It is a quiet Saturday morning in Victoria BC, and I find myself sitting at the kitchen table, Oishik Sircar’s book Violent Modernities: Cultural Lives of Law in the New India open in front of me.  It is a beautiful book, one whose insights continue to linger with me.  It is unconventional in some ways, a collection of essays which document a series of scholarly and activist journeys, written over a decade.  At the heart of the book is a conversation about the complex and paradoxical relationships of law and violence, of nation-states and justice, of culture as the terrain for the production of legal knowledge, of legal and cultural mechanisms of citizenship, belonging and exclusion.  If it makes an argument, it is not one that gestures in the direction of universal, atemporal or portable claims (xxvii); Sircar invites the reader to approach the question of ‘violent modernities’ with a grounding in an ethic of time and place. We are asked to spend time with him in an extended engagement with the ‘the New India’, its specific histories, geographies and political struggles at very precise junctures, where the question of belonging is right at the centre.  We are invited to spend time in the negative spaces of culture. Each essay tells a story in which law and violence are not each other’s opposite; rather, they are in a relationship of deep intimacy, each feeding the other (xxiv).  The seven essays move us through multiple points of entry, with different resources of law, and different genres of engagement.  The locations of struggle include the court room, the movie theatre, the red-light district, posters and advertisements, photographs, protest letters, acknowledgements and footnotes, and failures.  The chapters also ask us to engage with belonging and exclusion through attention to children and adults, class and caste, gender and sexuality.

But it is more than a documentation of these journeys; it is also an invitation to journey with him, attentive to the importance of time and place for thought.  This is explicitly marked in each chapter, which contains a footnote telling the reader both when and where the piece was written, making visible something of the places he was, the person he was becoming, the political winds that brushed against him in that time and place.  Sircar’s writing makes visible the journeys and travels that have been an important part of his own path, with training in India, Canada, and Australia, three nations deeply linked with shared and divergent histories of empire and (post)coloniality (xxxii).  His focus is on the postcolonial, modern and liberal India.  Who belongs to this New India? How are law and violence implicated in its practices of inclusion and exclusion, through both story and action. What are the sites of legal/cultural storytelling through which we might “invoke, listen to and perform law differently?” (xvi)

Grounding

In this book, Sircar clearly grounds, or places himself in the work. He inserts himself into each chapter in ways that explicitly reference feminist and activist practices related to the personal and the political, echoing with insights from feminist geography (Massey, 1994), which point to the layering of power and gender and ‘aliveness’ of space.  Such practices of grounding also introduce an element of openness into the analysis.  This practice of transparency about self, making himself visible, carries an element of vulnerability.  That is, it gives a reader permission to query the ways in which Sircar’s experience might shape how he sees the world he is describing.  The effect of this grounding is to create a kind of dialogical space for the reader to travel alongside him.  Rather than feeling ‘pushed’ by analysis, there is room for the reader to similarly place themselves in the text, to reflect on the ways that each chapter is rooted in specific flows of power and time.  This kind of grounding models a practice of non-violent generosity that leaves more breathing room for a reader, that leaves space to be drawn alongside, to accept that the analysis is provisional, and is designed up to open up rather than close down conversation.  

Sitting here, in my kitchen, I am conscious that I am 12 time zones away from the India that is the centre of his book. And yet, I am struck by the proximity I feel to the book, to its questions, its methods, and its invitations to thought. His insights, while grounded in the specific cultural and legal histories of India, have resonance in the political and cultural world in which I live, one in which questions of the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the Canadian settler state are at centre stage.  Taking up his invitation to subjectively rooted practice, let me make myself visible in this engagement.  My reading of his book is shaped by my own experiences as a white-anglo-settler Canadian, cis-gender, relatively neurotypical, relatively able-bodied, the mother of two men, oldest sister to 7 siblings, feminist law professor and part time potter (that is to say, someone who spends time thinking about ‘the ground’ in more than metaphorical terms). I have been teaching law for nearly 25 years at the University of Victoria, which is home to both the Indigenous Law Research Unit (ILRU) and a relatively new joint law degree program in Canadian Common Law and Indigenous Legal Orders.  The first of these (ILRU) is an independent research unit that is dedicated to revitalizing Indigenous laws. It partners with Indigenous communities seeking to re-articulate their laws to address the challenges they face, working by invitation with communities on their own terms (that is, independent of State law). The second of these (the JD/JID Program) attempts to create a certain kind of bridge, taking the existing Canadian state (with its legal structures) as a starting point, focusing on skills needed for legal practice within Canadian common law, but also with Indigenous legal orders, and at the interface between them  Both these programs presuppose a place for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous participation, conscious of the difficulties of such work against the background of complicated and violent modern colonial histories of legal exclusion, dispossession and erasure based on questions of identity and belonging. 

And so, I situate my reading of Sircar’s exploration of the New India adjacent to two of my specific concerns with Indigenous law and Canadian colonial and postcolonial violences and dreams of emancipation/reconciliation: the relationships of law, intimacy and violence; and of law, belonging and exclusion.

Law, Intimacy and Violence

I find myself returning to Vasuki Nesia’s description of the book as “an expression of love as a brawl with law for space – the space to invoke, listen to, and perform law differently.” (xvi). The book invites us to imagine the work of law in building relationships where conflict is part of the horizon, but without eruptions of violence that are life destroying (not only physical forms of life, but also ways of being). Sircar asks us to consider the relationship of law and violence “not as one of animosity but of intimacy (xxiv). Each essay provides us with cultural texts, films and images that offer us more complicated stories about the linkages of law and violence.  

Sircar’s argument and violence and intimacy brings to my mind a watercolour painting by my colleague Val Napoleon.  It is from a series of paintings featuring reimagined feminist grandmother Ravens (a trickster/teacher character in many indigenous legal orders), opening conversations about law in contexts that require multidimensional thinking, and resistance to flattened understandings of the work of law.[i] A cluster of these paintings, done in styles that evoke a variety of impressionist painters, carry the subtitle, “Old Indigenous Feminist Trickster does Peculiar Research in the Colonizer’s Garden.” The background tapestry of this particular painting draws on pointillist conventions of painting, and is filled in with Indigenous cultural referents.  Two Ravens take centre stage, their wings in motion, at cross angles, backlit by a golden centre of life, with a segmented line, representing the always complicated love relationship, tracing the circle in which they move.  The circle is edged by a field of green, with flowers emerging in the four corners/directions all representing parts of life, large and small. The ravens, the feathers close enough to touch, have their heads pointed towards each other, and one is calling out.  Is it a dance? A conversation? A conflict?  When I asked Val about the title for this painting, she told me it is “Intimacy”. This painting was produced during the last year of her husband Will’s struggle with cancer. Val, speaking with a close friend, had been trying to work out the difficulties of understanding how conflict kept emerging between her and Will, even where both of them were trying to remain focused on the background conditions of love and intimacy. Her friend, Val said, had reminded her that conflict is in fact a form of intimacy and this kind of conflict or argument could only happen in intense intimacy. But how does one work with such a difficult blending? Val image takes this question of law, intimacy and violence, and draws on practices of Indigenous visual storied and art practice.[ii] The image does not point us in the direction of a particular conflict with a simple narrative of guilt or innocence, nor does it suggest easy answers. For me, the image opens a space in which people can think and talk together not only the complexity in questions surrounding the relationship of violence and intimacy, but also the same complexity in questions about the law and violence.

This is the same practice I see throughout Sircar’s book.  He does not minimize what is at stake in our violent modernity, but makes visible some possibilities that open up as we attend to the ‘negative’ spaces of culture.  He invites us to take intimacy seriously as we think through the forms of conflict and violence that shape our experiences.  He provides us with stories and images (including the front cover with its photo of a pair of abandoned boots) that evoke this complexity, inviting us into a more nuanced storytelling.  While taking up the ‘postcolonial moment’, he steps back from conventional accounts of colonial storytelling, rooted in Manichean binaries of good and bad. He takes us to cultural texts, rooted in a postcolonial context that, like the trickster ravens, are attentive to gender and difference, and hold space for the complexity rather than resolving it.

Law, Belonging and Exclusion

One of the central and beautiful complexities for me is in Sircar’s centring the question of citizenship, of belonging, of the nation state.  He takes the reader into a space of engaging with what he calls, “the fable of citizenship” (26).  Here, he points us to the poetics, the polemics and the politics that undergird this fable.  In his chapter “Spectacles of Emancipation” he focuses on India’s constitutional framework in a way that takes up the gap between law’s promise of emancipation, and the reality of violence that law performs.  He is careful in his attention to questions about our experiences of history, and the shifts from ‘the old’ India to ‘the new’ India.

For me, this evokes powerful echoes with Canada’s constitutional framework.  We too engage with questions about the fable of citizenship, this difficult blending of emancipation and violence.  What does it mean to “belong” to a Canada whose conventional origin story is rooted in notions of terra nullius, and the doctrine of discovery, and which needs honest re-engagement?[iii]  I find myself reflecting on what I have seen about how these questions of belonging have been worked out not only within the Indian or Canadian (post)colonial legal orders, but also in different Indigenous legal orders. In 2017, ILRU entered into a partnership with the Secwépemc to work on articulating their own laws of membership and belonging.[iv]  Early on, in discussions about language, we were guided away from the English word ‘citizenship’ and towards the Secwepemctsín word “k̓wséltkten”, which translates more closely to family, relative and kin.  When working with the Secwepemc, nearly all conversations drawing on the language of citizenship made visible the difficulty of aligning legal concepts around belonging across Canadian and Secwépemc law.  There were serious (and understandable) anxieties about colonial concepts, such as ‘blood quantum’, which have been used to exclude people from the Secwépemc Nation within Secwepemcúĺecw.  Given the decades upon decades of colonial imposition and concerted efforts to erase Secwépemc legal institutions and understandings, it was clear that the project required a different kind of thinking, stepping back from the Canadian fable of citizenship to ask Secwepemc questions about the relations people have with one another and Secwepemcúĺecw. The central question shifted from “who are you” to “who are we to each other?”  Our focus moved to questions about responsibilities and relationships.[v] 

I raise this not in some kind of romantic idealistic approach to some kind of purified Indigenous utopia.  It is rather to note that this project made visible for us in a material way the amount of affective labour (here nodding to Sircar’s deployment of Hardt 1999) involved in building building relationships of identity and belonging.  Questions about ‘who we are’ are just one piece of the larger question, “Who we are to each other”?  But this left fewer ways for settler-Canadians like myself to sidestep complicated questions about origins, and what it might mean for me learn about and to consider myself as governed by not only Canadian, but also Secwepemc law.

These are the questions which were in my mind as I read Violent Modernities, resonating with Sircar’s observations in his chapter, “The Conduct of Critique.”  There, he provides an account of his journey as a male feminist jurisprudent, and the difficulty of doing so without a sense of an ‘origin story,’ an explanation of the moment when he moved from being one thing to being another (232).  He moves us from thinking in nouns to thinking in verbs, placed attention on the  “doing” of both law and critique.  He sees the limits, pointing to the experience of inspirational contradictions, of ‘dark hope.’  He argues, “To do feminism for me is the training in a certain kind of conduct… the practice of an ethic of responsibility, not responsibilization’ (234) .  He continues, well aware of the difficult entanglements, and the place of deep affect in these relations.  ‘Law’ and ‘feminism’, he notes, have had a shared and continuing history of desire and derision.  He again centres the verb, saying that “to do feminism means an acknowledgment of these entanglements, and taking responsibility for the consequences of choosing to or our inability to unentangle some of these in our conduct.  Thus, to conduct oneself as feminist would require living with both feminism’s potentials and limits.” (236)

This exploration, one in which he accounts for his own subjectivity, opens up space for important questions about jurisdiction, understood as the voice of law through which we come to arrive at understandings of lawfulness.  Following Dorsett and McVeigh (2012:6 ) this means attending to the ways that “critical engagement of law takes place not just at the level of ideas or practice, but also at the level of conduct.” (237)  Here, his exploration of conduct is situated in his own autobiographical exploration of his experiences of teaching as a feminist legal scholar.  There was much in this exploration that opened up space for me to reflect on my own challenges, as a white Settler legal scholar, doing work at the intersection of colonial and Indigenous legal orders.  His engagement with his own position in the New India provided resonances. It left me reflecting on the ways that questions of jurisdiction, identity and conduct must be thought together without being paralyzed by the entanglements involved.  Sircar opens space for the reader to learn from his articulation of his own path, while inviting one to consider spaces of similarity and difference.  He opens space for to consider “shared failures and vulnerabilities, for an ethos of associated living…. with a goal of living in theory.”  

As I finish this review, I again find myself sitting at a kitchen table, this time at my mother’s house in the interior of BC.  Looking out at the Shuswap Lake in what is Secwepemc territory, I continue to think about both the New India and contemporary Canada.  In his book Violent Modernities, Sircar models an important practice of intimacy in making space for the many conversations needed about ways we might go forward acting on the question “who are we to each other?” He invites us to think about relationships:  between law and politics, law and culture, justice and its delivery, capital and community.  He explores how these relationships are are wound up in ideas of the sacred and the secular in different places and in at different times. This book asks us to journey with him, to wander a number of pathways, asking not about solutions, but about the structures of our struggles and our desires.  I am persuaded by his suggestion that we need more attention to the legal and cultural institutions through which citizenry and people are engaged.  This is a book that offers many pathways of thought and action for folks who are situated in different geographical and political contexts, but grapple with equally pressing questions about law.  And it reminds us that the best journeys are those taken with each other.

[i] For background, see Justine Hunter, “Indigenous scholar Val Napoleon embraces disruption”, Globe & Mail, 1 Jan 2018 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/british-columbia/indigenous-scholar-val-napoleon-embraces-disruption/article37471709/  Images of her work can be accessed on the ilru website here: https://ilru.ca/purchase/

[ii] For more, see Jo-ann (Q’um q’um Xiiem) Archibald, Indigenous Storywork: Educating the Heart, Mind, Body, and Spirit. UBC Press, 2006.

[iii] Kathleen Mahoney, “Canada’s Origin Story” Big Ideas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1X3VEvilx8

[iv]  The Secwepemc people are in what is the interior of British Columbia.  For more, see Ignace, M., & Ignace, R. E. (2017). Secwépemc People, Land, and Laws – Yerí7 re Stsq’ey’s-kucw. McGill-Queen’s University Press. Friedland, H., Leonard, B., Asch, J., & Mortimer, K. (2018). Porcupine and Other Stories:  Legal Relations in Secwepemculecw. Revue Generale de droit, 48(1), 153-201.

[v] The Project involved a 7 year engagement.   The complete Report, Casebook and Glossary can be accessed here: https://ilru.ca/secwepemc-laws-of-kwseltkten-and-secwepemc-kt-project/

Rebecca Johnson is a Professor of Law and an Associate Director of the Indigenous
Law Research Unit at the University of Victoria.