Among the defining features of Hindu nationalist consolidation in postcolonial India has been the systematic reordering of collective memory around episodes of anti-Muslim violence, in ways that simultaneously acknowledge their occurrence and absorb them into a narrative of national progress and constitutional resilience. The 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat is the paradigmatic instance of this reordering, generating a decade of judicial and cinematic production whose ideological work has remained undertheorized. Oishik Sircar’s Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India (Reference Sircar2024) offers the most sustained and theoretically rigorous account of this work, demonstrating that the shared narrative of secular law and popular cinema constructs a collective memory of the pogrom in which the rationality of secular law presents itself as the panacea for the irrationality of religious violence, while keeping intact the violent legal order against India’s Muslim citizens that this rationality serves to reproduce. Written over more than a decade of research and activism, and published as India’s descent into majoritarian nationalism has become impossible to ignore, this book is a work of rigorous legal scholarship and a major contribution to the law-and-cinema field.

The book takes as its subject the pogrom that took place in Gujarat in 2002, which became “independent India’s most litigated and mediatized event of anti-minority mass atrocity” (Sircar, Reference Sircar2024, p. 1) resulting in deaths numbering in the thousands, massive displacements, sexual harm against women, and loss of property and home (Sircar, Reference Sircar2024, p. 1). Sircar approaches the pogrom in two distinct yet temporally overlapping archives—the four judgments of the Best Bakery case, a landmark criminal trial that traversed the full hierarchy of Indian courts from 2003 to 2012; and three Bollywood films—Dev (2004), Parzania (2007), and Kai Po Che (2013)—whose releases coincided with the trial’s duration. Sircar develops a novel methodological approach which he calls a jurisprudential-aesthetic (J-A) approach to read these together and is one of the book’s most distinctive and original methodological contributions.

The J-A approach draws on a scholarship at the intersection of aesthetic jurisprudence and cultural legal studies and brings it into a productive conversation with postcolonial Indian jurisprudence. Situating his reading within what he calls “law in/as aesthetics,” Sircar argues that judgments and films are not just parallel cultural records of the pogrom but constitute a shared narrative compact, one that operates both representationally and affectively to shape collective memory. By attending to “the way something is said in contrast to [merely] what is said” (Sircar, Reference Sircar2024, p. 3), the J-A approach makes visible the tropes—rhetoric, metaphor, form, images, and symbols—that recur across these two genres and that together advance a particular state-making and state-preserving rationality. It “considers Muslims as citizens and condemns the pogrom while always already exonerating secular law from having played any role in fomenting the actual violence, thus keeping intact the violent legal order against India’s Muslim citizens” (Sircar, Reference Sircar2024, p. 3). According to Sircar, this rationality is composed of a triad: legalism, secularism, and developmentalism. It is the discursive work of this triad that simultaneously condemns violence and rationalizes the structures that enable it that constitutes the book’s central argument.

Sircar locates this shared narrative within what he calls the “New India.” He defines it as the temporal and ideological condition marking the symbiotic consolidation of Hindutva and neoliberalism that the pogrom in Gujarat exemplified and accelerated. It is within this frame that the judgments and the films are read as co-constitutive elements of a national collective memory that keeps this rationality intact.

Chapter 3, on the Best Bakery judgments, is the book’s most forensically rigorous section. Sircar provides a re-description of all four judgments before subjecting them to J-A analysis, identifying a set of aesthetic tropes—crowd, atmosphere, evidence, truth, role, closure, development—that recur across the courts and perform the narrative work of ordering collective memory. A key feature of this ordering is the way anti-Muslim violence is rationalized by references to the 1947 Partition as a priori condition of the postcolonial nation-state’s coming into being, a logic that runs from the session court’s acquittal of the 21 accused all the way to the Supreme Court’s interventions. The Vadodara Sessions Court’s acquittal of all 21 accused, accompanied by the judge’s meditation on Hindu mythology and his lament that riots obstruct development, is shown to inaugurate a logic that the Gujarat High Court and Supreme Court will each, in their own way, reproduce. Most striking is Sircar’s account of the second Supreme Court judgment, which convicted Zahira Sheikh, the Muslim survivor and star witness who twice turned hostile in court, for perjury, opening the judgment with verses from the Manusmriti, the ancient Hindu scripture foundational to caste hierarchy. The court that had championed secular justice for Muslim victims of the pogrom invoked a Hindu religious text to condemn a Muslim woman whose vulnerability and fear the judiciary had failed to protect. As Sircar reads it, drawing on Upendra Baxi’s concept of the “second Gujarat catastrophe” (Baxi, Reference Baxi2002), this was the logical expression of a rationality that rehabilitated the majesty of secular law by sacrificing the very victim that law had claimed to rescue. The violence of this outcome is the kind of jurisprudential critique that stays with the reader.

Chapter 4 turns to Bollywood’s representation of law, and here the J-A approach does its most inventive work. Sircar treats cinema as jurisprudential source material in its own right. This is a significant move for the field of law and cinema in non-Western jurisdictions. The chapter opens with a deft reading of the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) censor certificates and standard disclaimers that preface each film as what Goodrich would call “obiter depicta” (Goodrich, Reference Goodrich2021, p. 83), the legal emblems of the state’s authority to sanction memory even before the film begins. Sircar then reads each film with care. Dev is shown to Hinduize the Constitution by equating it to the Bhagavad Gita through its hero’s living-room constitutionalism, rationalizing anti-Muslim violence as the product of individual bad actors while exonerating the structural and ideological foundations of Hindu nationalism. Parzania, the most explicit in its condemnation of the pogrom, places its faith in the secular space of a quasi-legal human rights commission hearing projecting the state that aided the violence as the site of its redress. Kai Po Che, arriving at the end of the post-pogrom decade, offers the most complete articulation of the rationality triad: legalism (Omi has served his time), secularism (Ali Hashmi plays cricket for India), and developmentalism (Govind’s entrepreneurial triumph on Gujarat’s gleaming highways). Read together, the three films train their publics in a way of remembering that condemns the visible violence of religious sectarianism while keeping intact the deep structural logic that authorizes it making the case that Bollywood and the judgment form are constitutive of the same governmental rationality.

Ways of Remembering makes several contributions that deserve particular note for readers of this journal. First, by moving “away from the binary of the internal/external approaches in legal scholarship” (Sircar, Reference Sircar2024, p. 28), it offers a model for how legal scholars working in postcolonial and Asian contexts might bring together jurisprudential life of aesthetic texts and the aesthetic life of legal ones in an interdisciplinary inquiry that does not subordinate legal analysis to cultural commentary nor isolates law from its aesthetic and affective surroundings. Second, Sircar’s use of Jan Assman’s concept of mnemohistory (Assman, Reference Assman1997, p. 14), the idea that what matters is not the past as such but the way in which the past is remembered and actively reconstructed, gives the book a connective tissue that holds its diverse archive together and offers scholars of Asian law and society a productive framework for thinking about law’s role in the memorialization of mass violence more broadly. Third, the book makes a significant contribution to the study of the rise and consolidation of Hindu nationalism and its relationship to constitutional legality, showing how the rationality of secular constitutionalism has been progressively occupied and redefined by “Hindutva” through the very triad of legalism, secularism, and developmentalism in ways that are not always visible if one looks only at law’s formal and institutional surface.

The book’s form is itself an expression of its argument about the relationship between aesthetics and meaning-making. Sircar is attentive to the book’s own form as it is to the forms it analyses. The endnotes are running parallel commentary that enacts the idea of the “narrative compact” the book theorizes. The acknowledgements situate the book within a life of scholar-activism that began with Sircar’s visit to Ahmedabad as a 21-year-old law student documenting survivor testimonies in the immediate aftermath of the pogrom.

Ways of Remembering arrives at a moment when the regime under whose watch the Gujarat pogrom was orchestrated now governs India with a parliamentary majority, and when the normalization of anti-Muslim violence has become a feature of the New India’s self-projection. In such a context, the book offers a way for seeing how secular law participates in that normalization through a methodology that reads law and cinema together as a shared narrative. It is a timely work of legal scholarship that will be of lasting value to anyone concerned with law, violence, memory, films, and the postcolonial state.