24 years since the Gujarat pogrom: a screening of "Final Solution", followed by Q&A with the director

Why do socially intimate communities periodically collapse into patterned violence? What does it mean that a pogrom — an analytic category that falls short of the protracted totality of genocide — can nonetheless recur with such force that it repeatedly marks Muslim life in India with dispossession and death? These are among the urgent questions that Rakesh Sharma’s pathbreaking documentary Final Solution confronts with unflinching clarity. Set in the aftermath of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom, the film refuses the euphemism of the “riot” — a term that fabricates moral equivalence and obscures asymmetry — exposing instead the ideological, affective, and organizational infrastructures of Hindutva nationalism. Through testimonies, political speech, and scenes of everyday life fractured by fear, Final Solution reveals how majoritarianism seeps into the everyday — how prejudice becomes ritual, and how the language of democracy is altered to reify exclusion in postcolonial India.

This screening invites us to think critically about communalism, media representation, and the grammar of state and vigilante violence in the twenty-first century. A discussion with the filmmaker will follow, reflecting on the documentary form as both archive and intervention: What does it mean to film in the wake of a pogrom? How might cinema bear witness where the nation seeks amnesia?Join us for an evening of urgent viewing and collective reflection.

Join us at 330pm for chai and samosas and at 4pm for the screening. Note no food or drink are allowed in the theater itself.