Poetry as Feminist Protest in India: The Women of Shaheen Bagh Claim Citizenship

Abstract: This essay looks at the 2019–2020 women-led protests at Shaheen Bagh against discriminatory citizenship laws in India, the Citizenship Amendment Act (2019) and National Register of Citizens (2019). I argue that the women of Shaheen Bagh recite Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911–1984)’s Urdu poem “ Ham dekheñge” “We Will See” 1979 as a bodily act of citizenship and thereby create a collective consciousness as agentive subjects and a political identity as secular Indians. I do not purport to “know” the protestors’ intentions, but rather, proffer a feminist reading of how the women created an idea of secular citizenship through their habitation of poetry. First, I look at a recitation of Faiz’s poem by a group of young girls and argue that in reciting the poem, the girls become its speaking subjects who overthrow the tyrants who have tried to marginalize Muslim women in the nation’s legislative history. Second, I look at a recitation of Faiz’s poem by a group of feminist activists at Shaheen Bagh, and argue that they use the poem’s Sufistic and Marxist rejection of religious and political authority figures to reject the right’s demonization of Islam, and performatively gesture to Shaheen Bagh as a space in which Islam is enacted as a religion of equality and tolerance. In conclusion, I analyze Urdu poet Hussain Haidry’s “ Tum dekhoge” “You’ll Surely See” 2020 to show how the women have remade the “we” of the poem as a rights-demanding Muslim woman in the public imagination.