SOAS Research Online

A Free Database of the Latest Research by SOAS Academics and PhD Students

[skip to content]

Suresh, Mayur (2023) Terror Trials: Life and Law in Delhi's Courts. New York: Fordham University Press. (Thinking from Elsewhere)

[img] Text - Accepted Version
Restricted to Repository staff only

Request a copy

Abstract

An ethnography of terrorism trials in Delhi, India, this book explores what modes of life are made possible in the everyday experience of the courtroom. Mayur Suresh shows how legal procedures and technicalities become the modes through which courtrooms are made habitable. Where India’s terror trials have come to be understood by way of the expansion of the security state and displays of Hindu nationalism, Suresh elaborates how they are experienced by defendants in a quite different way, through a minute engagement with legal technicalities. Amidst the grinding terror trials—which are replete with stories of torture, illegal detention and fabricated charges—defendants school themselves in legal procedures, became adept petition writers, build friendships with police officials, cultivate cautious faith in the courts and express a deep sense of betrayal when this trust is belied. Though seemingly mundane, legal technicalities are fraught and highly contested, and acquire urgent ethical qualities in the life of a trial: the file becomes a space in which the world can be made or unmade, the petition a way of imagining a future, and investigative and courtroom procedures enable the unexpected formation of close relationships between police and terror-accused. In attending to the ways in which legal technicalities are made to work in everyday interactions among lawyers, judges, accused terrorists, and police, Suresh shows how human expressiveness, creativity and vulnerability emerge through the law.

Item Type: Authored Books
SOAS Departments & Centres: Regional Centres and Institutes > SOAS South Asia Institute
School Research Centres > Centre for Asian Legal Studies
Departments and Subunits > School of Law
ISBN: 9781531501778
DOI (Digital Object Identifier): https://doi.org/10.1515/9781531501792
Date Deposited: 27 Jan 2023 13:52
URI: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/id/eprint/38671
Related URLs: https://www.for ... /terror-trials/ (Publisher URL)
https://www.deg ... 1531501792/html (Publisher URL)

Altmetric Data

Statistics

Download activity - last 12 monthsShow export options
Downloads since deposit
6 month trend
3Downloads
6 month trend
88Hits
Accesses by country - last 12 monthsShow export options
Accesses by referrer - last 12 monthsShow export options

Repository staff only

Edit Item Edit Item