This chapter uses the J-A approach to read (see and hear) three Bollywood feature films that make the Gujarat pogrom central to their plots. The films are Dev, Parzania and Kai Po Che, whose release dates span the period 2004–13, overlapping with the Best Bakery case. Attention to this shared memorial journey of the judicial and the cinematic will further reveal their narrative compact in the making and ordering of collective memories of the pogrom.

I show how narrative tropes and cinematic techniques are used and repeated in the films to reconstruct the memory of the pogrom and project imaginations of justice. The J-A lens examines how the films mobilise spectatorial publics, by bestowing on them the authority to pass judgment on both the cinema and the pogrom. The films severally and collectively train their publics in ways of remembering the pogrom as a story of the triumph of secular law over religious violence. In this way of remembering, the lineaments of the New India—the work of the state-making and state-preserving rationalities in legalism, secularism and developmentalism—become visible in the texts of the films.

In my J-A reading of the texts of judgments in the previous chapter, the judgment form was considered to be a record of images, by way of the aesthetic tropes embedded in their language. In my J-A reading of the films in this chapter, I will pay attention to how the cinematic form brings together word, image and sound to mobilise judgment.

The chapter opens with a brief explanation of how each of these films inaugurates a relationship between cinema and the spectator through the use of a specifically Indian practice of state-sanctioned legal certification and a standard disclaimer.