In advance praise for Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India by Oishik Sircar, writer and political scientist Achin Vanaik says this “strikingly original study” is about how two sources—cinema and law—played their part in constructing a pro-Hindutva collective memorialisation of communal violence in Gujarat in 2002. “The best micro-studies always provide significant and powerful macro-level insights,” Vanaik writes.
Sircar is associate professor at the Jindal Global Law School, Sonepat. In Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India, Sircar studies the memorialisation of the incidents of 2002 through court judgments and three Bollywood films that were set against a backdrop of the riots or alluded to the violence.
A fellow at the Centre for India Australia Studies at Jindal Global University and associate member at the Institute for International Law and the Humanities, Melbourne Law School, Sircar uses a novel interpretive framework to argue that the shared narrative between judicial pronouncements and Bollywood cinema produces specific ways of remembering 2002. The book makes a counterintuitive argument that the texts of the Best Bakery trial judgments and the images and sounds of three Bollywood films contributed to strengthening a Hindutva-aligned way of remembering Gujarat 2002.
Law and cinema are not frequently studied together, but Sircar’s study provides a unique perspective on how citizens collectively remember, or forget.
EXCERPT
Litigation was initiated against Dev and Kai Po Che by private petitioners who asked the court to ban their screening, arguing that the films could invoke sectarian violence, or were biased in their representation of the event. Parzania faced a lot of trouble releasing in Gujarat because theatre owners refused to screen it fearing backlash from the Hindu Right. Dev released in theatres on 11 June 2004, just about two months after the Supreme Court of India ordered the retrial of the Best Bakery case outside Gujarat. The release date for Parzania (26 January 2007) coincided with India’s Republic Day (when the Constitution was adopted in 1950), and Kai Po Che’s (22 February 2013) was just a week prior to the day that would have marked 11 years since the pogrom.
Dev, released in 2004, was the first Bollywood film that wove its plot around some key incidents related to the Gujarat pogrom. The film released a few months ahead of India’s general elections that year (in which the BJP was voted out at the centre but not in Gujarat) and soon after the Best Bakery case was shifted out of Gujarat to Mumbai (to ensure a fair trial and guard against the intimidation of witnesses).
Despite the fact that Dev’s story is located in Mumbai, and makes no mention of the Gujarat pogrom, the ‘pure coincidence’ that the standard disclaimer might be referring to is the key components in its plot and narrative that borrow from events that took place in 2002 in Gujarat. The violence against Muslims in the film is preceded by a ‘precipitating event’ like that of the Godhra train-burning incident. Dev, interestingly, even in its non-naming and non-identification with the Gujarat pogrom, frames its narrative in the same chronology as the 2002 pogrom: the death of Hindus in the train compartment is replaced by a bomb blast at a Hindu temple that becomes the trigger for the killing of Muslims. The female protagonist in the film is a Muslim woman, who like Zahira Sheikh was witness to the killing of her family members and then is called on to testify. In fact, it was because of these striking similarities with actual events from 2002 that legal action was initiated against Dev by private petitioners, who demanded a ban, claiming that the film could instigate sectarian tensions because audiences would identify the connection between the plot and the pogrom.
As journalist Ayesha Khan reports, when Dev released in Vadodara, cinema theatre owners put out advertisements in local dailies calling on both Hindus and Muslims to come and watch the film. They did this to get as much business as possible, fearing that it might be banned by a court order. The fact that Dev’s story was similar to events related to the pogrom, especially the Best Bakery massacre that took place in Vadodara, was apparent from the text of a film poster, which read: ‘Watch Vadodara’s Zaheera Sheikh–inspired Kareena Kapoor’s role. Naked portrayal of riots, inactive police force and non-performance at the behest of the chief minister.’ In fact, as Khan notes, the audiences would shout out ‘Zaheera Sheikh’ when the actress Kareena Kapoor appeared on the screen. In another reported incident, during the screening of the film in Jamnagar, a city in Gujarat, Hindu and Muslim audiences engaged in a heated argument on the film. In consequence, the theatre authorities had to stop the screening and also refund the price of the tickets to the audience. Martha Nussbaum, commenting on her experience of watching the film in an Ahmedabad theatre, wrote: ‘the mood of the audience was staunchly anti-Muslim’. Dev, thus, brought into being, through its surrogate address about sectarian violence, cinematic publics that identified the film with the Gujarat pogrom, despite its disclaimer of being fictitious.
The English and Hindi titles of Dev are digitally stylised to emerge out of flames, suggesting a trial by fire. The titling is accompanied by an intense background score in which a chorus of deep male voices recites a Sanskrit shloka (chant) from chapter 2, verse 27, of the Bhagavad Gita: ‘karmanye vadhikaraste ma phaleshu kadachana, ma karmaphalaheturbhurmate sangostvakarmani’. The English translation would mean: ‘You have a right to perform your prescribed duty, but you are not entitled to the fruits of action. Never consider yourself the cause of the results of your activities, and never be attached to not doing your duty.’ It is this message from the Gita—‘of action without consequence’—that frames the ethico-juridical universe that the film conjures.
The invocation of the Hindu holy book and the use of language in the title sequence offer a telling instance of how Hindutva ideology subliminally informs Dev’s affects of audience initiation and spectatorial address. The use of English and Hindi in the titling suggests the practice of what Prasad has called the ‘structural bilingualism of the Indian nation-state’: ‘a state of affairs where the multitude of Indian languages (here counted as one) function under the direction of a meta-language in which alone the national ideology can be properly articulated’. It is through Bollywood cinema that the meta-languages of English and Hindi have thus emerged as ‘defining the linguistic order of new India’, in which English works as the language of secular neoliberal aspiration and Hindi as that of secular nationalist unity. This has advanced the logic of ‘Hindi nationalism’ that wipes out the Islamicate presence of Urdu as a language that used to appear on film posters and the opening title sequences of Bollywood cinema ‘as a matter of routine’.
The use of English has strongly aided the processes and practices of Bollywood becoming a transnational and developmentalist export for consumption by the Indian diaspora. Hindi has come to displace Urdu, it can be argued, to advance a mandate enshrined in Articles 343 and 351 of the Constitution of India that make Hindi the official language of India and direct the state to be duty bound to promote and spread it ‘relying primarily on Sanskrit’. Pritam Singh traces the contestations in the Constituent Assembly debates to show how these provisions were aimed at imposing a ‘unified Indian nationalism’ that, through ‘Hindi imperialism’, worked ‘as a vehicle of “national” aspiration for a regional upper-caste elite’. In other words, constitutional recognition for Hindi as the national language was pushed through by Hindutva ideologues in the Constituent Assembly, ignoring the other regional languages. The primacy given to Sanskrit was also based on a demand by supporters of Hindutva who wanted to keep intact the myth that Sanskrit was ‘indigenous to India’, that it was the language of the (Hindu) gods, and Hindi its modern and most legitimate and secular offspring. The seamless blending of the Sanskrit shlokas (verses) from the Bhagavad Gita, and the English-Hindi titling of Dev, initiates the pedagogical project of Bollywood cinema in naturalising Hindutva’s secular narrative that reduces anti-Muslim violence to tragedy and politics, and celebrates the mythical Hindu foundations of modernity in India that the Constitution is popularly believed to enshrine.
Bollywood’s memorial record in Dev, thus, produces and mobilises judgment that contributes to the active (or mnemohistorical) commemoration of the pogrom in a particular way of remembering. This way of remembering, as I will discuss now, even while acknowledging the horror of the pogrom’s violence, rationalises it.
(Excerpted with permission from Ways Of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India, published by Cambridge University Press.)
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