Protesting with Panache

Writing for the NYR Online from India’s Cockroach Janata Party protests this summer, Poorna Swami explained the young protesters’ outrage at the corruption and authoritarianism of the Modi government, offered a concise history of antigovernment agitation in India, and laid out the complicated social forces that brought these students together in the street across lines of caste, religion, and gender. Swami is herself a student, working on a Ph.D. at Harvard’s Department of South Asian Studies, as well as a translator of Urdu, a dancer, and a longtime cultural critic. On the streets of Delhi, among protesters marching under the constant threat of violence, she saw the movement’s leaders attempt to subdue political chants; Hindu-nationalist sympathizers chanting along with anticaste activists; and the daring jocularity of the young people assembled before baton-wielding policemen, especially evident in their famous “sexualized posters: ‘Daddy, beat me.’”Swami’s earlier essays for the NYR Online have brought her historical and political analysis to bear on cultural matters; as she told me, “I’m interested in how the past pushes against the present.” Her essay about the great qawwali m...