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On the conjoined habitus of law and aesthetics: An interview with Oishik Sircar

  • Writer: Socio-Legal Review
    Socio-Legal Review
  • 7 days ago
  • 20 min read

Introduction


The Socio-Legal Review Forum recently conducted a book review roundtable on Oishik Sircar's Ways of Remembering. The monograph is an important intervention in understanding how cinema and law works in conjunction to alter and rewrite the public memory of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom. It introduces the 'jurisprudential aesthetic' approach to read the Best Bakery cases along with three Bollywood movies to unravel how secular law maintains an order of violence against Muslim citizens, while exonerating itself from this act.


At SLR, we look to make discourse around law and the social sciences more accessible. Two of our Editors, Sanaa Mathew and Adityatej Ghosh, interviewed Sircar about Ways of Remembering and beyond. We discuss how Ways of Remembering builds on his previous work, Violent Modernities in its exploration of the 'conjoined habitus' of law and aesthetics. He discusses cinematic texts as sites of the quasi-legal, allowing us to think of the law as animated by images, textures, and aesthetics. Finally, we touch upon how a commitment to amateurism — as an academic, artist, and parent — impacts his work.


Interview


SLR: In your previous book, Violent Modernities (VM), you discuss the importance of the ‘conjoined habitus’ of law and aesthetics, which work together to build collective memory. How does Ways of Remembering (WoR) build on the arguments you’ve made in VM?

 

OS: VM, as you know, is not a monograph. It is a book of academic essays on disparate topics that speak to the intimacy between law and violence in modern postcolonial societies, with a specific focus on what I have called the ‘New India’. All the chapters work to demonstrate how this intimacy, at this temporal juncture, and grounded in place, plays out in the terrain of the cultural. Simply put, VM charts the relationship between law and violence in modern India by studying cultural texts like literature, cinema, poetry, advertisements, photographs, among others. The reason for a focus on cultural texts like these, rather than on judgments or statutes (which can also be understood as cultural), is to advance a way of doing legal scholarship that takes non-conventional sources (or sources that fall outside the ‘province of jurisprudence’, as it were) as those that carry jurisprudential wisdom. In this way, VM shows how the sites of culture and a cultural orientation to the study of law can offer insights into the politics (and poetics) of postcolonial violence. It is in this context that the ‘conjoined habitus’ of law and aesthetics can be better understood. I use this description in chapter 5 of VM, which eventually becomes a part of my second book Ways of Remembering (WoR). In this chapter in VM, I try out what I do in a more expansive fashion in WoR, which is to read cinema as an aesthetic source of jurisprudential wisdom.

 

The description ‘conjoined habitus’, thus, suggests that law and cinema (and by extension, the aesthetic) occupy shared social and cultural worlds. The meanings we accord to law and cinema and how law and cinema produce meaning don’t take place in opposition to each other. Think about it in this way—when we consider law, we tend to understand it as the world of rules and facts, and when we think about cinema, we tend understand it as the world of creativity and fiction. Their form and content are presented to us as incommensurate.  When we read, see, listen, or feel law and aesthetics as living a shared life, we unsettle the watertight divisions between the two. Doing this carries methodological, political, and pedagogical potential. Methodologically, we open the borders that try and guard law’s purity against contamination by what the discipline considers its outsides. Politically, we displace the authority with which the law speaks through its established modes and forms of expertise (thus with the ability to couch violence in the languages of justice and procedure). Pedagogically, we learn to value (and read) the outsider, minor and apocryphal in conventionally non-legal (and legal) texts and material as sources of jurisprudential wisdom. What I am saying is, a judgement and a poem—though formally different—carry affective insights and intensities that can illuminate ideas that both forms might be interested in, like justice, restitution, testimony, harm. The point is, while many lawyers will not disagree with this, poetry will not necessarily be a key text in a course on Constitutional Law or Contract Law or Administrative Law. If included, it would be an aside. Similarly, cinema might be, perhaps more readily than poetry, included in the teaching of core law subjects, but its value will be restricted to representational purposes alone, rather than being read/watched with the same seriousness with which you will read/interpret a judgment or a statute.         

 

SLR: You employ a novel approach called the ‘jurisprudential-aesthetic’ lens to read the Best Bakery judgments with three Bollywood movies. This puts law and images, which you explain have a contested history, in conversation with each other. How would you expand this approach beyond cinema and into other aesthetic domains that create public memory like music, art, comics/cartoons, and literature?

 

OS: Not just law and images, but any other conventionally aesthetic material is in a contested relationship with Law (with a capital L). Modern Law, in particular, presents itself as an internally coherent, objectively verifiable, and self-referential body of knowledge and in this way others the aesthetic—that which appeals to the senses—as subjective, uncertain, fanciful, ambivalent, paradoxical, driven by passion (not reason). Through this othering, Modern Law wants to be in a position of authority from where it governs and regulates the aesthetic and not the other way around. In this way, the law is able displace violence out of its province and place it in the province of the cultural. Law, in effect, becomes the site of order, and culture the site of disorder (including violence) that the law condemns and corrects. This othering is directed not just at conventionally aesthetic material like art, cinema, images, music, literature, but also to aesthetic forms of writing that foreground the self, the personal and the experiential, writing that is imbued with emotions. Why else are we taught in the first year of law school that we should avoid writing in first person or using expressions like, ‘I feel…’ when writing a case comment?

 

In WoR, I developed a way to read the conjoined habitus of law and cinema. The jurisprudential-aesthetic (J-A) lens helps me do that. However, instead of only looking for jurisprudential wisdom in conventionally non-legal material, the J-A lens also looks for aesthetic wisdom in conventionally legal material. In this way, I show that law and its conventional forms, like judgments, cannot be separated from the aesthetic – they are aesthetic forms in themselves. The J-A lens guards against the possibility of law justifying it orderliness by othering the aesthetic by showing that the law is constitutive of the aesthetic. By extension, the displacement of violence to the realm of the cultural is also checked by a J-A approach to reading the law, because an attention to the aesthetic in the law shows how law uses the foils of objectivity and order to mask its foundational violence. My J-A reading of the texts of the Best Bakery judgments in WoR performs this task—by attending to the aesthetic form of the judgments, I am able to show how the ostensibly virtuous ideas of secularism, constitutionalism, legalism, developmentalism, rule of law, truth, democracy and justice that the judgments subscribe to keep intact, in fact strengthen, the structural violence against India’s Muslim citizens.   

 

As an orientation, I think the J-A approach can be used to read all kinds of texts and material, not just cinema or images. As mentioned, I am not proposing the J-A approach as one that is meant for reading conventionally aesthetic material but also for reading conventionally legal material. I want to show that legal material like judgments and statutes are constitutionally aesthetic and cultural.    While I use the expression J-A approach in WoR, many others from within the discipline of law have used adjacent methods to understand and interpret law’s co-constitutive relationship with the aesthetic. Few recent examples are, James Parker on law and sound, Marett Leiboff on law and theatre, Thomas Giddens on law and comics, Desmond Manderson on law and visual arts, Peter Goodrich on law and images, Richard K. Sherwin on law and digital cultures, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos on law and atmosphere. The J-A approach’s novelty lies in how it can be trained to read both conventionally legal and aesthetic texts, and in its postcolonial sensibility, given that most of the work in the field of law and aesthetics has emerged and been recognized in non-Southern legal traditions and tend not to engage and learn from other legal and aesthetic traditions. Another key characteristic of the J-A lens is that it considers the conjoined habitus of law and aesthetics as a political condition—meaning that it is a site of contestations, contradictions and paradoxes that animate the struggles regarding whose and what kind of power produces authoritative legal knowledge, and the corporeal and cognitive violence that such knowledge wields. In this sense, the J-A approach inherits both structural and post-structural traditions of critique without pitting one against the other.   

 

SLR: WoR explores how films construct quasi-legal spaces. The public meeting in Dev and the hearings in Parzania, which mimic elements of formal legal proceedings but operate outside traditional courtrooms. How might these cinematic representations of quasi-legalism, particularly those focusing on testimony and memorialisation, contribute to the development of an urbanised secularism?

 

OS: I think quasi-legalism is the quotidian condition of modern law. Most of the operation of modern law takes place in quasi-legal spaces—from state-organised spaces of bureaucratic exchanges (like immigration counters or passport offices), to legally-recognized private spaces (like the heterosexual family), to liminal spaces of identity regulation (like the public bathroom), to the municipal designation of parts of a city as bulldoze-able or where assembly is declared criminal (like Shaheen Bagh) or where a complete internet shutdown can be imposed (like in Manipur or Kashmir). There are quasi-legal spaces within courts as well, like the waiting area for litigants or the informal offices of lawyers/scribes who type out affidavits. And the cinema can be a quasi-legal space too where you can be beaten and abused for not standing up when the national anthem plays or when you are not allowed to enter if you look underage for a film certified as for adults only.    

 

I think Dev and Parzania use quasi-legal spaces to both produce and resolve the crisis in the plot as strategies for avoiding legal action for misrepresenting the judicial process in the context of the Gujarat pogrom or commenting on litigation that was sub-judice at that time, like the Best Bakery case. I don’t know what the directorial intent was. Though, counterintuitively, in the introduction of these quasi-legal spaces in the narratives of the two films, quasi-legalism emerges as a generative site for jurisprudential wisdom and that is what my J-A reading explores. I don’t want to think of the quasi-legal, both in the films and otherwise, as derivative or mimetic of the legal. If we do so, we will always consider the quasi-legal as lesser, just as we tend to do when it comes to cinematic representations of the law. Our analyses end up focusing on a comparison between the real and reel versions, with the latter’s value being judged based on how closely it mimics the former. This sets up law and aesthetics or the cinematic as oppositional rather than sharing a conjoined habitus. Similarly, the quasi-legal is a site and form that is not a derivative of the legal; rather the legal cannot exist without the quasi-legal, they co-constitute each other. Even legal positivists like HLA Hart recognized the importance of the quasi-legal through the relationship between the core and penumbral zones of law that generates possibilities of open textured judicial interpretation when posited rules have run out. So you don’t need to be a critical legal thinker to appreciate the value of the quasi-legal.

 

When practices of memorialisation are located at the site of the quasi-legal, like in Parzania and Dev, the film form gives testimony  a momentary sovereign life, outside of the adversarial bind of cross-questioning. This is especially significant in the context of cinema that tries to reconstruct stories of mass violence in the wake of the silencing of victims. However, it is necessary to acknowledge two things here: first, that melodrama in film, particularly in Bollywood cinema, has historically challenged the adversarial logic of the criminal trial through forms of storytelling where uninterrupted testimony constitutes the key climactic scene, like in the closing scene of Awaara or even in contemporary films like Pink.  Second, that uninterrupted testimony does not always favour the vanquished—like the deification of Amitabh Bacchan through testimonial resurrection after his death in Dev where he emerges as the liberal patriot who is both a saviour of Muslim victims of the pogrom and the unblemished secular police officer who can shoot errant Muslims in the name of upholding the Constitution. That is what urbanized, or what I would call developmentalist secularism, is in contemporary India—where the violence of the state stands justified in the name of secularism and developmentalism, and the Constitution provides the legalistic tools for keeping the state immune from accountability. Consider special security legislations like AFSPA or UAPA and their Constitutional basis in Article 22 (3). In the checkered history of of the Indian Supreme Court’s judicial activism, never has a special security legislation—that effectively grants the Indian state legal cover for unleashing violence with impunity—been declared unconstitutional. Yet, you have the same Supreme Court weakening the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act in the name of misuse. And this is the case irrespective of the political ideology of the government in power.

 

SLR: In WoR, you mention the “secularisation” of religious texts in both films such as Dev and the Best Bakery judgements of the Supreme Court. The tendency of even the higher judiciary to rationalise “secular” legal decisions by citing conservative Hindu legal tradition is worryingly common, in a profession where religious norms should have no bearing on decision-making. We were particularly struck by how often judges refer to pseudo-religious maxims and moralistic normative principles as reasons for their decisions. Is it ever possible to separate adjudication from personal religious belief in a meaningful manner in the Indian context?

 

OS: I don’t think even as a normative standard we can realistically say that religion should have no bearing on judicial decision-making, even if courts and judges are supposed to have an ethical allegiance to the secular constitution alone. I am also not entirely convinced that we have a “secular” constitution (consider the declaration in Article 1: “India, that is Bharat…” among many others). I think the separation of law from religion—the former being rational and the latter irrational—is a repetition of the same logic that separates the law from the aesthetic. This normative demand of separation has historical roots in the emergence of liberalism in the West, where the secular is considered public or state-discourse and the religious as private discourse. But in actual practice that has never been the case, either in the West or in India. Much like law and aesthetics, religion and secularism have a conjoined habitus in all modern societies, be they constitutionally secular or theological.

 

I don’t think we will solve the problem of judicial decision-making by separating judges’ personal religious beliefs from the so-called secular letter and spirit of the law. My concern here is twofold: first, the equation of the idea of the religious as anti-secular in a majoritarian context leads to minority religions and their demands for recognition or equal treatment being considered anti-secular and the majority religion being considered the threshold of secularism against whom other religions need to measure up, like Hinduism in India, Buddhism in Sri Lanka, and Christianity in the US or Western Europe. Second, I don’t think religious beliefs are exceptionally egregious to adjudication in comparison to other beliefs like judges’ economic ideology. Would I prefer a religious, human rights-affirming, and pro-poor judge in comparison to a secular, pro-corporation, and anti-poor judge? Why does religion become a greater taint but not when a judge is classist or when the judiciary time and again endorses neoliberal anti-poor positions? I think bigotry in judicial decision-making works in more complicated ways.

 

My critique of the films on the Gujarat pogrom and that of the Best Bakery judgements is that they mobilise ‘secularism’ to simultaneously condemn and justify the pogrom and strengthen state impunity. I don’t see secularism or for that matter any progressive liberal position as ones that carry unquestioned virtue. This is standard modus operandi of critical practice. By doing this, I remain alert to the limitations of the very things that I hold dear and that I draw privileges from—liberalism, secularism, human rights, democracy and the rule of law. It is this critical self-reflexivity that is missing when it comes to both the Hindutva ideologue  on the one hand who wants India to be a Hindu Rashtra and the Liberal (upper caste Hindu) on the other hand who thinks that for India to be secular it must have a Uniform Civil Code. There isn’t much of a difference between the two positions.           

 

SLR: In Chapter 3 of WoR, you explain how the violation of minority rights and the responsibility of the state is rationalised in judgments through appeals to economic development and asmita, something that is almost facilitated by the cold indifference of legalism. Is the legal concern with keeping the atmosphere of the courtroom “sanitary” (as you suggest through the use of Manto’s parable “Tidiness”) a generally misplaced and inhumane methodology of legal adjudication?

 

OS:  I think equating judicial objectivity with sanitising the courtroom and the adjudicatory process follows the casteist logic of purity/pollution. The same would apply to theoretical attempts that try to sanitise the discipline of law from the contamination of morality, politics, or aesthetics. All modern institutions are deeply entrenched in structures of oppression and the judiciary is no exception. Through a commitment to legalism, the judiciary attempts to present itself as an institution that is immune to the influence of these structures. But even at a very pragmatic level, just looking at the constitution of benches across courts in India, especially when it comes to the presence of Muslim, Dalit, and women judges, is enough to demonstrate how such immunity is a myth. In my analysis of the Best Bakery judgments across the full hierarchy of India’s courts, I found Manto’s parable on the Partition, “Tidiness”, particularly telling. It was this literary text that offered ways of understanding what the courts in the Best Bakery case were doing with their repeated attempts to uphold the ‘majesty of the law’. Irrespective of what the outcome of the judgments were, all of them seemed to agree that the site of violence was outside the courtroom and the courtroom was the place where remedy to such violence is available. Again, law in the courtroom is imagined here as the site of reason that will remedy the irrationality of religious violence that occupies the site of the city. So, to tidy up the court, to sanitise it of any accusations of being a site of violence—because Zahira Sheikh turned “hostile” due to witness intimidation not only outside but also inside the court—seemed more important to the judges than delivering justice to the violated.  I wouldn’t want to use pejorative terms like inhumane to describe such judicial conduct. I think this is the condition of the judiciary; it is not an exception to the rule. Even in the best of judgments by the best of judges, there is always an implicit attempt to sanitise the court and the judiciary of imagined or real contamination that is an affront to its authority. Why else do we have an offence called contempt of court? To sanitise the site of the courtroom has legal imprimatur.

 

SLR: Your analysis largely focuses on mainstream Bollywood films and their engagement with the Gujarat pogrom. How might your discussion extend to films that challenge the existing dominant ways of remembering and present alternative narratives? How are these alternative film narratives enmeshed with law, in particular, the authority of visual certification that rates films and has discretion to even disallow content?

 

OS: The three films that I read (see and listen to) in WoR actually offer secular critiques of the Gujarat pogrom. None of these films can be likened to The Sabarmati Report or Godhra: Accident or Conspiracy that are openly propagandist. Dev, Parzania and Kai Po Che, in different degrees, were providing alternative narratives to dominant ways of remembering the pogrom. In fact, Kai Po Che, as many anti-Hindutva commentators had noted, did not show the brutality of the pogrom against Muslims in all its nuances, but was still taken to court for representing Hindus in a bad light! And yet, despite their secular and liberal credentials, these films, while condemning the pogrom, were simultaneously reinforcing an idea of law, secularism and the Indian nation that, as I argue in the book, are at the foundation of the historical and structural disenfranchisement of India’s Muslim citizens. A propagandist film already gives its critical viewers the tools to see what is wrong with it. Such films do nothing to hide the hate they want to propagate. It is a far more challenging task when a film like Dev (made by a progressive filmmaker like Govind Nihalani, who was targeted by Hindu nationalists for his anti-Partition violence TV series Tamas) that is a cinematic protest  against the Gujarat pogrom ends up glorifying a Hindu police officer as a saviour of Muslims and who justified encounter killings by citing faith in the secular Constitution. What kind of memory of the pogrom is this? I am particularly interested in such counterintuitive possibilities of collective memory making that the shared narratives of law and cinema productively generate. With regard to certification of these three films by the CBFC, as I show in the book, as the temporal gap increases between 2002 and the release of the film, the classification becomes more open—from A or Adults only for Dev, to U-A or parental guidance for Parzania and U or universal viewing for Kai Po Che. Certification thus tells a story about memory as well—that too is a counterintuitive reading of CBFC certificates.       

 

SLR: You also examine the complex interplay between language, cinema, and the law in shaping collective memory of the Gujarat pogrom. We were particularly interested in the concept of “structural bilingualism” that you raise in the context of Dev’s titling and later interrogate in your discussion of Parzania’s use of English. You explain how these languages reflect the linguistic dynamics of the Indian nation-state. Could you expand on how this “structural bilingualism” operates within the broader location of Indian cinema, particularly the production of ways of remembering? What place do other Indian languages (other than English and Hindi) occupy within this framework?

 

OS: I borrow the expression “structural bilingualism” from the work of the film scholar Madhava Prasad who speaks of the emergence of a cinematic metalanguage in English, in the context of the Bollywoodisation (I would call it the combined neoliberalisation and Hinduisation) of Indian cinema that has replaced Urdu which was the older metalanguage. For Prasad, a metalanguage is one “in which alone the national ideology can be properly articulated.” I see structural bilingualism as the displacement of Urdu by English resulting in a form of secularisation of Bollywood cinema—English being considered secular and Urdu religious. However, what has effectively emerged as a metalanguage in place of Urdu, is not only English but also Hindi (some have called this Hinglish), which was always there alongside Urdu and English. These werethe three languages in which a Bombay film’s title always used to appear until the Urdu titling was removed across the board—in trailers, posters, and in the films’ titling. So, the modern Bollywood film gains simultaneous secular and nationalist traction through English and Hindi. Now, if we see this development in light of Hindu nationalism’s long-term attempt to turn India into not only a Hindu Rashtra but also a Hindi RashtraBollywood cinema becomes an ideal tool for achieving this end—that too in secularised modern form. So, on the one hand you have Amit Shah trying to impose Hindi as the national language and on the other hand you have all these recent propaganda films whose titles are all or mostly English—and they all have this forensic commitment to finding the truth, like that of a court of law. This is one way to understand how structural bilingualism in Bollywood cinema can strengthen the Hindutva project through the language of secularism and modernity.

 

SLR: In addition to your formal academic and teaching work, you also engage in a variety of creative pursuits. In We are Foot Soldiers, you explore sex workers and their children, and paint a picture of agency, identity, and political symbolism. How does your academic work interlink with these artistic pursuits? How do they inform and challenge each other?


OS: I wouldn’t distinguish my academic work from my creative work. I don’t think they sit separately. While I don’t disclaim the significance of conventions, I think conventional work can be done creatively and the other way around. Although, I’m trained in the law and am a disciplinary loyalist, given that I have been teaching in law schools for the past two decades of my academic life, I genuinely don’t consider myself as an expert in any field of law or in anything really. And I am not an artist or a filmmaker. I am uncomfortable with the idea of expertise (perhaps to make a virtue out of a lack). I find solace  in thinking of myself as an amateur and that is what drives my interest in experimenting with different forms of writing and presentation, and I always encourage my students to also not get rigid about modes and forms of writing. To be an amateur is also liberating in the sense that you worry less about making mistakes and you start thinking of failure as a form of ethical acknowledgement of your limitations.


This commitment to amateurism has become a profoundly comforting idea since I became a parent a couple of years back. Nothing trains you to become a parent, let alone an expert one. Every day and every moment you are learning on the job and constantly making mistakes. But every day and every moment are also intensely creative, even when the sleeplessness makes life unbearable.  A parent in that sense is a forever amateur—which is both a blessing and a curse. I say that with the acknowledgement that not all parents, especially given how gendered the roles and responsibilities are, can necessarily revel in the idea of amateurism. Afterall, the politics of social reproduction and care labour cannot be bypassed in whatever way you wish to spray-paint your experience of living in Babyland.  


But to share a concrete example about the relationship between amateurism and academic work: after I finished writing WoR a few years back, I couldn’t think of any new ideas for research. I became a parent and that meant that I did not have the time for anything at work apart from teaching. But I love writing (actually reading more than writing). So, I decided to carry out in-depth long form interviews with folks whose works I have read with great interest and excitement. The idea was simply to have engaged conversations and as I started to write introductions to these interviews and annotate them, I felt that there was something valuable in thinking about interviews as a form of legal scholarship.


As a teacher, I am unable to conceive of teaching a subject—be it Jurisprudence, International Human Rights Law or Tort Law—where I don’t include so-called non-legal material and train students to engage with provisions of a statue or a judgment and a scene from a film or an extract from a novel with the same amount of care and criticality. That’s how I inhabit the conjoined habitus of law and aesthetics in the classroom.


And to return to the relationship between WoR, aesthetics and amateurism: I do want to mention briefly the artwork on the cover. It is a painting by Pratima Dutta, my mother-in-law. It is a work from her art school days at Kalabhavan in Shantiniketan. During a spring-cleaning session at her home in Calcutta during the Covid lockdowns I found a stack of her student day paintings. It was this painting from a time when she was an amateur that appealed the most to me for its experimental daring, while working within the conventions of a form. I toyed with the idea of including a note in the book about the significance of the painting and how it speaks to the theme of the book. But then I thought that would burden the painting with meaning. That in the conjoined habitus that the cover and the content of book share, meaning needn’t always be assigned. I am just so overwhelmed with joy and sorrow in equal measure that she was able to hold WoR in her hands after its publication, and she is not around anymore to see her artwork appear with every discussion of the book in reviews and roundtables.     


To close, I would say that my interest in the aesthetic is motivated by the possibilities that it opens outside of the prosaic and the textual. For me, there are things in this world that words—or literality in general—fail to express or interpret. Aesthetics in that sense mark the limitations of our linguistic interpretative capacities. This is apparent in the difficulty of finding an appropriate word to describe or characterise Gujarat 2002. Words like riot, even genocide, felt either inadequate, hyperbolic or derivative. Pogrom comes closest given the factual nature of state complicity—and that’s what I use in WoR. But there are so many vernacular expressions that are also used like qayamat, aandhi, toofan that I heard during my visits to Gujarat—and these speak to the event’s affective intensity, not factuality. And as we live through genocidal times of unrepresentable violence (even if there is an unprecedented variety of images), we are being made more aware with every passing day the utter impossibility of language in both capturing and making sense of what is happening. In the context of Palestine, considering the Nakba (or catastrophe) as a legal concept pushes us to acknowledge the woefully limited vocabulary made available by international law to understand what is and has been happening in Gaza. We need non-textual vocabularies and that’s what aesthetics might make available to us. Or maybe, since I am not a believer in unquestioned virtue: it might not. After all, aesthetics has been and continues to be both the emissary and handmaiden of fascism (of all hues)—and so has law.     


Oishik Sircar teaches at Melbourne Law School. He is the author of Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India (CUP 2024) and Violent Modernities: Cultural Lives of Law in the New India (OUP 2021). Oishik has co-directed the award-winning documentary film We Are Foot Soldiers (PSBT 2011).  

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