As if in extension of this, judges often quote poetry and some have also written actual poems in their judgments.
Illustration/Uday Mohite
There is something poetic about legal judgments on personal matters. Perhaps there has to be, because it is the poetic and the artistic, that we turn to in order to articulate the intangible and tangled up qualities of human desire and conflict. As if in extension of this, judges often quote poetry and some have also written actual poems in their judgments.
We also remain endlessly fascinated by courtroom drama and court judgments on personal life because they demonstrate democracy at work through subjective processes—the intangible but real world of ideas, emotions and principles—alongside the empircal and public world of elections. After all, our lives are an interweave of these two realities–social identities, public notions of power and rights and the unpredictable, private self. In the constant dance and argument of these parts, lies change, and democratic possibility.
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Last week Justice N Anand Venkatesh of Madras High Court passed an order in a case of two young women in love with each other, whose parents had filed a missing person’s report. The truth of the matter is that the parents objected to the relationship, causing the couple to leave home and seek the help of an NGO. As is extremely common with young people’s relationships of choice, parents aided by a paternalistic police, routinely use laws purportedly for protection from sexual exploitation to regain control over their children’s personal lives.
There is no legal ambiguity here, as the judge noted in his order. Yet, he referred the parents and children to an LBGTQIA+ affirmative counsellor, going to the many hearts of the matter—the resistance to same sex relationships and the need to address these from a politically sensitive lens, the recognition that familial love sits alongside patriarchal rigidity and prejudice, and that rights can and must be understood both, legally and emotively. He did this while echoing the truth of his own conditioning. “To be open, I am also trying to break my own preconceived notions about this issue and I am in the process of evolving.”
We are not a society where people easily admit to their mistakes as this column has all too frequently noted. In a context as feudal as ours, the admission of mistakes is rife with anxiety about maintaining power for the privileged and of being humiliated and undermined for the oppressed.
We also live in a time when public debate, even about minute personal things, is dominated by moral absolutes and zero sum games; where to make a mistake or admit to vulnerability, especially intellectual vulnerability, can lead to inordinate attack. Unearthing old posts and tweets is a favoured method of criticism. The value of these approaches depends on the context, but it reinforces a fixity of positions and a false binary of tradition and modernity, rather than mirroring the untidy flux of change.
In an era where debate is a speedy, daily trial, a public utterance which reflects that at any moment, we are a complicated mixture of our conditioning and our enlightenment and that we are all evolving, brings a kind of relief. To be open to change, to admit to needing to change—we need so much to create an education, a public culture where this is normalised, seen as the poetic possibility and the poetic justice of every life.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com
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