The following is an excerpt from the book Violent Modernities: Cultural Lives of Law in the New India by Oishik Sircar. The book explores the complicated relationship between violence and in the modern societies, with a focus on India. Violent Modernities uses a critical legal perspective to show that law and violence in the New India share a deep intimacy, where one symbiotically feeds the other. The chapters in the book study the cultural sites of literature, cinema, people’s movements, popular media and the university to illustrate how law’s promises of emancipation and performances of violence live a life of entangled contradictions.
The following excerpt is from chapter three of the book titled ‘Bollywood’s Law: Cinema, Justice, and Collective Memory.’
The Work of Reconstructive Imagination
In 2013, a Bollywood film[1] called Kai Po Che (Kapoor 2013a)[2] received both popular and critical attention from audiences and commentators alike. The retelling of the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat—a sophisticatedly planned ethnocide that targetted Muslims, unlike its popular characterization as a riot, which is spontaneously provoked mob violence[3] —is part of the fi lm’s fictional plot and cathartic closure, and was one of the major reasons for this attention. While on the one hand, it was praised for taking a sensitive look at the pogrom and spoke of friendship, hope, and forgiveness in the midst of mindless religious hatred (Patel 2013), on the other hand, there was a lot of criticism about the cunning ways in which the film avoided questions of accountability, downplayed the enormity of the event, even as it acknowledged the trauma (Janmohamed 2013). When I first watched it on a pirated DVD in Melbourne, I felt that the film, in its narrative and aesthetic reconstructions of the pogrom, revealed—more than concealed—the workings of a nationalist, secularist, and developmentalist rationality in postcolonial India that has come to texture the mnemohistories of collective memory of the pogrom. As I read it, not only did the film not depict the violence in all its nuances (which was the standard critique), it also glorified love for the New India—a neoliberal and Hindu nation (a key element of Hindu right-wing discourse which provided the ideological justification for the violence) as the panacea for everyone who was affected by it. To put it simply, I, too, felt that the film lacked in its retelling of the events of 2002.
A few months after the film’s release, a PIL was filed in the Gujarat High Court in Ahmedabad, demanding that its clearance by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) in India be cancelled.[4] The CBFC had rated the film ‘U’, making it universally eligible for viewing without any age restriction. A news headline reporting the incident read: ‘PIL against Kai Po Che for “biased” portrayal of Gujarat riots’ (The Times of India , 3 May 2013). The petitioners, a lawyer named Bhautik Bhatt and another applicant, took issue with the representation of the 2002 violence in the film for its anti-Hindu bias. As the judgement noted, the two reasons for which the petitioners approached the court were: first, ‘the film defames group of a certain community, in the guise that the members of the minority community were victimized’; and second, ‘the fi lm does not approach the topic evenhandedly and projects one community being more responsible than the other’ ( Bhautik Vijaykumar Bhatt vs Central Board of Film Certification , 23 September 2014: 1).
I was a little taken aback.[5] The 3 Mistakes of My Life , author Chetan Bhagat’s novel on which the film was based, the film’s publicity and trailers, and even the theatrical release did not attract any attention from the Hindu Right—including the ruling BJP in Gujarat at that time. It was primarily secular-leftists like me who found the film problematic for its bias in favour of Hindus, for not depicting the atrocity in all its nuances, and for explaining the causes of the violence through realpolitik framings that displaced its deep ideological foundations (Sircar 2013a; Mukherjee 2013; Ghufran 2013). And here, the petitioners felt that even in the film’s soft pedalling of the violence carried out by Hindus, it depicted the majority community in a bad light. I did not think the petition stood any chance in court. The film could not have been challenged on its reconstruction of facts, because it did not make any claims regarding historical accuracy. It was, after all, a work of fiction, adapted from a novel. The filmmakers did not feel the need to offer a standard disclaimer regarding the story’s relation to the pogrom. The court in its 2014 judgement rejected the petition by stating why the freedom of speech and expression of the filmmakers cannot be curtailed, especially because it was ‘made on an imaginatory [sic] topic’. It might have been possible to restrain exhibition if the film had provoked sectarian violence because of the reasons that the petitioners had stated. However, as the judges noted: ‘Nothing untoward has happened or [been] reported. The viewers across the country, with due maturity, have absorbed the theme’ ( Bhautik Vijaykumar Bhatt vs Central Board of Film Certification , 23 September 2014: 3).
Yet, the same sequence of fictive events—or ‘imaginatory’, as the court called them—in the film are considered a watered-down version of the real violence by some like me, and by those like Bhatt as being biased against Hindus. This encounter between law and film opens up a contestation about the truth claims that constitute collective memory in the realm of filmic reconstructions of mass atrocity. Kai Po Che (KPC) participates in the ‘ideoscapes’[6] and ‘lawscapes’[7] of collective memories which I consider to be mnemonic in nature, doing, what Jan Assman would describe as ‘the ongoing work of reconstructive imagination’: ‘the past cannot be stored but always has to be “processed” and mediated’ (1997: 14).
This reconstructive imagination also points at the complicated intimacies between law and the aesthetic, and the ways in which their encounter processes and mediates collective memory. The aesthetic provides the fictive grounding for the film, while the legal provides the traction for making, or appealing to, truth claims. The critics of KPC— both groups that point at the film’s pro- and anti-Hindu bias—are engaged in contestations about the ways in which the stories of the pogrom are actively reconstructed and remembered. In recognition of this law–aesthetic conversation, this essay attempts to chart a response to the question: Do our legal investments in establishing the truth about the violence of Gujarat 2002 keep alive a faith in the aesthetic (in this case the cinematic) as an active archive of collective memory, and consequently, as a credible jurisprudential source that engenders imaginations of justice?
Law and image/imagination have played an important role in the making of collective memories of Gujarat 2002. This is the case especially for those like me who experienced it from a safe distance, consuming the unfolding of the horror on television screens or in newspapers, and continue to do so, given that the Gujarat pogrom has come to be one of the most mediatized events of mass violence in contemporary India (Ohm 2010: 123–44). The event’s contested narratives are shaped through a set of iconic photographs—like Qutubuddin Ansari begging for mercy with folded hands or Ashok Mochi’s war cry against Muslims with outstretched arms (Sahni 2012; Hazra 2012)—and landmark criminal trials of highly localized massacres—like the Best Bakery and Gulberg Society cases (Dhavan 2003; Katakam 2012)—that have not only produced a surfeit of reportage but have also offered templates for popular culture and aesthetic reconstructions in film, literature, and art. Despite their perceived incommensurability, law and image/imagination are porous archives seeping into each other constantly, and they share a tendentious intimacy in making, managing, and ordering collective memory.