‘Hum kaagaz nahi dikhayenge (We will not show our papers)’ has become a battle cry of those protesting the CAA and the NRC. Within days of lyricist-comedian Varun Grover reciting it at Mumbai’s Azad Maidan on December 21, the poem inspired spinoffs featuring Jawaharlal Nehru University and the Gateway of India.
At the same time, Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s ‘Hum Dekhenge’—which he wrote to protest the Zia-ul-Haq regime in Pakistan—became a point of contention after students at IIT Kanpur sang it. Soon, protesters across India started singing and sharing it. The poem even got translated into several languages.
The CAA, ever since it came into being last December, has inspired scores of young protesters who are putting their emotions into words to drive home the message of unity and oneness. For instance, Mandar Shinde, a 36-year-old from Pune, wrote his lines 24 hours before joining a protest. At midnight, surrounded by fellow protesters, he sang aloud, ‘Natak hai bhai natak hai, yeh Hindu Muslim natak hai...(It’s all a ruse, a Hindu-Muslim ruse)’, to thunderous applause. In Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh, writer Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee wrote: “Come to Shaheen Bagh...If you want to see ripples of light in the heart of darkness, come to Shaheen Bagh....”
Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee
The wide popularity social media generates has led youngsters to become performance artists on stage; the stage being the streets, college campuses or even dusty roadsides.
Poetry has a long history of resisting oppression and rallying support in the face of overwhelming odds; the ongoing protests are part of that legacy. “Oral traditions are quite strong in our part of the world,” says Faiz Ullah, assistant professor, Centre for the Study of Contemporary Culture, School of Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences. “People continue to turn up in large numbers to hear poets and balladeers. Inexpensive poetry collections still form a large part of sales for booksellers. Public discourse has been corrupted to such an extent that it has become impossible for most people, it seems, to tell truth apart from lies. In this context, poetry offers people a way of expressing themselves, which is not immediately reducible to simple meanings and, by extension, narrow ideologies.”
Some of the more popular poems are ‘Tum Kaun Ho Be? (Who are you?)’ by screenwriter Puneet Sharma, ‘Hindustani Musalmaan’ by Hussain Haidry and ‘Sab Yaad Rakha Jayega (All will be remembered)’ by Aamir Aziz. “I have been vocal about being a Muslim who is an Indian first,” says Haidry. “Why don’t we simply take off our glasses and look at the society with just one lens, that of unity?”
‘Bella Ciao’, an Italian song about resisting fascism, has also been employed at protests. Journalist Sugata Srinivasaraju and wife, Rosy D’souza, who is an award-wining poet, worked on developing the Kannada version of the Italian folk song. “It is original poetry that we adapted to the ‘Bella Ciao’ tune because we wanted to set it to the current mood and to the pain of divisive politics,” says Sugata.
Rappers, too, have rallied to the cause by creating ‘protest rap.’ Shumais Nazar, a student at Jamia Millia Islamia, released his song ‘Streetocracy’ in January; it was shared widely.
Santhanam Srinivasan (known as EPR), who released a rap online, says, “I speak about social ills to spread awareness. This is a call to people to rebel against the high-handedness of the government.”