Oishik Sircar, "Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India" (Cambridge UP, 2024)

Dec 29, 2024

In this engaging discussion, Oishik Sircar, a Senior Lecturer at Melbourne Law School and expert on law and violence in contemporary India, delves into the profound connections between law, cinema, and collective memory. He analyzes the memorialization of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom and critiques how popular films shape perceptions of justice amidst religious violence. Sircar explores the intersection of aesthetics and law, urging a deeper understanding of their interplay while addressing censorship and the complexities of societal narratives in New India.

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INSIGHT

New India: A Shift Since the 1990s

"New India" signifies a shift in India since the 1990s, marked by economic liberalization and rising Hindu nationalism.
It's not a break from the past, but a continuum, marked by events like increased military presence in Kashmir and the Babri Masjid demolition.

INSIGHT

Law and Cinema: An Interdisciplinary Approach

Oishik Sircar's interest in law and cinema stems from personal love for films, pedagogical value, and a conceptual motivation to look beyond conventional legal boundaries.
He explores law's aesthetic dimensions by examining sources outside its traditional scope, like cinema.

INSIGHT

The Inherent Aesthetics of Law

Law often presents itself as anesthetic, disassociated from aesthetics, to maintain objectivity.
However, Oishik Sircar argues that law is inherently aesthetic, evident in courtroom spaces, judicial presence, and legal proceedings.

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Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India (Cambridge UP, 2024) tells a story about the relationship between secular law and religious violence by studying the memorialisation of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom--postcolonial India's most litigated and mediatized event of anti-Muslim mass violence. By reading judgments and films on the pogrom through a novel interpretive framework, the book argues that the shared narrative of law and cinema engenders ways of remembering the pogrom in which the rationality of secular law offers a resolution to the irrationality of religious violence. In the public's collective memory, the force of this rationality simultaneously condemns and normalises violence against Muslims while exonerating secular law from its role in enabling the pogrom, thus keeping the violent (legal) order against India's Muslim citizens intact. The book contends that in foregrounding law's aesthetic dimensions we see the discursive ways in which secular law organizes violence and presents itself as the panacea for that very violence.

About the Author: Oishik Sircar is a Senior Lecturer at the Melbourne Law School. He was previously the Professor of Law at Jindal Global Law School. His work maps the relationship between law, violence and aesthetics with a particular focus on contemporary India. Along with Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Violence in the New India (CUP 2024), he is the author of Violent Modernities: Cultural Lives of Law in the New India (OUP 2021) and the co-director of the award-winning documentary film We Are Foot Soldiers (PSBT 2010).

Priyam Sinha recently graduated with a PhD from the National University of Singapore and has been awarded the Alexander Von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship, starting 2025. She has interdisciplinary academic interests that lie at the intersection of film studies, critical new media industry studies, disability studies, affect studies, gender studies, and cultural studies. She can be reached at https://twitter.com/PriyamSinha

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