Soon after its release on March 27, the Malayalam film L2: Empuraan, directed by Prithviraj Sukumaran and starring Mohanlal in a leading role, found itself in troubled waters. Several right-wing groups campaigned against the film, alleging that its depiction of the 2002 riots in Gujarat was anti-government. However, the response to L2: Empuraan has been a complete contrast to the response to the Hindi film, The Sabarmati Report, which deals with the Godhra train-burning and subsequent riots.
In the case of Empuraan, fearing backlash, the film’s makers made 24 cuts, including the removal of scenes depicting rioting and violence. These cuts were eventually approved by the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC), and the re-edited version of the film was screened from April 2. The film earned more than Rs 100 crore at the box office.
Directed by Dheeraj Sarna, The Sabarmati Report, released in November 2024, starred Vikrant Massey in a leading role. Though the film received mostly negative reviews and failed to make a mark at the box office, Prime Minister Narendra Modi praised it on X, claiming that it “reveals the truth” about the Godhra train-burning incident, which is often considered a trigger for the Gujarat violence of 2002. Modi and his Cabinet were even photographed watching the film in a theatre.
The varying response to both films reveals how the Gujarat violence of 2002, during the first of Modi’s four terms as the chief minister of the state, continues to be a contested issue even now, more than two decades later.
In Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in New India (Cambridge University Press, 2024), legal scholar Oishik Sircar claims that the 2002 riots in Gujarat, which some commentators describe as a pogrom, “is independent India’s most litigated and mediatised event of anti-minority atrocity”. Sircar acknowledges that there are multiple areas in which the memory of the incident continues to be contested — “litigation, films, literature, art, reportage, the economy, and, of course, electoral politics”.
His book, however, focuses only on two of these — judgments and films. He describes these to be “the most publicly available commemorative symbols, rituals and technologies of collective memory of the pogrom”.
Using an interdisciplinary approach, Sircar intertwines legal and cinema studies, usually thought to be distinct disciplines. He compares the judgments in the Best Bakery case, which was litigated in the courts from 2003 and 2012, and three films on the riots, released in the same period — Dev (2004), Parzania (2007) and Kai Po Che (2013).
The Best Bakery incident took place on 1 March 2002, when a mob attacked and burned down the eponymous bakery in Vadodara. The factory was owned by Zaheera Sheikh’s family members, who had taken refuge in the bakery along with some of their employees. Fourteen people were burned alive, including three Hindu employees. Zaheera, then 19 years old, was one of the survivors and key eyewitnesses in the case, which would cover the “whole hierarchy of the Indian criminal justice system”.
Formerly my colleague at the OP Jindal Global University, Sonipat, and currently at the University of Melbourne, Sircar reads the judgments and the films together, rather than in opposition, though the former attempts to reconstruct the truth while the latter uses “the scaffolding of facts to offer fictionalised accounts”.
Doing so allows him to demonstrate how both films and judgements construct the events of Gujarat 2002 as a conflict between secular law and religious violence, with the former emerging victorious.
Sircar describes this to be an example of state-making or state-preservation – narratives or processes that allow the political elite to construct how the citizens at large will imagine the nation. Such narratives, however, “normalise violence against Muslims by advancing seemingly secular critiques of the pogrom.” The films and the judgements critique religious violence and champion secular law, but, for Sircar, they eventually conform to the imagination of the nation that marginalises Indian Muslims. He contextualises these arguments by engaging with two major developments in India since the early 1990s – the rise of the Hindu right and the liberalisation of the economy.
The book, which emerges from Sircar’s doctoral research, has five chapters. After the initial introduction, in which he establishes his thesis, Sircar devotes a chapter to his methodology of jurisprudential aesthetics, tracing its origins to the Literature and Law movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Scholars of this movement, such as James Boyd White, Robert Cover and Richard Weisberg, argued that legal judgments should be analysed as literary texts because they were also a form of storytelling, filled with narrative, drama and cultural symbols. Sircar extends this methodology into Indian legal studies, combining it with film studies.
Culturally, this is not surprising at all, considering the hegemonic influence that Bollywood and other Indian cinemas have on our lives. Sircar would hardly be immune to such influences.
For instance, historian Gyan Prakash reads the films of Shyam Benegal from the mid-1970s as a context for the Emergency (1975-77) in his book Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point (2018). Sircar’s use of films in juxtaposition with legal judgments breaks new ground in interdisciplinary research.
The core of Sircar’s book is in two chapters analysing the various judgements in the Best Bakery case and the three films. In his analysis of the various judgments delivered by different courts in the Best Bakery incident, Sircar argues that the written documents were full of words that evoked images — atmosphere, witness, crowd, etc. By analysing the judgments, Sircar demonstrates that they remember the pogrom by simultaneously condemning the violence and normalising it.
The films, too, perform a similar function, though their certification by the CBFC and release faced activism by various interested parties. While several individuals petitioned courts to prevent the release of Dev and Kai Po Che, theatre owners in Gujarat refused to screen Parzania, fearing a backlash from right-wing activists. Sircar analyses not only the texts of the films but also the hypertexts in the form of disclaimers, opening credits, music, and so on.
Sircar’s analysis establishes that legal judgements and cinema have worked in tandem, with other cultural artefacts of post-liberalisation India, to create a society marked by stark inequality, backsliding democracy and religious conflict. He demonstrates that while the popular social and cultural discourse critiqued violence against minorities, they did not succeed in rooting out the causes of religious conflict. In fact, they performed the exact opposite task.
Sircar focuses only on one incident from the Gujarat riots and a few films. However, the methods he uses for his analysis can be applied to other incidents and films as well. This will open up a rich area of research into both popular culture and law.
As the recent controversy over L2: Empuraan shows, incidents of violence often have a long afterlife. It is essential to constantly interrogate the processes through which they are remembered to ensure that they are not weaponised. Sircar’s book does that successfully. It would be of interest not only to film and legal scholars but also to anyone interested in the history and society of India in the 21st century.
Uttaran Das Gupta is an independent writer and journalist.
Views expressed are the author’s own.