Review: From Phansi Yard by Sudha Bharadwaj

When Sudha Bharadwaj went to the American consulate in Delhi to give up her American citizenship, after graduating from IIT, Kanpur, in the early 1980s, the consul was rightly astounded. Such a thing had never occurred before. Such a thing is not common, especially for Indian IIT graduates whose life goal still remains that coveted passport and citizenship. It understandably took the officials some time to find the right forms. Back then, Sudha Bharadwaj probably smiled in exactly the same way that she does in the photograph that adorns the back page of this book 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 in the same way. As you read through this memoir of her life in Yerawada prison, in Pune, Maharashtra, and then in Byculla Jail, Mumbai, you can see that smile underneath the anguish and suffering she so simply describes.

Often portrayed as the archetypal urban naxal, who foments trouble against the nation, she has earned enormous notoriety as one of the Bhima Koregaon 16, accused serially of waging war in India, of plotting to assassinate the Prime Minister, planning violent events et al. Her beginnings, however, seemed unsuited for a life amidst India’s poorest and bravest. Born in Boston, USA, in 1961, where her parents Krishna And Ranganath Bhadwaj were both post doctoral fellows in economics, she was baby sat by an immigrant Russian couple. Her parents returned to India at the exhortation of PC Mahalanobis, today known as the leading man behind our Planning efforts in the 1950s. A formidable institution builder, he made the Indian Statistical Institute a mandatory stop for some of the greatest scientists of the world. Her mother, Krishna, was later invited to Cambridge, UK, by the close associate of Antonio Gramsci, Piero Saffa, who was deeply impressed by her review of her classic book, Production of Commodities by means of Commodities. Sudha spent several years going to school in Cambridge and among other things, helped edit her mother’s own famous book, Production Conditions in Indian Agriculture. Later, her mother joined the newly founded Centre for Economic Studies and Planning at Jawaharlal Nehru University, which gradually became internationally renowned, and that’s where she spent the rest of her emotionally taxing but otherwise idyllyic childhood – on a huge but safe campus, with a stern mother, her books and classes at Central School, IIT Delhi, where children of the karamcharis studied alongside those of the professors. She 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 terrible 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 adivasi and other mine workers in the region before Guha was assassinated. In Chhattisgarh, she found a kindred spirit in Dr 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 there, and lived among the poorest mine workers, although she missed her Scrabble and her PG Wodehouse. In explaining her unwavering allegiance to the cause she quotes a poem by Bertolt Brecht,

Fighters are poor people. They cannot leave…Before we go into battle I must know: have you a passIn your coat pocket?

In a long interview, which prefigures this prison memoir, she described how she eventually did return to Delhi, to teach at National Law University, before she was arrested. Some of her fellow co-accused including Varvara Rao, Arun Farreira, and Vernon Gonsalves, had already been imprisoned for years without conviction even before the current regime.

In the book’s main section, she presents aspects of her prison experience, including her first arrest, her experience in the lock up in Pune, and her subsequent stints at Yerawada and in Mumbai. Through 76 little biographies or sketches of inmates that 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 female political prisoners in India including Mary Tyler’s classic, My Days In An Indian Prison, the diary of the famous Kannada actor Snehlata Reddy, who died in prison during the Emergency, and Anjum Habib’s Prisoner No.100: An Account of My Nights and Days in an Indian Prison, which traverse related ground.

Bharadwaj tersely describes her first ritual undressing in prison, which is the lot of the ordinary: “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, Prevention of Immoral Trafficking Act comes in the form of five Nepali women, who had been supporting their family for years, some of whose children even study in a boarding school, but who, as Buddhists, look down on Dalit co-workers who are neo-Buddhist. She meets a Dalit nurse, an Ambedkarite, who scoffs at Marathas seeking reservations and dreams of making her daughter a police officer. The Marathi group and the Bengali group frequently clash, but amidst them is also a young, vivacious woman who tells sly jokes and unabashedly describes how she fell in love with a gangster, whose murder charge has landed them both in jail. She still has faith in him. There are, of course, a large number of women who are in prison for murdering their abusive spouses. As African-American civil rights activist Angela Davis and other prison reformers have long pointed out, women who are victims of domestic abuse should be treated differently when they retaliate and harm their perpetrators, or even take their lives. So many unhappy women, who are mostly victims of circumstances but find the law interposing between them and their sorrows!

There are many mothers in Yerawada jail, which has a school and a creche of sorts. Children stay with their mothers until the age of five when they are taken away by a sanstha. I sometimes wonder how many of the hawkers at our infernal traffic lights have emerged from these sansthas, or have survived a street upbringing to find this sham vocation, and how many of them are newly arrived migrants. There are others who made one error, or crossed one line briefly, but have been caught out for years. Like the one who ran away from her husband with a lover, but lost her child eventually, to a charge of kidnapping!

Bharadwaj writes of a tall women convicted under POCSO (Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act). While she was involved in an extra marital relationship, her sister’s minor daughter began a relationship with her lover’s friend. Under family pressure, the girl accused her aunt of colluding with the two men who she claimed had gang raped her.

“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,” writes Bharadwaj.

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There are rules for everything, and an infinite number of everyday items are “not allowed.” Women can only wear saris or salwar kameez and can possess no scissors, sewing needles, spoons, safety pins, empty plastic bottles, hair clips, fermented food or medicines. But everything is arbitrary, as the “rules” can change from madam to madam, guard to guard, warder to warder. Still, everything is also negotiated in a complex hierarchy running from jailers to female warders, to inmate officers, to inmate guards. Prisons in India are not total institutions as the sociologist Erving Goffman described them, but a mix of the formal and the informal, where rules are bent by human agency and there are “interactional spaces” between inmate and official. Mahuya Bandyopadhyay’s Everyday Life in a Prison: Confinment, Suveillance, Resistance, a study of Alipore prison in Kolkata, brings out these aspects well.

Many women work, some to earn money, some to keep themselves occupied. Those who work include the stately and highly dignified sister of Yakub Memon, the Bombay blast accused who was hanged in 2016. She is universally called “Aapa”. Some 50 also go to the Open Jail where they work outside prison. There are still nearly two dozen open prisons in India, from where inmates go out to work in factories or farms. They return to prison at night, sometimes unsupervised. These prisoners have a very low to negligible runaway rate and, as pointed out by Smita Chukkraburtty in a study of Rajasthan’s Sanganer prison, are cheaper to maintain. Lesbian relationships are forbidden and invites malice, sexist abuse and forced separation. Yet, a manly inmate, who even declares herself a man, is allowed to be.

Bhadwaj 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 relaxed hours. Court trips, hospital visits and festivals like Eid and Diwali are the only times when she can meet and engage with other prisoners, many of whom she otherwise observed silently. The remarkable fact is that, except for the old and the infirm, who should not have been incarcerated in the first place, many inmates find a life, a routine, even in these straitened circumstances. But rules are rules, like the fact that every new entrant must take a pregnancy test, even those who are long past menopause!

Bharadwaj dwells on the seasons in prison, as the incarcerated always tend to do, because they hardly notice days and dates, except for their own court dates, as every day seems like the one that went before. She writes about the mango wars in the summer, about the battle for the sun in the winter, about the provision and difficulty of access of hot water. She writes too about the medical treatment that many women can avail in jail, which is often a lot better than what they would get outside as poor women.

Still, no one becomes comfortable with their lot in prison. “In the short time that I have been here, I have learnt that even the poorest, most destitute person in this jail prefers the freedom of her release to the security of these stone walls and the daily fare of bhatta doled out with a dollop of contempt,” Bharadwaj writes.

Gradually, she begins to aid and assist others in their legal work. Before her imprisonment she had worked as a lawyer for the poor, sometimes even as a legal aid but now she gets to observe the system from inside and provides many valuable suggestions for making legal aid more effective.

Yerawada, with its tiled roof, its flower beds, its trees and its open fields was a heaven compared to Byculla. “Long after being transferred to Byculla, I realised that Yerawada, being a central jail, and also because it has a large proportion of convicts who are long-term residents of the jail, has better financed and systematized medical facilities than most of the district jails.”

Besides, Yerawada grew its own vegetables and the cooks were female so food too was better than in most other prisons in India. It allowed her some peaceful time at night where she did most of her writing, including letters and notes. These and her chargesheet, running into hundreds and thousands of pages formed huge stacks in her cell. She meets organ harvesters, partners in crime and victims of crime, runaways from unhappy marriages, and victim of unacceptable love affairs which invite legal wrath. Ramzan and Eid show an unexpectedly inclusive side as many non-Muslims fast and the administration makes special arrangements for a non-vegetarian feast. Inmates improvise to make sandwiches, rolls, even cakes from the meagre supplies at the canteen. Over months, the shocks recede, even that of the experience of jhadti, of stripping naked: “One even becomes nonchalant about stripping in front of the three or four prisoners who are being taken to the court in the same van. The thoroughness of the search depends on the mentality and mood of the senior constable on duty. Many don’t like seeing prisoners completely naked and ask them to replace their upper clothing before they take off their lower clothing.”

There is also the “other” world, of murder, bribery, hafta and Number 2 ka dhandha, whose perpetrators seem to gel better with the administration and the police than political prisoners for whom rules are more strictly enforced. There are occasional communal flare ups, especially in the adjoining men’s jail, but also skits and performances like Gadvache Lagna (The Donkey’s Marriage), which satirise gods, kings, noblemen and feudal practices, and contain ample sexual innuendos.

Occasionally, Bharadwaj seems to suggest that “criminals” or those who commit murders or other crimes are somehow different from “normal” people. We must know that greed, lust, anger, envy are not peculiar to “criminals” at all and that sometimes all our behaviour crosses a line. The law changes and the line changes and certain behaviours become criminialised, while at other times, people slip unintentionally or are trapped. That is why 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.

You would call this collection of vignetters a delightful read except that each story contains immense misery and anguish. What the reader takes away is a deep scepticism about the necessity of prisons. As studies worldwide have repeatedly shown, prisons neither deter nor prevent crime, and they certainly do not reform or rehabilitate inmates. Still, if punitiveness 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.

Mahmood Farooqui, known for reviving Dastangoi, is currently writing a book about Indian prisons.

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