In 2019, that watershed year just before the onset of Covid-19, a protest movement erupted on the Indian subcontinent in response to two new laws introduced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government. The first, a revision to the Citizenship Act of 1955, with changes to conditions for asylum conditions designed to specifically exclude Muslims; the second law required Indians to provide proof of ancestry, if and when asked by local state authorities, essentially enabling and encouraging discrimination against minority and oppressed groups. The passage of these laws was interpreted by those on the left as only one part of the Modi regime’s ongoing efforts at erasing the Muslim history of the Indian subcontinent. The action resonated with a contemporaneous right-wing historical revisionist movement that portrayed the Mughal era of Muslim rule as being oppressive and violent towards Hindus, who form the modern day majority in India. As the art critic and White Review editor Skye Arundhati Thomas explains in her new book, Remember the Details:
The two laws are designed to work in tandem: one in determining who gets to call themselves Indian, and the other in imprisoning those whose definition the state finds lacking.
In this brief essay, issued by Floating Opera Press, a small Berlin publisher devoted to books on contemporary art as well as a “Critic’s Essay” series that purports to offer its art world audience “thought-provoking ways in which to subvert or replace normative modes of discussing culture and the world beyond,” Remember the Details serves as both a piece of political reportage from the frontline perspective of the protesters and an attempt at writing a miniature history of the movement through the lens of the still images and videos it produced and circulated through social media. It represents a large ambition for an essay of less than sixty pages, but nonetheless manages to articulate the activists’ position and concerns.
Much like concurrent protests in Hong Kong, the movement was initially launched by students; and, again as in Hong Kong, the protesters were met by violence from the police—at least two teenage Indian protesters were shot and killed. This, however, did not deter the protest movement from eventually extending beyond India’s major cities and spreading throughout the country. The reaction from the Modi regime was rather typical, taken from the playbook of modern-day authoritarianism: the movement was branded unlawful, the work of hoodlums. At the same time, a counter-movement emerged that saw mobs of Hindus terrorizing those minorities aligned with the protests, burning down shops and throwing hand-made bombs in predominately Muslim neighborhoods of New Delhi.
Thomas remains vigilant in embedding these social movements within the larger context of India’s history and urban environment, its complex caste structure and aspirations as a post-colonial democratic nation-state. In one chapter, she guides us effortlessly from an evocation of New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, the city’s traditional protest site, to the predominately Muslim neighborhood of Shaheen Bagh, reading the architecture for traces of the casteism and Islamophobia that has resulted in “segregated landscapes, coded by layers of access and privilege”, which this attempt at revolution sought to overthrow.
In the wake of the social distancing required by Covid-19, nearly all that remains of this movement are, in fact, the images, which Thomas poignantly avers:
Many of this history’s protagonists—young women, activists, academics—are currently incarcerated, in pre-trial detention, or living under the fear of arrest. The protest sites have been demolished. The public space that had held the critical conversations produced by the movement—conversations that questioned words like ‘democracy’ and ‘citizenship’—are now more intensely surveilled.
Fittingly, the book culminates in a selection of color photographs that memorialize these traumatic events. These images are, of course, at risk of being buried under distorted interpretations. For Thomas, a laser focus on the details is revelatory of a deeper truth that is immune to the effects of propaganda. “The fists,” she enumerates,
the upturned faces, the books, the drawings, the protest signs; the barricades, the tear-gas shells, the metal bullet casings, the batons, the speeding jets of liquid spouting from water canons
—the diffuse ephemera that have come to form the material reality of the contemporary fight for democracy in a world order increasingly opposed to its manifestations. Remember the Details, then, is a much-needed document of resistance in a world besieged by increasingly hostile forms of tyranny.