You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world. But then you read.

- James Baldwin

To those who read,

It is always easy to start with cliches. Revolutions, perhaps the ultimate aim of protests, occupy a cherished place in our history books. When we ruffle these pages, the face of Gandhi and his followers stare back at us as they continue their civil protest, and their actions, even the seemingly mundane act of picking up some salt, get embedded into the fabric of our society. Not too far, in the realm of fiction, we see Atticus Finch, a middle aged white man, that stands up to defend a black man of a charge that he never committed in To Kill A Mockingbird. We almost see the fiery tongue of Manto as he stands up to tell his stories and his typewriter clangs breathlessly. And through the pages of our literature, this act of standing up continues, from Orwell's 1984 to Moore's V for Vendetta to Thiong'o's Grain of Wheat.

Yet, cliches only take us so far. While all of that and more is certainly what Protest Literature encompasses, a protest need not be a lone person standing against a crowd defiantly. It need not be against an oppressor whose face is different than ours. It is an act of protest when Moorthy, a brahmin boy and a staunch Gandhian, resists his casteist teachings and drinks water from the house of someone who is considered an untouchable in Raja Rao's phenomenal work Kanthapura. And it is an act of protest when the same Scout that adored Atticus looks at him strangely, unable to understand his racism, and proclaims that she is colorblind in Harper Lee's Go Set A Watchman. And even before it becomes tangible in reality, protest takes place in our refusals, in the shake of our heads, and the way it does in Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, it takes place within our thoughts.

As we live through an everlasting event that seems to have split our history into two, the one before the pandemic and the one after, let us come together at 4 PM on 10th May, 2020 (Sunday) and wonder if every attempt of protest and revolution seemed like such a historical event to those who lived through it and were participants of it, willing or otherwise. 

This will also be conducted online and a few glitches are inevitable, so please be patient with the process.

The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are.

- Chimamanda Ngozi Aidchie