In a photograph taken in a crowd at Jantar Mantar, three things are being held over people's heads at once. On the right, a printed portrait of Savitribai Phule, in a green sari, with her dates under her name. In the middle, a copy of भारत का संविधान — the Constitution of India — held up in both hands, spine out, the way you hold a book you want photographed. On the left, a banner from Krantikari Yuva Sangathan carrying the demand everybody had actually come to make: देश का युवा करे पुकार! सभी कोचिंग सेंटरों को बैन करे सरकार! The country's young are calling out — government, ban the coaching centres.
A nineteenth-century schoolteacher, a constitution and a complaint about the coaching industry, in one frame, at the same height. This is not a stray combination. It happens across the archive, often enough that it is worth asking what the portraits were doing there at all. The protest was set off by a question paper that leaked. It kept reaching past the question paper for people who had been dead for decades.
Here is a board somebody spent an evening making. Black poster paper, hand-lettered in white along the top: DHARMENDRA PRADHAN MUST RESIGN. Bottom left, PAPER LEAK KI SARKAR. Bottom right, EDUCATION IS NOT A BUSINESS. Pinned between the slogans are two portraits. On the left, Bhagat Singh in an orange turban, painted by hand, looking off to one side. In the middle, Che Guevara in the two-tone stencil that has been on T-shirts since before anybody carrying this board was born. There is a small black panel between them with a line in white about what it means when you cannot say that a wrong is wrong.
Bhagat Singh was twenty-three when he was hanged in March 1931. Most of the people holding this board were the age he was, or younger, and had spent the previous two years being told that their futures depended on an examination. That is the join. The complaint was never really that one paper had leaked. It was that the arrangement by which you are sorted, examined, ranked and then let in or kept out had been quietly rigged in somebody else's favour — and once you are making that complaint, you are in much older company than you thought.
This one is a single gesture, and it is the sharpest thing in the album. Two arms, raised to the same height. In one hand, a red poster with a caricature of the Prime Minister, blindfolded, a padlock hanging over each ear, captioned MITRON — and then an obscenity. In the other, the standard portrait of Dr B.R. Ambedkar: blue suit, red tie, spectacles, the picture that hangs in ten million offices and about as many living rooms.
Nobody staged that. Two people happened to be standing next to each other and a photographer happened to see it. But the pairing is the whole argument of these two months in one frame. Ambedkar chaired the committee that drafted the Constitution, and he is in this photograph as the author of the rules. The man in the red poster is in it as the person accused of breaking them. You are not being asked to admire one and dislike the other. You are being shown a document and a defendant.
Said out loud, on a card small enough to hold in one hand: The Constitution of India begins with "WE THE PEOPLE OF INDIA" not "WE THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA". The first three words of the Preamble, used as a boundary marker. It is a schoolroom fact, which is exactly why it works — everybody holding a placard that week had been made to learn it, and here it is being handed back with the emphasis moved.
"We, the people of India" — not "we, the government of India"
It is worth saying that these portraits are not decoration and they are not interchangeable. Savitribai Phule opened a school for girls in Pune in 1848 and is remembered for insisting that education was not something to be rationed by birth. Ambedkar wrote the arrangement under which that argument could be made in court. Bhagat Singh is what you carry when you have decided the argument will not be settled politely. Che is the imported one, the least specific, the one that travels because it has travelled so much already. Put them together and you get a fairly precise sentence: we were promised this, in writing, by people who paid for it.
The newest photograph in this album was not taken at a protest. A young woman is standing in a train carriage with one hand on the rail, and Ambedkar's face is printed across the front of her T-shirt, large, unmissable, the same portrait from the same red-tied original. There is no placard, no slogan, no crowd. The protests had been called off. She was going somewhere.
That is the part the archive is least good at holding, because it does not look like an event. The portraits did not arrive with the protest and they did not leave with it. They were already on the wall, already on the shirt, already in the book on the shelf that somebody thought to bring along. What these two months did was lift them up where a camera could see them.
One last thing, about this archive rather than about the protest. Every real face in these photographs is covered before we publish — a strip of tape across the eyes, because being in a crowd should not be the same as being on a list. The faces printed on the placards are left exactly as they are, because they are the artwork and covering them would be doing the erasing for somebody else. We wrote that rule to protect people, and it has an effect nobody designed: in this album the living are hidden and the chosen dead are in full view, at full size, looking straight out. Which is, more or less, what the people carrying them were trying to say.