Book Panel: 'Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema, and Collective Memory in the New India'
Dr Oishik Sircar (author)
Dr Kanika Sharma (discussant)
Mr Zahir Janmohamed (discussant)
Notes & Changes
Please note this is a fully online event.
"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."
About the speakers
Oishik Sircar is Senior Lecturer at Melbourne Law School and was, until recently, Professor at Jindal Global Law School, which he joined in 2009 as a founding faculty. Oishik is the author of Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India (CUP 2024) and Violent Modernities: Cultural Lives of Law in the New India (OUP 2021). Oishik is the co-director of the award-winning documentary film We Are Foot Soldiers (PSBT 2011). "
Zahir Janmohamed is an assistant professor of English at Bowdoin College. He received his MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan where he received awards in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and playwriting. In 2019, the podcast he co-founded about food, race, gender, and class called Racist Sandwich was nominated for a James Beard Award. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, Guernica, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Newsweek, and many other publications. Prior to beginning his writing career, he worked at Amnesty International and in the US Congress.
Dr Kanika Sharma is Senior Lecturer in Law at Soas University of London. She is the co-convenor and the India specialist for Law, Religion and the State in South Asia (PG) and Law and Society in South Asia (UG) at the SOAS School of Law, Gender, and Media. She has previously taught on the Public Law and Equity modules at SOAS and is a Fellow of the HEA.