Justice Delayed: Chaitanya Tamhane’s Court

A Review of Court by Ratik Asokan

“The fact is if we followed the history of every little country in this world—in its dramatic as well as its quiet times—we would have no space left in which to live our own lives or to apply ourselves to our necessary tasks, never mind indulge in occasional pleasures, like swimming. Surely there is something to be said for drawing a circle around our attention and remaining within that circle. But how large should this circle be?”

—The Embassy Of Cambodia, Zadie Smith

Court, Chaintaya Tamhane’s debut feature film, is haunted by an absent hero. Billed as a procedural drama, Court is ostensibly about the trial of Narayan Kamble, a Dalit (untouchable) folk-poet wrongfully convicted, released, and then wrongfully reconvicted for abetting a sewage worker’s suicide. In the film’s opening scenes, Tamhane deftly introduces his cast of characters: the folk-poet, Kamble; an accomplished activist-lawyer who will defend the poet; a policeman invested in arresting him; the opposing government attorney; and a tired judge. Tamhane then proceeds to banish his protagonist from the film.

As his case suffers one absurd delay after another, as Mumbai’s self-important Chekhovian bureaucrats argue over arcane Victorian laws, as dubious witnesses disappear and withdraw their statements, Kamble remains largely off-screen—either behind bars or in the jail’s medical center. In fact, early in the film, director Tamhane seems to lose interest in the legal dilemma he has constructed. Fed up with the case’s halting progress, he follows Vinay Vora (Kamble’s lawyer), Sharmila Pawar (the government attorney) and Judge Sadavarte back to their homes, to witness the tender truths and uncertainties of their lives, and Court becomes a collection of domestic narratives. Kamble returns for a brief cameo in the film’s closing section. But he is soon arrested again and consequently shunted off-screen. His screen time in the film’s trailer is comparable to his screen time in the film.

So why is Court’s marginalized protagonist given so little screen time?

On one level, Tamhane is simply playing against viewer expectations. Here is a courtroom tragedy that is really a courtroom comedy, a political film that is more domestic than political, a grand drama that is dismantled in gentle bathos. But this subversion is only half the story. Tamhane seems to be making a deeper political point—one woven into aesthetics of his film.

After Tamhane introduces his characters and establishes his dilemma very early in the film, nothing much happens. Kamble’s trial—beleaguered by scheduling issues and bureaucratic mix-ups—drags on and by the end remains unresolved. In interviews, Tamhane has conveyed his admiration for playwrights like Beckett and Ionesco,...