Melbourne Law School - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 1 of 1
-
ItemWays of remembering: law, cinema and collective memory in the new India( 2018)This thesis explores the relationship between secular law and religious violence in contemporary India from a ‘law and aesthetics’ perspective. It offers an inquiry into and expands the understanding of secular law’s public life, by reading two narratives of collective memory produced in the wake of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom—postcolonial India’s most litigated and mediatized event of anti-Muslim mass violence. The first is a ‘factual’ narrative, contained in the texts of the judgments in the Best Bakery case (a key criminal trial related to the massacre of a Muslim family in Vadodara); and the second is a ‘fictional’ narrative captured in the images and sounds of three Bollywood films (whose plots prominently feature the pogrom). These two narratives—which are located both inside and outside conventional sources of law—have had a shared temporal journey. The three films span a period of nine years (2004–13), which closely coincides with the years through which the trials in the Best Bakery case ran (2003–12). Focusing on this post-pogrom decade, the thesis develops a ‘jurisprudential-aesthetic’ approach as an interpretive lens which treats the factual and the fictional as co-constitutive of imaginations of justice that shape collective memories of the pogrom. My reading shows that a shared narrative of the judgments and films engenders ways of remembering the pogrom that condemn the violence while simultaneously rationalizing it as aberrant. Such a reading makes visible the workings of a particular kind of postcolonial state-making and state-preserving rationality that orders collective memories of the pogrom. The workings of this rationality sustain a collective memory in which the reason of secular law triumphs over the violence of religious irrationality, and keeps intact the state’s ideological anti-Muslim foundations. This is increasingly marked by the combined rise of neoliberalism and Hindutva (right-wing Hindu nationalism). By simultaneously condemning and rationalizing the Gujarat pogrom in collective memory, this shared narrative of law and cinema both conceals and continues to perform the role that secular law plays in enabling religious mass violence in the state-making and state-preserving project of Indian postcoloniality.