<< The exhibition ‘Memories of Change’ was held at New Delhi’s India Habitat Centre (IHC) and the Institute of Economic Growth (IEG) in November 2019. You can find here the curatorial note as well as a digital access to the material exhibited. The Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH), in collaboration with ICAS:MP, the CNRS 80 and the French Institute in India (IFI) presented the first retrospective on the legacies of campus-based politics in contemporary India.

>> The following themes are covered by the MoC exhibition: Emergency, Hindu nationalism, Reservations, Liberalization, Gender, Caste, Dissent. Each link redirects to the interviews and pamphleteer material pertaining to each theme.

Curatorial note

“The world is changing so fast that we cannot waste time.”[i] The hand note is scribbled in haste on the back of a 15 paise postcard. It leans at the juncture of the 1989-1990 turmoil, engrossing the stack of hopes and anguishes dwelling in the university dormitories of the country. Peering into such repository of youthfulness, Memories of Change asks whether the thorny pamphlet, cyclostyled from a generation of students to the other is effectively a tool to envision the faulty lines of present times.

Through socialising energetic calls for action on political ink, the object is inseparable from the everyday of student activism. While the pamphlet’s materiality is no longer the vanguard spur of political campaigning, its grammar has in part dematerialised, permeating social media, mass TV media and Manichean political speeches. While democracies are haunted by moral calls for harmony and oneness, constantly spearheaded by their elected representatives, is the lowly pamphleteer bitterness, based on competitive-argumentation, slanders, sincerity and veritas-claiming, the effective way to reimagine social rifts in the pursue of social justice?

Carefully xeroxing vivid fragments of Indian history over the past half-century, Memories of Change showcases the pamphleteer memories of educated youth. It illuminates the transformative experience of the university hostel room, dragging us into the red-bricked boudoir, both public and intimate, of citizen’s fabric.

The main installations, reconstructing pamphlet wars stained with dinnertime dal, scrapable arguments, anxious aspirations and online vituperations do not claim facts over myths, nor truths over lies like in a well-pitched parcha. Instead, MoC tenderly points at those public campuses in which, through agonistic friendships, a public sphere is typed-out, editing selves and besting the circulation of cross-fertilising ideas.

The plea of Memories of Change is thus not indictment but rather acknowledgement, praising a space that can both shift consensus clichés and reproduce them, while pasting together in many universities the chipped edges of combative ideologies. Through dotting textual agonism, oral testimonies and visual emotions, the exhibition celebrates the educational microcosm that incubates political imagination day-by-day. Grounded in the comparatively more egalitarian and less time-constrained ecology of the campus; yet tied to the abyssal layering of India’s social fabric, student politics offers a potentially formidable viewpoint through which cohorts’ world views are redrawn.

Archival in spirit, the exhibition traces a journey through seven touchstones of Indian polity. It plunges us into the autocratic experiment of the Emergency (1975-77), witnesses the consolidation of caste and unpacks the emergence of gender empowerment. It also unravels a set of simmering debates around the unrolling affirmative action provisions, the deepening of economic liberalisation, the mainstreaming of Hindu nationalism and the criminalisation of dissent.

Collected over several years in campuses such as Jawaharlal Nehru University, Banaras Hindu University, Hyderabad Central University, Presidency University or the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, the pamphleteer material of the Pamphlet Repository for Changing Activism (PaRChA) is curated to interrogate the relevance of campuses, going beyond their tradition of training grounds for inceptive politicians.

Walking the fragile rope of political socialisation and destabilised by the three-cornered winds of muscle politics, government stigmatization, and so-called a-politicization through privatization, political pamphlets in university spaces remain a formidable testimony of an intermediary political platform, somewhere at the intersection between the elite and the subaltern.

Line after line, emphasis after emphasis, emerges the bold, italicized and underlined contours of youth experiments with variously tinted fonts, ready to (re)write and (re) interpret the meaning of their collective stands. In the shadows of the against, fights, struggles, we can spell out the concise threads between activist initiation, personal experiments and academic learning. Binding cadres with the student community they claim to embody, distributed pamphlets do not only let us unveil the backbone forces of party politics; they cover the walls with a competitive universe of its own, drawing an immense dendrogram of ideas, regenerating political organisations, civil society, and interpretations of India.

[i] Postcard sent by Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union President, Amit Sengupta – PaRChA archive, 1989.

Medium/Media: Audio (recordings, songs), written texts (pamphlets, newspaper clippings), visuals (art murals, cartoons), infographics (textual analysis), mural artworks, bricks, lamp creations.

Exhibition availability (preferred dates): 6-13 November 2019. Thereafter, the exhibition will be moved to the Institute of Economic Growth (IEG), New Delhi.

Sample visuals: 7 items (see below).

Title:	Memories of change – An Historical Exhibition on the Pamphleteer Campus and Indian Politics
Guest curator/Exhibitor:	Jean-Thomas Martelli
Contact:	Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH), 2, Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam Road, New Delhi 110011, +91(0)9999138769 (phone), jt.martelli@csh-delhi.com, jtm.martelli@gmail.com (@)
Organizers:	Julien Levesque, Jean-Thomas Martelli, Srirupa Roy
Partners:	CSH, CNRS80, Int. Centre of Advanced Studies: Metamorphoses of the Political (ICAS:MP)
Main Funders:	Fonds d’Alembert (French Institute), ICAS:MP
Repositories:	PaRChA project (+70 000 items),[ii] The Long Emergency (+10 000 items)[iii]
Proposed Venue:	Open Palm Court Area, Visual Arts Gallery, India Habitat Centre
Exhibition’s Events:	A panel discussion moderated by a prominent journalist for the opening and an academic seminar on generations and public participation for the closing event.
Details of the Guest curator/Exhibitor:	Jean-Thomas Martelli is a researcher in contemporary Indian politics at CSH. He was previously postdoctoral fellow at Sciences Po Paris. He received a PhD in politics and sociology at King’s College London.
Excerpt	In November 2019, the exhibition ‘Memories of Change’ is held at the India Habitat Centre (IHC) and the Institute of Economic Growth (IEG), New Delhi. The Centre de Sciences Humaines (CSH), in collaboration with ICAS:MP and the CNRS 80 is delighted to present the first retrospective on the legacies of campus-based politics in contemporary India.

 

[i] The Pamphlet Repository for Changing Activism (PaRChA) is a repository of pamphlets, posters, leaflets, manifestos, reports, letters and press releases produced by student organisations of national and regional parties over four decades (1973–2015).

[ii] The Long Emergency Collection comprises a series of oral history interviews documenting journalistic praxis around the time of the Indian emergency (1975–1977).