1. This Is A Protest

Why do protest visuals have to look a certain way? Can’t we centre love, sisterhood and at times even survival, and register life itself as a sign of protest. Our communities have been stereotyped, and our resources looted for far too long now. Extraction—of our resources, our bodies, and our knowledge—only tell a part of the story. Dehumanized visuals that we have been forcefully subjected to deny us of our holistic reality. And we refuse such dehumanisation.

This photograph was taken in Central India’s Chhattisgarh at one among the 40 ongoing protest sites where the villagers, mostly indigenous and Dalit women, protest the illegal mining of iron from within their forests.

This is also the time when in India’s capital, relentless headlines detail heat wave fatalities as merely “a 100 People Die in Heatwave” or “Extreme Heat Kills Hundreds.” The profound human narratives often fade into statistical obscurity. Who are these individuals succumbing to the sweltering temperatures in the Global South, in our cities, and across our villages? What stories do they carry, and what societal injustices push them to the forefront of this climate crisis?

The unsettling truth emerges: the victims predominantly hail from marginalized communities, bearing the intersectional weight of caste, gender, indigeneity and economic disparity. The impact of heat on our bodies is far from equitable.

The heat is not equal to us all.

(The title for this specific chapter is loosely inspired by a Christmas gathering we had in 2023, in Hyderabad at Percy Tabitha’s home—a day that felt like a protest in itself. Ever since, I’ve carried that feeling, sentiment and the very idea of a protest, with me. This is a Protest is also the title of Percy’s photo-book on the Tsundur Massacre, in southern India’s Andhra Pradesh where eight Dalits were murdered by “upper-caste” Reddy men, allegedly with police complicity.)