iv Table of Contents Foreword ........................................................................................................ i Mani Shekhar Singh Editorial ......................................................................................................... ii Dikshit Bhagabati, Malini Chidambaram, Neeta Stephen A Lexicon of Law and Listening ..................................................................... 2 James Parker The Dreaming, Never to be Lost .................................................................. 24 Upendra Baxi Indian Necropolitics and Weaponizing Covid-19 in Kashmir ...................... 78 Ather Zia Hopeful Rantings of a Dalit-Queer Person ................................................... 91 Dhiren Borisa Queerings .................................................................................................... 97 Oishik Sircar Writing Against the Violence of History ..................................................... 103 Shals Mahajan The Ineffable Somethingness of Love and Revolution ................................. 108 Rahul Rao “But No One Gets Used to Living Here” ..................................................... 113 Jordy Rosenberg The Ministry for the Unconsoled ................................................................ 123 Arundhati Roy Seasons of Life and Seasons of Law .............................................................. 129 Dolly Kikon Pandemic Diary in Three Parts.................................................................... 140 Vasuki Nesiah Where the Pandemic has Led Us ................................................................. 146 Teesta Setalvad “Things Can Change” ................................................................................. 152 Danish Sheikh Courtroom Sketches from Vizag ................................................................. 159 Gnanavi Gummadi Vol. 1 Jindal Law and Humanities Review 2020 FOREWORD Mani Shekhar Singh It is a proud moment to be part of the birth of the inaugural volume of Jindal Law and Humanities Review, the first interdisciplinary law journal of its kind in the country, initiated and imagined by a group of extremely talented and creative student editors. I remember fondly the conversations in the sociology classes which led to the idea of starting this student journal. For their class assignments, the students had done stunning empirical research based on participant-observation fieldwork. Their research projects also resulted in some of them publishing their findings. We talked about how the doing of “law by other means,” to borrow from Peter Goodrich, is a necessary condition to thinking through the nature of law, and its entanglement with social science and humanities. And how a student-led journal would provide a creative and unconventional space for this doing of law by other means. The journal in its conceptualization challenges the artificial distinction between “law” and “non-law” by putting law on “speaking terms,” to invoke James Clifford, with social science and humanities. It imagines cross-disciplinary dialogues and border crossing so as to facilitate a more productive conversation between legal research and scholarship, and social science research. This moment is particularly inspiring to me as a sociologist teaching in a law school. I am most honoured to have been in conversation with my students from the beginnings of this idea to the inaugural issue. I have been deeply impressed by the creativity, hard work, and initiative of the editors, especially their attention to the proliferation of issues, debates, and modes of writing. The inaugural issue reflects their desire to think afresh and launch a journal with a difference—one which takes modes of conversation, dialogue, and border crossing seriously. Talking about law today is one of the most important aspects of the social, yet cross-disciplinary perspective and form is something that has not been experimented with enough. Jindal Law and Humanities Review is undoubtedly path breaking. Its future holds great promise for serious interdisciplinary engagement with law. It is my hope that scholars, researchers, and students will support this endeavour with a keenness and urgency that coincides with the times we live in, soliciting academic freedom, reflexivity, and creativity. Mani Shekhar Singh is Associate Professor, Jindal Global Law School and Executive Director, Centre for Law and Humanities, OP Jindal Global University. He also serves on the Advisory Board of Jindal Law and Humanities Review. i Editorial Bhagabati, Chidambaram, Step- hen, ‘Editorial’ (2020) 1 JLHR ii EDITORIAL Dikshit Sarma Bhagabati, Neeta Maria Stephen, Malini Chidambaram Oh, JLHR! Of our Feral Hearts and Murdered Inks Dikshit Sarma Bhagabati Back in 1936, frustrated with the lifeless and quotidian routines of law review publications, Fred Rodell declared aghast: “there are two things wrong with almost all legal writing. One is its style. The other is its content. That, I think, about covers the ground.”1 Two decades later Barthes echoed from across the Atlantic that style, as a “blind force” in writing, is situated at the cusp of temporal biographical nature and the beyond of grammatical norms where the writer’s formal identity can be established.2 Style archives the writer’s personal history, acting as a metaphor for her literary preferences without even “signifying a choice”. What choice does legal writing ever We write this editorial by preserving our individual voices not as an egoistic fruition of the editorial process, but to lay bare the irreconcilable yet complementing singularities of our styles, visions, and nuanced political positions. Even though the three of us might be hinting at similar issues, we hope that the different epistemological and experiential standpoints which overwrite these familiar motifs reveal the journal’s wish to rethink the familiar in uncharted ways. The many circularities, repetitions, and implicit conversational allusions within this narrative derive from the aporetical logjams of the editorial process itself. Perhaps we can hope to vindicate this dispersed Editorial—but not its attendant privilege—by agreeing that it is as murky, desolate, and circumspective as the rigours of producing a journal can be. Yet, it discloses the challenges we have grappled with, and the challenges we must still forebear to realize JLHR’s cherished vision. While we sign the Editorial with our names, the effort of producing this journal has been a collective enterprise. We owe an enduring debt to the Board of Advisors for their constant guidance, support, provocations and, most importantly, for acquainting us with the ramifications and possibilities which had escaped our sight. Our contributors, overwhelmed with their own challenging schedules amidst the covid-19 pandemic, continued working with us to curate this issue. We are very grateful for the individualized and dedicated collaboration provided by each of our contributors. The University Administration at OP Jindal Global University has been generous with institutional support and personal encouragement. We owe our deepest gratitude to the Vice Chancellor and Executive Dean, JGLS. The IT team at the University has invested long hours of labour to develop a brilliant website. Being quite technologically inadequate, perhaps we will never understand the full extent of their help. Finally, try as we may to read the efforts of our fellow editors in shaping this issue, we can never fully express the collective student-led initiative of JLHR in mere words of thanks. We, therefore, write this Editorial upon the limitedness of our own contributions amidst the cumulative labour that has materialized this journal. 1 Fred Rodell, ‘Goodbye to Law Reviews’ (1936) 23 Virginia Law Review 38, 38. 2 Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero (Beacon Press 1970) 13-14. ii Vol. 1 Jindal Law and Humanities Review 2020 present except its deadness and stuckness? If style is indeed a metaphor for the history inscribed in the writer, almost as indelibly as the natural constitution of her body, then perhaps legal writing does represent the incisive juridico-deductive logic that law usurps to seal its semantic closure. Perhaps legal writing does serve its ends: that is— borrowing from Nietzsche’s famous Ten Rules—to suit the person with whom the enunciator is communicating. Judges writing for lawyers, lawyers writing for clerks and judges, scholars writing for whoever would care to read, and parties reading their fates imprinted on legal papers but rarely writing much—one legal actor for another, that is the communicative circuit of legal writing. Jindal Law and Humanities Review, therefore, emerges with an elementary understanding that the familiar signs of legal writing, those permeating the neoliberal classroom where we are located, have to be ventriloquized with a rebellious mode of writing. Precisely, a mode of writing; not some pathbreaking style, content, or even language. But a mode of writing (again, à la Barthes) that speaks to the solidarities forged in the renegade traditions of legal academia—and also in the anthropological, historical, literary, psychoanalytical, and the other humanities discourses which are deliberately ostracized under the inclusively excluded mark of interdisciplinarity. We are aware of the banality in what we are doing, the usualness dictating this venture that we are tempted to call unprecedented. The fabled celebration of writing as freedom is a premium on