Ways of Remembering by Oishik Sircar
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Cambridge University Press (Law in Context Series), 2024
Ways of Remembering tells a story about the relationship between secular law and religious violen... more Ways of Remembering tells a story about the relationship between secular law and religious violence by studying the memorialisation of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom—postcolonial India's most litigated and mediatized event of anti-Muslim mass violence. By reading judgments and films on the pogrom through a novel interpretive framework, the book argues that the shared narrative of law and cinema engenders ways of remembering the pogrom in which the rationality of secular law offers a resolution to the irrationality of religious violence. In the public's collective memory, the force of this rationality simultaneously condemns and normalises violence against Muslims while exonerating secular law from its role in enabling the pogrom, thus keeping the violent (legal) order against India's Muslim citizens intact. The book contends that in foregrounding law's aesthetic dimensions, we see the discursive ways in which secular law organizes violence and presents itself as the panacea for that very violence.
Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India, 2024
Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India, 2024
Violent Modernities by Oishik Sircar
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Oxford University Press, 2021
Law and violence are thought to share an antithetical relationship in postcolonial modernity. Vio... more 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 lives of law are reimagined as such, the book argues, the violence at the foundations of modern law in the postcolony begins to unravel.
Violent Modernities: Cultural Lives of Law in the New India, 2021
Violent Modernities: Cultural Lives of Law in the New India, 2021
Journal Articles by Oishik Sircar
Jindal Global Law Review, 2018
What is Upendra Baxi's contribution to jurisprudence in India? Baxi's single-most important contr... more What is Upendra Baxi's contribution to jurisprudence in India? Baxi's single-most important contribution to jurisprudence in India has been to infuse legal scholarship with pathos – the pathos of suffering, resistance, responsibility and care. An apocryphal reading of Baxi's work might make us consider his passionate heft as a sentimental inflection, but it will not necessarily lead us to consider this as a jurisprudence. Baxi's pathos endeavors to unmask law's violence and silence about the suffering of those on the margins (even as he has offered ways of working with law); and in turn Baxi's pathos has become marginal to the teaching and learning of jurisprudence in India. Indian legal education is marked by a simultaneous presence and absence of Baxi. His work is acclaimed for its rigorous content, but not necessarily for its innovative forms. While his politics is contingently celebrated, his aesthetics is considered removed from jurisprudential insight. It might be well accepted that Baxi writes with pathos, but does that pathos constitute a jurisprudence? In this essay, I offer some illustrations of Baxi's minor jurisprudence by looking at three particular forms of writings which don't get counted as part of his jurisprudential oeuvre: his lesser known works in the field of law, acknowledgements and footnotes that appear on the margins of major works, and tributes written by him on the passing of his mentors and comrades. My choice of the selected references has to do particularly with how these writings have helped me think through my own work as a law teacher and scholar.
What happens when queers become democracy's 'favourite minority' championed by the capitalists, t... more What happens when queers become democracy's 'favourite minority' championed by the capitalists, the liberals, the conservatives, and the leftists, all singing in the language of rights? It marks the inauguration (or culmination?) of a moment that is not bad but dangerous. "If everything is dangerous," Michel Foucault wrote, "then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy, but to a hyper-and pessimistic activism." 1 The common-sense opposite of bad is good-and the good in this situation, of all of these apparently oppositional political positions becoming strange bedfellows to turn queers into rights-bearing subjects, as I will argue, is what makes this a dangerous common-sense.
Economic and Political Weekly, May 16, 2015
What does it mean for a man to conduct oneself as a feminist? It is this question that the author... more What does it mean for a man to conduct oneself as a feminist? It is this question that the author, a legal academic, dwells on in this essay. The article can be seen as a jurisdictional auto-critique about feminism's relationship with law, which by extension is a comment on the author's relationship with both law and feminism and his attempt to fashion a lawful feminist self as a man.
Jindal Global Law Review (Special Double Issue Part II, on 'Law, Culture and Queer Politics in Neoliberal Times), Nov 2013
Jindal Global Law Review (Special Double Issue, Part I, on 'Law, Culture and Queer Politics in Neoliberal Times), Aug 2012
Feminist Studies 39: 1 (2013)
Osgoode Hall Law Journal 49: 3 (2012)
Childhood 18: 3 (August 2011)
In 2005, children of sex workers from Kolkata's Sonagachi red-light district formed their own col... more In 2005, children of sex workers from Kolkata's Sonagachi red-light district formed their own collective, Amra Padatik ('We are Foot Soldiers'), to work for gaining dignity for their mothers and claiming their own rights as children of sex workers. In this article the authors speak to AP's founder members to demystify the culture of fear associated with their lives -perpetuated through popular representations -not to underplay their acute experiences of disadvantage, but to foreground them as politically astute citizens and decision-makers in policies that concern and affect them -to replace the compassion-driven traditional 3Rs of raid, rescue, rehabilitation with 3 counter-Rs: resilience, reworking and resistance.
Journal of Indian Law and Society (Vol. 2/ Monsoon 2011)
In-Spire E-Journal 2: 1 (June 2007)
Refugee Watch, Issue 28 (December 2006)
Edited Books by Oishik Sircar
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In the last 15 years, queer movements in many parts of the world have helped secure the rights of... more In the last 15 years, queer movements in many parts of the world have helped secure the rights of queer people. These moments have been accompanied by the brutal rise of crony capitalism, the violent consequences of the ‘war on terror’, the hyper-juridification of politics, the financialization/managerialization of social movements and the medicalization of non-heteronormative identities/practices. How do we critically read the celebratory global proliferation of queer rights in these neoliberal times?
This volume responds to the complicated moment in the history of queer struggles by analysing laws, state policies and cultures of activism, to show how new intimacies between queer sexuality and neoliberalism that celebrate modernity and the birth of the liberated sexual citizen, are in fact, reproducing the old colonial desire of civilizing the native. By paying particular attention to the problematics of race, religion and class, this volume engages in a rigorous, self-reflexive critique of global queer politics and its engagements, confrontations, and negotiations with modernity and its investments in liberalism, legalism and militarism, with the objective of queering the ethics of our queer politics.
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Ways of Remembering by Oishik Sircar
Violent Modernities by Oishik Sircar
Journal Articles by Oishik Sircar
Edited Books by Oishik Sircar
This volume responds to the complicated moment in the history of queer struggles by analysing laws, state policies and cultures of activism, to show how new intimacies between queer sexuality and neoliberalism that celebrate modernity and the birth of the liberated sexual citizen, are in fact, reproducing the old colonial desire of civilizing the native. By paying particular attention to the problematics of race, religion and class, this volume engages in a rigorous, self-reflexive critique of global queer politics and its engagements, confrontations, and negotiations with modernity and its investments in liberalism, legalism and militarism, with the objective of queering the ethics of our queer politics.
This volume responds to the complicated moment in the history of queer struggles by analysing laws, state policies and cultures of activism, to show how new intimacies between queer sexuality and neoliberalism that celebrate modernity and the birth of the liberated sexual citizen, are in fact, reproducing the old colonial desire of civilizing the native. By paying particular attention to the problematics of race, religion and class, this volume engages in a rigorous, self-reflexive critique of global queer politics and its engagements, confrontations, and negotiations with modernity and its investments in liberalism, legalism and militarism, with the objective of queering the ethics of our queer politics.