The Symbolism of Backpacks in E. P. Unny and Ai Weiwei

Social revolutions often throw up symbols that remain fresh in the socio-cultural and political imagination, even though they may not play a direct role in revolutionary acts. In 1930, Mahatma Gandhi picked up a mundane object like salt and transformed it into a powerful political symbol through an unprecedented combination of creative imagination and practical philosophy. He made salt from seawater, openly defying the draconian British laws governing its production and sale.

In 2013, the Aam Aadmi Party picked up the broom as its election symbol, promising to clean society of bribery and other forms of corruption. Later, when the Chief Justice of India condescendingly described Indian youth as “cockroaches,” an Indian student, Abhijit Deepke, then studying at Boston University, created a satirical Instagram platform. The image of a creature that had hitherto been considered despicable was transformed into a lasting symbol of organisation, protest and agitation.

While the cockroach grew in stature through its many avatars, shaped by the imagination of millions of young Indian content creators, another mundane object emerged as a powerful symbol of the educated, rejected, frustrated, dispossessed, betrayed and job-seeking youth of India: the backpack.

Alongside the dominant cockroach symbol, the backpack became an enduring marker of the Gen-Z generation that spearheaded the agitation on the ground and brought about a series of changes in the government's attitude. A minister resigned, the Prime Minister began making reels, and parliamentarians started adopting Gen-Z expressions and language. Meanwhile, the cascading effect of the protests began to spread across the country.

Irrespective of gender or class—and regardless of the brand or price of the bag—most young people use backpacks for their convenience. They can carry their dreams as well as their worldly possessions in them. Unlike many other kinds of bags, backpacks leave the carrier's hands free, allowing greater freedom of movement. The shoulders and back together can support the weight while travelling, and most backpacks are relatively inexpensive and affordable.

For a young person, a backpack can contain a miniature version of their room, their work, their aspirations and, in a sense, their life.

When thousands of young people arrived at Jantar Mantar in July this year, demanding the resignation of the Union Education Minister, none of them knew how long the struggle would last. They came prepared with backpacks containing spare clothes, snacks, laptops, mobile chargers, books, water bottles, sanitary napkins and, above all, hope and determination.

The protest continued for a month, accompanied by the state's increasingly ruthless resistance, which went to the extent of using brutal pellet guns against unarmed students demanding their rights.

Backpacks were everywhere.

Today, I came across a cartoon by the veteran intellectual cartoonist E. P. Unny of The Indian Express. It contained nothing but the image of a backpack, complete with a water bottle tucked into the side net and a book and pen in the outer pocket. The caption simply read: “15 Aug 2026.”

What a befitting cartoon for the 80th anniversary of Indian Independence.

This minimalist cartoon transforms the Gen-Z symbol of an ordinary backpack into a lasting icon of an ongoing socio-cultural resistance. From Delhi, the Gen-Z protests have spread to different parts of India, and now even Gen-Alpha has begun raising its voice for better educational facilities and teaching. They are supported by Gen-Z leaders who have chosen to function as a pressure group rather than convert the momentum of the movement into a political party.

Unny is not alone in transforming the backpack into a cultural and political symbol.

In a very different context, the prominent Chinese conceptual artist Ai Weiwei created an installation using thousands of backpacks. Titled Remembering, the installation was a response to the devastating 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, China, in which more than 80,000 people lost their lives, many of them schoolchildren.

Weiwei investigated why the death toll among schoolchildren was so high. He discovered that many school buildings had collapsed because they had been constructed with cheap materials, amid rampant institutional corruption and the alleged siphoning of funds by politically influential building contractors.

For Remembering, Weiwei used 9,000 school backpacks. Arranged on the façade of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, the backpacks formed the sentence “She lived happily for seven years in this world” in Mandarin. The words were made up of backpacks, each associated with a child whose name his team of researchers had identified through grieving parents and government records.

The backpacks in Weiwei's installation carry the weight of children who are no longer there. Unny's backpack, on the other hand, carries the presence of a generation that refuses to disappear into silence.

E. P. Unny's untitled cartoon and Ai Weiwei's Remembering thus symbolise two different tragedies of our times. One speaks of a generation fighting to protect its future; the other remembers children whose future was brutally taken away.

Yet both works ultimately speak to the same human imperative: the fight against forgetting.

A backpack can carry books, clothes, food, technology and the small necessities of everyday life. But in the hands of an artist—or in the hands of a generation in revolt—it can carry something much larger: memory, resistance, grief, aspiration and hope.

JohnyML

 

Dimagee Naxals and the Orwellian Thought Police

 

“The other is hell,” said Albert Camus. It was quite an existential statement. But in the hands of Edward Said, the “Other” became the one who is forced into hell. For the survival of any ideology, there has to be an “Other”—someone against whom we define ourselves. It makes us believe that our survival depends on comparison. We other, therefore we are.

Yesterday, when the Prime Minister spoke to the nation on the occasion of the 80th Independence anniversary from the ramparts of the historic Red Fort, he once again created another “Other”: the Dimagee Naxal, or the “mentally Naxal.”

The Prime Minister, however, did not pinpoint who these Dimagee Naxals are. Nor, unlike an earlier infamous political remark, did he suggest that they could be identified by their clothes.

Dimagee Naxal is the latest contestable term to enter our political vocabulary. The Prime Minister could have meant several things by it. Perhaps he meant “Urban Naxals”—the so-called Naxals who live in cities. But these are not the gun-wielding, emaciated young men and women in the forests of Bastar or Dandakaranya who have taken Maoism as their political faith and way of life.

Urban Naxals, in the contemporary political imagination, are more likely to be intellectuals, academics, students, writers and citizens who think differently from the dominant ideology—in our case, the dominant right-wing Hindutva ideology. They have previously been described as “anti-nationals,” members of “tukde-tukde gangs,” and by many other labels.

In the immediate political context, however, Dimagee Naxal could mean something else altogether. It could refer to the educated, jobless and frustrated youth of India—the very people who can be easily identified because they think, speak sense and assert their logic.

They want democracy. They want fraternity. Their primary demand is remarkably ordinary: decent jobs that allow them to fulfil their dreams and take care of their families. The government has offered plenty of promises, but very little that addresses this immediate anxiety. And, interestingly, this particular goalpost cannot simply be pushed twenty years into the future, to 2047.

Ever since the BJP-led NDA government came to power at the Centre in 2014, its political rhetoric has relied heavily on hyper-nationalism. To maintain that rhetoric at the same intensity, it has required a constant production of “Others.”

First, it was Pakistan. Then Indian Muslims—an established “Other” in Indian majoritarian politics since the late nineteenth century. Then China and Chinese products. Then students raising slogans of “Azadi.” Then beef eaters. Then those who did not consider the cow their mother. Later came Maoists and “Urban Naxals.” Then anyone who appeared too sensible, too educated or too questioning.

The list went on.

But now the process of “othering” appears exhausted. There are only so many Others one can manufacture.

Pakistan does not seem interested in constantly providing the enemy image that Indian political rhetoric requires. China plays its own strategic game, intelligently combining military pressure, trade and diplomacy. Indian Muslims have been forced to negotiate with a political reality that has repeatedly diminished their sense of security and belonging. Intellectuals and professors have been intimidated. Beef politics has transformed what people eat into a political question. Urban Naxals continue to write autobiographies, essays and books to record their experiences.

So the ruling party needs a new category.

And like Hollywood, which periodically needs to invent an alien threat when terrestrial enemies become insufficient, our political imagination seems to have arrived at something even more abstract:

The Dimagee Naxal.

The term needs some qualification. “Dimagee” suggests someone with a brain—someone who thinks, questions and acts. “Naxal” suggests the perpetual disruptor, the person who asks uncomfortable questions about justice, equality and rights.

But how does one identify a Dimagee?

A man with a beard, or a woman with kohl-lined eyes and unconventional clothes, might be taken for an intellectual. But appearance does not make an intellectual. A thinking person could look completely ordinary, without sending out any visible signal that says: I am brainy.

And therein lies the problem.

If the “Dimagee Naxal” is defined by thought rather than appearance, then virtually anyone can become one.

Our governments have historically been uncomfortable with education and independent thinking because education teaches people to ask questions. And where there are questions, there is the possibility of dissent, resistance and, eventually, political change.

The old feudal order, codified through texts such as the Manusmriti, placed severe restrictions on who could access knowledge. In contemporary India, one can see echoes of this anxiety in the systematic politicisation, weakening and restructuring of schooling and higher education.

The Dimagee Naxal also resonates disturbingly with George Orwell’s idea of the Thought Police.

In 1984, Orwell imagined a totalitarian state in which the government does not merely police actions or words—it polices thought itself. Surveillance becomes permanent. Movements are monitored. Words are scrutinised. Rooms are bugged. Telephones are tapped. People are watched. And eventually, even an unexpressed thought can become evidence of a crime.

We seem to have arrived, rather smoothly, at the threshold of that Orwellian condition.

Perhaps the Dimagee Naxal is the final stage in the politics of “othering”: when there are no more convincing external enemies left, the enemy becomes thought itself.

Anybody can now potentially be accused of a thought crime.

Be ready for it.

What is the next stop? I do not know.

But history tells us that regimes built entirely on the production of enemies eventually begin to consume themselves. The politics of permanent othering ultimately turns inward; the regime starts devouring the very society it claims to protect.

So, beyond all the expected calamities, perhaps there is a small silver lining around the clouds.

The final Other may eventually become the regime itself.

JohnyML

A National Exhibition, or an Affordable Art Fair?

 

The 65th National Exhibition, conducted by the Lalit Kala Akademi, was formally inaugurated on 21 August 2026. I went to see it yesterday. Densely displayed, and complete with ‘price’ and other details—title, medium, size and year—the works, in general, and the exhibition, in particular, felt more like an ‘affordable’ art fair (the kind that these days are conducted in hotel rooms, washrooms, corridors and lawns) than a ‘National’ exhibition.

I should not be cynical, I told myself as I waded through the rough works of art. At one point, I thought that established artists who have already had several solo and gallery exhibitions should not participate in this, even if they feel that a coveted prize from the Akademi—or at least participation in the exhibition—elevates their status among the art fraternity, otherwise known as the art market. This kind of ‘rising’ is merely an illusion. They should listen to the veteran artist Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, who, in an interview with a leading daily last year, said that artists have ‘outgrown’ their need for the Akademi and its services. This simply means that we have a matured art market, with professionals handling its affairs, which also means that the Akademi has failed on all these fronts.

Last year, at the 64th National Exhibition, there was an overflow of spontaneous depictions of cows and gods as painterly images. This time, beyond the first two halls, the cows and gods have stopped grazing. The psychology of the organisers is clear. Government officials—these days, ministers do not have much time to waste on art openings—who come to inaugurate the exhibition obviously lose interest by the time they reach the third hall, for two obvious reasons. One, fatigue sets in when one is forced to confront unfamiliar things while maintaining a smiling face. Two, visual overload is always distracting.

For a regular art lover, the show begins after the second hall. My verdict: there is nothing spectacular on offer. I should say that the best works on display have already been taken, with a ‘sold’ sticker attached to them. Some are bought for their visual freshness and experimental verve. Others are acquired for their obvious mythological references. Buyers are never idiots; they know that it is their money going into somebody’s pockets. But from the stickers, one could clearly understand the mindset of the buyers. Those who bought works with religious subjects seem to have bought them for their drawing rooms. The other buyers who picked up works of ‘art’ know that they are going to see these artists grow and, if they do not, will make efforts to cultivate them.

Two works placed side by side caught my particular attention. One shows a woman clad in saffron, wearing a red bindi on her forehead, with two wings growing from her shoulders. The work is titled Ambition. The next depicts Hanuman in the Ashoka Forest, where Sita Devi is kept under a tree while her demonic sentinels are seen in various stages of slumber. The theatrical appearance of Hanuman is quite phallic, relegating Sita Devi to ignominy.

Seen together, I thought about the intelligence of the curator—though nobody has claimed the curatorship—or the lack of it. A woman clad in an ideological robe who wants to take off into the sky is itself an oxymoron. She seems to have forgotten that the ideology she has accepted is not going to let her fly. At maximum, she could become a member of the ideological crowd, if it lets her fly beyond the streets.

Sita Mata, in our childhood imagination, has always been the central character, especially when she is abducted to Lanka. In her presence, Hanuman is usually shown in a diminutive form, genuflecting and consoling her. Times have changed, and Hanuman, one of my favourite characters from the epic, has become a ferocious sticker on the backs of auto-rickshaws and cars. We can clearly see where the artist and the buyer stand when it comes to the epic and its ideological use.

You don’t miss much even if you fail to visit.

JohnyML

Beyond Van Gogh: The Mad Genius of Yayoi Kusama

 

Yayoi Kusama (1929–2026) has passed away. She was 97. When every artist in the world thought that they were ostracised by society for being crazy and, ironically, lived in the midst of that society, earning success and enjoying all that society could give them, Kusama chose to live in a mental facility. She walked to her studio every day, made art, and returned to her room in the asylum.

Kusama, whose works were displayed in India for the first time as part of last year’s India Art Fair, was an inverted image of Vincent van Gogh, who has been the reigning star in the kingdom of artistic lunacy. In the post-Freudian understanding of art, a woman’s genius is often directly connected to her sexual frustration and hysteria, while a man’s genius is seen as an expression of his divine capabilities. But we do not have any history of a woman genius dying of sexually transmitted diseases, as did Gauguin, Basquiat, and Haring.

Kusama was neither sexually frustrated nor hysterical, but she was a misfit in the male-dominated American art scene—or, for that matter, in any art scene—and found solace in polka dots, a cultural symbol from her Japanese upbringing. She used them profusely to inhabit the skins of her works. Polka dots were to Kusama what sunflowers were to Van Gogh. Despite her self-isolating madness, which was philosophical, resistive, and affective, Kusama gained acceptance in the art world as a feminist artist with an exotic bent of mind.

The biggest challenge before any artist is to develop a recognisable set of symbols that is exclusive to them. Kusama achieved this much earlier, as her polka dots became unmissable. She travelled through the various phases of technological evolution witnessed by the 20th century and upgraded her works each time without fail. By the new millennium, Kusama’s works had become immersive, interactive, and spectacular, replicating the mood of the times. It was a world of intelligent clones, and through the clever use of mirrors, she created a magical and illusionary world of transcendence.

With yellow pumpkins covered in black dots, and vice versa, Kusama created a symbology of her own. “Pumpkin” is also slang for an idiot or a foolish person. In the politico-culinary history of Japan, the pumpkin is seen as a Portuguese import that eventually became an integral part of Japanese culinary culture. Perhaps Kusama used the image of the pumpkin to suggest both stupidity and the colonial import of things, along with their future implications.

Like Ai Weiwei, Takashi Murakami, and their father figure, Andy Warhol, Kusama also had a studio with assistants who executed her work under her strict instructions. Like the Ghibli studio of the late Hayao Miyazaki, the Kusama studio also saw her working like any other assistant, without asking for a special cubicle or an executive chair.

Kusama will remain in our hearts for her works and for the madness she brought into and expressed through her art.

JohnyML

Women, Objects and the Memory of Sculpture

 

(My Sitting Laundry by Sojwal Samant)

Saturday. NFCC. New Friends Colony Community Centre. Espace Gallery. The glass wall reflects the pub across the road. I train my eyes and make sure that there is a show inside. Bahadur, the faithful multi-role man of the gallery, whom I have known for the last three decades, is at his post. He receives me with a familiar smile and goes to switch on the lights. With the lights on, Sculpting Lineages: Women Across Generations, a group show of sculptures and sculptural installations, comes into existence.

Curated by Nainvi Vora and designed by the veteran exhibition designer Prima Kurien, the show is impressive, with works by Ira Chowdhury, a ceramist who seems to have seen centuries, the way Louise Bourgeois had seen centuries through her works, and those by Latika Katt. Ira Chowdhury's ceramics are subtle, emanating the old-world charm of Greco-Roman vases. Her works started and ended like a haiku in this exhibition.

Peering at the viewers with his sad eyes, a bust of Tagore emerges from the dark wall. Beside him, in a niche, one could see the bust of Mahatma Gandhi, his eyes closed in prayer—or do they show a sense of resignation? Both are by Latika Katt, an artist who offended one and all with her haughty attitude (because she had artistic talent and thought that each time she was sidestepped, it resulted in a permanent irritation). Though done at disparate times, she imbued them with a sense of loss and pain, befitting the mood of the century in which they walked the earth.

My Sitting Laundry may be a very ordinary title for a sculpture, but when Sojwal Samant places four pieces of ceramic that imitate clothes on two levels, the assemblage becomes the portrait of an ordinary woman as a subject worth portraying and an object denied her levitative rights. Using recognizable and unfamiliar forms, Samant creates an ensemble of sculptural installations, provoking viewers to eke out meanings from them. An abstract figure trying to break out from a broken ceramic surface leaves room for considered interpretations.

Sambhavi is a senior artist with an established language, using scaled-up objects to create sculptural bodies. At the same time, the perforations in them create an added dimension to the work, along with the shadow and the space around it. Scaled-up images of a palm-leaf fan with extended handles transform the sculpture into a surreal object, the way C. K. Rajan has done in his works.

Remembering an artist's name is difficult these days, as there are many artists, not only in galleries but also on social media, flooding real and virtual spaces with innumerable works and their images. I believe that if a work is outstanding, naturally the artist's name gets etched into the viewer's memory. This is exactly what happened with the works of Radhika Agarwala and Pooja Gupta.

Radhika Agarwala plays with images of 'nature' and the 'natural'—bark, roots, and so on—in order to create her works. Each object that we encounter in life has a story, and these objects in turn generate memories in our minds. The concept explored by both Agarwala and Gupta is the relationship between object and memory. It is not Barthes-ian; they are not ridden with cultural memories but with very subjective ones. However, personal memories can evoke empathy and identification. I thought that after Shilpa Gupta, there is another Gupta on the scene who could make her mark further with her tablet-strip sculptural installations in various mediums.

One good thing about this exhibition is that, even if it does not trace direct lineages from Ira Chowdhury to Radhika and Pooja, viewers can recognize the curatorial intention of highlighting feminine ways of sculpting (if sculpting is seen as a male forte) and their ability to address the intimate as well as the larger issues of our times. These works in the exhibition have a 'personality' of their own. It is a good thing that Prima Kurien has not darkened the space more than required.

JohnyML

There Is Nothing That Wouldn’t Change

 

'There Is Nothing That Wouldn’t Change' is the title of a book of conversations between Ramon Magsaysay Award winner Bezwada Wilson and noted writer Perumal Murugan. For those unfamiliar with Wilson’s work, he is an activist who has devoted his life to fighting for the rights of sanitation workers, particularly those forced to clean dry latrines and human waste by hand.

Many among the urban Gen Z and Alpha generations may not know how dry latrines work. You defecate and leave the waste where it is. Sanitation workers then come and remove the raw human waste in buckets, often using nothing more than a tin blade as their tool. When wheelbarrows or pickup vans are unavailable, they carry these buckets on their heads. These workers come from the lowest rungs of India’s caste system and are often forced to inherit this inhuman occupation, receiving only meagre benefits from municipalities and corporations.

Born in Andhra Pradesh to a couple who worked as sanitation workers, Wilson experienced the inhumanity and oppression associated with this work firsthand. As a teenager, he began to feel that he had to work towards eradicating this uncivilised practice.

Human waste in dry latrines, however, is only part of the problem. In cities, drains and sewers become clogged, and sanitation workers are made to enter poisonous, gas-filled pits without adequate life-protecting equipment to unclog them. Many have died in the process, suffocating in these confined spaces.

Wilson has spent decades working for the welfare of sanitation workers and for the complete eradication of manual scavenging. He believes technology can replace human involvement in this sector and that former sanitation workers can be rehabilitated through education and skill development. Safai Karmachari Andolan (Sanitation Workers Movement) emerged from this activism. Today, Wilson travels across India and abroad, speaking about the urgent need for change.

Every time Wilson speaks about the plight of sanitation workers, he returns to the question of the Indian caste system. In his conversation with Murugan, he traces how this practice evolved into a legitimised form of caste-based labour, particularly during the post-Mughal and colonial periods.

Today, our Prime Minister expresses empathy towards sanitation workers but does little to dismantle the system that keeps them trapped in this work. Wilson argues that the Prime Minister sees business opportunities where there should be a focus on human dignity, stripping the issue of its human content. In large states such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, the practice continues. Many workers are leaving the occupation, but those caught within the system find it extremely difficult to escape.

Wilson calls for the complete eradication of this vile system, which now operates largely through contractors, allowing governments to shirk their responsibilities—especially when deaths and accidents occur during sanitation operations. It is an appalling reality that, even as India approaches eight decades of Independence, such an inhuman system remains embedded in our society.

This book is, fundamentally, about justice for sanitation workers. Yet the very production and presentation of the book raises another question of injustice—this time towards Bezwada Wilson himself.

Penguin presents the book primarily as a work by Perumal Murugan, who has a considerably larger readership and fan following than Wilson. In reality, Murugan’s role in the book is minimal: he asks questions and facilitates Wilson’s reflections. The book, therefore, could more appropriately have been presented as Bezwada Wilson in Conversation with Perumal Murugan.

Penguin, like the government Wilson criticises, appears to see the business opportunity before it sees the human being. And, in an increasingly authoritarian environment, the publishing industry too cannot afford to forget its responsibility towards those whose voices it claims to amplify.

JohnyML

Instagram and the Illusion of Being an Artist

 

“Facebook sucks, so I am shifting to Instagram. See me there @....” has been a common refrain among friends for quite some time. Instagram is longer than X and crispier than Facebook. Period. Fashionable people throng there, and “Insta posts” make them hipper than the hippies on Facebook. True, perhaps. It all depends on one’s mindset, approach and perspective—like bell-bottom pants, once fashionable, then an embarrassment, and now retro, fashionable and trendy again.

There are many art advisories on Instagram. They offer quick fixes and the hope of getting rich. Every time I come across art videos posted by random people who call themselves “influencers”, I feel that they are dream sellers who know that they are selling painted versions of nothingness. Some are “desi” types who tell you how to make quick money by producing smaller works featuring flowers, bird couples, women in ecstasy, sublime architectures and so on. They tell you that such works sell quickly in foreign markets and that you could make a few quick bucks.

Then there are the globe-trotting neo-richies who visit a museum or gallery and make highly sophisticated videos intended for Instagram. They talk about artists who are absolutely unfamiliar to you and whose works are produced on a scale that one can only dream of. The galleries look neat and immaculate, as if they were created specifically for an Instagram reel. The more they talk, the more wistful and weary you feel, because you are unable to emulate anything you see—in either style or scale. What you don’t realise is that they may not be committed to what they are seeing or saying. You could say almost anything, and AI will correct it, polish it and make it presentable.

The third category belongs to Gen X. They are rich in experience and firmly believe that the Gen Z artists out there are destined to make mistakes in their artistic careers. They offer plenty of advice, and their intentions are often good. But they rarely acknowledge that making mistakes is also one of the most important ways of learning.

The fourth category consists of artists themselves, who flaunt their works as if the world is coming to an end the following day. They flood their feeds with multiple images until someone is eventually forced to remember them.

The irony is that the young artists who follow Instagram advice are not generally featured in galleries. This suggests that Instagram is not yet a marketplace for even gallerists, who are constantly on the lookout for fresh talent. I am not saying that posting on Instagram is a waste of time, nor am I saying that it cannot eventually translate into a market. But if you blindly follow the advice offered by innumerable influencers—whose credentials are rarely verified beyond what they display on their own posts—and by AI-generated influencers, you may be following an illusion rather than a direction.

So, what is the solution?

I am not here to give advice. But the only way to become an artist with a recognised visual language is to develop a strong artistic practice. And to have a strong artistic practice, one needs a strong life—a life lived fully, in the direst of situations as well as in the most depressing times. Exceptional lives need not necessarily be happy lives.

Driven by FOMO—the fear of missing out—even veterans today slip into posting trivia on social media. But, ultimately, nothing matters.

Cry out in the midst of a forest; the birds will carry your tears to the city.

JohnyML