ABSTRACT
Drawing on my co-performative witnessing of the historic Shaheen Bagh protests, this chapter engages with quotidian practices of care, khidmat, mehmannawazi, and mahalledari, rooted in the everyday lifeworlds of the elderly Muslim dadis who both led and sustained the sit-in. In particular, I attend to the aesthetics of these care practices. Aesthetics, as I articulate here, shifts away from the familiar repertoire of protest aesthetics like that of songs, graffiti, slogans, turns instead to the artistry, efficacy, and the relational textures that emerge in the day to day gestures of caring for one another. By bringing care into conversation with aesthetics, I aim to expand our understanding of what may be recognised as artful beyond conventional categories of the arts. Extending this dialogue further into the framework of political performance, I argue that this aesthetics embedded in everyday practices of care needs to be understood as consequential, constituting the very conditions through which political life is enacted, sustained, and made legible.
