A song for the scavenger

Baap sarkar… O lord, our Master!

How you wield the sword,

That stabs the heart,

That smashes all life!

With one shot of your gun,

The best of people are downed,

Down in the dumps!

Yet you did not muffle me,

Showed me the courtesy to try me in court,

How you rendered a favour unto me,

O’ how you rendered a favour to me.

Baap sarkar… O lord, our Master!

So sings Narayan Kamble on being released on bail. This ‘ballad of gratitude’ exposes the violence that lies at the heart of law. It places the machinery of law on a par with the swords and guns that ‘smash’ and ‘drown’ people, much as it may pretend to be its exact opposite.

Director Chaitanya Tamhane’s Court follows the trial of Narayan Kamble, an ageing ex-mill worker, now part-time tuition teacher and full-time balladeer who sings at street corners, at Ambedkarite meetings, and among workers. Kamble is arrested for abetting the suicide of a sewage worker who is found dead in the gutters, just days after he had performed rousing songs in the slum of the now dead man. The prosecution’s case is as follows: How could a man who had cleaned manholes for five years as a contract worker with the BMC, a man well aware of the hazardous gases that filled these hell-holes, descend into one without protection? The absence of any safety equipment amounted to wilful disregard of norms by the deceased. The dead worker had been coaxed and incited by Kamble’s song to inhale toxic gases to gain dignity and respect.

While it may appear to be a satire — and it almost is, given the incredulous charges against Kamble, and even flimsier evidence supplied by the police to support the prosecution’s case — the troubling thing about this plot is that it is wholly plausible in today’s India. There are shades of the Kabir Kala Manch trial as well as Binayak Sen’s, and innumerable less-reported ones. The evidence — recovery of books either never banned, or banned by the British almost a century ago; a stock witness who testifies for the prosecution in several cases; and a letter from a friend in jail urging Kamble to look after his ill mother presented as a conspiracy in code language — is fairly typical of such cases.

Kamble sings, “truth has lost its voice”. But the film also shows us how ‘truth’ is produced in the courtroom. The messy and unruly claims and counterclaims enter the records through the dictation of the sessions judge, cleaned and flattened, in the service of law. In his cross-examination by the public prosecutor, Kamble denies having written or performed the song “ Manhole workers, all of us should commit suicide by suffocating inside the gutters …” which may have triggered the suicide in question.

“Ok, have you written such a song?”

“Not yet.”

“So you might? You don’t mind?”

“No.”

“Note,” tells the judge to his typist, “The accused is claiming that though he has never written or performed such a song, he doesn’t mind doing it either.”

The judge shakes his head, as if to suggest that this admission on Kamble’s part, of the possibility of writing such a song in future, is as good as an admission of guilt.

Anti-terror laws have raised the pursuit of the slippery and elusive ‘intention’ into a weighty legal category. This, combined with the widest possible meaning of terror acts (as the public prosecutor says, “it could be bombs or chemical, or any other means of whatever nature, includes anything”), has made it legally possible to criminalise practically every opinion that the government may dislike.

To those of us reared on a diet of Sunny Deol venting his fury about “ tareekh, tareekh aur tareekh ”, Court offers a very calm, even resigned, look at the workings of our lower judiciary. It unravels the socially conservative skeins of the judiciary: the public prosecutor enjoys an evening out watching anti-immigrant Marathi theatre and wishes that the judge would sentence the accused to 20 years in prison and relieve her of boredom; the judge who gently reprimands the police for not following the manual during search and seizure but won’t discard the tainted seizures; who refuses to hear a litigant in a sleeveless dress, because it violates his sense of decorum.

Court is the story of the criminal justice system as well as those it has abandoned: the dead gutter cleaner who drinks himself to insentience so that he can clamber down the manhole, who throws a pebble into the filth and waits for a cockroach to appear so that he knows that there is oxygen down there, who has lost an eye to the deadly gases. This man’s degradation is turned into material evidence of Kamble’s guilt. Court shows us that law may only rarely be about justice. It is a requiem for gutter cleaners, for the balladeers who sing the truth, for the ideal of justice — and indeed, for all us.

Manisha Sethi is the author of Kafkaland: Prejudice, Law and Counterterrorism in India (Three Essays Collective, 2014)

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