A dafli's account of its detention during the Gen Z protests

Hello everyone! You don't know me personally. But some of you might have seen a clip - a blink-and-miss reel on Instagram - where I was detained during the ongoing Gen Z protests. Protesters being detained makes headlines. But I'm just a small dafli. News of my confiscation slipped under the radar.

Let me tell you, it wasn't nice to be separated from my owner, a nice student activist - no, not Neha Bora, though she did pick me up once. I know you guys squabble plenty between Left and Right, but, as a dafli, I see myself as my owner's sister, her right-hand girl. The Right never took a liking to me, preferring the trishul and dhol. Besides, their favourite slogan is full-throated 'JSR'. Which doesn't have much use for my insistent and repetitive sound.

I was passed from cop to cop before one ran off with me and deposited me on a thana table. They didn't know what to do with me, or what protocol to follow. No one at the thana played me - except for one policeman who seemed to have a musical bone in his body. But it was clear it had not been allowed to develop. I'm used to the thrum of skilful fingers raining down on me, banging out a monophonic beat, even as the slogan-songs keep changing.


Cops cursed the pest protesters and began discussing the evolution of the lathi: from the colonial wooden lath to fibreglass, to the baton with an electric charge, and back to the lathi-with-nail. I got so bored listening to them that I took a nap.

While at the protest, I had to compete with an unusual musical cacophony - policemen blowing whistles. Whistles and daflis share an uneasy relationship. The English word for us is 'frame drum', and we see ourselves as coming from an old multicultural musical heritage.

The dafli was immortalised in the song from the 1979 movie Sargam: 'Dafli waale, dafli baja', though Hindi movies being Hindi movies, I can tell you straight-up, Rishi Kapoor wasn't playing me correctly on screen.

We consider ourselves superior to a whistle, usually associated with traffic cops and PT teachers. Whistles lying in the thana complained that they were not used to being blown so frequently, and were drained after being put to continuous use. I cracked a PJ about the government pitting whistleblower against whistleblower, but it wasn't received well.

Also detained in the thana were placards, some of them torn. Placards are by nature impermanent, with short lifespans like moths. They change from protest to protest and are abandoned afterwards or kept as mementoes.

We, daflis, have an immutability built into our existence. Having said that, my heart goes out to the placard, the dafli's fellow traveller. They were so dishevelled and broken that I felt I shouldn't bother them. I was getting some respect from my abductors, having been placed on a table (the paperweight next to me was insultingly sullen), the hapless placards were piled on the floor in a corner.

Bored, I began playing myself, startling the cops no end. I think they got spooked, for one of them removed me from the table and hung me on a nail, much to the delight of the paperweight. Then the cops brought in a few detainees. I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw my owner among them. She too recognised me instantly.

I might be a humble percussion instrument. But I have a strong sense of loyalty. I sized up the situation, started playing myself even louder until the frightened cops ran out as if the plague had come.

I unhooked myself from the nail and flew to my owner, who, taking advantage of the empty police station, walked out with me straight into the protest. I was so happy to be back in my element, keeping a jaunty beat to 'Halla Bol!'