“Hum Kaagaz Nahi Dikhayenge” (“We won’t show our papers”): The Narratives of Bodies and Belongings at the Anti-CAA Shaheen Bagh Protests 2019-20

Abstract

The Shaheen Bagh protests of 2019-20 were a nation-wide performance of dissent against the Indian citizenship laws CAA, NRC and NPR that would religiously discriminate against Muslims. Began and led by Muslim women from the neighbourhood of Shaheen Bagh in Delhi, the protests engendered critical conversations around the nation, the gendered body, space, history, and legal citizenship. The essay is a critical exploration of the counter-narratives the protestors performed against the State’s discriminatory, divisive and violent narratives, through the lens of performance studies. The bodies of the protestors became spaces of dissent and the bearers of the multiplicities of the nation, the corporeality of the individual, the domestic space, the Muslim neighbourhood, and the protest space expanded, encompassing, and even creating, the nation itself. The essay, thus, argues that as the protest site became a space of multiplicities, the protestors built the nation(s) of their secular imagination and their disidentifications presented the excess that the State could never fully regulate.