Breaking the false promise

In the last week of this decade I listened at Azad Maidan to a young man from Jamia Millia speak with clarity and eloquence about a vision of India a place where one exists with ones complete identity shaksiyat A Muslim with his daditopi kurtapyjama alhamdulila and bismillah Sikhs with kirapan and turban Hindus with Jai Shri Ram and ritual prayers I noted the default masculine but knew the women of Shaheen Bagh were its parallel counter and modificationThe tussle between who we are and who we are allowed to be at multiple levels is an eternal one Each generation experiencing its unique contexts and innovations throws up new iterationsAs the promised aspirations of liberalisation revealed themselves to be limited to only a few we have found ourselves in increasingly authoritarian times The Internet is emblematic of this From a place of fluid exploration where those who didnt fit in went to work love play and create newness it became a place of control surveillance binaries followersmdashcapitalist engineering pretending to be freedom Political mirrored by shrill insistence on majority conformity homogeneitymdashfascism pretending to be democracyNow we see a revolt against masks the breaking of false promises built on fake premises The saasbahu era of barbed euphemisms is suddenly countered with a frank expression and assertion of identitymdashwhether Muslim or Adivasi or Dalit The digital word wars are being heavily replaced by offline political and cultural activity and expressionThe constant references to colonial history whether in a play like Jamiawala Bagh or in the pinpoint comparison between the colonial reserves for denotified tribes with the governments planned detention centres also points to a new iteration of the discussion around what it means to be secular democratic and national The protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act has expanded to become something very fundamental but with a very different leadership tooEarlier notions of the secular Indian while accepting the coexistence of religions cohered around a figure seen as modern and progressive through a dilution or disavowal of religious and regional identitymdashinterfaith marriages not so much intercaste children with Sufiyana names an emphasis on rationality Implicit here was that identifiably religious or regional identities were somehow narrow and backward The modern individual was a hybrid of the old and new for whom culture was a consumable heritage In older Hindi films such figures were heroheroine surrounded by a cast of lesser stereotypically desi costumed figures as if pantshirt and sari are not also costumes masking the unremarked identity of being upper caste usually North IndianContemporary discussions are shrugging off this hybridity for heterogeneity where we might be strongly rooted in religious identity while partaking of all kinds of markets politics books clothes sexualities and relationships The leaderless nature of this movement where women students Dalits Adivasis queer groups trans groups protest both concurrently across locations as well as leading in turns at common locations like Jantar Mantar mirrors this There is a surge towards selfdetermination and a move away from the idea of nation as identity and entity versus nation as a place we call home and can be ourselvesHow will these understandings of the past and the future be in conversation or concert with other varying visions as everyone pushes for a change What will be the contours of this new plurality A decade awaits curiously some newer truer promises based on new premisesParomita Vohra is an awardwinning Mumbaibased filmmaker writer and curator working with fiction and nonfiction Reach her at paromitavohramiddaycomCatch up on all the latest Crime National International and Hatke news here Also download the new midday Android and iOS apps to get latest updates