Shaheen Bagh’s solidarity must be reimagined as a temporal, ongoing movement, channeling its energy into new issues to sustain its transformative power.
Author
Nida Arif, Assistant Professor, Jindal School of Languages and Literature (JSLL), O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat, Haryana, India; University of Delhi, Delhi, India; University of Lucknow, Lucknow, India
Summary
In his work Now It’s Come to Distances: Notes on Shaheen Bagh, Coronavirus, Association and Isolation (2020), Soumyabrata Choudhury argues that the historical sit-in protest of Shaheen Bagh 2019 was a project of ‘collective creation’ that went beyond the interests of one section of society and made something universally imaginable to anyone. In its ability to form associations across the lines of religion, sex, age, caste, economic activities, and language, Shaheen Bagh inaugurated a project of new avenues of solidarity, especially through the overwhelming participation of women.
‘New’ in Choudhary’s formulation is a threshold that transforms the possibilities of our living histories. ‘New’, then, is historically contextual in the passage of time as all historical situations are. By building on Choudhury’s thesis on the same, this viewpoint article advocates reimagining this solidarity built across disparate lines as something temporal. This is in opposition to governmental practices of containing popular protests into spatial grids. A reimagined solidarity would ensure that Shaheen Bagh’s newness continues to live by channeling itself into new issues. People’s movements in India must be an ongoing Shaheen Bagh.
Published in: Contemporary South Asia
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