Dear reader,I still remember the oracles, and my father’s face, confused and angry and somehow smiling, all at once. We were walking home from a distant relative’s funeral, I was still in school, and as we got off the bus, a trembling triangle of men and women came at us in a sudden rush, out of nowhere, almost as though the road had conjured them. They wore cheap cotton crimsons, saris and shirts and mundus, and the afternoon was so bright that when they moved the street gave up its dust and a golden, foggy halo settled around them as they chanted and pressed on past us.“Komarangal,” someone murmured, and my father, without a word, gestured for me to keep clear of their path. It was the first time I had seen the oracles, although I had grown up hearing wild stories of them.A few minutes from my house lies Kodungallur, once part of the ancient port of Muziris, and its Bharani festival at the Sree Kurumba Bhagavathy temple draws these komarams who, for the length of the rite, become the earthly medium of the fierce goddess Bhadrakali. Keralites know all this in their bones, although most of the country does not, and even Keralites tend to forget that the oracles who converge on Kodungallur are not the mild temple mediums you meet elsewhere in the State but rawer and more unbridled—men and women drawn mostly from oppressed and marginalised communities, draped in vermilion, dusted in colour, each carrying a heavy crescent sword and a waist belt of brass bells that jangle as the chenda drives them, beat by relentless beat, into thullal, the trance in which the goddess is said to speak through them.But the part that got my attention then was the chants. Many of the oracles sing verses so explicit, so packed with hardcore sexual imagery, that an ordinary listener can be knocked flat by them—crude, ferociously rhythmic accounts of every imaginable act, the sort of thing I cannot quote here without inviting a jail term, so you will have to do your own research. And then, as the procession passed, one oracle turned, looked straight at me, screamed a single line into my face and went under. I started shivering. I did not follow the meaning, but my father pulled me close, smiling and furious at once, furious because the boy had heard it. The line, put as modestly as I can manage, called the goddess a whore.Why on earth would you abuse your own goddess? It made no sense to me then, and it took years of listening before I began to understand the thing for what it was. As my grandfather’s friend explained to me in the plainest terms, for these people god is never merely god but a stand-in for power, the power that in the old days reached the ordinary person through a king, so that when you are permitted, once a year, to gather on the temple ground and hurl filth at the goddess, you are really hurling it at the king and the feudal lord, the landlord and the dominant castes, at everyone who has ever stood above you. It’s a way of auditing them, holding them to account, not the most effective way but a way nonetheless, a safety valve, a mini revolution let off under conditions the rulers themselves were happy to allow, because the screaming kept the whole arrangement in a kind of working balance.Much later, reading Mikhail Bakhtin put the Bharani festival into place. Writing about the bawdy medieval world of Rabelais, Bakhtin described the “carnival” as a sanctioned season when the usual order was turned upside down, the fool crowned, the high brought low, and the body shoved rudely into the open. He wrote that the carnival “celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions”. The peasant mocking the bishop and the oracle cursing Bhadrakali are doing the same thing, and Bakhtin’s hunch was that this kind of laughter is never quite safe for the powerful, because it is, as he put it, open-ended and unfinished, and therefore the natural enemy of everything that wants to call itself permanent and absolute.The anthropologist James C. Scott coined an interesting phrase, “hidden transcript”, which is what runs behind the deference the weak are forced to perform for the strong. It explains the mocking, truth-telling speech the powerless reserve for the safety of their own company. His book opens with an Ethiopian proverb that says it all: “When the great lord passes, the wise peasant bows deeply and silently farts.” The genius of these forms is that they are deniable. The real political power, as Scott said, is generated on the rare day when the silent transcript is spoken aloud, to power’s face.On the other hand, Slavoj Žižek insisted that power secretly and silently licenses certain transgressions, so that the obscene joke, the tolerated cruelty, and the ritual blowing-off of steam are not cracks in the system but part of the masonry that holds it up. It is the safety valve.The danger in Žižek’s position is that it can explain away every act of resistance as secret collaboration, which leaves the theorist looking wise and everybody else looking duped. I would like to think that Bakhtin saw what Žižek tends to miss—that the carnival kept alive the memory of another way of being together, a world without lords, and a powerful memory of resistance, so that people who have once stood as equals in the square, even for a single day, even in jest, are a great deal harder to convince afterwards that the hierarchy above them is natural and eternal. The valve lets off steam, yes. It also teaches the hand where the valve is.In the digital world, the meme is the carnival’s natural heir, going where no festival ever could. The modern meme merges images to challenge power; speaks aloud forbidden words that power cannot trace to any single voice; creates rude jokes to ridicule power. Which brings me to the swarm of the moment: the rise of the cockroaches in India.In May, hearing a case in the Supreme Court, the Chief Justice of India Surya Kant reached for a bad metaphor and said certain unemployed youngsters were “like cockroaches” and “parasites of society”. He clarified the next day that he had meant only those who enter professions on fake degrees, but the metaphor had already done its job. The rest, as you probably know, is history.Within a day, a young man named Abhijeet Dipke had registered a domain and opened the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), a straight-faced parody of the ruling party’s name, with free membership and entry criteria that flung the insult back—be unemployed; be lazy, be online at least 11 hours a day—and within days it had hundreds of thousands of sign-ups and tens of millions of followers, all of them flying the hashtag #MainBhiCockroach, I too am a cockroach, the oldest move in the carnival book: pick the slur up off the floor and wear it as a badge.Whether the CJP grows into something that genuinely speaks to power, or settles into being one more comfortable place to feel briefly righteous before going back to the job hunt, is the open question, and I have no tidy answer for you, only the conviction that the difference will be decided by the people doing the asking rather than by anyone watching from the stands.At Frontline, we are following the movement closely, and I point you to two pieces here, one by Soni Mishra and another by Ajaz Ashraf. Read and decide for yourself whether power is merely listening politely this time, or whether it has started to worry.Wishing you a pest-free week ahead,Jinoy Jose P.Digital Editor,FrontlineCONTRIBUTE YOUR COMMENTS