Abstract
The brief but powerful intersectional protest at Shaheen Bagh in 2020 against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) passed by India’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government presented a paradox: as the immobile and visibly Muslim Indian women protesters, emblematized by the dadis or grandmothers of Shaheen Bagh, formed a blockade, their images quickly went viral. Inspired by their example, many makeshift ‘Shaheen Baghs’ cropped up across the nation, the name of this neighborhood in South Delhi exceeding its location to become a metonym of dissent in a country hurtling toward fascism. This article argues that the protest performative of Shaheen Bagh marked a significant narrative break in representation of Indian women’s iconized mobility after liberalization. Reading Shaheen Bagh along with Anita Desai’s ‘The Rooftop Dwellers’ and Deepti Kapoor’s A Bad Character, I examine the politics of representing women’s mobility in Delhi, and its gendered constraints as well as strategies to overcome and subvert them within the larger context of both Hindutva and liberalization. I conclude by locating a hopeful feminist counternarrative in Shaheen Bagh against the prevalent discourse of marketized Hindutva that melds the cultural and economic logic of both neoliberalism and Hindu nationalism.
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