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Session #4: Wednesday, 29 December, 9.00 - 10.45 am (Tagore 4)
Panel coordinator(s): * (*)
Chair/discussant: * (*)
Panel description
Panelists, paper titles, and abstracts
Through this paper, the author will enquire into the correlation between the law, and motion pictures. It aims to look into how, on one hand, the films portray the society and the law and how on the other, the society and law perceive these art works. The enquiry begins with brief study of transition from the glorified image of legal system in 80s and early 90s in the Indian Cinema (much similar to, if not inspired from its American counterpart) to the gradual degradation of this image in later times. While there cannot be one view on whether films depict what happens in the society, or whether society imitates what is picturised on the screen, the paper will examine the mix of this notion by discussing two aspects. First, it will look into films as a medium of exercising the freedom of expression. Film makers of all genre have used their work to address strong social realities that require immediate attention. Through bold cinematography, Deepa Mehta’s Fire and Shekhar Kapoor’s Bandit Queen, (among many others) have called for controversies and criticism by challenging the set norms of society and its system that often turns a blind eye towards its inherent issue. In reference to these works, the paper will analyse situations where the law has protected this right and has stressed on the need for accepting the societal reality. The second aspect of the paper then examines the situations where the films have exposed the cruel face of legal system, as in ‘Gangajal’ in the background of Khatri v. State of Bihar.
In conclusion, emphasis will be made on the need to develop critical consciousness in the contemporary societal set up by promoting Cinema which is bold and at the same time does not exaggerate system’s drawbacks by misleading the audience through its unnecessary melodrama.
I propose to present an ethnography of the public screening of Islamic films during the annual Muharram commemoration, as a cityscape. Islamic films, part of on-line Shi’a networks, were freely downloaded, dubbed into Urdu, screened, copied and sold by a Shi’a activist group, Tanzeem, in stalls that lined the streets of the old city of Hyderabad. The films circulate unconventional meanings of Muharram that read Karbala as an eternal fight against oppression, relating the ethical battle of Karbala to the 2006 Lebanese war and the Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation. In my presentation I elaborate and describe the manner in which Tanzeem activists sought to insert themselves in a modern Shi’a imaginary through the screening of radical Islamic films, contending local Muharram practices.
The presence of Islamic acoustic elements as part of the complex urban environment, in which discipline and deliberation, language and power are interdependent, are similar to the spaces in Lara Deeb’s Beirut and Charles Hirschkind’s soundscapes of cassette sermons that undergird the revivalist daw’a movement in Cairo as “counterpublic spaces” (Deeb 2006; Hirschkind 2006). Unlike the pure moral economy of modern technology in producing pious dispositions in the Islamic cityscapes described by both Deeb and Hirsckind, I describe the manner in which religious media practices played in the streets are part of the noise of postcolonial cities as “cultures of recycling” that fashion subjectivities and permeate bodily senses (Liang 2005; Sundaram 2004), seeking to re-inscribe and transform traditional Indian Islamic practices.
Through this I explore shifting notions of an ethical community in continuity with modernity, in which beliefs, practices, collective memory and modes of belonging from a ‘pre-modern’ past are sought to be recuperated and re-inscribed in an otherwise homogenous present. I reflect on ways in which an empty homogenous time of nation, that Walter Benjamin apprehended as a uniform and unfilled space, interacts with multiple social experiences of modernity. In particular I speculate if the presence of Islamic acoustic elements and screening of ‘radical’ Islamic films in the city can be read not only as a moral inhabitation of the space of the nation but could also interrogate liberal notions inherent in the framing of notions of ethical and legal communities.
The use of resistance to counter dominant and oppressive power (and the norms that such power produces to solidify its authority) has been a compelling device to seek changes to the legal status quo. Resistance often entails an element of outlawry, yet depending on the circumstances, certain acts of defiance prove legitimate. Narratives of “rightful” resistance that are waged for such purposes often make for compelling artistic material, whether it is in film, television, theatre and/or literature. Taking the position that such forms of artistic and cultural endeavor are sites of legal normativity, my paper shall examine, amongst other things, how, within such “Theatres of Justice”, resistance is presented as a normatively legitimate device for obtaining and securing justice or an otherwise justifiable goal when pitted against a legalized or otherwise legitimized oppression.
Given the rich amounts of material that explore the relationship between law and resistance, particularly in film and television, I shall focus my attention to one specific realm of artistic endeavor – the valourization of resistance within the context of depictions related to military service within theatres of war, conflict zones or matters related to national security. Popular notions of military life often imagine a highly regimented world where orders are to be followed despite misgivings a subordinate might have. Films and television have presented an alternative vision of law where subordinates challenge orders by superior officers and, at the same time, challenge the latter’s presumed wisdom. As such, they present normative ideas not only about when such acts of defiance by subordinates are justifiable but perhaps also expected.
This paper forges together my two main areas of academic interest: (1) law and resistance; and (2) law and popular culture. I currently contribute writings to a law and popular culture web log which I co-founded called Jurisculture. I have also written an article that was published last year on the cultivation of a unilateral American Responsibility to Protect on the once popular American television program, The West Wing.
For long, the possibilities that the Internet provides for freedom of expression have been hailed as revolutionary. Increasingly, however, it is also recognised that when states are intent on doing so, circumscribing the right to freedom of expression can be achieved online almost as effectively as it can offline. Parallel to this growing realisation, the United States in particular has now in fact started to use campaigns in favour of online freedom of expression as another strategic weapon in its fight against select authoritarian states.
In this context, how has the Internet affected possibilities for freedom of expression in India? This paper will examine this question from two angles. On the one hand, it will investigate the challenges thrown to existing restrictions on freedom of expression as defined by Indian law not only, as is usually highlighted, by the ways in which terrorists use technology, but also, for example, by the appearance on the Internet of videos of young women who were filmed with their consent while stripping (although they may not have consented to the subsequent distribution of this clip).On the other hand, the paper will explore how the international political economy of campaigns to promote freedom of expression online affect the space to resolve in a progressive direction such challenges at the national level. As will be shown, while the growing spread of the Internet as such provides an excellent occasion to reopen the debate on laws on freedom of expression in India, the way in which the question of online freedom of expression has gotten caught up in world politics makes it very difficult for these possibilities to actually come to fruition.