Performing Radical Care: The Muslim Grandmothers of Shaheen Bagh

Abstract: On December 15, 2019, a group of elderly women from a Muslim ghetto on the outskirts of New Delhi came out in protest of the police brutalities against minority students who were resisting the recently passed Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). Despite the widespread attention it received, the protest eluded attempts to understand it fully within both popular and academic discursive frameworks. Such incomprehensibility, this essay argues, stems from a disavowal of the protest's fundamental organizational principle: care. This essay brings scholarship on political performance in conversation with feminist care studies in order to look at how grandmothers reproduce their quotidian actions of care as radical performance.