How Court, the Movie, Uses Screenplay and Multiple Languages to Depict Identity Politics in the Courtroom
‘Court’ is an intense courtroom drama told in a rather matter-of-factly way. Throughout the film, there are grave injustices being advanced, intense emotions that have gone stale with time and repetition, and many micro-uprisings that are ironed out systematically, structurally, and socially. But all of this unfolds almost like a sheet of statistics – a style of storytelling that seems to be deliberate as a metaphor for how the Indian legal system, a public institution we put so much of our faith into, passionlessly watches the human condition pass by. If you are someone used to watching a movie with a lot of background music or visual effects to interpret the gravity of a scene, you might want to train your senses to look for the nuances hidden in plain sight in this movie.
The movie goes beyond the protagonists’ interactions with each other, and delves into the disparate lives each of them leads outside of the court. This gives us a peek into how their identities play out in different scenarios, even as the common thread of the case binds them together. We notice that while they all seem to participate in the case, the implications of the courtroom drama affect them in different ways. This is evidently because of their personal identities and the context in which they perform it.
For instance, public statements of protest take on different meanings for each of the characters. Narayan Kamble, the accused of the case, is a folk singer who rouses the public conscience with his lyrics, but has a limited reach in terms of audience. We seem him play at Ambedkarite events, weaving songs around modern-day acts of casteism. The case itself is about a manual scavenger’s death while working in the gutters. According to the investigating officer, supported by ‘evidence’ and stock witness, the death was a suicide inspired by Kamble’s lyrics. Even when it is disproven, justice is not exactly delivered.
Even though the defence lawyer brings up the colonial hold over the Indian legal framework and exposes the occupational hazards of a country-wide mechanism that upholds its massive drainage infrastructure, no further action is carried out to investigate and hold accountable those who are (or that which is) actually accountable for the man’s death.
In the light of the pre-elections manifesto released by the Safai Karmachari Andolan in 2019, the caste system, that has manifested in myriad ways in modern-day Indian society, is one of the prominent causes for the state of affairs behind the fictitious death in the movie. It cannot be overlooked as a major reason for such social injustices to be perpetrated and then, its consequences, overlooked.
In the movie, the absence of a Brahmnical saviour, in the guise of the caste-privileged defence lawyer, may have resulted in a weak case for Kamble, resulting in his indictment. This would have a casteist double whammy in a scenario where those of the ‘lower castes’ are constantly negotiating space and identity even as the formalised governance structure ignores their realities.
We also see how muted the politics of the privileged can be. The public prospector is not just a woman who seems to be juggling work and home, but is also someone who accompanies her family to a local play that subtly suggests ethnic cleansing. The defence lawyer himself is attacked for a comment made by him in court, referencing a particular community. He is publicly attacked and it is suggested that nobody interferes with this (he steps out of a seemingly upscale restaurant, and even as he is attacked off camera and his face is, implied to be, blackened by the assailants, the man guarding the entrance of the restaurant rushes in, as if to avoid embroilment). A short scene shows us that he is visibly upset, but it is followed by another where he has the wherewithal to take care of the optical aftermath of it, privately.
The depiction of the courtroom in the movie seems to suggest a handicapped legal system, which is apparently informed by the anthropological sensibilities of our erstwhile colonialists, formalised by the prevalent Brahmnical patriarchy of an independent India, and perpetrated by those trained in a system approved by the former.
The movie is multi-lingual, and this itself seems to be a metaphor for how the different actors interact and how little or how much they understand of each other’s worlds. But that’s for a different piece.
4 min readJun 28, 2020
