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

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Join us for a LASSnet book discussion of Oishik Sircar's Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India (CUP 2024). Oishik will be in discussion with Manisha Sethi (Jindal Global Law School) and Shohini Ghosh (Jamia Millia Islamia).

Oishik Sircar's book 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.

Speaker

Oishik Sircar is Associate Professor, Jindal Global Law School, Fellow, Centre for India Australia Studies, Jindal Global University, and Associate Member, Institute for International Law and the Humanities, Melbourne Law School. Oishik completed an LLB from ILS Law College, Savitribai Phule Pune University, an LLM from the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, and a PhD from Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne. Oishik was previously a Teaching Fellow at Melbourne Law School (2012-2015), an Assistant Professor at the Jindal Global Law School (2009-2012) and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Human Rights and Citizenship Studies, National University of Juridical Sciences (2008-2009). In 2015, Oishik served as Junior Faculty at Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law and Policy Workshop. As a human rights law researcher and activist, Oishik has worked with Amnesty International and the South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre and has been closely associated with the sex workers’ and queer rights movements in India, and the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israeli apartheid globally.