To read more in depth from Telos, subscribe to the journal here.
On January 31, 1920, Dr. Bhimrao “Babasaheb” Ambedkar—lawyer, thought leader, social thinker, and one of Columbia University’s most famous alumni, who later became the prime architect of the constitution of the postcolonial Republic of India—published the first issue of the Dalit newspaper Mooknayak (The Silent or Muted Hero). The aim was to create, in the Marathi language, an alternative narrative of self-representation of Dalits (then called “untouchables”) to counter the caste-biased local vernacular and colonial English-language newspapers in pre-independence India. Under Dr. Ambedkar’s leadership, and often led by his editorials, Mooknayak quickly turned into a megaphone for those who were consciously being silenced by those in power, a platform to champion the rights and dignity of the oppressed and impoverished lowest castes. The idea was effective: through Mooknayak, those who were marginalized and minoritized were able to leave a paper trail of their accounts, their struggles for dignity, hope, and rights for the next generations to come.
On December 18, 2020, at the end of a year marred by the global COVID-19 pandemic, during which a shadow pandemic exposed the socio-economic divisions and the differences between the mainstream and the marginalized across the world, the most befitting centennial tribute to the spirit of Babasaheb’s Mooknayak came through the publication of Trolley Times, a self-published newspaper of the Indian farmers’ movement. The paper drew its title from the trolleys (trailers) hitched to a tractor or a truck that have become the temporary abodes of thousands of farmers protesting at the borders of New Delhi since November 2020. The genesis of this newspaper is as extraordinary as its founding team, comprising a freelance journalist, a filmmaker, a documentary photo artist, and a physical therapist and farmer. Launched bilingually in Punjabi and Hindi with a first printing of 2,000 copies that quickly grew to 10,000 in the subsequent editions, Trolley Times established itself as a very important space for the narrative self-representation of the political and cultural spirit that is the driving force of the ongoing Indian farmers’ movement. With the digital presence of this newspaper on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and more recently through online English translations of its issues, it is hardly surprising that Bloomberg called it the “fastest growing newspaper in India today.”
In the first two parts of this essay series, I reflected on the genesis and growth of the Indian farmers’ movement and its resonance in the global Indian diaspora through digital media. In this last essay, I want to outline the socio-political, historical, and cultural significance of Trolley Times. After briefly locating the coverage of the farmers’ movement in national and international media, I will turn to the first issue of Trolley Times and connect its stories with the tradition of Punjabi songs and with literary works that have long documented the lives of farmers. My central aim here is simple: against large powerful governments, when the voice of the people finds aesthetic and poetic expression, a new republic of letters emerges from those who have been marginalized.
The massive mainstream media machine in India, subservient to the majoritarian Hindutva agenda of the ruling party and in complete alliance with the aims and goals of the government—very much along the lines of Rossiya 1 in Putin’s Russia or Global Times in Xi Jinping’s China—has comfortably settled into its self-selected role as the extended arm and PR agency of Big Brother. Apart from the state-run radio and television network Prasar Bharati, most of the private media conglomerates—the India Today empire, Zee News, Republic TV, and many more—thrive not because they ask questions of the government or the politicians, but because they perform media trials against anyone who dares to ask questions of the government.
The reason behind this strange public–private symbiosis is pecuniary rather than purely ideological: the government of India is the biggest media spender after corporate houses and a major funding source for India’s multilingual media reaching over a billion people. The state functions as a major revenue-generating source for the media. Through regular reservation of print and digital space and television and electronic media spots, the state’s own political ads bombard the public, showcasing the “accomplishments” of the government. So aware are the farmers of the distortion of their own narrative that they have stood by with placards saying “Godi Media Go Back!” (Godi=lap, a play on words implying Modi’s lapdog media).
A handful of leading journalists are indeed countering this narrative. Ravish Kumar, the Ramon Magsaysay Award-winning Hindi journalist, has featured the movement in over 45 hour-long episodes of his show Prime Time, with reporters from the highway covering everything from press conferences of the leaders of the movement to interviews with women, men, children, youth, and allies supporting the movement. Siddharth Vardarajan, founding editor of The Wire, Arfa Khanam Sherwani of The Wire (Hindi), Dalit YouTube channel Bahujan TV, and a host of independent freelance journalists such as Lankesh Trikha and Mandeep Punia—the latter was recently arrested, beaten up by the police, and thrown in jail to be freed a few days later—are covering these events, and the farmers trust them and open up to them. The BBC—recently banned from China—in English, but also in its Punjabi and Hindi editions, has been covering the movement with some journalistic integrity.
In this mostly biased landscape, Trolley Times has emerged as an account of farmers’ positions, ambitions, hopes, and aspirations. International media, including NPR in the United States, has simplified the farmers’ movement as a fight between government subsidies and open-market economy. The English media in India, which caters to the educated middle class, has largely portrayed farmers either as terrorists or separatists—as I also discussed in the second part of the essay series—or as a spoiled privileged elite, or as poor folk incapable of understanding the liberatory potential of the new farm laws, and therefore misled by those with more sinister intentions.
Against these narratives, Trolley Times gives relief to the soft and harsh contours of farmers’ lives, their bittersweet existence, their passion for farming, and above all their attachment to their land. Browsing through the pages of the Trolley Times will quickly reveal that land for farmers is not simply revenue-generating territory. It is home, mother, and motherland to be served, and a child to be nurtured and nourished with care, year after year, season after season, come rain come sunshine.
The very first edition, available in English translation, features the story of a woman in a little village in Punjab who was working on knitting a sweater when the movement began. She drops everything to register her name for the protests in New Delhi. When her daughter-in-law jokes with her that this way her sweater will never get knit, the mother-in-law replies, “If I don’t join the protests, everything we have knit so far will come unraveled.” In another story, a woman photographer encounters an elderly gentleman who is painstakingly reading a leaflet holding it very close to his eyes. When she asks if he left his reading glasses at home, he declares with moving honesty, “No child, I do not know how to read well. I try to join letters, and slowly words appear.” When the photographer offers to read the leaflet to him, he blesses her and explains every single political point on the leaflet with the poise of an expert. In a third story, two farmers from the same village meet at the protests. One of them has sued the other over a boundary dispute pertaining to their lands. He offers tea to the other. After sitting in silence and sipping on tea together, one tells the other, “Brother, when we go home, the first thing I want to do is drop the case against you.”
Those among us who are readers of Hindi literature will recognize in these stories Halku from Poos ki Raat (The Winter Night, 1930) and Shankar from Sava Ser Gehun (900 Grams of Wheat, 1921), unforgettable characters of the master storyteller and novelist Premchand. For readers of Punjabi literature, there are glimpses of Jagseer, the first Dalit character created by the great Punjabi novelist Gurdiyal Singh in his Madhi da Diva (The Lamp on the Tomb, 1966), traces of Sajaan Singh from Sohan Singh Seetal’s Tootan Wala Khoo (The Well with Mulberry Trees, 1963), and the gritty gumption of women characters that marked the creativity of Punjabi women authors: Amrita Preetam’s Pinjar (The Cage, 1950) and Dalip Kaur Tiwana’s Dusri Sita (2001). For readers of world literature, Trolley Times marks the humble beginning of a twenty-first-century rendition of De Agri Cultura (Farmers’ Notebooks), written by Cato the Elder, the oldest surviving prose text in Latin. The trials and tribulations of lives of everyday farmers intersect with those described in Letters from an American Farmer (1782) by the French-American author J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, the exiled Cuban author Cirilo Villaverde’s depiction of rural life in Cecilia Valdés (1882), and of course of Tom Joad, Jim Casy, and others from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939).
The need for self-representation and a fight for dignity and rights covering every color, thread, knot, and weave that make this movement a real twenty-first century movement has come from the music industry. Major singers from Punjab with millions of worldwide fans: Harf Cheema, Kanwar Grewal, Satinder Sartaj, and others have created songs that have become anthems of this movement. Full of the passion and wit and verve of Punjabi poetry, the inspiring political lyrics of Cheema and Grewal’s “Pecha Pay Gaya Center Naal” (There’s an Issue with the Center) remind one of Lala Banke Dayal’s title poem on the Pagri Sambhaal Jatta Movement (1907). Drawing on and repurposing the rich treasure of Punjabi folk melodies and upbeat rhythms, and visuals from the protesting farmers, these songs exemplify the German poet Bertolt Brecht’s poignant observation during the Nazi period: “And in dark times, will there be singing? Yes, there will be singing, of the dark times.”
The English masthead of Trolley Times cites a line from the famous Indian martyr of the freedom movement and great intellectual Bhagat Singh, who was hanged by the British Raj at the young age of twenty-five: “The Sword of Revolution is sharpened on the whetstone of ideas.” Through its collection of individual stories and portraits of participants, poignant photographs, moving sketches, scathing cartoons, Trolley Times is the people’s archive of the contemporary farmers’ movement. Its stories belong on the same shelf as the words and songs of the worldwide community of singers, artists, writers, and ordinary citizens who are joining hands in the digital world, offering whetstones of ideas that give out sparks of democratic futures for generations to come. Even after one hundred days of protests, still going strong, the end of the ongoing farmers’ movement in India is yet unknown. Yet, to borrow from the celebrated Punjabi poet Surjit Patar, the movement has shown everyone a “Hanere vich sulagdi varnmala,” a blazing alphabet of hope, dignity, and rights written by the farmers themselves, guiding our lives as we come out of a pandemic and turn a new collective chapter in the history of our shared humanity.
B. Venkat Mani is Professor of German and World Literature and former Director of the Title VI National Resource Center for South Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. For the previous essays in this series, see part one and part two.
