In Praise of Profanities: The Mughal Era Poetry of Protest

Watching Gen Z hurling volleys of profanities at the Indian prime minister and the education minister was indeed a staggering spectacle at Jantar Mantar. It was perhaps the first time that the country encountered such a protest movement. The sight, however, took me a couple of centuries back to the reign of Mu‘azzam/Bahadur Shah I (1707-12) – the successor to the sixth Mughal king, Aurangzeb Alamgir. I sighed, and muttered to myself: Lo bhai, Zatalli’s children have also made it to Jantar Mantar. 

Mir Jafar Zatalli (1658-1713) was a well-known Hindi/Rekhta poet who penned, to cite Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s words, “obscenity-and-invective-filled satire.” The nom de plume, Zatalli, means a “babbler of nonsense.” And a quick perusal of Zatal Nama – a compendium of Zatalli’s verses, would testify that the poet had a special taste for writing erotic and pornographic poetry. He thoroughly critiqued Bahadur Shah I. In fact, he spared none. His compendium contains stinging satire (hajv) of sheikhs, qazis, kotwals, and others who were not only inept but also mired in corruption of various sorts at the time.

The centre cannot hold

The maelstrom of outrage that gripped Jantar Mantar for 36 days stemmed from watching a tragedy. It was the suicide of students in the wake of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) paper leak. Seeing the loss of young lives on varied social networking sites helped Gen Z relate “personal troubles” with “public issues,” to cite C. Wright Mills’ phrases, that shattered the hierarchy of souls, which in turn helped rock the boat. At a time when political dissent has almost become a crime in the country, and the activists as well as the academics are in the line of fire, the dramatic spectacle at Jantar Mantar looked seismic.

The novelty of Gen Z’s collective rage across India was the fact that it was entwined with a massive outpouring of swear words. On swearing, Abhishek Avtans, a scholar of Hindi language and literature at Leiden University, writes that it is “a universal linguistic behaviour exhibited to navigate social taboos, express intense emotions, exert power over others or build solidarity.” Its usage at protest sites has, however, wounded the public sensibilities very badly. It has also triggered a discussion, online and offline. Swearing is, Avtans submits, a “normal human behaviour and not some deviant form of communication to be swept under the carpet.” 

On a slightly different note, the tradition of tossing choicest women-specific expletives on the bridegroom’s side is very common in north Indian weddings. The women who throw such abuses get a sum of money called Neg. Similarly, Nakta is an important merrymaking at weddings in eastern Uttar Pradesh. In the aforementioned women-only event, one woman acts herself as a man and the other his wife, encompassing lewd gestures and a slew of profanities. In short, expletives are written into the very fabric of Indian culture – political, social and others.

As a matter of fact, swearing in the protest has opened up avenues to understand the political rage of Gen Z. To get an objective analysis of the bawdy slogans, we must factor in the three dimensions. 

First, the categorical usage of expletives needs to be read in conjunction with the role of the Indian state. Given the utter failure and incompetence of the state in checking corruption, they became a site wherein the state-student power relationship got altered. And thus, profanities were used as political weapons to harm the honour of the high and mighty. For instance, the protesters in Egypt heaped scorn on the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) during the Egyptian Movement in 2011. And one of the curse words was F**kSCAF! What Faruqi opines about Zatalli’s verse holds equally true for the profanities of protestors too. “The primary intent,” Faruqi suggests, “is to shock, or offend, or to be excessive.” 

Second, swear words cannot be divorced from the site of a protest. They need to be understood in the context in which they were shouted. In other words, profanity never sounds political on its own. 

Finally, expletives need not be pinned down to their semantic content only. For they are not just linguistic texts, but public performances too. We witnessed that Gen Z was laughing, dancing, and screaming a host of curses while moving hither and yon at the site. And all these acts were undoubtedly coordinated. 

Stated differently, the utterances of swear words were rooted in performances that cannot be separated from the analysis. The collective endeavour produced a lively ethos that cannot simply be reproduced in normal circumstances. Victor Turner’s idea of Communitas captures the unity and the lively spirit of Gen Z at varied sites. The notion entails the sudden appearance of a collectivity that encompasses a cohesion of its own, that defies the conventional social structures.

Poetry of protest 

From the vantage point of morality, swear words would certainly not make sense. Actually, it would be utterly foolish to consider expletives as scurrility (fahash goi) or just mumbo jumbo. With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to argue that there was a method to this “madness” of calling names. For placards, posters, and utterances bearing “offensive” language were very well-thought-out couplet-slogans. Take, for example, the pronouncement of two popular couplet-slogans:

Neem ka patta kadwa hai

M**i sala bha*wa hai

and

Gali gali me halla hai

M**i sala nalla hai

The above two couplet-slogans are not only catchy but also easy to sing. They also rhyme well (Kadwa hai, bha*wa hai; halla hai/nalla hai). To add to it, they are metered (utterance is rhythmic) as well as measured (temporal interval between metered utterances is equal) utterances.

Zatalli’s oeuvre comes in handy to get an understanding of the usage of profanities in a democratic protest too. One of the swear words that was making rounds across the country was “catamite” (gandu). Interestingly, Zatalli’s compendium contains one satire named “A note on Catamite” (Gandu nama) or “A Note on Butt-Sex” (Gand marawwa nama). He had penned the previously mentioned “obscene” satire to attack the ineffectiveness of Bahadur Shah I. The first two couplets of the satire are as follows:

Pān khā kar gānd marawwa kheliye;

Bāgh ja kar gānd marawwa kheliye

Bādshāhi hai Bahadur Shah ki;

Ban banā kar gānd marawwa kheliye

(With the betel-leaf in the mouth, play the game of buggery;

go to the garden to play the game of buggery.

Since sovereignty now rests with Bahadur Shah;

dress up for the occasion, and play the game of buggery.)

On first reading, the poem betrays societal anomie and a lack of ethical standards. Zatalli ties this chaos to the weak sovereign (bādshāh), that is, Bahadur Shah I. On a second reading, a qualitative juxtaposition of two different political regimes emerges from the poem: Past Perfect versus Present Tense. And this gets clearer when it is read alongside Zatalli’s poetic composition on Aurangzeb. 

For Bahadur Shah I was the immediate successor to Aurangzeb, and also the fact that Zatal Nama contains one elegiac poem on Aurangzeb (Dar tareef-i-Aurangzeb) and one eulogy of a bygone era (Marsiy-i-Aurangzeb) as well. Zatalli considers the king to be as comatose as Rip Van Winkle (be-khabar); regards joblessness as a fait accompli (ab naukri ka haz nahi); complains about the complete absence of accountability and justice (hukm-e qazi, muhtasib za’il shudah), and so on. 

Likewise, the poet advises his readers to resign to their fate given the scarcity of dopiaza and kabab (dopiaza-o-kabab), nonavailability of thoroughbred (asp-i-jald-o-khub), a dearth of beautiful and perfect virgins (bikr), and so forth, in a different poem titled Qanayat Nama (“A note on Abstinence”). As a consequence of such a terrible state, the poet suggests the readers cultivate the virtue of contentment. He once again mentions Mu‘azzam in the poem, and writes:

Gar shevah-i-gudāi va khwāri talb kuni

Pus naukri Shah Mu‘azzam ghaneemat ast

(If you’re a seeker of mendicity and shame

Being an employee of Shah Mu‘azzam is enough.)

It is easy to infer from the above discussion that Zatalli considers Mu‘azzam to be a blithering nincompoop and is disgusted at his sovereignty (bādshāhi). Armed with a language that is not only erotic but also sexualised, the poet attacks the ineptness and incompetence of Shah Alam I – embodiment of Mughal sovereignty. Seen this way, Zatalli appears to be a poet who penned poetry of protest (ehtejaji shayari). Similarly, the riti text of Biharilal’s (1595-1663) Satsai also makes use of such a language for state and sovereignty. At one place, he says:

Aware of the constituents (ang) [of his kingdom], the youthful (joban) and astute king has enhanced (izafa) [the attractiveness of his empire’s] breasts (stan), heart (man) and eyes (nayan).

But the question that concerns us is: Why did Zatalli categorically deploy the swear word catamite (gandu) for Bahadur Shah I?

Homosexuality, for us in the Persianate world, unlike the Britishers, was never a source of anxiety. The attitude rested somewhere between the two extremes: disgust and approval. To put it differently, the orientation towards homosexual acts, here, lied in, C. M. Naim writes, “an in-between state of indifference.” The esteemed scholar cites Samuel Z. Klausner’s phrase “tolerant jocularity,” asserting that this phrase aptly captured our attitude towards same-sex acts. Still, it was a pederastic relation that possessed a power dynamic of its own. Put differently, the act encompassed hierarchy and control. While the bottom position, in this power dynamic, was considered to play a ‘passive role’ the,  the top, being in an ‘active position’, was assigned a superior place, embodying authority and dominance. Alternatively, passivity in this power dynamic bore the stamp of stigmatisation as it stripped a man of his manliness and brought shame as well. Naim makes an insightful point when he writes, “launde-baz (pederast; lit., boy-player) is not as exclusively an emphatic term of abuse as is gandu (catamite; lit., anus-defined).”

Following from the above, one can reason that Gen Z used the same swear word to convey the prime minister’s passivity – a lack of coercive power that is no longer able to hold the sorry state of affairs intact and has made life nasty, brutish, and short – in keeping a check on question paper leaks. 

Alternatively, since the prime minister, like Bahadur Shah I, is unable to fix the breakdown of order and stability, the people including the NEET aspirants can do as they please, or they can, in Zatalli’s own words, “play the game of buggery.”

It was the Victorian morality that, first, stigmatised the above genres of poetic composition, and later, the nationalist historiography, taking a cue from Victorianism, erased it from our collective literary canon. Considering Hindutva’s obsession with decolonisation, the hullabaloo over Gen Z’s use of profanities is uncalled for. They should bear the fact that decolonisation has just put on a colourful language. 

In sum, the deployment of obscene language by Gen Z gestures towards the corporeality of the state, laced with a scathing indictment of its presence. Taking into account the interpenetration of the “modern” state and its citizens, this particular language of protest makes even more sense in our time. We must pay thanks to Gen Z, who has not only resurrected India’s deeply buried tradition, but also reminded us about such a language of protest. Their frankness is reminiscent of Zatallli’s bluntness: Kapat khot mere sukhan me nahi. (My speech is not touched by deceit.)

Fahad Hashmi is an independent researcher. He received a PhD in Sociology from University of Delhi, Department of Sociology, in 2026.

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