Ways of Remembering: Volume 1
Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India

Investigation into how a shared narrative of law and cinema produces ways of collectively remembering mass violence in postcolonial India.

Oishik Sircar (Author)

9781316512814, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 4 July 2024

240 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.4 cm, 0.633 kg

'Rare is the shedding of new light on an historical event that has been thoroughly dissected, but Ways of Remembering does just that. Providing connective tissue between the current-day force of Hindutva with the Gujarat pogrom of 2002, Oishik Sircar brilliantly illuminates the reconstitution of violence through legal and cinematic narrative collusion. What emerges as well is an innovative approach to textual reading that generates novel questions and insights about memory making and the state. The result is a book about the past that is unexpectedly timely.' Jasbir K. Puar, Rutgers University, USA

Ways of Remembering 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.

List of Figures
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
1. Law and the Aesthetics of Atrocity
2. A Jurisprudential-Aesthetic Approach
3. The Best Bakery Judgments: Aesthetics of Judicial Memory
4. Bollywood's Law: Cinematic Justice and Collective Memory
5. 'As They Ought'
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Law [L], Violence in society [JFFE], Cultural studies [JFC], Genocide & ethnic cleansing [HBTZ], Social & cultural history [HBTB], Films, cinema [APF]