Shifting Grammar of Protest

Dissent defines the contours of public life. In the act of performing dissent a ground of sociability opens. Being a simultaneously felt need, dissent is almost always contextual. There have been several academic and journalistic treatments of the idea of dissent and its causality, particularly those that concern the history of dissent in the subcontinent. The book under review traces the ‘shifts’ in the pattern of popular protest (p. 1). It begins by foregrounding the context of ‘transformative dissent’ and wades through the changing contours of it till 2018. The vast canvass of time traversed by the authors allows them to contextualize the reason behind the transformation in the grammar of protest. It offers the readers through a delineation of the trajectory of political mobilization that India as a democracy is perhaps moving towards an era of proactive interface between the government and the people, but it remains to be seen whether their million mutinies can make the small voices to be heard or be drowned in all the mediatized 24×7 cacophony.