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Watching Gen Z hurling volleys of profanities at the Indian prime minister and the education minister was indeed a staggering spectacle at Jantar Mantar. It was perhaps the first time that the country encountered such a protest movement. The sight, however, took me a couple of centuries back to the reign of Mu‘azzam/Bahadur Shah I (1707-12) – the successor to the sixth Mughal king, Aurangzeb Alamgir. I sighed, and muttered to myself: Lo bhai, Zatalli’s children have also made it to Jantar Mantar. 

Mir Jafar Zatalli (1658-1713) was a well-known Hindi/Rekhta poet who penned, to cite Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s words, “obscenity-and-invective-filled satire.” The nom de plume, Zatalli, means a “babbler of nonsense.” And a quick perusal of Zatal Nama – a compendium of Zatalli’s verses, would testify that the poet had a special taste for writing erotic and pornographic poetry. He thoroughly critiqued Bahadur Shah I. In fact, he spared none. His compendium contains stinging satire (hajv) of sheikhs, qazis, kotwals, and others who were not only inept but also mired in corruption of various sorts at the time.

The centre cannot hold

The maelstrom of outrage that gripped Jantar Mantar for 36 days stemmed from watching a tragedy. It was the suicide of students in the wake of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) paper leak. Seeing the loss of young lives on varied social networking sites helped Gen Z relate “personal troubles” with “public issues,” to cite C. Wright Mills’ phrases, that shattered the hierarchy of souls, which in turn helped rock the boat. At a time when political dissent has almost become a crime in the country, and the activists as well as the academics are in the line of fire, the dramatic spectacle at Jantar Mantar looked seismic.

The novelty of Gen Z’s collective rage across India was the fact that it was entwined with a massive outpouring of swear words. On swearing, Abhishek Avtans, a scholar of Hindi language and literature at Leiden University, writes that it is “a universal linguistic behaviour exhibited to navigate social taboos, express intense emotions, exert power over others or build solidarity.” Its usage at protest sites has, however, wounded the public sensibilities very badly. It has also triggered a discussion, online and offline. Swearing is, Avtans submits, a “normal human behaviour and not some deviant form of communication to be swept under the carpet.” 

On a slightly different note, the tradition of tossing choicest women-specific expletives on the bridegroom’s side is very common in north Indian weddings. The women who throw such abuses get a sum of money called Neg. Similarly, Nakta is an important merrymaking at weddings in eastern Uttar Pradesh. In the aforementioned women-only event, one woman acts herself as a man and the other his wife, encompassing lewd gestures and a slew of profanities. In short, expletives are written into the very fabric of Indian........

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