I want to begin with a small anecdote, though I admit anecdotes may seem out of place in all of this. I also admit that in August, India confronts the monumentality of events like independence. Yet, I believe history is the combination of the personal and the public. The anecdote and the event.
Mine is a simple story. A few years ago, I used to spend time in cafes frequented by journalists. It was an enormous learning event. One understood journalism as a craft. One realised the difficulties of reportage. I was told that reportage is generally presented as a linear event when events are much more complex in time and space. I realised the importance of this again in the last few weeks, when I was listening to the protest movements.
Protest is presented as a linear event—as a simple opposition between protest and governance—when it is much more complicated. I also realised that government language is important. The ruling regime sometimes regiments words, so that meaning becomes an act of conscription. Journalists pointed out that both the word ‘history’ and the nation state have been subject to officialisation. History is often communalised and the nation state ignores the plurality of the national movement.
I remembered this discussion during the recent weeks when two other concepts came up for constant discussion—one was the word ‘youth’ and other was the future.
Two events changed the landscape of discussion. The first was the victory of Vijay in Tamil Nadu politics. Vijay has to be understood semiotically. His movies convey the same message. It is the dreams of youth. Youth is not a cadre, like the DMK, but a network of friendships, a coordination of peer groups. Vijay swept the elections this time and people are still trying to understand his victory. Vijay can be best understood with the metaphor of his dance.
Vijay’s dance is confident—he offers choreography to challenge party cadres. He seems to indicate that dance expands both individuality and the social. But it does serve in a tentative way. The tentativeness of his messages, the hope it offers, and the body language of his politics offers a message for the youth. The protest of youth is a dream and a protest which says no, goes beyond negation to the language of yes. To the dream of alternatives.
The other event one has to look at is the protest of Sonam Wangchuk. In a simple sense, it was a protest against leak of NEET pre-medical test papers. But the enactment of protest was much more diverse and plural. Many students came out of concern and curiosity. There was an element of tentativeness, openness. There was a conviviality of protest.
Here, the youth protest was a commons of doubt, and many of the protest became acts of conversation and dialogue between different groups that had never met. Dialogue was a key to the protests. The students wished to articulate the positions and explain them. They took time to talk to strangers. The level of non-violence was high.
The youth protest was open-ended, experimental. It was an attempt to articulate tacitly issues of knowledge, education and the future. The parents played a chorus of complaints, worried about future jobs of the children. It was not that the protest focused on education—it was more a discovery of the social linkage between the problems. In that sense, protest can often be inarticulate and yet powerful as a message.
The third event was the Jharkhand protest, where hundreds of students and candidates suddenly discovered that recruitment exams had been repeatedly cancelled. This protest emphasises two points. One, there is analogy between exam and election. Both are rule-based games, and both need a sense of integrity. Mere committees are not enough to guarantee integrity. Committees nit-pick at events. The second point is that protest is usually narrowly read as a law-and-order problem. Lathi-charge appears to be an inevitable reaction of the regime.
The regime also tries to take over the concept of youth. The ministers talk of youth as potential citizens, as progressives whose grievances must be attended to. Protest is not seen in the language of generality. It is reduced to a few social science indicators. One is reminded of W H Auden’s lines: “Thou shalt not answer questionnaires... Thou shalt not sit with statisticians nor commit a social science.” Protest is eventually reduced to a questionnaire. A clerical list of indicators.
The magic and celebration of youth disappears in the clericalisation of doubt and complaint. One has to make a set of comments about such an attitude. Many sociologists have informally suggested that there must be an annual report of protests presented by civil society. Such a report must include descriptions about the levels of violence, possibility of dialogue, the question of whether the protests connected to other doubts and complaints to become a general sociology of youth.
Youth is a concept the regime is trying to capture. Rather than becoming a dream of the future, a sense of doubt, youth is restricted to an aspirational community with grievances. The questionnaire captures the aridity of response to the poetics of protest.
One must add that the regime, which once corroded the past as a concept, is trying to provincialise the future. This is Macaulayism at its worst. Social scientists have pointed out that a future is a site, a liberating concept; the Soviets used it as a place for dissent. The future becomes a dream of alternative possibilities where doubt, dissent and eccentricity mix to create an alternative world of understanding.
The future cannot be appropriated. It cannot be a mere extrapolation of current tendencies. It must be an omnibus of alternative worlds and understanding.
One must ensure that the future and the concept of youth are not appropriated, not provincialised, not confined to cadres. It is strange that in August one does not use the words youth or future to dream of alternative possibilities. One has to understand that protest itself is an alternative dream for future possibilities.
Shiv Visvanathan | Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations
(Views are personal)