Slogans are dispatches, a voice of persuasion and resistance, and hence, carry as much historical and cultural value as our monuments. Though the trajectory of sloganeering has evolved with time, the essence of its purpose is still the same — bringing change.British gets checkedMore than 150 years ago, sepoys in North India echoed three words with intense vigour. Maaro Firangi ko (Strike down the foreigners) kept ringing in the air, shaping the message of the 1857 revolt, the first major and revolutionary uprising against British authority. The revolt also came to be known as the First War of Independence. The slogan was a linguistic weapon, which spread from the sepoys towards the common people like artisans and peasants, awakening and uniting them (cutting across religions) for the first time, excavating bits and pieces of a national consciousness and the idea of a nation-wide resistance. For the British, this was a shocker.
A print of Delhi, India, circa 1860. From The History of the Indian Mutiny, volume VII, by Charles Ball, published by The London Printing & Publishing Company (c1860).
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The spirit of resistance, social frustration, and emotional call to action packed in those simple three words had a sense of straightforward urgency. At the most immediate of our understanding of slogans in any case, is this function. In this way, slogans become rhetorical devices. This is why slogans are able to catch the attention as well as support of a large number of people. Slogans thus help a revolt, like the 1857 one here, achieve virality.Political culture of ‘opposition and resistance’After spending much time in jail in Mandalay, Myanmar for defending, in his newspaper Kesari, Indian revolutionaries and calling for Swaraj (self-rule), Bal Gangadhar Tilak from the Lal Bal Pal trio formed the Indian Home Rule League in 1916.Tilak perfectly captured the emotion of discontent and protest and cried out an unforgettable, goosebump-inducing slogan — Swaraj is my birthright and I shall have it! The slogan was confidence personified and it inspired an anti-colonial solidarity where ‘we’ are in opposition with ‘them’.
