'COURT'- WHEN LAW BECOMES AN ASS IN THE SILVER SCREEN

The Marathi film ‘Court’ directed by Sri. Chaitanya Tamhane, won the National Award for Best Feature Film of the year 2014. The said film, which has received several international accolades, raises a lot of profound issues and deserves a lot of discussion and deliberation.

The film has a Kafkaesque plot, bearing a lot of semblance to that of Franz Kafka’s celebrated work ‘The Trial’, wherein the protagonist Josef K had to stand an absurd and labyrinthine trial, without being informed at all about the crime for which he was being prosecuted. The film also adopts the device of an absurdist plot, often invoked in literary works to signify the random, meaningless and nihilistic vicissitudes of life.

The protagonist is a senior citizen, Narayan Kamble, who is a dalit-activisit, poet and folk-singer, and gets prosecuted for abetment of suicide.   The allegations is that  a sewer-cleaner suffocated himself to death in an underground sewer, and that the same was a suicide, which was instigated by a song performance by Narayan Kamble which lamented that the sewer-cleaners and manual scavengers had no right to life in this country. The prosecution is on the strength of certain anachronistic provisions of law like, Section 306 of Indian Penal Code which makes abetment to suicide an offence, and the Dramatic Performances Act 1876. The possession of certain literary works by Narayan Kamble, which were banned during the British regime, is used as an evidence to portray Narayan Kamble as an anarchist and extremist.

The prosecution story is as absurd as it sounds, and defies common sense and logic. Law is, however, not always compatible with common sense, and often defies logic, which made Charles Dickens to comment long ago that ‘Law is an ass’. That which appears as absurd to common sense, might transform as jurisprudential doctrines in law. What is discarded as puerile and non-sense by the prudent man on the street, might seem as legal conundrums to a jurist. Strange, is the course of law, and the film marvelously conveys that point.

Anyways, the Court conducts the trial of Narayan Kamble very seriously, reminiscent of the instance of Dr. Binayak Sen, who was prosecuted for sedition for possessing Maoist literature. The trial makes no deviation from the consistent pattern of history from time immemorial, which has always persecuted those who speak out inconvenient truths.

Apart from being a satire on the perfunctory and absurdist ways of the legal process, the film is a brilliant depiction of the innumerable paradoxes present in the human self. The defense lawyer of Narayan Kamble, Vinay Vora, hails from a rich and elite background. He puts in all sincere efforts to save Kamble, and fancies himself as a protector of human rights. While not arguing in courts, he gives talks on human rights before upper-class intellectual audiences( ‘five-star activists’, to borrow the usage of PM Modi), frequents plush pubs and restaurants, enjoys premium wines and jazz music, and sinks himself into mindless TV programmes at late night. A loner at heart addicted to luxuries of life, Vinay Vora gives out the impression of a person who is doing things to fill in the void of his inner life, and he is a beneficiary of the neo-liberal policies and consumerism, against which Narayan Kamble had been fighting throughout his life.

Whereas, the lady prosecutor Nutan, who goes about her job with the sort of nonchalance characteristic to a government employee, is a middle-class wife, who travels in second class local train compartments and worries about price rise of cooking oil. As a  typical middle class woman, who is struggling to make both ends to meet, and to balance the interests of work a family, she is in a better position to identify and empathize with the ideals of Narayan Kamble. However, she is trapped within the confines of her humble life, and does not endeavor to look beyond its limited horizons. For her, the case of Narayan Kamble is yet another headache, and she wants to get done with it at the earliest by sending him to prison.

The judge in this movie is the personification of apathy and indifference. It is true that a judge should be dispassionate. However, if the judge goes about his business mechanically, without opening his eyes, and without understanding the essence of law, the results would be absurd and dangerous, as pointed out by the film.

Be that as it may, Narayan Kamble gets ultimately acquitted for want of evidence. However, he is immediately brought before the same court on a different allegation that he committed sedition by writing anti-national poems. The Court was closing for long summer recess, and the judge, in his haste to wind up things fast, refuses to hear his bail plea, and with utmost apathy directs him to approach the High Court during vacation. What follows is a long still shot of the dark and empty court room, after the staff has switched off the lights and shut the doors, and the scene is powerful enough to fill darkness in the hearts of any sensitive viewer.

All of us are thrown into life situations which were beyond our choice, and we all confine ourselves to such situations, sleep-walking through our lives without caring to understand or discern the ultimate truth, and to experience the essence of life. We all believe our half-truths to be eternally and universally valid, and that often results in inflicting of punishment on others and ourselves. Such grand philosophical insights  glitter here and there in the film, without getting preachy. Here, the only person to grasp the real truth was Narayan Kamble and he gets punished due to the ignorance and apathy of others. And the others make a prison for themselves with their half-baked lives, and wallow in self-pity and agony therein.

The film closes with the scenes of the judge indulging in vacation revelry. Without any prick of heart regarding the suffering caused to others due to his dereliction of duty, the judge enjoys himself in a beach resort. Clad in a tee-shirt and bermuda, he sings to anthakshari games, drowns in liquor and gets jealous about young IIM graduates landing lucrative jobs with lakhs per month as pay, gives unsolicited advise on numerology and gem stones etc. Upon getting exhausted in his vacation revelry, the Judge dozes off in a bench, and a bunch of kids play a prank on him by screaming at him. The Judge wakes up from his slumber, with a stunned expression, and the film ends with that scene. Was it the director’s call to the audience to wake up from the slumber of life, and to feel the essence of life and grasp the truth? Yes, the truth might stun us; but it will also liberate us. The brilliant film, portrays reality as it is without taking any artistic liberties, and turns our faces to a lot of inconvenient truths.