The Plural Architectures of Chaitanya Tamhane's Court
Court, Chaitanya Tamhane (2014)
The architectures of Chaitanya Tamhane's Court are deceptive. Narayan Kamble, an aged activist, teacher, and performer travels with his troupe to the peri-urban and rural parts of Maharashtra to sing songs of anger and resistance about and within communities considered to be lower-caste. He is arrested on the claim of instigating the alleged suicide of one such member of his audience, a sewer-worker named Vasudev Pawar, through his protest songs. Human rights lawyer Vinay Vora is his tenacious defense lawyer, and the public prosecutor is Nutan, both of whom converge in a Maharashtrian lower court.
Court was funded in part by the Rotterdam Film Festival's Hubert Bals fund; associated projects circulate primarily in film festivals in the European market, with short runs in their home countries. In approaching a film on caste and class politics in India, most of these self-selecting audiences might have preconceptions about its politics: neoliberal critiques of the regressive and corrupt legal system, apathetic servants and the woke activists who fight them—you know the rest of the map. Court does little of that. Neither does it follow the usual blueprint of an absurdist courtroom drama. What it is, is a series of alleyways with the illusion of being an open playground. The players do not merely play for opposing teams, although they are designated as such, and the referee is anything but the judge.
The linguistic gullies of the courtroom meander from 'official' English, to smatterings of Hindi, and slippages between the judge and Nutan into Marathi (the most commonly spoken local language in Maharashtra), which is incomprehensible to Vora—we sense an immediate alliance beginning to form along these lines of familiarity as he is left out of their conversations. Halfway through the film, Vora asks, "I would like to request my colleague to converse either in Hindi or English." But Kamble interjects: "actually I'm more comfortable in Marathi." The judge tells Vora he'll translate anything he doesn't understand.
Court, Chaitanya Tamhane (2014)
Language becomes the demarcation of an increasingly visible distance between Vora and the rest of the court, and beyond it as well. He gives lectures in Anglo-phonic spheres of protest and academia, wanders the aisles of an organic grocery store buying artisanal cheese and imported wine while generic Euro-classical music tinkles in the background, frequents bars where the singer introduces the song she's about to perform as picked up from a street singer during her travels in Brazil—Tamhane then cuts to the Marathi space of the lower court, emphasizing this distance. Vora drives a posh car listening to jazz, and returns to his solitary abode. Nutan, meanwhile, travels in the local train and cooks for her family after a whole day of work. She and another female passenger talk about new-fangled notions of healthy eating, bemusing the properties of multigrain flour and olive oil as advertised on television. They are "healthy but so much more expensive," they say, "if we use it everyday, we will go bankrupt." But is not simply a class/gender/neoliberal-centrist divide that is illustrated or even directly critiqued here.
Bodily politics and political bodies come into a frictional multi-plane wherein the perverse Brahmanical pursuit of purification keeps the caste divides firm, late-stage capitalism and globalization reify the class divide, and the nationalist body is inherently at war with itself, and thus oscillates between comatose and feverishly aggressive states. When the victim Pawar's widow appears in court, she reveals that her husband had been a violent alcoholic and often drank before going to work in the sewers, since he was given no protection in this toxic environment. The case begins to crumble and Kamble is granted bail at a high price, which Vora pays out of his own pocket. When Vora goes to visit him in the hospital, Kamble takes several pills, complaining he has no idea what he's taking nor why; his reports state high blood pressure and fever, it might be jaundice, but they don't really know. Symptoms are medicated and treated, causes are indistinct, obscured, maybe even unimportant—the pharmacological and national collapse into one another. Both are notional ideologies, to the extent that they are seemingly speculative spaces, especially in the geopolitical labyrinth of paradoxes that constitute India.
Court, Chaitanya Tamhane (2014)
But in his concerted effort to avoid being didactic, Tamhane sporadically lapses into employing Kamble and Pawar as narrative devices, points against which to trace his observations of the majority. Positioning the fate of the lower-caste as inescapably subaltern through parallels with vermin reads as reductive. Despite an attempt to delve into the biopolitics and, indeed, necropolitics of performance, art, caste and their interconnections, Court might have benefitted from a greater examination of these two characters and their realities, whose non-fictional counterparts are unfortunately all too common, as are their filmic tropes. At a crucial juncture, the court case ventures into an argument about distinctions between the fictional and non-fictional, a ludicrous tussle that pertains as little to art as it does to a post-truth society. This paradox is also evident in the double nature of cinematographer Mrinal Desai's wide shots—they hold the court's goings-on in frames that concurrently play to the 'objective' gaze and acknowledge the futility of such an aspiration. In his last song before being arrested yet again, Kamble sings about truth being lost amidst the noise about art and aesthetics, and implores society to not call them artists at all.
Court is not a snotty indictment of the government civil servant. The judge has seemed impartial, reasonable across the legal process. In one of the closing sequences, we see him playing antakshari, a singing game, with his family as they travel to a beach resort. He advises a relative, whose child is developmentally challenged, to obtain certain gemstones, consult a numerologist, and change the child's name to alter his luck. The normalcy of such beliefs coexisting with a self that is bound to law only illustrates the inherent fallacy of this binary in the first place. But does the denial of an explicit moral stance necessarily represent a weak, diluted, centrist position? I think this very film is both the subject and symptom of Tamhane's quiet interrogations into such inquiries. Is an artist merely a scapegoat in the multiple worlds that compose the notion of India—can art even have a politics that is nuanced in this bi-fractured system? In the film's final scene, a group of kids from the judge's family scare him as he dozes in the garden. He awakes and slaps one kid as the other three run away giggling. The berated kid walks off into opposite direction; the judge goes back to sleep on the sunlit bench. Someone must be the scapegoat, and the machinations continue their usual cycles, and the system continues to rust, with the requisite jolt every now and again.
Court, Chaitanya Tamhane (2014)
Court is dense with multilayered intent, which emerges from the cracks in the topography of the megapolis, radiating outwards from the judicial epicenter and rippling back into it. Nutan raises a point in court about a book found at Kamble's estate, which she says is banned by the state for being offensive to the Goyamari community (presumably modeled on a Hindu sect) as it is a negative critique of their practices. Vora objects, concurring that these are indeed 'harmful and irrational' rituals. Shortly after, two Goyamari members attack and assault Vora outside a fancy restaurant he's just visited. Class divides and its frustrations are real. Fanaticism is real. The spectator teeters on a fractured ground of certainty.
I write this while Muslim people are being set on fire by Hindutva terrorists in the capital of India. I write this while Kashmir is in the longest blackout in the history of a supposed democracy. I write this while detention camps are in operation in Assam. I also write this in a time of rebellion and rebelling. How are we still here, after Partition, the 1984-85 riots, the massacre of Muslims in 2002? But perhaps cycles of history are a false conception, and we are still frozen in the longue durée resulting from the plural temporalities that sprung from 1947. The many paradoxes of India as a geopolitical entity don't often accommodate teleological lines of socio-political progress.
And I write this in a time when it seems easiest to vilify those in Tamhane's film—the mythical, apathetic, average middle-class Indian. While an obvious construction, the specter of this reality haunts many homes and family WhatsApp and social media groups. And how could it not? How long before apathy turns out to be a closeted agreement with the Hindutva agenda? At the risk of being reductive, the common lines drawn across this territory are us, the 'liberal,' the empathetic, the anti-fascist; them, all of the others; and then the inhuman, the religious and Brahmanical extremists. I have no answers, neither does Tamhane's film. What the latter has is a caution—against falling into the irreconcilable chasm between first two factions, particularly in the fight against a system that breeds the third.