Book Review: Terror Trials: Life and Law in Delhi's Courts
| Published date | 01 August 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/09646639231206702 |
| Author | Zoha Waseem |
| Date | 01 August 2024 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
ORCID iD
Chulani Kodikara https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1124-6087
References
Butler J (2016) Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London, New York: Verso Books.
Felman S (1997) Forms of judicial blindness, or the evidence of what cannot be seen: Traumatic
narratives and legal repetitions in the O. J. Simpson case and in Tolstoy’s‘The Kreutzer
Sonata’.Critical Inquiry 23(4): 738–788.
Ismail Q (2005) Abiding by Sri Lanka: On Peace, Place, and Postcoloniality. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press.
MAYUR SURESH 2023. Terror Trials: Life and Law in Delhi’s Courts. New York: Fordham University
Press, ISBN: 9781531501778, 272 pp., $32.
How do undertrial prisoners in anti-terrorism cases in jurisdictions of the global South
navigate themselves, shape their existence, and make sense of their experiences with
the law? What sort of knowledge do they acquire and how? What sorts of relationships
do they form? What stories do they tell and believe? Terror Trials attempts to offer some
thoughtful responses to these questions. In doing so, author Mayur Suresh makes an
important contribution to sociolegal scholarship, while also providing an excellent add-
ition to contemporary anthropological, sociological, and criminological research explor-
ing aspects of crime and criminal justice in the global South.
Perhaps Suresh’s most novel contribution is that, empirically, Terror Trials pro-
vides intimate, everyday insights into how the Law and laws (in this case, anti-
terrorism laws and trials –and the institutions involved in implementing them) are
not just producers of physical and epistemic violence, but also that these laws and
legal procedures create possibilities for participation and negotiation in the trial
process, especially for the accused. They do so through various techniques, technical-
ities, ordinary and mundane processes and paperwork that lie at the centre of these
trials. In so doing, these legal technicalities give agency to those under trial; it gives
them voice, power, access, flexibility, opportunity, and knowledge (gyaan)–both
legal as well as experiential.
Suresh takes us through the everyday experiences of under-trial prisoners, those
who are charged under anti-terrorism laws in Delhi, India, and those who must navi-
gate unknown, unfamiliar, and uncomfortable terrains. He does this through 18 cases,
and the layered relations of individuals involved in these cases, their routine experi-
ences, trials, humour, and humiliations. These are stories that Suresh gathers over
14 months of rich ethnographic fieldwork conducted inside Delhi’sTisHazari
courts, allegedly Asia’s largest court complex where terrorism trials are held in ordin-
ary criminal courts, unlike special courts that we might find in other jurisdictions and
contexts in South Asia. In Delhi, these trials are open to the public, hence Suresh is
able to observe what he defines as ‘the subtle, fluctuating, and contested ways in
which legal power works in courtrooms’(p. 10). These ‘terror trials’are not
Book Reviews 677
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