on a sea of placard-wielding people, scanning for moving mouths from which the audible words might be emanating, and eventually coming to rest on a cluster of people that seems to be the source. The chanting is barely audible over the din, and the quality of the video is deplorable. It was only in stumbling across the video (which I’d forgotten about) that I recalled that there had been chanting that day—or that I thought much about sound at all. Audio or video traces of the event were present neither in traditional nor social media, both of which attended primarily to visual content. It was only upon discovery in my library of the shaky-noisy video of the chant that I became aware of the material affordances of the crowd-as-infrastructure, which is markedly better disposed to the visual than to the audible: inscribed and visualized awaaz (words and drawings) were amenable to imaging, sharing, and posting, whereas audible awaaz (call-and-response collective chanting), while certainly contributing to the event’s mahol (atmosphere), did not circulate beyond the time-space of the gathering itself;24 indeed, of all the reposted images and videos from that day, I searched in vain for a reposted video of any collective chant. Watching the video, I strained to make out what the chanters were saying. Ultimately it was the visual cues—reading a man’s lips to make out the word “azaadi”—that enabled me to decipher what was being said.

All of which is to say: notwithstanding high-profile onstage speakers and sporadic outbursts of singing and call-and-response chants during the August Kranti Maidan event, sound was not the primary means by which awaaz was communicated. While the primacy of the visual at August Kranti initially took me by surprise, given that protest songs, sloganeering, and public oratory are staples of political life in India, it was precisely against this conventional ubiquity of sound that anti-CAA protesters sought to articulate “personal perspectives.” Indeed protest organizers pointed to potential dangers inhering in the anonymity of the audible, collective awaaz: in the days preceding the August Kranti event, messages were posted on Twitter pages and circulated through WhatsApp chat groups (which is where I saw them), warning that “infiltrators” might try to “disrupt and discredit” the peaceful event by raising “anti-national and anti-Hindu slogans” all the while hiding in the crowd. One digital poster read:

Important: For tomorrow, Thurs, Dec 19 protest.

This is contingency planning for a scenario if certain groups or individuals try to oppose or disrupt our protest event of Thurs, Dec 19th. When your movement grows to mammoth proportions, as ours is, chances are it will attract miscreants. If miscreants want to disrupt and discredit our protests, here is what they will want to happen

1. Cause mayhem, chaos, panic or violence
2. Force us into doing things that are unlawful
3. Get us to say things that are unlawful

How will they do it? One of their ways will be to mingle with you like protestors and chant unlawful/communal slogans (like anti-national slogans and anti-Hindu slogans), which they will later attribute to you.

In this context, where the ineluctable excess and unpredictability of crowd aesthetics posed a risk not merely of misinterpretation but even of intentional hijack, participants took pains to broadcast their personal perspectives as precisely as possible—not in collective awaaz but rather via uniquely crafted paper placards. If for Kunreuther, sticking with awaaz invites us to ask what democracy sounds like, the August Kranti protest thus prompts us to ask, What does the awaaz of democracy look like? How is the awaaz of democracy imaged and imagined? What are the material infrastructures by means of which awaaz-images are set in motion and circulated? What are the sensory affordances of the infrastructures mediating these awaaz “image-events”: the city spaces, mobile phone screens, paper placards, and proximate bodies?

Instalanguage

While the proximate public was certainly the first audience for the placards, it was not the only or final one. And yet the co-present participant-audience was a crucial component in this communicative infrastructure: those present had to be enjoined to notice a placard, to focus attention on it, to pause long enough to click a photo, and to appreciate it enough to post on their social media platform. Indeed, many placards were explicit in requesting and suggesting that proximate viewers put their social media accounts and networks to work in this way.

Amid the undulating crowd, a young man stood motionless, posing with his prominently displayed placard and locking eyes with a mobile phone camera. His poster dispatched with artistry (even color) altogether, the small-print text—messily scrawled onto torn paper—nearly impossible to decipher in the jostle and bustle of the throng and at any distance greater than a couple of meters; one had to stand directly in front of the placard for long enough to read it, and even then, the handwritten, roman-alphabet transliterated Urdu wasn’t easy to decipher. The nine hashtags at the bottom of the placard seem to explicitly enjoin people to enlist their phones—to photograph and post on social media, even suggesting hashtags. Obediently, I clicked a photo (Figure 27), making a mental note to read it later that evening (more on that in a minute).

The hand-drawn hashtags had caught my attention that day, but while scrolling through the thousands of images posted on social media over the following days I noticed that the young poet wasn’t alone; many posters sported hand-drawn hashtags. A bit of a social media rookie myself, I shared some of these images with a few of the more media-savvy among my research interlocutors and asked how to interpret the hashtags. To them, the hashtags were read both as literal suggestions for how people posting photographs might tag those images as well as a simple incorporation of “instalanguage” into everyday communication. Whether or not photo-clickers eventually posted images of placards on social media, the hashtags worked as an effort to “tag” the meaning in the dual sense that media anthropologists Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa describe—where the hashtag “serves as an indexing system in both the clerical and the semiotic sense.” In a clerical sense, hashtags “operate in ways similar to library call numbers: They locate texts within a specific conversation, allowing for their quick retrieval, while also marking texts as being ‘about’ a specific topic.” And in a semiotic sense, hashtags have an “intertextual potential to link a broad range of tweets on a given topic or disparate topics as part of an intertextual chain, regardless of whether, from a given perspective, these tweets have anything to do with one another.”25 As “instalanguage,” hashtags are efforts to mark a text as being potentially “about” something—efforts (rather than accomplishments) because (unlike the relative stability of library indexing systems) hashtags are much more dynamic than library call numbers, constantly changing and in-formation in relation to perceptions of whatever else is happening.26

Preety messaged me a few days after the August Kranti Maidan gathering, asking me to send any interesting photos I might have clicked, and sharing with me her own favorites. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of the photos that comprised her Instagram “story” were close-up images of placards. Indeed, the days following the initial gathering at Mumbai’s August Kranti Maidan witnessed an explosion of imagery in both traditional and social media (as well as traditional media posted on social media) of clever-placard imagery, as people shared and reposted photos of one another’s paper posters.

Speaking with Preety by phone, I asked how had she known in advance to make a placard. For that matter, how did anyone know to make placards? Had she discussed it with anyone beforehand? Did her colleagues also make and carry placards? And most importantly, how had she decided what to write on hers? She paused to consider the questions, then told me, “See, going to the protest was an emotional decision.” It was “emotion” that impelled her “to take action” and join the protest, she explained, but more importantly, “to take a placard to explain the specific reason I was going.” I asked her to say more about her “strong emotions,” and Preety explained how over the previous months she’d been watching her father’s social media consumption with deepening despair:

He’s been watching these YouTube and WhatsApp videos and forwards . . . news which is very biased. Social media basically shows you what you want to see. My dad’s WhatsApp and Facebook are filled with pro-BJP content whereas mine . . . mine is not. It’s not his fault, he doesn’t even realize it’s happening to him—that he’s being made to believe certain things without questioning . . . because he doesn’t know what’s authentic and what’s not.

She tells me about a heated exchange on her family chat on the morning of the protest. “My family members got on WhatsApp and started saying that ‘a dangerous protest by Muslims is going to happen and there could be trouble so everyone should stay away.’ I messaged back that ‘It’s not a protest by Muslims. It is by those Indians who are against CAA.’” She forwards me the screenshot of the chat—which she’s overlaid with commentary and (of course) posted on Instagram (Figure 29).

Preety recalled how her family’s (especially her father’s) social-media-fueled opposition to the protest had “triggered” her. Earlier, she explained, “I could never have imagined myself making a placard and going to a protest, but I was so angry.” For Preety, moreover, emotion and reason are inextricably intertwined: it was her anger that impelled her to write up a poster in order to “explain clearly” her “reason” for opposing the CAA. She continued: “I wanted to explain clearly that this has nothing to do with politics, that it’s a constitutional matter. I can explain this easily when I sit down with someone to have a conversation,” Preety tells me, recalling how she’d “sat down” with her parents to read sections of the Constitution together—again posting images overlaid with commentary on her Instagram (see Figure 30). “But at a protest, how can you make that kind of explanation? So I wanted to condense my perspective. That’s why I put it on a placard. It was impromptu. I just tore some cardboard into pieces and made it right there on the train platform. I thought: maybe someone will capture it in a photo and post it somewhere.”

As Preety makes clear—and as the hashtags suggest was the case more broadly—her paper placard was crafted with the precise goal that it be photographed and that those images be circulated over social media by other crowd participants. The infrastructure of the embodied crowd (the streets that afforded material proximity of placard-wielding individuals) and the infrastructures of circulation and amplification of those communicative acts (the photographing and circulating of those images), in other words, were one and the same. The very same people performed both the work of articulating their “personal perspectives” on paper placards and of selecting and amplifying resonant messages.

The emphasis on personal perspectives and emotions at the August Kranti gathering, along with the ubiquity of one-of-a-kind handcrafted posters, is a striking contrast from the visual uniformity characterizing the rally described in chapter 2—where participants dressed up in identical hats and scarves, carried uniform party flags, and participated explicitly in order to contribute to a singular image: the “size and strength of the rally.” In contrast with the electoral rally-show, the August Kranti gathering was almost entirely devoid of political party flags, save a smattering of banners bearing the logo of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). The only ubiquitous visual sign was the Indian flag. Indeed, the visual space of the August Kranti gathering was explicitly nonpartisan (a subject I take up in the next chapter)—notwithstanding the fact that almost everyone I spoke to expressed party preferences. Standing on a raised platform at the edge of the crowd, I had been chatting with a man (visibly Muslim, his taqiya27 and forehead prayer bump announcing Islamic piety) who looked to be in his sixties who introduced himself as an architect and told me that this was first time he joined a morcha (protest demonstration or rally). As we’re chatting, some excited hullabaloo becomes evident amid the throngs. The architect points a finger and says: “There’s our MLA!” I look up to recognize the face of a seasoned Congress Party politician. The architect calls out to the politician by name; the latter turns his head in our direction, smiles, and waves. And yet notwithstanding such affinities, party identity had no place in the awaaz-image of “the people of India” that the gathering sought to articulate and represent.

Kaaghaz, Khoon, Constitution

It wasn’t until I got home that evening and transferred photos from my phone to my computer that I had time to consider the poem that the young man had written out and marked with hashtags (see Figure 27):

Jinko suraj meri chowkhat se mila karta tha

Ab woh khairat me dete hue ujale mujhko;

Jang me kagazi afraad se kya hota hai[?]

Hausla ladta hai tadaad se, kya hota hai

Translated literally, the poem says something like:

Those who got sunlight from my threshold,

Now in charity they are giving light to me;

In war, what’s the power of paper?

Courage fights through numbers [tadaad].

Put differently, the poem is saying something like this:

The people themselves are the actual source of the government’s power/authority (“sunlight”), but the government is behaving as if that same power originates with the government, to be doled out to the people as charity. But the powerlessness of the government’s regime of paper is nothing when confronted with the courage and strength of our actual (flesh-and-blood) numbers [taadad].28

The poem levels a scathing critique at the government’s pretensions to power—its claim to have a self-proclaimed authority to adjudicate citizenship and national belonging based on the existence or absence of some or another bit of paper—kaaghaz—which is counterposed with flesh-and-blood numbers (tadaad). In counterposing kaaghaz with the embodied, fleshy strength of human presence, the young poet’s use of kaaghaz reflects long-standing use of the word in Urdu poetry. The recurrence of the word kaaghaz during the CAA-NPR-NRC protests in Mumbai (on placards; in poems, written and recited) caught my attention—not least because kaaghaz isn’t a word often used by Mumbaikars (whether speaking English, Marathi, Hindi, or Urdu) when describing their various identity documents (ration cards, voter IDs, PAN cards, etc.); these things are generally referred to not as kaaghaz (as is more common in North India) but rather as “documents,” or more colloquially as “proofs.”

In the course of my research on regimes of documentation in Mumbai—on water politics; on slum surveys, on neighborhood upgrading and popular housing—I’d rarely (if ever) heard anyone say anything like “The officers are asking for my kaaghaz” or “I have to bring copies of my kaaghaz” over to some or another government office. And yet colleagues working in other Indian cities—Calcutta, Delhi, and Lucknow—maintain that kaaghaz is in fact sometimes used to refer to such documents. Curious about whether perhaps I’d simply overlooked kaaghaz all these years, I WhatsApped the question to colleagues and friends working in Mumbai, starting with a well-known Mumbai artist and housing activist (and longtime friend) named Simpreet, who grew up in North India is thereby attuned to regional differences:

Lisa: Simpreet, can I ask you a quick question? In Gowandi and so on, when people talk about their documents/proofs, do they ever use the word kaaghaz?

Simpreet: “Proof kya hai” [They’d ask “what is your proof”]

Simpreet: also “document”

Lisa: I’ve never heard people use “kaaghaz” but colleagues in other cities say that “kaaghaz” is used—in Delhi etc.

Simpreet: In north

Simpreet: Not here

Lisa: why do you think that’s the case?

Simpreet: Not sure

Curiosity piqued, I posed the same question to three Bombay ethnographers having document-related research projects. The first did a word search in her multilingual fieldnotes, reporting back that “‘document’ is there everywhere” and “I don’t see kaaghaz actually.” A second recalled that people refer to “specific papers,” adding that “I’ve never heard the word kaaghaz.” A third colleague was the notable exception that seems to prove the rule, reporting that kaaghaz was indeed quite commonly heard in her research—which she carried out among migrants hailing from North India. Wondering whether kaaghaz might be more common among Bombay’s native Urdu speakers, I WhatsApped a friend who teaches in a secondary school in the Urdu-speaking South Bombay neighborhood of Nagpada:

Lisa: when people in your area talk about their identity papers (ration cards, pan cards and so on), what word do they use?

N: Documents

Lisa: do you ever hear/use “kaaghaz”?

N: No

N: If they hv to show somewhere they always say I hv my documents.

Lisa: is “kaaghaz” used only poetically then?

N: Yaa

Indeed, with the ambivalence toward paper documents the crux of the anti-CAA movement, kaaghaz emerged as key problematic, especially in protest poetry. The ubiquity of Urdu poetry during the anti-CAA protest season has been widely noted.29 In one of the most prominent instances, two days after the December 19 gathering, Bombay-based writer and standup comedian Varun Grover posted a video of himself on his Twitter page, reading his just-penned poem “Hum Kaaghaz Nahi Dikhayenge” (We will not show papers)—a passionate call for mass civil disobedience that begins by declaring: “Dictators will come and go, our kaaghaz [papers] we won’t show.”

Raise your batons and shut down the trains all you want;

We will walk and walk . . . and we won’t show kaaghaz

. . . We will save the constitution before we go;

and we won’t show kaaghaz . . .

. . . You will try to divide us by caste and religion;

we will continue to demand only our rights to food

We won’t show kaaghaz

We won’t show kaaghaz

Varun Grover introduces his Twitter-circulated video recitation of the poem with a simple dedication: “Inspired by the spirit of every protestor and India lover. With Hat Tips to Rahat Indori Saab.” By the time Grover tweeted his poem, the media sphere was already saturated with images of posters bearing renowned Urdu poet Rahat Indori’s pithy, poignant couplet (e.g., see Figure 31)—the very same couplet, notably, that Junaid (our Urdu orator) had shared with me two years earlier as an inspirational example (see chapter 3):

Sabhi ka khoon hai shaamil yahan ki mitti mein

Kisi ke baap ka Hindustan thodi hai

Everyone’s blood is mixed together in this soil.

Hindustan doesn’t belong to anyone’s daddy

The resonance of Indori’s couplet—which itself became a ubiquitous anti-CAA protest anthem—inheres in the particular way it envisions the relationship of blood (khoon) to soil (mithi) and national belonging (Hindustan), a relationship quite different from that envisioned by Hindutva and institutionalized in the CAA. As anthropologists Dwaipayan Banerjee and Jacob Copeman have explained, the notion of a “shared community of blood” is both “a medium and conceptual resource for Hindutva practice.”30 Tracing how the notion of the “blood community” is entailed in Hindutva, Banerjee and Copeman demonstrate how the CAA is both an iteration and culmination of Hindutva’s “hematological geography”:

The CAA is a punitive legal manifestation of a long-standing claim . . . that ancient inhabitants of India shared a common blood-tie, only recently betrayed and broken by the recent conversion of some to Islam. Because of this shared consanguinity, Muslims could return to the fold, if only they were to give up their allegiance to Mecca. The implications of this Hindutva’s knotting together of geography and blood (based on an implicit assumption that Muslim blood had now been recently contaminated by conversion) reveals itself in the logic of the CAA.31

Hindutva’s ideological equating of blood with national territory, and the insistence on Indian Muslims’ primordial “blood tie” to Hinduism, demands they either “reassimilate” to Hindutva or else suffer the inevitable consequences of their betrayal: the delegitimation of their claims to belonging and citizenship. Indori’s couplet breezily dismisses this hematological history and geography, supplanting the ideology of primordial blood ties with the actual history of cohabitation and mixing in a territory whose very ground is the substance of that mixing: “Everyone’s blood is mixed together in this soil.” Meanwhile, the verse’s second line meets Hindutva’s righteous allegations of “disloyalty” with a gentle, teasing rebuke deserved of a schoolyard bully: “Hindustan doesn’t belong to anyone’s daddy.”

While Indori’s couplet comprises the final lines in a ghazal (lyric poem) that the author penned thirty-five years earlier (and in a context that Indori himself could not recall),32 the salience among anti-CAA protesters of Indori’s articulation of khoon-based belonging is clear enough: a historical corrective to the imaginary of khoon in Hindutva’s exclusionary articulations of citizenship. As early as the Jamia protest on December 15, 2019, photographs of placards bearing Indori’s couplet filled the mediascape. And its resonance was such that not only the couplet but its reconceptualized version of khoon (and also Hindustan) began turning up on placards, where it was often explicitly counterposed with kaaghaz.33 Rewatching my video of the Azaadi chanters at August Kranti, for instance, my attention fell on a paper placard that inadvertently got caught in the camera frame (see Figure 26):

Hum paper se Hindustani nahi; hum khoon se Hindustani hai

We aren’t Hindustani by virtue of paper; we’re Hindustani by blood

It was a slogan that, by the time I stumbled upon it in my video still, I had seen a myriad of times—in images of paper placards at protest gatherings from all corners of India, where they had been photographed, posted, and circulated through social media (see, e.g., Figure 32).

In making sense of the protest valence of kaaghaz, it is thus helpful to consider the uses of the term in the Urdu poetic tradition and to attend to explicit references to Urdu poetics in both the form and substance of anti-CAA poetry, placards, and imagery. In the following verse, for instance, kaaghaz appears (rather straightforwardly) as a way to characterize something as inauthentic or even deceptive:

Kitne hi kushnuma inhen yaaro banaiye

titli kabhi na baithegi kaaghaz ke phool par34

No matter how beautiful they appear,

butterflies will never sit on paper flowers35

And yet when used to describe written correspondences (especially love letters), kaaghaz changes its normative valence entirely, the papery materiality now idealized as a medium for conveying intimate feelings:

Khat pe khat likhiyega ai shah-savar

ghodi kaaghaz ki bhi daudaiyega.36

Oh gallant knight,

How about setting some paper horses [ghodi kaaghaz] in motion as well.37

That kaaghaz is up to this task—delivering love, unscathed and intact—is evidenced in the physical and material effects that the absence of kaaghaz-mediated love inflicts on heart and body of the snubbed lover:

Hae lay ana koi qasid-e-dilbar kaaghaz

ho gaya gham se hamara tan-e-laghar kaaghaz38

Alas! No messenger has arrived to bring any beloved letters

[dilbar kaaghaz; i.e., letters penned by the beloved]

my body is emaciated from grief, like brittle paper [laghar kaaghaz]39

In this couplet, kaaghaz appears twice. First, kaaghaz is the material embodiment of love itself: “dilbar kaaghaz” means something like “paper infused with love” or “love incarnated as paper.” The second use of kaaghaz then describes the material effects—weakness and pain—of dilbar kaaghaz’s absence: the body of the snubbed lover becomes laghar kaaghaz—brittle, fragile paper.

“Please Understand the Chronology”

In her research in the government offices responsible for an employment scheme in the North Indian state of Uttarakhand, anthropologist Nayanika Mathur characterizes India’s “government of paper” (kaaghazi sarkar) as the site of a kind of Orwellian double-speak: “Senior officials would scold their juniors for maintaining progress only on paper while simultaneously ordering them to look after the paperwork properly for, after all, what really counted was what was on paper.”40 Mathur observes how, on the one hand, allegations by higher-ups against field officers that some actual work remained only “on paper” (kaaghaz pe) served as a critical evaluation of the sorry state of on-the-ground activity—what Orwell famously described as “doublethink” in 1984: “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them.”41 And yet, at the same time, Mathur observes how those same higher-ups would instruct lower-level functionaries to “fix” reports such that “on-paper” records remained in order.42 Indeed as anthropologists John Harriss and Craig Jeffrey point out, the historical and ethnographic record presents “abundant evidence of the significance of caste, class and gender privilege” in patterns of access and exclusion, and reveals the central role of political actors and agents in putting papers to work in reproducing or contesting those entrenched patterns.43

And yet, as demonstrated in chapter 1, registering things “on paper” and putting those papers to work in creative ways are also sites at which entrenched hierarchies are regularly obviated (even if this is not the most common outcome). Regimes of documentation present possibilities of resource access as well as the danger of foreclosure of such access; the difference resides not in some characteristic of paper per se (or in any particular paper document itself) but rather in processes and practices by means of which papers are put to work by their handlers.44 The loss or lack of access to things such as municipal services, housing, education, livelihood, and even suffrage is not ascribed to papers as such (their existence or want; their realness or forgery), nor to the regulatory regimes, policies, or programs within which documents become necessary, but rather to the human-centered processes and agentive practices of putting those regimes to work—notwithstanding the existence, absence, or appraised authenticity of any particular piece of paper. The crucial difference between paper documents that are treated as “genuine” and those treated as “duplicate” inheres neither in some document’s origins nor in some material quality of some document in itself, but rather in the real-time work by means of which some documents are rendered efficacious while others are not.45

That kaaghaz is simultaneously the site of violent exclusion as well as of potential promise of overcoming those same exclusions yields a great ambivalence in India toward paper documents—which are sign and substance of both possibilities. Indeed, as Varun Grover’s powerful poem makes clear, the call for civil disobedience is not tantamount to denying the value of documents per se; Grover’s poem does not declare, for instance, that “we will destroy our paper documents because they are meaningless,” but rather “we will not show our paper documents in this particular context”—that is, in conjunction with the CAA-NPR-NRC combination. The critique of kaaghaz is thus not of paper documents per se but rather of their enlistment in this particular context and way.

This centering of the intentioned use rather than the material fact of documents as the target of anti-CAA critique is evidenced in the debate that erupted in the media over whether or not the CAA was linked to the creation of a National Registry of Citizens. With protesters pouring into streets in cities across India, the BJP government and its supporters tried to suggest that the CAA and NRC exercises were completely separate. “There is no question of joining CAA with NRC,” Union Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad stated at a press conference on Tuesday, December 17, 2019—two days after images of police violence against protesting students in Delhi had gone viral.46 And yet detractors were quick to point out precisely that link been clearly stated on multiple occasions by the BJP home minister. Protesters drew attention to a post made by the home minister earlier that year (on May 2019) in which he lays out the intended sequencing on his Twitter page: “First we will pass the Citizenship Amendment bill and ensure that all the refugees from the neighboring nations get the Indian citizenship. After that, NRC will be made and we will detect and deport every infiltrator from our motherland” (see Figure 33).

Within a week of the act’s passage into law, the video from earlier that year (seven months before the CAA was passed into law) in which the home minister enjoins the public to “chronology samajh lijiye”—“please understand the chronology”—went viral on social media. The phrase quickly set off what one media outlet described as a “Hilarious Meme-Fest” on Twitter, mocking the government for downplaying the obvious (and alarming) implications of the CAA as a matter of mere “chronology.”47 And unsurprisingly, “please understand the chronology” quickly became a staple of hand-drawn paper placards.

Given the dual valence of kaaghaz, it was the specification of the government’s intended use of paper documents so clearly stated in the home minister’s “aap chronology samajh lijiye” speech that rendered kaaghaz a protest-season epithet—a shorthand dismissal of the cynical proposal to treat mere paper documents as if they were the actual embodiment of citizenship.

“The Only Document That Matters”

Amid all the talk of the capriciousness of paper as sign and substance of citizenship, one particular document was held up as the infallible substance through which belonging actually could be adjudicated: the Indian Constitution. Preety’s handmade placard was part of a genre that grounded critique of the CAA not by questioning the appropriateness of deducing citizenship status from identity documents per se, by rather by citing the constitutional prohibition on differential application of law. “All the articles in our Constitution can be amended, but the Preamble . . . cannot,” a Bombay High Court lawyer told the media that had gathered outside the courthouse January 2020 to record seventy lawyers reading aloud the Preamble to the Indian Constitution. Another lawyer explained how the CAA is unconstitutional in two ways: “Firstly, it violates Article 14 of the Constitution, which says nobody should be denied equality before the law. Secondly, it also violates Article 15, which prohibits discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth.”48 The gathering of lawyers in Mumbai was of a piece with similar gatherings across the country; Preamble readings took place in Lucknow, Delhi, and Chennai, leading one reporter to conclude that “in the anti-CAA agitation where ‘Kaaghaz Nahin Dikhayenge’ is the raging intonation,49 the Preamble is the only document that matters, that protesters display like the defining proof of their citizenship.”50 And significantly, protesters did not merely display paper printouts of the Preamble, but read aloud from those paper printouts as well—echoing the dual meaning of awaaz, which conveys audible sound as well as individual voice or “personal perspective.”51 Assembling to read aloud (and in unison) from paper printouts of the Preamble, the gatherings at once asserted the authenticity and individuality of voicing subjects (awaaz as “personal perspective”) while emphasizing the crucial importance of subjectivity’s material mediations: paper, sound, cameras.

Paper’s materiality sits at the heart of both valences of kaaghaz. On the one hand, the Constitution’s solid dependability is attributed to its character as dilbar kaaghaz: a material embodiment of equality before law, written down for anyone to consult and cite.52 And on the other hand, the capricious character of governmental documentary practices is such a truism that it has long been a theme in popular satire. For example, in Hindi satirist Harishankar Parsai’s mid-twentieth-century story Bholaram Ka Jeev (The soul of Bholaram) the punch line has the missing-in-action soul (jeev) of recently deceased, impoverished former government peon Bholaram eventually found hiding inside his own file folder in the dusty government office—refusing to go to heaven until Bholaram’s file is approved. The story is funny, and darkly so, because (so the story goes) the soul properly resides in the earthly body until death sets it free; it does not get waylaid in a dusty government file waiting for approval. The story is darkly funny, in other words, because it plays out the all-too-familiar experience of paper-mediated injustices to an absurd conclusion. Similarly, the CAA-NPR-NRC combine was such a shocking affront because it sought to institutionalize and empower a notion so widely accepted as ludicrous as to be the subject of a satirical literary genre: that paper documents in themselves are the substance of citizenship—an idea that shamelessly treats kaaghaz ke phool (mere paper flowers) as if it were dilbar kaaghaz (paper embodying and conveying authentic love).

Amid the outrage, legal scramble, mass protests, and police violence, the home minister gave a TV interview (widely circulated on social media, which is where I saw it).53 In the interview, he sought to deflect the conversation from the flood of concerns raised over what the CAA-NPR-NRC combine would mean for the millions of Indians without identity documents, assuring all non-Muslims that “all the Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Christians, they will get citizenship. . . . We want to walk up to them and give them citizenship. They wouldn’t be asked for any documents [dastavez].”54 Whatever his intention in giving the speech, the meaning that the home minister’s words conveyed was clear enough: the power of documents does not inhere in the paper per se, but unfolds processually and discretionally—in the power-inflected contexts and encounters by means of which papers are produced (or not produced), empowered (or declared doubtful), and declared effective (or deficient).55 While Shah’s words presumably hoped to calm the nerves of the millions of non-Muslims scrambling to get their documents in order, it affirmed suspicions among Muslims that not even their documents could save them from being stripped of citizenship.

“To See and to Do”

Back at August Kranti Maidan, the dual valence of kaaghaz was on full display: just as the whimsical mediations of kaaghaz were discursively counterposed with the embodied realness of khoon (blood) and strength of tadaad (numbers), the very people comprising the tadaad had inscribed critiques of kaaghaz on kaaghaz itself—writing by hand their personal critiques of paper on paper placards. This enlisting of paper as an ideal medium of intimate ideas and “personal perspectives,” moreover, wasn’t incidental. Preety, for instance, explicitly contrasted the affordance of paper placards with that of the digital, explaining to me how with digital media “you don’t know what’s authentic and what’s not. But when I write on a placard, you can’t alter that.”56 Preety thus characterizes the material affordances of paper precisely as that of authenticity. It wouldn’t have sufficed to sit at home and make digital posters; they had to be written on paper—handwritten on paper even—in order to faithfully convey personal perspective. At the same time, the digital (while perhaps unreliable in itself) has its own role to play in the conveyance of authenticity. “If my placard is captured in a photo and someone captures and shares it,” Preety explained, “then I’ve shared my personal perspective and point of view.” While paper mediates authenticity, the sociomaterial infrastructure by means of which that authenticity is “captured and shared” encompasses the digital as well.

How did protest-goers make sense of this apparent contradiction between kaaghaz as medium and message? I posed the question to my friend Rohit, who’d carried a paper placard explicitly critiquing the duplicitousness of kaaghaz at a protest a week later on Azad Maidan (see Figure 36). While I wasn’t present at the Azad Maidan event, I had seen an image of his paper placard on a mutual friend’s Instagram page, recognized Rohit, and rang him up. I asked if he found it ironic that he wrote his critique of paper on paper. He found the question silly: “Oh the material could have been anything. It didn’t make a difference that it was paper. It could have been written on anything.” He explained that it wasn’t even important to him to carry a placard at all; to him, the important thing was to actually go: “That motion of going for something . . . to take time out to actually do something.” He recounted to me how he had seen the images of the young women at Jamia—sheltering their bleeding friend and scolding the lathi-wielding police—as well as the images of the elderly women of Shaheen Bagh braving the bitter cold and hostile Delhi authorities to block traffic in peaceful protest. “Those old Muslim women, they’ve paralyzed the government! Because see, the government can’t have the visual of physically removing these old women. That was so inspiring. I thought, ‘Sure, I can just go on with my own life,’ but I thought, ‘Like them, you too should disrupt your own life! Get involved with what’s around you. Take time out, to see and to do.’” That’s why it was important, he explained, to “actually be there.” This importance of embodied presence is why it was so necessary to physically assemble—both in flesh and with hand-inscribed placards—rather than, say, simply tweet from home, or (as in the next chapter) draw up petitions, gather lawyers, and go on delegations to elected officials and government ministers and so on.

If the ultimate audience for the placard-mediated content—amplified by the camera-wielding participant-public—was the one scrolling through the bazillion digital images of the paper placards circulated over social media during and after the event, then what was the point of traveling all the way downtown to gather at August Kranti Maidan? That is, if the final goal was to have one’s “personal perspective” communicated over digital platforms, why not just stay at home, design a cool poster, and then post it on social media? The question, at first glance, seems ridiculous, because obviously—intuitively—there’s a difference between sweating it out under the midday sun to wave a placard and chant “Azaadi!” amid the jostle and bustle of the crowd, on the one hand, and, on the other, sitting at home under the ceiling fan designing a poster while listening to the Bollywood remake of Kanhaiya Kumar’s no-longer-“seditious” chanting of “Azaadi!” on Spotify. Something important happens between the act of crafting a paper placard and the digitally mediated encounter with some placard’s images by an appreciative (or unappreciative) public. What, then, are the communicative affordances of the crowd itself?

Notwithstanding the urge “to see and to do,” Rohit explained to me that he hadn’t gone to the August Kranti Maidan anti-CAA protest the previous week, because he “didn’t agree” with the premise whereby “space is demarcated by the state to ‘protest.’” He explained: “The whole point of a protest is to disrupt! Where you are permitted to protest, it isn’t a space of disruption. A protest is supposed to shut down the road.” That’s what made the women of Shaheen Bagh so powerful, he explained: they had disrupted the capital, had shut down a public road without permission. “What’s the point of a protest if it’s in a garden? The government gives us the permission and then says ‘go and play your role’—that’s not a protest!”

In Rohit’s reading, the “organized” and “permitted” character of the August Kranti protest turned it into a piece of theater—not a real protest but a dramatization of one: a “protest” (in scare quotes) in which participants were simply invited to “play their roles.” Identifying the protest gathering as theater had turned Rohit off to the demonstration, but not because the theatricality made it somehow deceptive—“only natak” in a disparaging sense.57 Indeed, the conveners had taken care not only to secure all the proper permissions but also to make sure that it was public knowledge that they had done so. For Rohit, the problem with the event’s theatricality was simply that, to his mind, this wasn’t the time for “protest” but rather for (unvirgolated) protest—protest that is not “allowed” and which thereby “disrupts.”58

Like many young people I spoke to, Rohit was somewhat new to protest politics; he recalled having participated in demonstrations on only “a couple” of occasions prior to December 2019. In this context, Rohit recounted how he had initially been shocked by what he saw on social media in the days following the August Kranti gathering—by how many people had turned up (unofficial police estimates put the turnout around 100,000, although the officially reported number was 25,000) and by the visuals: “there was such a cross section of society . . . office-goers next to Muslims wearing caps and hijabs, and the mix of students and liberals—it was the first time I saw that.” He was moved as well by the wave of popular mobilizations across India: “This was the first time I could remember that there were so many protests cropping up all over the country.” Rohit recalled that he realized he’d initially misunderstood the point of the protest: “It wasn’t about disruption or breaking anything, but something else.” Inspired by the “mood of the moment,” as he put it, he revised his earlier judgment—that the “organized” character of the protest rendered it meaningless (“what’s the point?”)—and headed downtown to the Azad Maidan protest a few days later.

Rohit had joined a group of his artist friends for a placard-painting session before hopping the train toward Azad Maidan, but he hadn’t written up a poster at his friend’s house in the western suburbs. “I would have said something in that form—on a placard—if I had thought of something clever. See,” he explains, “the thing about placards is that they have to say something smart, something that stands out. A point that can catch attention in the midst of a whole group. I’m always looking for a poster that stands out. You have to make your point quickly—jump in and jump out! But nothing came to mind.”

But it didn’t matter to him that he hadn’t thought up anything satisfying enough to write up a placard; unlike Preety, he wasn’t going because he had something particular that he wanted to say with words. To him, the most important thing (as he put it) was “to move with people who don’t move in same circles as me; to stand there together.” Rohit explained that he while regularly interacts with Muslim Mumbaikars through his work, “they still look at me as different because I’m not Muslim.” To Rohit, it was important to physically go to the Azad Maidan so that other people there would see him—so that “people from the Muslim community would see that there are people who don’t look them but who are also against CAA-NRC and who are there to support.” For Rohit, his body was its own “placard” that conveyed a distinctive message: that Muslim Indians were not alone in their opposition to CAA.

Rohit had gotten on the train empty-handed, but somewhere along the hour-long ride downtown inspiration struck: “Kaaghaz ke Fools” (Paper fools)—a reference to the 1959 Guru Dutt film Kaaghaz ke Phool (Paper flowers). “See, the whole CAA-NRC thing was about kaaghaz,” Rohit says, recalling that Varun Grover had been listed among the speakers for the Azad Maidan event, and that he had been looking forward to hearing Grover recite “Hum Kaaghaz Nahi Dikhayenge,” which Rohit had seen the poet recite on Twitter. “I liked the poem,” Rohit explained; “I liked how he had recited it very plainly. Because of the poem, everyone started reading up on this CAA thing, asking, ‘What is this kaaghaz?’” And yet even while Rohit recalled his excitement about hearing the onstage speakers, they weren’t the reason he was going. After all, he reflected, “I could just have listened to the speeches later on YouTube.” Rather, for Rohit, the point of actually going was “to see and to do.” And drawing up his paper placard over the course of the hour-long train journey from the western suburbs was part of the doing.59

Rohit’s “Kaaghaz ke Fool” poster was a hit. “There I was,” he recalled, “sitting next to scores of Muslim men—men dressed in Pathan suits60 or wearing the cap and with surma [charcoal] in the eyes, identifiably Muslim men. Here they were wanting to take photos of me and of my placard! Some people even posed for photos with me. I was really happy.” Indeed, while Rohit’s intended audience—both that of his visibly non-Muslim self as well as that of his clever placard—was first and foremost the other protest participants and their mobile phone cameras. While the materiality of the digital and of embodied presence are once again revealed to be parts of a shared communicative infrastructure, for Rohit the digitally mediated encounter is secondary, even instrumentalized as the mere pretext for the flesh-and-blood embodied experience. The most important thing was the “moving together” with “those who don’t look like you.” It is in this moving together that “we the people of India” sought to constitute itself as a mass political subject, and to render sensible its collective awaaz.