Objection, M'Lord

Abstract

This book engages with two major public archives of India’s modernity—law and cinema. Law and cinema stage powerful public dramaturgies that speak to millions, and the two significantly cross-reference each other. Indian cinema constantly dramatises courtroom scenes and issues of legal and personal morality, and character types move between criminal, lover, victim, and vigilante. If cinema has been a bold mediation on the legal apparatus, law has typically been a site of commentary on censorship, violence, and sexuality—all themes in filmic transgression. Law is a site of debate on censorship, copyright, and circulation. In this book, the public archives of law and cinema in India emerge as critical, overlapping forcefields that constantly rewrite each other’s histories. There has been almost no scholarship on law and cinema. 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 overdetermined by the law (from censorship to protection of film as property), then at the same time the representational world of cinema has always retained for itself a diegetic freedom where the ordered worlds of law and justice erupt through other fantastical possibilities. This is a world where democracy is not played out 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 often the legal system itself.