Dangerous Little Things: a brief memoir essay

In 2018, one of the essays I published but did not share around much, was about protest, about how I grew up apolitical and was suspicious of student politics until I became a journalist and finally learnt the dangers of distancing oneself from politicking as citizens or confining oneself merely to the exercise of the ballot. 

MY GRANDFATHER WAS once in jail.

As a kid, I’d pronounce this with a little flush of pride. My grandpa! Way back in 1941.

As a young man, my maternal grandfather became involved with student politics and wrote rousing poems, neither of which the British government cared for. A warrant was issued. He went underground, but was eventually arrested.

I know nothing of his jail stint except that he wrote more Urdu poetry and learnt the Hindi (Devanagari) script. I did ask once if his mother was mad at him for getting arrested. She was upset, he said, mainly on account of the family’s reputation. His marriage had been fixed, but after his arrest the girl’s side broke off the engagement. Clearly, not everyone thought it was such a fine thing to go to jail – not even in the name of the freedom.

My pride rested on the fact that Grandpa was a political prisoner. So was the Father of the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi, and our first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the tallest leaders of India’s freedom struggle. Some were charged with ‘sedition’, causing disaffection towards the government, but that didn’t stop them. They courted arrest, confronted police batons and went on hunger strikes. They emerged from jail with their heads held high.

Then came freedom. On 15 August 1947, at the stroke of midnight, politicking was no longer quite the same. Inquilab Zindabad – ‘Long Live the Revolution’ – became a fraught slogan. My grandfather was no longer so political. The sedition law stayed on the books.

Read the fully essay here: https://www.griffithreview.com/articles/dangerous-little-things-turning-political/