A placard held above a march in Mumbai has four lines on it, and it changes script twice on the way down.
प्रधान
Ka cut gaya ab
पंतप्रधान
Kii baari!!!!
Pradhan has been cut. Now it is the Prime Minister's turn. Two words are in Devanagari and the rest is Hindi typed in the Roman alphabet, and the switch is not decoration — it is the whole joke. Pradhan is the education minister's surname. Pantpradhan is the Marathi word for Prime Minister, and the minister's name is sitting inside it, unavoidably, the way a word you cannot unsee sits inside a longer one. Setting both in Devanagari and everything else in Roman makes the shared letters line up down the middle of the sheet where you cannot miss them.
It also tells you exactly where you are standing. Pantpradhan is not what a Delhi placard would say; Delhi would write प्रधानमंत्री. This is a Marathi word, in a Hindi sentence, typed mostly in English letters, printed at a photocopy shop, and slipped into a plastic sleeve because it was July.
There are three hundred and seventeen photographs in this archive and no single language runs through them. What runs through them is the switching.
"YELLA OKAY, ISLAMOPHOBIA YAAKE"
Bengaluru. Kannada — yella, everything; yaake, why — written in the Roman alphabet, wrapped around an English abstract noun that has no Kannada equivalent anybody would use on a placard. Everything else is fine, so why this. It is the construction of somebody arguing with a relative, and it does not translate cleanly into any of its three components.
Roman-script Indian language is the actual common tongue of this archive, and it is worth being clear about why. It is not a compromise between Hindi and English. It is what a phone keyboard produces. A generation that has typed to its friends this way since school does not switch to Devanagari to write a placard any more than it would switch to cursive; the marker in their hand simply reproduces the thing their thumbs already do. Every joke about a group chat in this archive is written the way a group chat is written.
Which means the places where somebody did reach for Devanagari are choices, and they all point the same way.
"सब याद रखा जायेगा !"
All of it will be remembered. The line is from a poem by Aamir Aziz that came out of the protests of 2019 and 2020, and it has been on walls in this country ever since. Nobody writes that one in Roman. It arrives in Devanagari with a red drawing beside it, made at home, photographed flat on a rug before it was ever carried anywhere — and the formality of the script is doing the same work as a black border. The joke placards are typed. The elegies are handwritten, in the script the language actually belongs to.
The same holds for the cloth banner strung between two trees that demands Pradhan's immediate dismissal in careful red Devanagari, with the youth organisation's name along the bottom, and for the graffiti sprayed across a Delhi wall. Organisations write in Devanagari. Mourning writes in Devanagari. Individuals joking write in Roman, and there are far, far more of them.
And then there is the fourth register, which is neither. On a blue sheet somebody has written out the Preamble — sovereign, socialist, secular, republic, justice, liberty, equality, fraternity — scattered around three raised fists like a word cloud, and captioned the whole thing Democracy Mubarak. Congratulations on your democracy. Mubarak is the word you use for a wedding or a new baby or Eid, and it is being used sarcastically here, in English, about a constitutional document that is itself in English. Four vocabularies in two words.
It is tempting to call all of this hybridity and leave it there, which would be a way of not saying anything. The sharper point is that nobody on these pavements was translating. There is no placard in this archive that says the same thing twice for a second audience. Each one is pitched at exactly the people standing next to it — a Panvel commuter, a Bengaluru cousin, a Mumbai crowd that knows what pantpradhan means — and is content to be opaque to everybody else.
That is unusual for a national movement, and it is the reason this material has survived as well as it has. A slogan built for the whole country has to be general enough to travel, and generality is what dates. These were built to travel about fifteen feet. Two months later they are still exact.