Session #2: Friday, 9 January, 15.45 - 17.30 (CSLG)
Panel coordinator(s): Lawrence Liang, Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore (lawrence@altlawforum.org)
Chair/discussant: Ravi Vasudevan, CSDS, Delhi (raviv@sarai.net)
Panel description
Panelists, paper titles, and abstracts
Internationally, hate speech is the generic term for speech attacks on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation or any other social grouping. Advocates of suppressing hate speech claim that this kind of speech promotes discrimination and violence against those it describes. The debate on Hate Speech and whether or not it should be regulated is a bitter bone of contention amongst those who are politically committed to protect the rights of minorities and those who defend the Freedom of Speech and Expression. The fantasmatic site of cinematic representation complicates the debate further. Should all articulations of hate be considered hate speech? How may we understand articulations of hate in cinema? Using illustrations from popular films, this presentation attempts to explore how different insights might emerge from cinematic articulations of hate.
Towards the end of the fifties, a public love scandal captured the imagination of the nation. This was the Kawas Nanavati-Sylvia Nanavati-Prem Ahuja murder case in 1959 which became a mobilizing moment to express larger anxieties arising out of the urban experience; around sexuality, morality and transgression. While the Nanavati case was directly played out in the courts of law as it involved a murder, like other scandals of the time it also became a public trial outside of the courts, invoking great debate, outrage and anxiety around threats to “family values.” The Nanavati case particularly took on a life of its own in popular imagination circulating through popular film and fiction, trivia, drawing room gossip and rumour. One of the key players in this reactive public drama was the popular tabloid Blitz. In a pre television era, the photographic image of the ‘crime’ in Blitz was both, indexical as well as reconstructive, sometimes becoming a site for speculation around the “fake” picture. Looking at the intersections between all these extra legal spaces, this paper would seek to look at the nature of shadow trials that emerged out of cultures of leisure and their constructions of ‘victim’, ‘aggressor’, ‘guilt’ and ‘innocence.’
This paper seeks to examine the anxieties around the criminal trial in the age of mass media by analyzing the debates around the emerging notion of 'Trial by Media' in India. It will focus on the discursive strategies that the appellate courts deploy in dealing with this phenomenon, moving between a direct access to the public whom they claim to speak on behalf of to a disavowal of publicity and its impact on the trial process. By claiming the rhetoric of immediacy and presence in emphasizing the value of an open trial based entirely on evidence and testimony before it, the court denies the already textualised and overdetermined nature of trials represented extensively in the media, and tries to maintain the fantasy of an unmediated trial. The paper will analyse the parallel and competing tropes of immediation that get deployed by mass media and the courts and foreground these as crucial to their strategies for legitimation, particularly examining them vis-à-vis ideas of formalism and criminal procedure in common law. The question of immediation is interesting also as a point of comparison between these two regimes of truth and publicity as both are over-determined by the police 'investigation' and swing from blind reliance to fetishized suspicion on the police story, while having to perform an ambivalence towards it through direct access to the parties' testimonies. In this, they undertake the ritual of masking and unmasking the public secret that police investigations in India are all about extracting confessions through torture. These practices will be placed in the context of ideas of publicity underpinning the theory of a modern public trial process.
The paper will take as a case study the legal challenge in 2005 to the release of a Hindi film called "Black Friday" based on a book on the police investigation of the serial bomb blasts in the city still called Bombay in March 1993. The emphasis will be on critically examining how the Bombay High Court judgment, which continues to be the clearest judicial pronouncement on this issue, deals with the question of publicity, its basis being "it is just and necessary that justice must not merely be done but must also appear to have been done." The film was to have an all-India release on January 28, 2005 but could not be released because one of the accused in the trial successfully filed a case asking for an injunction against it arguing that the film in re-enacting the police investigation would pre-judge the accused as guilty and would thus vitiate the trial that was still in process. It would therefore be a "contempt of court" as it would "interfere with course of justice" and also would defame the accused pronouncing them guilty before a public audience before the court has actually done it.
The relationship between law and cinema has to be one of the most well guarded public secrets in the world of legal theory and film theory. This is surprising given the pervasive presence of the law in cinema, and vice versa. If on the one hand, the institution of cinema and practices of film going are over determined by the law (which regulates every aspect from the grant of the censor certificate to the protection of film as property) -then at the same time- the representational world of cinema has always retained for itself the diegetic freedom where the ordered worlds of law and justice play themselves out through fantastical possibilities, with little regard for formal rules and regulations. This is a world where the game of republican democracy is played out, not in public institutions of justice, but in shadow courtrooms instituted in cinema screens across the country, where the accused is neither a petty thief nor a dreaded murderer, but the Indian legal system itself. From the courtroom drama (Awara, Waqt, Kanoon) to the encounter films (Ab Tak Chappan, Kaaka Kaaka, Sehar), popular cinema in India has had a huge investment in the politics of legality. And while there have been some hints in film theory about the dominating presence of themes of law and the impossibility of justice in popular cinema, there exists no systematic survey of the idea of popular legal imagination. At the same time legal cases on censorship and on the spatial regulation of cinema, which depend on the production on the ability of the law to produce a theory of cinematic experience and affect, are only read in law school classrooms as free speech cases. The silence in legal theory about the role of cinema in the creation of a popular legal theory is matched only by the relative silence within film theory on the role of the law in constituting the domain of cinema. This paper seeks to examine the social life of law in images, and explores how the presence of questions of law and justice creates an idea of a cinematic jurisprudence which is unique and different from the jurisprudence of legal theory.
This paper is a creative exploration of identity making among the plantation Tamil youth of Sri Lanka, exploring the dynamics of their negotiation with the Sri Lankan state and its attendant violence. The exploration was carried out through a series of workshops where we engaged with a group of 20-odd persons ranging from 15-36 years of age. Through a creative use of the popular cinematic medium, the workshops explore the subjectivity of the youth, their desires and negotiatory moves toward a sense of belonging to nation, community, family and home. The workshops emphasize a processual reflection on identity making relating it to issues of gender that serve to map the terrain of individual subjectivity and political action in multiple ways. The plantation workers were brought over from South India as indentured labour in the 19th century by the British and were settled in the hill country of Sri Lanka to work in first coffee and later tea plantations. Disenfranchised by the Citizenship Act of ’48, the struggles of the community had been primarily in relation to wages and trade union politics on the one hand and on moves toward recognition of citizenship, which was finally granted to all in 2000. The year 2000 also saw the ‘Bindunuwewa’ riots in many parts of the plantation, in which the estate youth, Sinhala villagers and the police clashed. Taking this as the defining and restraining framework for the exploration, the paper looks at emerging identities of the community in terms of a longing for belonging and a movement for citizenship. The plantation community is working through an emerging identity making, the Malaiyaha identity, which is both tied to and strives against the plantation and estate working class identity. It is an emerging (middle) class consciousness articulated by the sons and daughters of tea plantation workers, female tea pluckers, who have not been able to attain full middle classness in terms of income, but have been infused with a middle class sense of identity, nationalist identity through various political, educational and media-wise signifiers. It is within this emergence that we strive to see how media, particularly cinema, which is one of the major forms by which identity is fashioned contributes to the shaping of perceptions about leaders, leadership, politics, home and society.