On the afternoon of 24 July, Left student organisations marched from Sealdah, in the north of Kolkata, towards Esplanade. Walking with them for the first time in the city were supporters of the Cockroach Janta Party, the satirical outfit Abhijeet Dipke had founded on 16 May and which had been sitting at Jantar Mantar since 20 June, and whose insect had been turning up on placards in a dozen cities since.
The CJP had asked the police for a route of its own, College Square to Esplanade. No answer came, so it joined the Left procession instead. "This is an open platform, and anyone can join it," Dedipya Ganguly of the CJP told reporters that day. "But we won't support hooliganism during a CJP rally here."
The demands were the ones being made everywhere that month: Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation, the dissolution of the National Testing Agency, a judicial inquiry into the policing of the Delhi protests, and compensation for the families of students who had died by suicide after the leak. The paper itself had been written on 3 May.
By the 24th all of this was four days old and moving in several directions at once. The march on Parliament in Delhi had ended on the 20th in tear gas and lathis, with around sixty injured protesters counted at one hospital alone and a police officer filmed slapping a woman on the way out. On the 23rd Sonam Wangchuk had broken a twenty-six-day fast on government assurances, and the Cockroach Janta Party had said the same day that it made no difference and the sit-in would go on until the minister went. Parliament had lost four sitting days to the same argument. Kolkata was not waiting for any of it to resolve.
"Memes are very popular in my area. This is an easy way to express anger or love. So we carried many."
That is Sourav Das, who had come in from Piyali, explaining to PARI why the Kolkata march looked the way it did. Someone had redrawn the education minister as a Charmander and captioned it dharmander — pradhan istifa do. Beside it a hand-lettered sheet read Fakir aadmi jhola uthake chaldo, and underneath, in English, Modi ji you messed up with wrong generation.
Das was describing a method, not just a mood. A meme is designed to be copied badly and still work, which is exactly what a placard has to do — legible from ten metres, in a language the person next to you also reads, funny enough that somebody photographs it. A Charmander does all three at once and costs nothing but a marker.
At Dorina Crossing the march stopped and held the intersection for about forty-five minutes. Footwear and water bottles went towards the police line. RAF and central paramilitary units were brought up, there was a lathi charge, and tear gas was fired. When the crossing was cleared the protesters sat down again along both sides of Rani Rashmoni Avenue. "We will continue our sit-in at this site," an SFI leader said, "and persist with our demand for the resignation of the Union education minister."
Pradhan resigned the following day, 25 July, in a letter addressed to "young friends" that cited "the situation that has developed". Album 003 covers the evening after that.
What Kolkata added to the month was a register. Delhi had the numbers and Mumbai had the flags; Bengal turned up with cartoons, and with a satirical party marching behind a Left procession because the police had not answered its letter. Both halves of that are worth keeping. The Charmander drawing and the sit-in on Rani Rashmoni Avenue were the same afternoon, made by the same people, and the archive has no reason to prefer one over the other.