Join us for a screening of Court (dir. Chaitanya Tamhane): a Kafkaesque walk through the Bombay High Court, in which a young lawyer defends a man charged with abetting suicide through revolutionary poetry.

India, as a contemporary democracy, possesses a wide array of “democratic” institutions — elections, courts, “free press”, etc. While these insitutions are increasingly at risk today, it is worth also questioning whether the mere existence of institutions can ever act as a guarantee for the preservation of democratic values — particularly when these institutions are riddled with the liberal desire for “order”, whatever be the cost. The screening shall be followed by an open discussion on how legal institutions can be democratised, particularly in societies with widespread hierarchical discrimination; in the case of India, that of caste.