Celluloid Testimony: Witness Vulnerability, Custodial Impunity, and the Cinematic Construction of Criminal Justice in Contemporary Indian Cinema

Abstract

Indian cinema has, since the early 1990s, repeatedly staged the criminal trial as a public forum for interrogating the credibility, safety, and dignity of the witness. This article undertakes a law-and-film analysis of six landmark works, Damini (1993), Talvar (2015), Pink (2016), Section 375 (2019), Article 15 (2019), and Jai Bhim (2021), to examine how mainstream Indian cinema visualises witness vulnerability, investigative failure, and custodial impunity. Using a doctrinal-cum-content-analysis method, this research maps each film's central legal conflict against the statutory and constitutional framework governing it, including the Supreme Court's ruling in Mahender Chawla v. Union of India (2019), the Witness Protection Scheme, 2018, its codification under Section 398 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, and the Supreme Court's own February 2026 monitoring of States that have yet to notify a compliant scheme, Madhya Pradesh among them. Drawing on National Crime Records Bureau and National Human Rights Commission data current to March 2026 (170 custodial deaths recorded in 2025–26 alone, against only three convictions of police personnel nationally between 1999 and 2023), the article argues that Indian cinema has functioned as an informal instrument of legal pedagogy and reform pressure, translating doctrinal abstractions into affectively legible public narratives, while simultaneously reproducing certain evidentiary and gender biases it purports to critique. It closes with concrete, implementable proposals, statute-linked disclaimers on OTT courtroom dramas, a CBFC-NALSA procedural-accuracy consultation protocol, joint law-and-film clinical legal education modules, festival-based law-cinema dialogues, and empirical audience-impact research, designed to convert cinematic engagement into monitorable improvements in access to justice.