#avnisethi

[12magazine]

On Resistance

Avni Sethi / May 2018

a. You don’t write on resistance

b. You resist

c. And yet I write on resistance

I want to think about resistance for this particular moment as an ability to practice deep-love. You resist only if you care enough.

Take, for instance, young Kashmiri people, they come out of their homes knowing their life has an imminent threat, with full cognizance that a future may be destroyed yet they come out to resist. The only means available to them is the body, when nothing else remains, when structures fail, when institutions collapse and when citizenship is a distant dream, there is only the body to resist with. The final site of declaring love for a land, seizing every day available to be heard on the street, on the internet, in front of blinding guns.

The body was all that remained when Manorama’s Mothers resisted in Manipur against the Assam Rifles at Kangla Fort, Imphal in the year 2004. Their naked bodies a proof of their belief in justice, a love for their daughters, a commitment to their land. A transformation of their bodies from repeated vulnerability into strengthened vulnerabilities. Post-independent India’s history and contemporary history itself has many such lovers who have resisted with their hearts and bodies. I speak of being a lover as a prerequisite to hone the capacity of resistance, no wonder the State fears the very imagination of lovers. From policemen clearing parks of lovers to the State deeming a mixed religion marriage of consenting adults as Love Jihad to section 377 of the IPC, the state fears the tenacity of lovers, the tenacity of happiness.

As a practitioner, my interface with two facets of the human condition is constant: culture and conflict. Both essentially evidence of being alive.

The Conflictorium, a Museum of Conflict I conceptualized in 2012 remains some sort of a fulcrum of my practice. It aims to seek a positionality for the self, a location from where one could comprehend conflict, it offers an examination of oneself as victim, perpetrator or witness. Each position as vulnerable as the other, the museum attempts to be autoethnographic, to trace memory, to remember, each a methodology of resistance.

Memorials are political, against their epistemology, they are sites of forgetting and not sites of remembrance, they are a means of deactivating resistance. For each memorial built by the State, the pertinent question to ask is, ‘For who did we not build the memorial?’.

To resist is to remember. To resist every day is to remember every day.