Violent Modernities: Cultural Lives of Law in the New India

by Oishik Sircar

Law and violence are thought to share an antithetical relationship in postcolonial modernity. Violence is considered the other of law, lawlessness is understood to produce violence, and law is invoked and deployed to undo the violence of lawlessness. Violent Modernities uses a critical legal perspective to show that law and violence in the New India share a deep intimacy, where one symbiotically feeds the other. Researched and written between 2008 and 2018, the chapters study the cultural sites of literature, cinema, people's movements, popular media and the university to illustrate how law's promises of emancipation and performances of violence live a life of entangled contradictions. The book foregrounds reparative and ethical accounts where law does not only inhabit courtrooms, legislations and judgments, but also lives in the quotidian and minor practices of disobediences, uncertainties, vulnerabilities, double binds and failures. When the cultural lives of law are reimagined
as such, the book argues, the violence at the foundations of modern law in the postcolony begins to unravel.

370 pages, Hardcover

Published October 12, 2021

Reviews

[proma roy chowdhury · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read “questioning queer” the article, its BRILLIANT. Finally feel myself represented: Sircar deals with the broader question of inclusivity in the queer movement as being oppressive and forced, identity politics as superior, establishing a form of “sexual lower orders” within the queer community. You cannot belong unless you prescribe to a certain behavioural attitude; what if you identify against the norm but do not prescribe? Sircar engages with the idea of Butler’s definition of gender as being “sites of trouble”, exploring the Indian context through the IPC and section 377.
“I remain what i am”