It is amusing to see the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and much of the mainstream tying themselves into knots over the ‘disrespect’ being shown by young protesters, how it is not ‘sanskari’ or cultural. Maybe the mainstream pro-government media could learn a bit more about sanskar by studying the words of the 11th-century Kashmiri poet, Kshemendra, who wrote: They did not lose the jewel of self-respectin the pretence of making efforts at serving [a king].Their heads remained untouchedby the dust on the streets.The RSS’s worldview, of course, is wholly foreign to India. Its politics was imbibed from the Italian Fascists and its current whining has far more to do with Victorian morality than anything from South Asia. In fact, disrespect for the powerful and sarcastic poetry – the memes of their times – are endemic to our region. Pick up any treatise of history and it is full of tales of poets and saints who cut a king or lord to size by a nasty couplet or two. Kashmir has a centuries-long tradition of baand pather, a mix of satire and plays at the local level that aired the grievances of the marginalised against the mighty. In what is probably the definitive book on how people asserted sovereignty in Delhi, The King and the People, the historian Abhishek Kaicker has a whole chapter on dissenting poetry. It begins with a petition by Aurangzeb’s chamberlain, Kamgar Khan, who writes to the emperor how the poet Mirza Muhammad Ni’mat Khan had written a scandalous poem and the whole of the city was mocking Kamgar Khan. The chamberlain is discreet in his complaint, but Kaicker lays out the whole story, how Ni’mat Khan had written a poem for Kamgar Khan’s wedding, and the chamberlain had tipped him lightly. Insulted, the poet had written a longer poem, one in which Kamgar Khan’s young wife is repeatedly calling him to bed and the chamberlain chooses to discourse on astrology, theology, and all sorts of subjects. The implication that the older chamberlain simply can’t get it up, despite the pleas of his young and beautiful wife, was undeniable, and hilarious. The rowdy young of the city had a field day reading parts of the poem in the public squares – the Jantar Mantars of their time. Also read: The BJP’s Intolerance for Profanity Is New, But Profanity’s Role in Movements Isn’tWhat is striking, though, is Aurangzeb’s reply. “Punishing him will cause greater disgrace [to you than before],” wrote the emperor, then at height of his power in 1688 or 1689. Furthermore, Aurangzeb wrote, that if he punished Ni’mat Khan, the poet would then mock the emperor as well as Kamgar Khan, “and fame it through the world (shuhrat-I ‘alam sazad). Formerly, too, he had not spared me [in his satires]; in return, I had increased his reward, that he might not do it again; yet in spite of this [favour] he had not on his part been less [satirical]. It is not possible to cut out his tongue and sever his neck. One must burn and accept it.”Ni’mat Khan, though, was writing at a time when the empire seemed mighty, and while his satirical poems spared not even the emperor, he was relatively restrained. Not so the great Jafar Zatalli who came after him, and wrote while the empire was on the decline. His nom de plume, or takhallus, ‘Zatalli” literally means “the one who uses curse words”. Not only did he write of key generals that they were “showing their skirts (asking to be buggered)” he wrote of the royal women that people compared them to the moon but he thought they resembled more “the backsides of buffaloes”. The Jantar Mantar protestors and their meme-army on Instagram have been comparatively polite. Had they gone full sanskari, true to the Dilli tradition, they would have called Modi and Shah “bhains ke chu….d”. Despite his language, or maybe because of it, Jafar Zatalli was famous. Even Farrukh Siyar, the emperor (though in name only) was stated to have said that, if only he was not such a zatal, he would have been the poet of the age/world (shayar-e-alam). The basic truth is that Indians for centuries before even before there was the Republic of India have understood that respect must be earned, and it is not automatically given because somebody occupies a high office. The greatest of our voices have been those that have challenged the mighty when they have gone wrong with their words, sarcastic, satirical, and even profane words. That is our sanskar, and it is a great one, one that today’s protestors are carrying forward proudly. Omair Ahmad has worked as a political analyst and journalist in India, the US and the UK.