As nations make violence seem normal and silence those who question it, cultural resistance has become more important than ever. Writers, artists, and intellectuals who dare to speak for humanity are increasingly censured under the pretext of national security and institutional discipline. India is no exception. It is in this backdrop that the reputed Malayalam writer T. Padmanabhan’s short story, “Children of Gaza” published in the Onam Special Issue of Mathrubhumi Weekly stands out as a forceful act of defiance.

The story transcends its narrative frame to become an agonising allegory of conscience. It becomes a writer’s moral protest against indifference, war, and hypocrisy. Its appearance during the Onam season, traditionally a time of celebration, intensifies its irony and urgency, especially when contrasted with the experience of a well-known literary critic of Kerala, M. Leelavathy, who was viciously attacked on social media for saying she could not celebrate Onam while Gaza’s children starved.

Her humane remark, met with hostility from pro-Israeli and communal groups, revealed how even compassion has become controversial. Together, Padmanabhan’s story and Leelavathy’s statement inform a larger cultural moment, one where moral imagination itself becomes resistance, and where speaking for the suffering is an act of courage in an age that rewards silence. The significance of “Children of Gaza” lies in the fact that it is set on a campus.

A climate of fear and suppression

Across campuses in India, the United States, and elsewhere, expressions of solidarity with the people of Palestine have become acts of defiance. Students and faculty are being warned, censured, even punished. Universities in the U.S. have faced funding cuts under US president Donald Trump’s renewed nationalist agenda, while student activists have been detained or deported. In India, several seminars and conferences on Palestine have been denied permission under vague “law and order” pretexts.

The idea of moral empathy itself has been treated as subversive. It is in this suffocating climate that T. Padmanabhan’s story gains its profound moral force. It captures, in a small frame, the courage of a conscience that refuses to be restrained by academic etiquette or political fear.

The story’s unnamed protagonist  – clearly modelled after a veteran man of letters – is invited by a vice chancellor to inaugurate a university programme on the benefit of artificial intelligence in new-age literature.

The invitation itself becomes contentious. Younger members of the syndicate opposed him: “You will not be able to do justice to the subject,” they argued. They accused him of being irrelevant, a relic of another age who knows only Ezhuthachan, Kumaranasan, and Vallathol, and a man ignorant of feminism, contemporary literature, and AI. The VC, torn between affection and institutional caution, pleads, as the protagonist moved to the function: “Please don’t put us in a difficult situation.”

This is not merely a story about a conflict of generations. It is about the moral decay of institutions, afraid of truth and eager to please the powerful. The protagonist’s isolation shows that of the writer in a time when speaking for humanity is deemed inconvenient.

From silence to moral outcry

When he finally steps onto the stage, his heart trembles. He cannot talk about AI or “new-age literature.” Instead, he begins with a cry that cuts through academic decorum:

“Children are crying. I hear it. If you pay attention, you can hear it too.”

In that moment, the conference collapses into moral urgency. Gaza enters the hall. He evokes images of starving children, parents killed, little hands raised to the sky –

“They were raising their hands to get food from planes which may come sometime. Instead of food, the children received a bomb or a missile.”

Then comes the most devastating question:

“Is it right to kill human beings? Especially innocent little children who have done no wrong?”

No one answers. The audience – representatives of a sterile academic world – remains silent. The man’s closing words, My God, I don’t understand anything…, are not an admission of ignorance but a cry of moral bewilderment in a world that has normalized horror.

A metaphor for cultural resistance

When he walks out, no one stops him. However, symbolically, he walks with all the helpless children of the world, dissolving into what Padmanabhan calls "that big stream".  It is the stream of moral conscience – the collective humanity that refuses to die even when institutions crumble.

This final image recalls the ethical tradition of writers who stood against barbarism: from Sartre and Camus opposing colonial violence, to M. Mukundan, O.V. Vijayan, and many others in Malayalam literature who turned fiction into moral resistance. Padmanabhan, now in his 90s, continues this lineage.

Cultural resistance today

Padmanabhan’s story reasserts what many universities and cultural institutions have forgotten, that literature and art are not neutral spaces, nor political vacuums. When power kills and justifies, silence becomes complicity. His protagonist’s refusal to conform is an act of cultural rebellion, a reminder that moral clarity does not come from algorithms, but from empathy.

In a time when even the word Gaza invites censorship, this story reclaims the writer’s right to feel, to cry, and to accuse. It symbolises the same spirit that moved Leelavathy’s statement,  that celebration without compassion is hollow, that art without ethics is noise.

T. Padmanabhan’s story, thus, goes beyond its plot. It is not about a man who failed to speak on AI; it is about a man who chose to speak on humanity. In the face of intellectual cowardice and political intimidation, he utters the simplest, most radical truth: “Children are crying. I hear it.”

That line becomes both a moral indictment and a call to conscience, a reminder that when power suppresses solidarity, cultural resistance becomes the last refuge of humanity.

Names of Gaza

Just as Padmanabhan’s story transforms literature into moral protest, Kerala’s cultural community extended this spirit to the streets of Kochi, turning empathy into collective action. The event titled Names of Gaza, held at Vanchi Square in Kochi, stood out as a intensely humane and defiant cultural gesture.

Conceived by writer N.S. Madhavan and organised by the Chintha Ravi Foundation along with the Palestine Solidarity Forum, it brought together leading writers, artists, activists, and media professionals who gathered to read aloud the names of children killed in Gaza. What made the event remarkable was its deliberate simplicity, the moral power of naming as an act of remembrance and resistance.

In an age when war casualties are flattened into numbers like “over 18,000 children killed,” the public reading of each name reclaimed individuality from anonymity. Each uttered name reasserted a life, a face, and a story, transforming abstract statistics into a shared experience of grief and empathy.

This slow, ritualistic process turned the act of reading into a moral performance, where art replaced slogans, and emotion replaced rhetoric. It was not just a vigil but a collective testimony, a refusal to allow the world to forget.

The Names of Gaza gathering also connected Kerala’s long-standing intellectual tradition to a global chain of solidarity. Inspired by similar events held abroad, such as in Brussels, it reaffirmed that the struggle for justice is universal and that compassion cannot be confined by geography. Kerala’s cultural environs, with its strong anti-imperialist legacy and progressive literary community, gave the protest a distinct moral depth.

The participation of artists, writers and actors and the wearing of the keffiyeh, transformed the square into a space of symbolic defiance. The inclusion of Dabke, the traditional Palestinian dance, gives deeper meaning, linking mourning to moral strength, and grief to the unbroken spirit of Sumud or resoluteness. In short, Names of Gaza was more than a protest. It was an act of ethical remembrance that affirmed the role of culture in defending humanity. It reminded us that even when politics silences dissent, the arts can still speak the language of conscience.

In the face of militarism, censorship, and moral indifference, Kerala’s writers and artists have reminded the world that culture still has the power to resist. From T. Padmanabhan’s solitary cry of conscience to the collective mourning at Names of Gaza, these gestures reveal how art can reclaim humanity when politics fails.

Both acts insist that compassion is not weakness but courage, that moral imagination, not fear, sustains civilisation. In a time when universities punish empathy and the word Gaza itself is treated as dangerous, Kerala’s cultural voices have turned remembrance into rebellion. They affirm that literature, art, and moral reflections are not indulgences in an unjust world, but its last defences.

When a writer says, “Children are crying. I hear it,” and a people answer through song, dance, and solidarity, it is humanity itself that speaks, refusing silence.

The author is Director, Inter University Centre for Social Science Research, Mahatma Gandhi University, who earlier served as Senior Professor of International Relations and Dean of Social Sciences. 

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