The Courtroom as Metaphysics: Ritual, Reverence, and the Vanishing Voice

When I first sat in the high-backed, king-sized chair of the Executive Court in Kishoreganj, Bangladesh, perched above everyone, a red cloth draped across the desk like a theatre curtain, I had a strange feeling that I had replaced a forgotten deity. Not quite a magistrate, more like a stand-in for a king who once claimed to speak for God. A nervous defendant stood silently as his lawyer droned on in polished legalese, ‘I did not do this; I never intended that,’ the counsel intoned, curiously using the pronoun ‘I’ as if he were the accused himself. At that moment, I was jolted by a memory of Meursault, the anti-hero of Camus’s novel The Outsider (The Stranger). In that story’s climactic trial, Meursault watches his lawyer speak in the first person on his behalf, effectively hijacking his voice. He feels like a spectator in his judgment, an outsider to the process of deciding his fate.

The courtroom smelled of damp paper and bureaucracy. Files were stacked like the archaeology of absurdity, layered sins and archived accusations. I, the magician in the chair, was tasked with revealing the truth folded between exhibits and affidavits. In a Bangladeshi courtroom, every time a lawyer addresses the bench with ‘My Lord’ or ‘Your Lordship’, the phrase feels out of place, grand, weighty, and oddly inappropriate. These titles are remnants from British rule when judges acted as stand-ins for the King. Even decades after independence, such titles linger in Bangladesh like a ghost of feudal reverence. Rahela Khorakiwala argues that titles like ‘My Lord’ are not benign leftovers but ritualised echoes of colonial power. In Bangladesh, this phrase, still uttered daily, does not merely address a person; it invokes a sacralised hierarchy where critique is muffled by form. Obedience, as Ambedkar insisted, belongs to reasoned law, not to individuals cloaked in divinity. Although a High Court bench has urged against the use of ‘Your Honour’ or ‘Sir’, old habits, like incense, linger. The courtroom, with its stylised bowing, archaic language, and black gowns in the tropical heat, resembles a stage more than a workspace. Linda Mulcahy writes that ritual and courtroom architecture discipline bodies and entrench hierarchy. In Kishoreganj, the red cloth across my desk did not just demarcate authority; it sanctified it.

There is a tongue-in-cheek saying in Kishoreganj: ‘I came from the haor (wetland) to the city, so let us file a case against my neighbor.’ It is a satirical jab at how some villagers view the courts as an almost theatrical venue to air grievances once they are in town. In my experience as a magistrate in the CrPC 107 court (a forum for preventing breaches of peace), I often saw a peculiar dynamic. The petitioners and defendants, mostly ordinary folk, would stand nervously, often reduced to nodding along while their lawyers recited monologues of accusation or denial from memory. It was as if everyone had learned their lines in a play. The legalese was so stylised I often felt more like a spectator than a participant, as if watching a ritual unfold. The parties seemed incidental, their voices ventriloquised, while judgment descended from above, cloaked in red cloth and reverence.

Bangladesh still operates under the colonial-era Contempt of Court Act, 1926, a law that leaves ‘contempt’ undefined, giving judges vast discretion to punish dissent. In 2010, the acting editor of Amar Desh was jailed for six months for publishing a report questioning judicial neutrality. The charge was not obstruction of justice, but the elastic offence of ‘scandalising the court’, a phrase as colonial as it is brittle. In these sanctified halls, even scrutiny curdles into sacrilege. Irony becomes blasphemy. With 135 contempt cases pending, criticism becomes a form of sacrilege. The courtroom ceases to be a forum; it becomes a shrine, where ritual matters more than reason, and doubt is desecration. Justice, wrapped in abstraction, floats above the lives it governs, untouchable, unquestioned. That abstraction is its metaphysical character: not just unseen, but unchallengeable. The courtroom does not merely adjudicate power; it embodies it. Judges hover above as vessels of unseen authority, fortified by ritual. Here, law becomes God – sacred, silent, and supreme. Individuals become case numbers, and their voices merely echo.