Colonial Coat Tails In Feudal Fabric

Thoroughly liveried, the judge comes across as a maharaja. A time-warp cloaks Indian judiciary’s etiquette.

- Ushinor Majumdar

Every day, courts across India begin proceedings at 10.30 am when an usher in a crisp white uniform, and in some places a turban, holds open the door. It is then that the waiting lawyers, litigants and others stand up and, after a very brief pause, the judge (or judges) walks in. An attendant holds the chair till the judge sits down…more than one of them, if it’s judges.

This ceremonial seating begins the gruelling day for high court or Supreme Court judges who have to traverse through reams of paperwork and scores of ‘milording’ advocates. As lunch hour or 4 pm draws closer, waiting lawyers keep one eye on the clock and the other on the usher. When the attendant reaches for the judge’s chair from the back, it’s the sign that his lordship will now rise and retire from the open court.

Everything about that scene—the unevenly distributed privilege, the visual cues, the obeisant forms of address—is straight out of a pre-modern protocol, a feudal code. Its survival into modern contexts was seen to have served a function—ennobling the idea of justice and its arbiters, granting them a safe distance from the mundane, conferring on them the right to the last word.

In India, though, the risk of all this being read in terms of older forms of privilege is never too far. Ushers are part of the small, visible tokens reserved for India’s higher judiciary. (One argument advanced in its defence is that it creates jobs, though in economics there also exists the concept of disguised unemployment.) There are other privileges, both seen and unseen. In the latter category are protocol officers at airports. Their job is to help judges, both serving and retired, past airport security as well as run other errands.