‘Be with us again, in freedom, Sharjeel and Umar’: A JNU teacher’s message for her jailed students

As a modern Indian historian, I am accustomed to reading the records produced by the colonial state “against the grain”. This means reading them for purposes they were not intended to serve. It means retrieving, from the condemnations and indictments of the colonial record, some sense of the persons who would, in our times, be seen as the architects of the independence we enjoy, of the liberties we take for granted.

This is as true of the peasants of 1830s Mysore who rose in rebellion, as it is for those who took part in declaring freedom from British rule in 1942, in a small village of Issur, also in Mysore. They all paid the price so that we might be free.

So it is the historian in me that hopes that the Supreme Court’s decision to deny bail to activists Sharjeel Imam and Umar Khalid as a document will be read “against the grain”, perhaps in the not-too-distant a future. One must today divorce hope from reason in order to do this. Such an action is vital to our sanity today.

Those of us who were fortunate enough to be in the Delhi region in late 2019 early 2020, such as myself, were able to witness, if not participate, in one of independent India’s most creative, sustained, non-violent and therefore powerful movements against the Indian state’s intention to restrict definitions of a hard-won citizenship.

The movement brought onto the streets, quite literally, large numbers of Muslim women who had rarely participated in public political life, and who sustained their movement for weeks, with little or no overt political support.

Is it any wonder that young people were mesmerised by the hopes of that moment, that site, which experimented with new styles and repertoires of protest and communication? Is it any wonder that Sharjeel Imam and Umar Khalid, given their interest in historical research and their political awareness, were drawn to the movement, like many of their age and background?

Sharjeel Imam and Umar Khalid were no bomb-throwing revolutionaries. I taught both of them, and they impressed me with their intelligence, diligence and capacity for thinking differently. I did not always agree with the ideas they had. They both shared the arrogance of youth, which was sometimes irritating. But like most students from Jawaharlal Nehru University (and the Centre for Historical Studies), they were passionately attached to argument, driven by the elemental hunger to read, write, argue, and speak boldly, sometimes even giddily, of many things that had come into their grasp.

Jawaharlal Nehru University’s mission was to provide that intellectual space where the young could take the risks of thinking, arguing, and arriving at conclusions, even dreams that may remain unrealized. This happened not only in our classrooms, and seminars, but in our canteens, messes, open spaces, and in the wonderful “philosophy of the night” that went on into the wee hours in all our hostels, night after night.

Can we fault Sharjeel Imam, Umar Khalid, Natasha Narwal or Devangana Kalita for dreaming of a better world than the one our generation had left them? Many students from the Centre for Historial Studies were similarly gripped by the desire to build a new future. Our students enjoyed and appreciated the chance of framing questions, reading sources, and assessing ideas on their own. Some of these were harebrained, some shot through with brilliance.

But the Centre for Historical Studies and Jawaharlal Nehru University fostered spaces where these, and other contrary ideas could be tried out, adopted, defeated in argument, or abandoned, without fear of reprisal.

Instead, Sharjeel Imam and Umar Khalid have been incarcerated for five-plus-one-more years of the most creative, productive time of their lives – all because of words they chose to use in public.

On this 75th year of our Republic, we must commemorate figures like Sharjeel and Umar who are paying a heavy price for their speech acts, ideas. We must never forget, that legions of others, who openly called for violence against other Indians, continue to enjoy their freedoms today, and even occupy public office – because they have the right names, and have the right political patrons.

We have become acutely aware of the contradictions that BR Ambedkar had warned us about. He had known that democracy was just top dressing in India. He knew that violent contradictions would erupt when the social structure of our inherently hierarchical, unjust society collided with the Republic’s hard-won political freedoms and liberties.

As the insightful literary scholar, Rahamat Tarikere, has pointed out, India has a long history of producing some of the loftiest ideas, whether religious or not, but our social practice has never matched these ideals. What chance of a less inequitable world – I hesitate to use the more decisive “just’ and ‘equal” – when the very people who are capable of dreaming that possibility, our young, are forced into a form of social death?

But I am confident that Sharjeel Imam and Umar Khalid will emerge from these trials with all their ideals intact. In fact, I am sure, that even behind those prison walls, they think, read, dream, and survive, perhaps even transforming the oppressive space to which they have been condemned.

Here I can do no more than cite the brilliant words of Mahmoud Dervish, the Palestinian poet, translated by Ben Bennani:

It is possible . . .
It is possible at least sometimes . . .
It is possible especially now
To ride a horse
Inside a prison cell
And run away . . .

It is possible for prison walls
To disappear,
For the cell to become a distant land
Without frontiers:

What did you do with the walls?

I gave them back to the rocks.
And what did you do with the ceiling?
I turned it into a saddle.
And your chain?
I turned it into a pencil.

The prison guard got angry.
He put an end to the dialogue.
He said he didn’t care for poetry,
And bolted the door of my cell.

He came back to see me
In the morning.
He shouted at me:

Where did all this water come from?
I brought it from the Nile.
And the trees?
From the orchards of Damascus.
And the music?
From my heartbeat.

The prison guard got mad.
He put an end to my dialogue.
He said he didn’t like my poetry,
And bolted the door of my cell.

But he returned in the evening:

Where did this moon come from?
From the nights of Baghdad.
And the wine?
From the vineyards of Algiers.
And this freedom?
From the chain you tied me with last night.

The prison guard grew so sad . . .
He begged me to give him back
His freedom.

Be with us again, in freedom, Sharjeel and Umar.

Janaki Nair taught at the Centre for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University until her retirement in 2020.