When Does a Protest Become a Carnival?
Attending the student protest in central Delhi last month, political scientist Nivedita Menon described it as “jahmooriyat ka tehvar (a festival of democracy)”. Supriya Sharma, executive editor of Scroll.in, called it “a carnival of protest”. And echoing the sentiment, a friend who visited the site said, “It’s so chaotic…like a carnival.” But how can a protest resemble a festival or a carnival? Protests are “ways in which groups and organisations (more rarely individuals) publicly express their dissatisfaction or seek to influence political decisions”. Festivals, by contrast, are, in the words of Italian folklorist Alessandro Falassi, “time out of time”: occasions devoted to collective recreation rather than everyday work. Can the lens of festivals tell us something about the nature of dissent?
'Collective effervescence'
French philosopher Émile Durkheim defined festivals as “collective effervescence” in his 1912 magnum opus, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Studying indigenous people in Australia, he found that their lives were divided into two strictly contrary phases. In the first phase, they focussed on economic activities (hunting, gathering, farming, et cetera) necessary for survival, which they found monotonous. But in the other phase, the entire community gathered together, and discarding social taboos, engaged in singing, dancing, drinking and feasting. “The sexes come together in violation of the rules governing sexual relations,” wrote Durkheim. “Men exchanged wives.”
Memes, cosplay and humour at CJP protests
The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) protests in July were also marked by taboos being discarded. The protestors, mostly young people referred to as Gen-Z, used digitally native humour, such as memes and 'brain rot,' in response to the state’s heavy-handed attempts at repressing them. Some turned up cosplaying as comic characters like Spiderman, Batman or the Hulk. Others turned a police baton charge into a real-life version of the endless runner video game 'Subway Surfer.' When the police used water cannons, the protestors turned them into a rain dance. A few even made sexually suggestive videos, with police officers in the frame, to the tune of “Everybody knows I’m a good girl, officer” by Lana Del Rey or carried posters with BDSM references, like “Cuff me, daddy!”
Behind the humour
The humour of expression, however, does not belie the risks of taking part in these protests. In Delhi, the police baton charged peaceful protestors and allegedly used pellet guns. In Mumbai, many were detained for hours and, at least, one police officer was caught on camera threatening to falsely implicate young people in a narcotics case. Clashes broke out between protestors and security personnel in Patna and Kolkata, and in Jehanabad, the police reportedly opened fire on demonstrators after they started throwing stones. A report by the Centre for Study of Organised Hate claimed that the police used state-of-the-art surveillance equipment to potentially criminalise innocent protestors.
Despite these risks, thousands of students, many of them minors and without any experience of political activism, kept turning up at the protest sites. Some even mocked the police officers on duty: “Will you beat us up today?” So, what is it that motivated them? What motivates anyone to take part in protests?
Why do people show up?
While political scientists and sociologists have studied protests for many years, Jennifer M. Larson summarises their findings in a 2021 paper: “Protesters come together when they know where to go and why, when they expect enough others to join them, and, in at least some cases, when they expect their peers to judge them favourably for doing so.” This deft generalisation points out the importance of organisation and messaging, but it sheds no light on the ability of protests, like festivals, to build communities.
British cultural anthropologist Victor Turner explained the community-making potential of festivals through his concept of "communitas." In his 1969 book, The Ritual Process, Turner observes that in certain liminal moments, the structures of laws and customs that govern our societies break down. “Beyond the structural lies not only the Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’ but also communitas.”
In Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes argues that the state of nature, without social structures, was a “war of all against all”; it is only through social structures that humans could be brought together into a useful community. Turner, however, argued that these liminal intervals did not merely result in destructive chaos, they could also lead to communal empathy. By linking such liminal moments to festivals and carnivals, writes anthropologist Sarah Haggar, Turner argued they “can on the one hand perpetuate certain values of the community… and on the other hand criticise the political order.”
From Durkheim to contemporary event studies
The ideas of Durkheim and Turner continue to influence scholars in the 21st century. Echoing Durkheim’s dichotomous framing of festive and non-festive time, Donald Getz and Stephen J. Page open their book Event Studies (2024) with the following sentence: “The world is full of bad news, but planned events offer relief and hope.” Since Getz and Page classify festivals as a subcategory of planned events (sports, conferences, seminars, trade fairs, et cetera) this rubric applies to festivals as well.
However, other scholars are critical of how events (including festivals) have been commodified and mediatised to serve dominant social and political structures. “Events have become… the archetypical cool capitalist product,” write Karl Spracklen and Ian R. Lamond in their book, Critical Event Studies (2016).
For instance, the recent spate in music concerts in India. Since 2024, several top international bands and artists have performed across the country – Dua Lipa, Coldplay, Ed Sheeran, Alan Walker, AP Dhillon and more. Even Rihanna performed at the private, pre-wedding event of billionaire heir Anant Ambani and Radhika Merchant in March 2024.
This has positively affected the live music industry in India, which grew from Rs 83 billion in 2019 to Rs 145 billion in 2025, according to German data website Statista. Even Prime Minister Narendra Modi hailed this growth. However, as I have shown elsewhere, this growth was created through the well-established marketing strategy of FOMO (fear of missing out), leading to conspicuous consumption.
Art at protests
Protests sites in India have also been marked by a spontaneous outpouring of art. Shaheen Bagh in Delhi, which became the most important site of the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) protests in 2019-2020, opened up “a space for daily congregations of activists and citizens, for singing and poetry reading… as well as a profusion of murals, drawings, posters, and installations,” write Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Vazira Zamindar in their book How Secular Is Art? (2023).
Similarly, art, literature and music played a key role in the farmers’ protest in 2020-21. The student protests last week were also marked by performance of music and creation of art. In fact, the profusion of memes and reels, as well as the humorously defiant modes of protest such as cosplaying, are also a form of performance art. Evidently, while music concerts are the “cool capital products,” serving particular economic interests, the music and art engendered at protests embody qualities of Turner’s liminality.
Protest as radical leisure
The planning and organisational needs for protests as well as the ability to produce a profusion of art and culture have prompted scholars such as Spracklen and Lamond to regard them as a type of planned event. While commoditised events, like music concerts, appropriate leisure time for commercial purposes, protests offer a radically different possibility.
Protests become “a form of communicative leisure, the only space and practice where counter-hegemonic resistance becomes possible,” write Spracklen, Lamond and their co-author Cassandra Kilbride in a 2014 paper. They add that protests are also spaces where “new public spheres are potentially constructed”. Protests are, therefore, a radical form of leisure, which not only disrupt cycles of production and consumption, but also lead to the formation of new public spheres and community – both essential characteristics of festivals.
The power of communitas
The community that a liminal moment like a festival or a protest can foster, writes Turner, is different from the “comradeship… between friends, co-workers or professional colleagues”. It is a “transformative experience that goes to the root of each person’s being and finds in that root something profoundly communal and shared.”
It is this “transformative experience” that makes a protest into a festival and provides the courage that ordinary people find in themselves to block the path of a police van containing their detained comrades, to interrogate why officers on duty were not wearing name tags or to laugh at the face of armed security personnel. It ruptures the hegemony of the state and opens up space for a new public sphere, transforming a protest into “a festival of democracy”.
Also read: Jantar Mantar and Fraternity
Looking at protests through the lens of festivals and leisure opens up new dimensions of analysis. Protests create liminal spaces where ordinary routines are suspended, social hierarchies are challenged and new forms of solidarity emerge. Humour, performance, music and art are not distractions from political struggle but central to its transformative power, fostering the communitas that Turner described and the collective effervescence identified by Durkheim.
Unlike commodified leisure, which often reinforces existing economic and political structures, protest reclaims public space as a site of democratic participation and cultural creation. In doing so, it not only contests state authority, but also imagines alternative futures, making dissent itself a deeply communal and celebratory democratic practice.
Uttaran Das Gupta is an independent writer and journalist. His doctoral research focusses on Indian art and culture festivals.
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