Hope is the thing with teeth

One of the most unforgettable demonstrations of mass public dissent in my life was the wave of protests against Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC) in 2019-2020. But much before people took to the streets across the country to oppose the Bill, to those paying attention, the seeds of monitoring citizens had already been planted with the evolution of Aadhaar in India.

Over the course of my career, I’ve watched the watchers—journalists, activists, digital rights advocates—reporting from the ground about this gambit of unrest planted meticulously . Power was already playing the long game to stay there, as we have now witnessed 15 years after it was introduced.

So when the government proposed a law in India in 2019 that selectively  targeted minorities, it came as little surprise, and big anger. Citizens took to the streets protesting across the country, and something other than fury arose—the unexpected refuge of dissent. 

It took coming together to remember that independent India was as a result of a centuries of dissent, the Constitution a love language of Dr Ambedkar’s incorrigible endeavour to safety net the last citizen standing.

To learn that one is not alone is gratifying. But to discover just how exceedingly supported they are in resistance with and by people around them in varied shapes, breaths, and languages is resuscitative. 

In slogans and in spirit, in pamphlets and in song, in muscle and in cloth, I found a pattern at these protests—at their angriest, people’s dissent turned poetic. In food distributed en masse at 48H protests, to fists bloodied and rising, poetry flowed. People sang and lamented and held truth to power in turns.

Poetry is often perceived as a “soft” art, as though softness is something to reject. Poetry houses fierce roots; more bite than bark. Humans invented language to communicate with each other. But poetry found us to help us congregate with our souls. 

Now, the world still ablaze, we struggle to find ways to express everything in us that resists the fire. We feel all alone sometimes, even within social media silos where we signal to each other. In the absence of mass gatherings (the story of how the post-pandemic machinery has orchestrated an environment that makes it difficult to gather and protest anymore is a story onto itself), it is often in the history of poetry that I’ve found myself seeking refuge. 

From Gwendolyn Brooks to Tishani Doshi, from Faiz Ahmed Faiz to Mahmood Darwish, from Meena Kandasamy to Grace Paley, I nestle my desperations into their lexical revolutions, and find myself being held. 

Dissent is far from an exclusive public expression. If we look around (and inside ourselves), we learn that it began very early as a personal recognition of our boundaries, of a child learning to say No, of women unbraiding their hair in local trains in Mumbai aflutter in the wind, of courage in telling someone you love a difficult truth, of holding up peak traffic to let a street dog cross the road. 

Poetry and dissent often found us before memory found us. If we inherited intergenerational burdens, we also inherited intergenerational strength. In the war cries of our ancestors and the blazing kitchen fires that burn food when angry, in the knowledge that revolutions always come, we’ve inherited both poetry and dissent.

So writing dissent poetry, to me, is a way of reclaiming the margins of agency that get chipped away in constant negotiation with the hostility of an unhealed world. 

This also the reason why I feel compelled to share this inner red sanctuary with anyone who wants to make it their own. In keeping with this, I am holding a workshop on April 25, 2026 at Underline Centre, Indiranagar (Bangalore) to teach dissent poetry this #GloPoWriMo month. I will draw from the reservoirs of selective history and writing techniques to guide people into channeling all that we resist into the formidable art of writing dissent poetry. 

My goal is only, that we walk away knowing how far from alone we are in a burning world. And that hope is the thing with teeth. 

If you’d like to participate in the workshop, please grab a spot here! Limited seats.

P.S. If you’re a student and/or from a marginalised community, I’m offering a select few subsidised spots. Please drop me a word at shrutisunderraman@gmail.com  or DM me on Instagram :)