Avneet Dhaliwal

Archiving Protest, Imagining Community: A Reading of the Trolley Times

As tens of thousands of farmers in India protest three recently enacted agricultre laws that put their livelihoods at risk, a group of artists, writers and activists have started a publication called the Trolley Times to voice the stories of the Farmers Protest. As a repository of texts and images from the protest, the Trolley Times can be considered a community archive, entangled in notions of history, memory, community and identity. This paper is the result of my ongoing exploration of the Farmers Protest through the images and stories archived in the Trolley Times. By positioning the publication as an archival practice, I will analyze its contents through Michelle Caswell’s notion of the archival imaginary, considering the influence of the remembered past on imagined futures. In doing so, I will highlight the role of the Trolley Times in establishing the collective identity of the protestors through their shared history, reinforcing their imagined community and envisioning a future built on solidarity and social justice. This paper also stems from a consideration of the ambivalence surrounding my own sense of belonging to a community of people from which I am ten thousand miles and one generation removed. It is driven by the surprising urgency with which I find myself deeply invested in the revolutionary agitation of a community that has always and never been mine.