Sponsored by Shearline Press Writing for the NYR Online from India’s Cockroach Janata Party protests this summer, Poorna Swami explained the young protesters’ outrage at the corruption and authoritarianism of the Modi government, offered a concise history of antigovernment agitation in India, and laid out the complicated social forces that brought these students together in the street across lines of caste, religion, and gender. Swami is herself a student, working on a Ph.D. at Harvard’s Department of South Asian Studies, as well as a translator of Urdu, a dancer, and a longtime cultural critic. On the streets of Delhi, among protesters marching under the constant threat of violence, she saw the movement’s leaders attempt to subdue political chants; Hindu-nationalist sympathizers chanting along with anticaste activists; and the daring jocularity of the young people assembled before baton-wielding policemen, especially evident in their famous “sexualized posters: ‘Daddy, beat me.’” 
Poorna Swami; photograph by Abhishek Khedekar Swami’s earlier essays for the NYR Online have brought her historical and political analysis to bear on cultural matters; as she told me, “I’m interested in how the past pushes against the present.” Her essay about the great qawwali musician Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan includes a thrilling and immersive description of the atmosphere around his appearance at a music festival in 1985, years before she was born—but Swami has been an acolyte in the cult of Nusrat her whole life; her father had even made a short film about him, “a love letter to Nusrat.” We emailed last week about matters personal and political: her artistic childhood in Bangalore, her experience on the streets of Delhi, and her hopes about what this summer’s uprising means for the future of India. 
Advertisement Nawal Arjini: How did you come to have an interest in the arts, and especially the performing arts? When did your interests in music (particularly Nusrat) and film emerge, and how were they nurtured—were there any particular institutions, works of art, or artists that encouraged deeper examination? Poorna Swami: It was an unusual childhood: my parents were both painters, my grandparents worked in independent cinema, and most of my family was in some way involved with theater. At first I just napped backstage, then I dabbled as a stagehand, then I designed costumes, then acted. Anything we did as a family involved the arts somehow. My father took me to art galleries, with my grandfather I watched way too many age-inappropriate films, my grandmother took me to bookstores and music stores. She and I would use two separate bookmarks in the same book if we were reading it together but at different paces. I painted and danced and was an annoying kid who, at thirteen, decided to make a camcorder documentary about music in Bangalore. There was a brief period when I’d convinced myself that I’d study sociology in college, but I ended up pretty close to the family trade. I grew up in a house that wasn’t really religious, which wasn’t all that common in 1990s India. So any sense I had of Hinduism and Islam—the two religious traditions that ran in my family—was through music, literature, and paintings around the house. Nusrat was also the soundtrack to my parents’ short-lived marriage and, as I mentioned in the essay, he was a part of my earliest memories. As a child I found a lot of his songs very danceable, but as I grew older, my mother and grandmother began to explain the lyrics and the spiritual message behind them. By the time I was a teenager, we were looking up words from his songs in dictionaries to find additional meanings. Now that I think of it, that exercise probably led me to literary translation later in life. 
Advertisement You have written in the past about the difficulties in researching a play, for instance, many years after it was performed. As a researcher and a critic of historical performances—theater, dance, music—how do you deal with such ephemeral material? When the past becomes harder to trace it’s a fun challenge for me. I am a real archive nut, so going on wild-goose chases is something I enjoy; I looked for that play—a 1963 production of The Flaming Spear/No Other Way, an Indian play about the Mau Mau rebellion—for maybe a year, writing to people and going through the dusty, unorganized cupboards of a theater troupe in Mumbai. This slightly insane approach doesn’t always work out, as it didn’t in that case. So I had to recreate the play from a handful of photographs and short newspaper reviews of performances from the 1960s. Again, archives helped me find my way into a text and a moment in time that I couldn’t know firsthand. But of course, archives don’t tell you everything. Any good historian will tell you that archives also exclude groups and distort the past. But piecing small things together to build a story excites me. I find disproportionate pleasure in laboring over tiny details, like the weather in a given city on a certain day forty years ago or the gestures of a now dead poet. It’s not just big, fancy libraries but often people’s under-the-bed junk that has given me interesting nuggets to write about. Finding my father’s film on Nusrat is a good example. You are also a translator, and so you must deal with another kind of intangibility. Do you have a philosophy when it comes to literary translation? I’m still figuring it out. Sometimes I find I have to let go, to keep some meanings in translation and relinquish others. After all, a text has multiple meanings even in the original, and not every native reader gets all of them. But sometimes I might sneak in a gloss, or attempt some kind of sleight of hand to introduce context. When translating modern poetry I have a lot of affinity for sound and texture. I try to strike a balance between conveying the meanings of individual words and phrases and retaining a sense of what I felt about the poem’s grain as I was reading the original. There are these opening lines from a Jack Gilbert poem that I often come back to: “How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,/and frightening that it does not quite.” Language is at once capacious and imprecise, and while translating, I try to remind myself of that, lest I fall into an endless cycle of handwringing. Would you tell us a bit about the writer you’re translating at the moment, Fahmida Riaz? Fahmida Riaz was an incredible Urdu poet from Pakistan, arguably the most prominent female Urdu poet of the twentieth century. She was a Marxist and a feminist, and in the 1970s and early 1980s she ran this dissident magazine called Awaz, which published pro-democracy op-eds and translations of African and Asian literature in Urdu. During Zia-ul-Haq’s military dictatorship, the magazine was banned and Riaz faced multiple charges of sedition, which could have led to capital punishment. So she fled across the border to India and spent seven years in exile there. It’s amazing, given India and Pakistan’s adverse political relations, that Riaz was given asylum by the Indian state—in fact, by the prime minister personally. Although Riaz is perhaps Urdu’s quintessential feminist poet—what Forugh Farrokhzad is for Farsi—her exile years tend to be mentioned only in passing. I’ve been researching that period of her life and translating her exile poems into English for the first time. I’ve scoured libraries in both India and Pakistan, begged her friends and family to let me ransack their personal collections for letters and photographs, and spent hours talking to people on both sides of the border to put together an account of how she spent her exile years and what the fallout was once she returned. It’s a project that brings together literature, political history, and feminism. The translation is called Guilty as Charged: poems of exile and will be out in 2027 from Ugly Duckling Presse in the US and Poetry Translation Center in the UK. That takes us to India: How was the first news of the protests received among your friends and family? To be honest, most of them didn’t take the Cockroach Janata Party too seriously at first. Online, we saw people wearing cockroach costumes and doing sporadic demonstrations in different parts of India, but those seemed to be social media larks. When a more formal sit-in started in June, again, it seemed a bit scattered and, at that point, sorely lacking in concrete aims. And then when Sonam Wangchuck joined the protest, becoming a sort of figurehead, people in my circle were wary. In 2011, when the Congress Party was in power, there were huge anticorruption protests in Delhi led by a self-described Gandhian activist named Anna Hazare, a man who went on a hunger strike. The origins of that popular movement were murky, and later many people alleged that it had been orchestrated by the BJP and its right-wing parent organization, the RSS. Certainly that 2011 movement helped take down the ruling government and usher in the era of Modi. Given this history, many people around me were skeptical of the provenance of a group like the CJP, especially because some of its leaders had, in the past, been affiliated with the Aam Aadmi Party (another political party that emerged from the 2011 protests). Many wondered if it was only a matter of time before some established political party came in and took over this new movement, too. It didn’t help that leading the demonstration in Delhi was another fasting, middle-aged man—one who was known to have collaborated with the BJP in the past. But when the left-wing student organizations began to have a more prominent position in the protests—sharpening the messages that went out from the street, bringing actual college students to the ground, and going on hunger strike themselves—there was clearer anti-BJP sentiment and more organized agitation. When the police kidnapped Wangchuk, it actually helped stir up momentum. I showed up in person because I knew something was changing. By the time extensive police violence broke out on July 20, the movement had spread far beyond the grip of the CJP and Wangchuk and that helped counter some of the early reservations that people around me had. Did you ever imagine that such a substantial protest movement would arise among students, or among young people more broadly? Not really. Earlier waves of student protests had been met with such immense repression, and some of those leaders are still behind bars without trial. University campuses have also become so heavily policed in the last decade that I didn’t think there was any room for an uprising. The willingness of students (especially those from majority religious and caste backgrounds) to directly take on the state at its most violent was not something I expected. Is a sense of generational warfare as pervasive in India as it is here? I don’t think so. Respecting one’s elders is encoded into Indian life in a very different way—deference is a given. But that’s why these protests have been so remarkable. We’re seeing such a clear and vocal generational break for the first time. I met students who had showed up to protest without telling their parents. Children of BJP leaders were also reported to have turned up. The leader of the All-India Students’ Association, Neha Bora, said she went on hunger strike without her BJP-supporting parents knowing. The unfiltered language and near-bacchanalian texture of these protests was not something we’d seen before. Gen Z, who had been written off as lacking both purpose and politics, suddenly asserted themselves with reels and memes, eventually taking direct aim at the prime minister. Part of the success (and fun) of these recent protests was watching older media commentators and authorities try to decipher the various viral trends the young protesters unleashed. To what extent do you think the protests, and the spirit with which they were received by the nonprotesting part of India, have shifted the terrain of political life? It’s hard to say, especially because there haven’t been any elections yet. One also has to remember that many of the young protesters have never voted. I did ask a bunch of young people if they’d sign up and actually vote in the next election. Most of them said yes, but not all of them committed to writing off the BJP for good. Because a large segment of protesters claimed a kind of “nonideological” stance, they garnered a lot of sympathy from people outside the movement, who saw students as the “future of the country” asking for nothing more than “their basic rights.” But now that the movement has gone beyond a headline-grabbing, site-specific demonstration, and even the CJP is much more vocal about its indictment of the BJP, I am curious to see what, if any, kind of electoral shift we will see down the line. There’s been renewed momentum two months later: the CJP is now calling for the resignation of the chief of the Election Commission of India, whom they allege has rigged the country’s electoral rolls in favor of the BJP. Left-wing student organizations are leading a parallel campaign on the same issue. It’s also not just about youth and student groups. The Congress, the main opposition party in India, and its leader, Rahul Gandhi, have been campaigning hard on student issues and have pushed the government on its brutal response to the July protests, though their agenda continues to remain separate from that of the CJP and the left. It would be a gross overstatement to claim that this scenario is the end of Modi and the BJP. Hindu nationalism’s takeover of India’s public institutions and its social fabric runs too deep. But at the same time, the country has not seen such a large movement in six years, and certainly not with such broad appeal. How has your sense of the protests changed since they began, and since they ended? I am definitely a lot less cynical. Even though I questioned many aspects of the protests, being there in person made me realize that in whatever imperfect way, an unlikely range of people were coming together to show their dissatisfaction—and that in itself was unprecedented. I am not holding my breath to see if the CJP makes electoral strides. I think the significance of these protests has been that they enabled all kinds of young people to voice their opinions about the only government they have ever known. We’re also seeing a new generation of student leaders come up (campus politics in India are more directly connected with national politics than in the US): Neha Bora has emerged as a tremendous force, perhaps the most clear-sighted leader throughout this movement. And most importantly, the BJP’s inability to keep up with the language of a generation that is master of the Internet has been entirely exposed. Try as they might, there’s no way the government can erase how, at the height of the protests, young people had reduced Modi to a joke. If they did that once, and with such panache, I think they could do it again. 
Advertisement More by Poorna Swami at nybooks.com
‘Every Tiny Molecule of Ash’India’s historic youth uprising brought together a wide and fractured coalition. Where can it go from here? 
Our NusratThe Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan earned fans the world over. For decades they have debated just what he stood for. 
Of LightPayal Kapadia’s films are defined by the slippage between women’s longing and the dogged grip of reality—not least of India’s unyielding social divisions. 
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