Notes from inside
When Sudha Bharadwaj went to the American consulate in Delhi to give up her American citizenship after graduating from the Indian Institute of Technology (Iit)-kanpur in the early 1980s, the consul was rightly astounded. Such a thing is not common. It understandably took the officials some time to find the right forms.
Back then, Bharadwaj probably smiled the same way she does in the photograph at the back of this book, a way that speaks of her commitment to social change. For this commitment, she was unjustly imprisoned for three years. When first arrested, she was photographed smiling the same smile. As one reads through this memoir of her life at the Yerawada prison in Pune, and then at Byculla Jail in Mumbai, one can see that smile underneath the anguish and suffering she so simply describes.
Often portrayed as the archetypal “urban Naxal”, a person who foments trouble against the nation, she was one of the Bhima Koregaon 16, accused serially of waging war in India, of plotting to assassinate the prime minister, of planning violent events.
Her beginnings seem unsuited for a life amid India’s poorest. She was born in Boston in 1961, to parents who were both postdoctoral fellows in economics. They returned to India at the exhortation of PC Mahalanobis, today known as the leading man behind our Planning efforts in the 1950s. Bharadwaj went on to study mathematics at Iit-kanpur and it was there that she met a Marxist group of students and teachers, and began working with textile workers, farmers and campus mess workers.
The spate of constructions related to the Asiad Games in 1982 in Delhi, and the suffering and unreported deaths of workers, brought her in contact with the union leader Shankar Guha Niyogi and she went off to
Chhattisgarh to join the Chhattisgarh
Mukti Morcha, which worked with Adivasis and mine workers in the region before Guha was assassinated.
In Chhattisgarh, she found a kindred spirit in Binayak Sen, who suffered the ire of the previous regime. Her own life journey parallels that of Kobad Ghandy. All these individuals relinquished privilege and adopted poverty in order to help some of India’s poorest. Even after the movement split, Bharadwaj stayed on for nearly three decades, adopted a child, and lived among the poorest, although she missed her Scrabble and her PG Wodehouse. In a long interview that precedes the prison memoir, she describes how she eventually returned to
Delhi, to teach at National Law University, before she was arrested. Some of her fellow co-accused, including Varavara
Rao, Arun Ferreira and Vernon
Gonsalves, had already been imprisoned for years without conviction even before the current regime.
In the book’s main section, Bharadwaj presents aspects of her prison experience. Through 76 sketches of the inmates she encountered there, she writes about the material conditions, the food, the celebrations and the humiliations.
There is, of course, a long tradition of prison memoirs by woman political prisoners in India, including Mary Tyler’s classic, My Days In An Indian Prison, and the diary of Kannada actor Snehlata Reddy, who died in prison during the Emergency.
Bharadwaj tersely describes her first ritual undressing in prison: “I am told to strip in a dingy side room — ‘yes, take off everything,’ ‘squat,’ ‘open your hair’ — under the watchful eye of an enormous tabby. I feel naked, and not just physically.”
Her first encounter with PITA, the Prevention of Immoral Trafficking Act, comes in the form of five Nepali women, who had been supporting their family for years but who, as Buddhists, look down on Dalit neo-buddhist co-workers. She meets a Dalit nurse, an Ambedkarite whose dream is for her daughter to become a police officer. There are a large number of women who are in prison for murdering abusive spouses. There are others who crossed a line briefly, but have been behind bars for years.
Bharadwaj writes of a woman convicted under POCSO (the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act). While she was involved in an extramarital affair, her sister’s
Through 76 sketches of inmates she met during her imprisonment, activist Sudha Bhardwaj’s looks at the material conditions of life in jail
minor daughter began a relationship with her lover’s friend. Under family pressure, the girl accused her aunt of colluding with the two men, the inmate tells Bhardwaj.
“It’s a sad story of an unhappy marriage, socially unacceptable love affairs and vicious legal revenge… This is one of those cases in which even a feminist lawyer like myself is forced to look critically at rape laws that rely solely on the evidence of the prosecutrix,” she writes.
Bharadwaj and her co-accused, professor Shoma Sen, are put in solitary cells in phansi yard and are not allowed to interact or go out during normal recreational hours. Court trips, hospital visits and festivals are the only times when she can engage with other prisoners. Gradually, she begins to assist others in their legal work. Before her imprisonment she had worked as a lawyer for the poor. Now she gets to observe the system from the inside and provides valuable suggestions for making legal aid more effective.
She meets organ harvesters, partners in crime and victims of crime. There is also the “other” world, of murder, hafta and scams, whose perpetrators seem to bond better with the police, she writes, than with political prisoners for whom rules are more strictly enforced. Occasionally, Bharadwaj seems to suggest that criminals are somehow different from “normal” people.
But the law changes and the lines change and certain behaviours become criminialised, while at other times, people slip unintentionally or are trapped. That is why the African-american civil rights activist Angela Davis has been insistent about using the word “lawbreaker” rather than criminal. This word also reminds us that for each one inside, there are millions of other lawbreakers who never meet their comeuppance.
In the end, what the reader takes away from this work is a deep scepticism about the necessity of prisons. As studies show, prisons do not necessarily reform inmates. If punitive punishment is our only goal, there are other ways to punish, and even other kinds of prisons to build, including open prisons that serve a better purpose for both society and its errant members.