THE LIVING PAST IN THE MORPHED PRESENT
A prison diary captures the struggles of a young man of the Naxalbari generation
There’s a certain monotonous sameness to prison memoirs – the venal prison officials, the loathsome fellow prisoners, the leeching out of hope, the filth and the awful food, the beatings and torture, the gruesome tales of anal rape, and the sudden unexpected acts of kindness amidst the pervasive cruelty have been written about extensively and aspects have been presented on screen in films as far apart as Shawshank Redemption and Sanju. From Alexander Berkman’s Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist published in 1912 and set in the US to James Tooley’s Comeuppance and Arun Ferreira’s Colours of the Cage that expose the Indian prison system, literature about incarceration tends to confirm our worst nightmares about what goes on behind those barred windows and high walls. And so it is with Ramchandra Singh’s 13 Years; A Naxalite’s Prison Diary.
What sets it apart, however, is that the writer is a ‘genuine’ subaltern from the ‘backward’ arak community of Bangarmau in UP, who, as a student in 1967, around the time of Naxalbari, became “active in the Unnao district unit of CPI-M.” The interview with the author conducted in 2017 that’s appended to the book reveals that, following Charu Mazumdar’s call to “annihilate class enemies”, the young Ramchandra Singh and his comrades began targeting zamindars: “There is a village called Bakhaura… there was a terrible landlord there. We annihilated him.” Singh’s use of the word ‘annihilate’ instead of the more mundane ‘killing’ seems to hint at the distance he travelled from his original position. The escape of the naxals was thwarted, and so began Singh’s prison sojourn.
Some of the most affecting writing is about the author’s feelings for his family and for the girl he loved, and the camaraderie among political prisoners. There’s some unexpected humour too especially in his account of eccentric prisoners. Here’s the brawler Gourishankar: “Being antibrahmin was his greatest merit or demerit, which he expressed not through any argument but by his curses… Sometimes, lying on his back in the evenings, he would suddenly start cursing, “Damn these thread wearers! These goddamn tilak wearers!” But when Pandey-ji, the teacher and jail’s writer, lying on the neighbouring berth, scolded him he would lie down quietly.”
The memoir captures both the outer and inner worlds, and the ideological struggles of a politically aware young man attempting to arrive at a nuanced understanding of how to drive change within a complex society riven by caste and class. It is fitting that Navayana has chosen to publish the English translation of Thehre Hue Terah
Saal (1970-83), that was first serialized in now-defunct Hindi weekly Shaan-e-sahara in the early 1980s in 2018 when once again India seems caught in an impenetrable ideological fog and when terms like “urban naxal” are thrown around to vilify whole categories of people and to gain favour with the mighty, whose own stand on a range of issues is unknowable and shifting. The true power of Singh’s slim book emanates not from its description of imprisonment – the chapter entitled ‘Of Pimps, sexual abuse and honoured dacoits’ shocks with its descriptions of the violation of “timid and goodlooking boys” -- but from its recalling of the battles of an earlier time whose distorted echoes boom in our own. The reader learns of long forgotten arguments that persist in a different context: “Tyagi took one of my essays to be published in Yuvanak, in which I had tried… to make a reassessment of the roles of Gandhi and the Congress during the period of the nationalist struggle. Part of my argument was that the demolition of public statues of Gandhi and other nationalist figures by leftist protesters in West Bengal was not faithful to the values of the Cultural Revolution, and that political and ideological criticism be kept separate from personal insult.”
The same Tyagi, the reader soon learns, was later instrumental in the publication of pictures of Jagjivan Ram’s son having sex with a DU student in Surya, a magazine published by Maneka Gandhi. Clearly, plus ca change; plus c’est la meme chose
the more things change, the more they stay the same. The flap announces that the author died while the book was in press. He lives on in this exemplary work.