‘I’m a little cockroach’: The new non-violence of poetry, protest, and imagined communities

Sab yaad rakha jayega, sab kuch yaad rakha jayega
Main Hindustan ki beti hoon
I am a little cockroach.

A people may coexist; a community must be imagined into being. And what more powerful tool of the imagination than poetry? Mesmerised by the flood of poetry streaming into my social media, I have put together a very preliminary sense of what the poetry of the Cockroach Janta Party protests did and is doing, and what kind of “Imagined Community” it is speaking into being.

The many commentaries and thoughtful publications that have emerged in the wake of these protests are a testament to an urgency – to note and remember and archive their unexpected and singular nature. To all these, I want to add the power of poetry in its active refusal of the politics of violence, and its creation of what Benedict Anderson would have called an imagined community that harks back to the imaginaries of the freedom struggle.

It looks towards a future by building on the ways in which the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act in 2019 integrated that vision and voice in their poems and art. Anderson’s term came back to me forcefully while immersed in the unfolding of the CJP protests through news and social media....

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