Sort the placards from the twenty-third of September not by what they say but by who they are talking to, and the march comes apart into four different arguments happening in the same road.
To the state. DEAR SYSTEM DO YOUR F*CKING JOB. MAKE THIS CITY LIVABLE OR GET HELL OUT OF OFFICES. REMOVING WOMEN'S ACCESS FROM THE SPACE DOESN'T MAKE IT SAFER — DON'T CAGE US, MAKE INDIA SAFE, and under it in smaller hand, our freedom is not the price of your failure to stop the violence. That last one is doing policy analysis on a piece of card. It has identified the specific thing an administration does after an assault — restrict the women — and refused the trade in advance.
CURFEWS FOR US, IMMUNITY FOR THEM. Nine words, two columns, the whole asymmetry.
To men, generally. EDUCATE YOUR SONS. BOYS WILL BE BOYS HELD ACCOUNTABLE, with the second word struck out and the correction written over it in red handprints. WATCH YOUR THOUGHTS, NOT OUR CLOTHES. IT'S A DRESS, NOT A YES. WE DON'T NEED MEN TO PROTECT US, WE NEED MEN TO STOP HARMING US — again the crossing-out, again the same move, which is to take the sentence society already says and edit it in public.
That is a particular kind of authorship. It does not write a new slogan; it defaces an old one and shows you the correction.
To anyone who thinks they are being reasonable. A hand-drawn pie chart, titled CAUSES OF RAPE. Four keys in four colours — black for rapists, blue for clothes, green for alcohol, red for rapists again. The chart is entirely black and red. Clothes and alcohol get a colour in the legend and no slice on the wheel.
Somebody ruled that circle with a compass. It is the format of a school project and of a government presentation, and it is being used to make an argument that needs no data at all, which is the joke: the pie chart is a borrowed authority and the borrowing is the point. MUNNI BADNAAM HUI BECAUSE SOCIETY ALWAYS BLAMES WOMEN does the same thing with a film song — takes a line everyone can already hum and finishes it differently. SORRY FOR INCONVENIENCE, WE ARE TRYING TO CHANGE THE WORLD is municipal signage, the apology on a dug-up footpath, lifted whole.
To families. This is the group that surprised me. बेटियों की गाली = Cultural Shock, RAPIST = बेटा Cultural Pride? — a cardboard placard split down the middle, weighing a daughter's swearing against a son's crime and asking which one the house is actually ashamed of. RANI BETI REBEL KAREGI. And on the other side of the road, IN A COUNTRY WHERE FEMINISTS GET MORE HATE THAN RAPISTS.
None of those are addressed to the police. They are addressed to the people who raised everybody.
And one addressed to a woman three thousand years dead, if she ever lived at all. उठो द्रौपदी शस्त्र उठाओ / अब यह रण तुम्हारा है / उठो अग्निजा स्वर को गुँजाओ / अब मौन नहीं स्वीकारा है. Rise, Draupadi, take up arms; this battle is yours now; rise, fire-born, let your voice ring out; silence is no longer accepted. Four lines, hand-lettered in red on white, held above a red SMASH PATRIARCHY banner with NO LIBERATION WITHOUT REVOLUTION printed along its lower edge.
The card is in metre. Somebody wrote a quatrain, scanned it, and carried it. And the figure it summons is the one woman in the epic who was dragged into a hall and asked, in front of everyone, a legal question about whether she could be wagered. The placard does not ask her for protection. It tells her to pick up a weapon.
उठो द्रौपदी शस्त्र उठाओ — अब यह रण तुम्हारा है
Twenty-eight photographs, and the thing they have in common is not anger. It is that almost none of them are shouting into the air. Each one has picked a listener — a ministry, a brother, a mother, a goddess — and written to them directly. The Hindi ones rhyme. The English ones borrow a format. The angriest one is a pie chart.
The demands the students actually marched for were lighting, patrolling, working CCTV and a pink booth with somebody in it. That is the list. The cardboard is what the list looks like when four hundred people have to write it out themselves.