The Politics of Memory: Richard Sherwin Reviews Ways of Remembering
- Socio-Legal Review
- 27 minutes ago
- 8 min read
Richard K Sherwin
Gaining control of the means of communication in society is the royal road to political dominance. Those who own or otherwise dominate society’s communication infrastructure – from newspapers to radio and television broadcast networks to digital social media and (soon enough) fully immersive virtual reality platforms – have the power to shape perceptions, feelings, opinions, ideas, beliefs and, ultimately, individual and collective memory.
The ability to shape social and political reality enables the power holder to advance whatever interests or objectives they favor. In a liberal democracy, where sovereignty is “of, by, and for the people,” public media will ideally serve liberal democratic principles and interests. This means that encouragement and tolerance of a diversity of viewpoints will be preferred – on the premise that the more we know, or consider, or openly debate in the public marketplace of opinions and ideas, the better our judgments will be.
Needless to say, a preference for optimising prudent judgment and freedom of choice by an educated public does not always prevail. For example, contemporary experience shows that in the absence of a strong state regulatory framework committed to the public interest, corporate ownership of society’s communication infrastructure all but ensures the prioritization of private gain at the public’s expense. The “attention economy” generated by corporate giants like Microsoft, Google, X, and TikTok thrives on spectacle, disinformation, and highly divisive content – preferably within the emotional spectrum of hate and anger. The reason for this is not difficult to discern. Studies show that it is precisely this kind of emotional intensity that most effectively holds users’ attention online. Keeping people glued to their screens ensures increased exposure to advertising – and to strategic data mining. And by providing more personalized information, data mining ensures more effective (‘targeted’) advertising. Shopping preferences now can not only be met, they also can be anticipated and shaped.
The same strategies of influence, animated by the same desire to control human behavior, can also be used for political purposes. When the dominant means of communication in society are covertly acquired, openly seized, or otherwise subject to the will of illiberal state actors, strategies of political control will follow. The neoliberal preference for maximizing corporate profit now shifts, or perhaps joins hands with, the oligarchic impulse to maximise state power.
In Ways of Remembering, Oishik Sircar explores the oligarchic convergence of political and economic power under the rubric of what social scientist Rūta Kazlauskaitė calls “memory politics.” Shaping a nation’s narrative – of the past, the present, as well as an imagined future – is part and parcel of controlling its collective identity. As Joseph Goebbels demonstrated, acting in his capacity as Nazi Minister for Popular Education and Propaganda, the power structures of the state can be replicated in the communication practices of popular culture. In this sense, viewing law through the lens of culture and aesthetics (what Sircar calls “law in/as aesthetics” [Sircar, 12]) opens up important dimensions of how law operates “beyond its posited forms” (Sircar, 13), which is to say, in the everyday practices of storytelling and power.
Sircar explores this theme in the context of contemporary Indian law and cinema. The result is a meticulously researched, deeply felt volume that is both cogent and morally compelling. Sircar masterfully synthesises a vast array of scholarship in diverse academic fields – including law and literature, law and film, cultural legal studies, and critical theory. Further, he also operationalises this knowledge, applying and testing its efficacy in the context of specific legal and cinematic case studies.
The sense of moral urgency that drives this work arises from an incident of traumatic intensity in contemporary Indian history, namely a violent pogrom in 2002 that targeted Muslims in the western Indian state of Gujarat. Approximately 2000 people (mostly Muslims, but also some Hindus, Christians and Parsis) were killed. Tens of thousands were driven from their homes. (Sircar, 6 -7) This event gave rise to highly publicized judicial rulings over a period of nine years. It also figured prominently in major Indian feature films. While scholars have written about the Gujarat pogrom from both legal and cinematic perspectives, Sircar is the first scholar to bring these perspectives together. The result is an acute critical analysis of the Hindutva (or Hindu supremacist) movement in India (Sircar, 2).
Sircar shows that the Gujarat pogrom effectively served as a laboratory for the Hindutva movement, helping it to solidify and expand its influence – especially under the leadership of Narendra Modi. It was Modi, in 2002, who oversaw and evidently helped to bring about the violent targeting of Muslims in Gujarat, and who as Prime Minister – elected for a third term in 2024, after serving from 2014 to 2019, and from 2019 to 2024 – propagated a nationalist and religious identity that he claimed for India as a Hindu nation.
Ways of Remembering focuses on six judicial decisions that arose from the Best Bakery case (2003–2012) and three Bollywood films (Dev [2004], Parzania [2007], and Kai Po Che [2013]). According to Sircar, the courts got to eat their cake and keep it too by seeming to condemn the killing of Muslims, while simultaneously preserving the narrative significance (and collective memory) of Muslims killing Hindus. The latter can be traced to an infamous train burning incident in Godhra, an event that was seared into Hindu memory since its occurrence shortly before the Gujarat pogrom (Sircar, 10).
The courts condemned anti-Muslim violence, but ultimately the 21 defendants in the Best Bakery case were acquitted on procedural grounds. On the surface the secular rationality of law appeared to triumph, but not far below religious passions continued to churn – apparently with the tacit approval, and perhaps even strategic encouragement, of the courts. Consider, for example, the Court’s glib and misleading characterisation of Hindutva’s radical ideology as “a way of life.” With that prosaic stroke, India’s Supreme Court seemed to wash away any trace of religious nationalist fervor. And indeed, the Court’s triumphant narrative, championing the merger of legal secularism and economic opportunity, seemed to neutralize the ultra-nationalist violence that lay at the heart of the case. But the Court’s narrative was a mask, for the sake of appearances only.
According to Sircar, a similar sleight of hand operates in the films that took the Gujarat pogrom as their subject. Here, too, on the surface anti-Muslim violence comes in for condemnation. But upon deeper reflection one may discern an all too familiar template that these films, like the courts, deployed to neutralize anti-Muslim violence along with the state’s collusion in it. (Sircar, 156) By deploying a myth of the modern Indian, and the modern Indian state as the embodiment of secular (“liberal”) humanism, these films used a “state-preserving” logic to mask and ultimately preserve the dharmic thinking that lay at the heart of ‘Hindu-ness’ (Sircar, 41).
In short, Sircar shows that film, like law, deploys the secular language of nationalism to simultaneously mask and disseminate extremist Hindutva ideology. Like a parade of Trojan horses, legal rulings and popular films alike propagate narratives that both condemn and normalize religious violence against Muslims. It is as if, through the alchemy of pop cultural and legal reconstruction, acts of nationalist violence, which in their narrative amount to no more than an unfortunate ‘aberration’, serve as a testament to the resiliency of India’s legal system and a tribute to the strength of Hindu nationalist culture allied with global neoliberal economics. (Sircar, 89–92, 121) It is the same kind of alchemy US President Donald Trump indulged when he sought to re-narrate a violent coup attempt in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021, as “a day of love,” recasting violent felons as “patriots” and “political prisoners.”
The parallel alerts us to the global nature of the threat to freedom presented when the dominant means of communication in society falls prey to an illiberal politics of memory. Understanding how reality is being shaped, by whom, and to what end, is essential to countering that threat. This is the crux of Sircar’s message. It invites us to recall crucial lessons taught long ago by classical rhetoricians (those early jurists and public advocates) in ancient Greece and throughout the early Roman Empire. In the realm of rhetoric, it is the play of images and metaphors, in conjunction with voice and plot, that spurs emotions, memories, and beliefs as precursors to action. Eschewing abstract concepts and the totalizing propensity of linear logic, rhetoric takes as its point of departure specific human needs and desires in particular social, cultural, and political contexts.
As a practical matter, rhetoric may operate as a sword or a shield. For example, subjects who lack an adequate understanding of rhetoric as an aesthetic of political power remain vulnerable to its sharp capacity for deceit and strategic (often subconscious) manipulation. This risk has only grown in parallel with contemporary advances in science and communication technology.
Not unlike the baroque enchantments that were enthusiastically enlisted by state authorities during the seventeenth century to shore up the political power of both Church and nation-state, today the “engineering of consent” has attained unprecedented success—not only in advertising, but also in politics and law. With respect to the latter, the proliferation of new visual technologies (from feature films and video games to diverse social media platforms online) has ensured that the aesthetic codes of visual storytelling have infiltrated courtrooms, law offices, as well as the court of public opinion via the screens upon which their images play. The aesthetics of visual meaning-making increasingly shape and inform the way litigators present (and judges construe) evidence and argumentation. Here, too, life imitates art. Fact and fiction, proof and persuasion, deliberation and entertainment, seamlessly interpenetrate in the production (or reproduction) of representational truth.
This shift toward digital visual representation has produced new epistemological anxieties. There is an uneasy feeling that it just might be signs all the way down – an endless flow of constructs with no meaningful difference (or way of discerning a distinction) between representation and reality. Within this late modern (or postmodern) mindset, it is as if we were caught in an endless regression, like some spectacular baroque tapestry or infinite arabesque endlessly folding in upon itself. In this way, the disquieting deceits of seventeenth century baroque art find their counterpart in the visual deceits of film, video, and newer forms of digital visuality (including fully immersive technologies).
To be sure, the aestheticization of law and politics is not a new phenomenon – particularly in regard to the tactical methodologies of fascism. In any event, regardless of ideology, it remains encumbent upon every generation to cultivate and affirm appropriate normative standards for critical judgment in the context of new aesthetic practices.
The early rhetoricians were keenly aware of the entanglement of ethics and aesthetics, as are many contemporary law and humanities scholars (such as James Boyd White and Richard Weisberg). In this respect, ancients and moderns alike share a critical insight that Sircar’s work underscores, namely: that without knowledge and ethical wisdom aesthetics remains hollow – trapped (and perhaps entrapping others) in shadow play, a miasma of spectacle and disinformation. Yet, without aesthetics (elevated by “eloquence”), knowledge and ethical wisdom remain mute and powerless and, hence, incapable of effect in our lives.
We still have a long way to go before an ethics of critical judgment in law and politics attains the degree of clarity and broad based acceptance that the moment demands. But it is beyond cavil that an essential step toward that goal is greater aesthetic literacy among legal professionals and the public alike. Would-be political masters, who use masks to disguise and amplify their power, require subjects lacking in critical reflexivity, who mistake illusions for reality. Absent an adequate understanding in our time of how collective remembering is aesthetically constructed – within the larger project of shaping a nation’s narrative – freedom remains at risk. As Sircar warns: “If we do not attend to the aesthetic dimensions of law, we will not be able to see the discursive ways in which secular law organizes violence, while presenting itself as a means to overcome that very violence” (Sircar, 162).
Richard K Sherwin is the Wallace Stevens Professor of Law Emeritus at the New York Law School.
This is part of a book round-table on Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India (Volume 1, Cambridge University Press 2024) by Oishik Sircar.