In a Mumbai street in October, at a protest about the electoral rolls, somebody knelt down and wrote the slogan on the road.
They used chalk on the tarmac rather than card or cloth, in four or five colours, across an area about the size of a small room, with a cartoon drawn into the middle of it and the lettering running at an angle so that it reads right way up to the people standing on the far side.
It is worth stopping on how different a thing this is from a placard.
A placard is portable, and that is nearly its whole design. It is cut to a size one person can hold above their head for three hours. It can be lifted higher when a camera appears. It can be carried from the station to the gathering point. And at the end of the day it goes home under somebody's arm, or into a cupboard, or into a bin, and it leaves intact, in the possession of the person who made it.
Chalk on a road does none of that. It cannot be lifted, carried, confiscated or kept. It belongs to the surface it is on, which belongs to the city. The first van over it takes a third of it away.
What it says, where it is legible, is VOTE CHORI नाही चालणार , meaning vote theft will not be tolerated, with the letters SIR drawn separately in a big cyan outline, which is the abbreviation at the centre of the whole argument about the rolls. Beside it on the road lies a printed sheet spelling the same abbreviation out as an accusation: Suspicion, Intimidation, Removal.
So the chalk is not decoration around the real protest. It is carrying the same sentence the placards are carrying. It has simply chosen a surface that cannot leave.
Grant my wishes
There is English in it too, in pink, beside a drawn figure and a lamp, Grant my wishes , and a good deal more in Marathi that we cannot read with enough confidence to translate here, which is an honest limit of this essay rather than a feature of the drawing. Some of it runs under the feet of the people photographing it.
Two things follow from the choice of chalk, and the second one is about us.
The first is that it takes much longer. A placard is fifteen minutes with a marker. This is several people on their knees for an hour or more, in the open, on a road, before anything has started, and that labour is itself a kind of claim. You do not spend an hour decorating a surface you are passing through. You spend it on a surface you are, for the afternoon, treating as yours.
Compare the banner the same crowd marches behind an hour later: इंकलाब ज़िंदाबाद! LONG LIVE REVOLUTION, painted on cloth, with the organisation's name along the bottom edge. That banner will be rolled up, taken back, and unrolled at the next protest and the one after. It is built to be reused. The chalk is built to be gone.
The second thing is that this archive's job, which is usually a matter of keeping a copy of something that still exists, is here the whole of it. The placards in these photographs are somewhere. Somebody has them. If every photograph of them were deleted tomorrow, the objects would still be in a cupboard in Mumbai.
The chalk is not anywhere. It was swept, or rained on, or driven over, within days of being made, and every trace of it that survives is a photograph, mostly phone photographs, taken from standing height by people who happened to be there, which is why it appears in this archive at an angle, with a water bottle and somebody's shoe in the frame.
That is not a flaw in the picture. It is the only form the thing has left.
By nightfall the same protest has gone back to the usual materials, with a tricolour held up on a pole and a sheet of card reading A GOVERNMENT THAT CAN'T TOLERATE PROTEST CAN'T TOLERATE DEMOCRACY. Those will be photographed too, and they will also go home afterwards.
But for a few hours in the afternoon, the argument was lying on the road, and everyone who wanted to read it had to stand around the edge of it and look down.