Book: FROM PHANSI YARD : MY YEAR WITH THE WOMEN OF YERAWADA

Author: Sudha Bharadwaj

Published by: Juggernaut

Price: Rs 799

The prison diary has remained an enduring genre in all societies with its extraordinary capacity to document the self and interrogate power structures. The prison has been the school for leaders encountering the brutality of colonial and national regimes while simultaneously enabling them to make sense of and give expression to their experiences. Even when the experiences are mostly banal, tedious, repetitive and dull, they work as a catalyst for a deeper understanding of the larger social context in which men and women find themselves in prison for a variety of circumstances, from petty theft to grisly murder to political dissent. Sudha Bharadwaj brings an evanescent quality of hope and self-transformation as she documents jail life, what the Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, would refer to as “a cliché: dull, mundane, monotonous, repetitious, torturous in its intended animal rhythm of eating, defecating, sleeping... [and not] a story of sentimental heroism.” It is in the recursive quality of everyday detail that From Phansi Yard comes alive, giving the reader a graphic but undramatic account of the brutal isolation prison inmates suffer, of the social reality that brought them to the cell, and of the rare moments that cut through the dehumanised existence of prisoners.

The diarist, Sudha Bharadwaj, needs no introduction. As a trade unionist, lawyer and activist who dedicated her life early on to the cause of marginal groups, she was arrested in the contentious Bhima Koregaon case and remained in Yerawada jail for more than three years. It was in jail that she recorded her experiences under conditions of emotional and sensory deprivation. Yet it was in these circumstances that she encountered human will and resilience, the capacity to laugh and communicate, the paradox of religious prejudice, caste discrimination and solidarity. The entries are evocative and simultaneously informative — they are an exercise in documentation and annotation, a feature that makes the work of immense value.

The author organises her entries around seasons — Winter, Mango Days, Routines, Rituals, Rains and Winter again. The rationale for this, Bharadwaj says, is that only seasons and the changes that they brought in provided a real compass for marking time that otherwise dissolved and disappeared without a trace. In each of these segments, there are stories of incarceration that give the reader a light brush stroke of hard, material realities, the brutality of trafficking, the ineptitude of the jail bureaucracy and the abysmal quality of legal aid, the backstories of communal violence and attacks, not to speak of the individual stories of young women who found themselves in jail after retaliating against a jealous husband or a tyrannical mother-in-law.

Phansi Yard is more than just jottings of a sensitive prisoner. Like all jail diaries, it documents the everyday — the quality of food, limited access to clothing, the absence of privacy — with great attention and, alongside, records individual stories with real sensitivity, framing them within a larger social context. The references to the Pardhis are especially noteworthy; as members of a denotified tribe found in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, they are treated with derision and contempt in the jails with no chance of redress. Some of them converted in jail to Christianity and prayed with the Bible in their hands in search of a hearing date that never came!

Another excellent section is on jail bais or women constables who worked long, difficult shifts, juggling home and work, with no idea about rights or even the reforming aspects of jail administration. As a result, they function within the norms of power and patriarchy they were used to “along the natural fault lines of power.” While there is absolutely nothing preachy about the book, its sensitive and balanced interrogation of power and its misuse makes one wonder whether there is any rational basis for the kind of incarceration Bharadwaj and many of the inmates have suffered.

This book is a must read for anyone engaged with life in prisons, with its dynamics of prison administration and reform. It is not an easy read; it is difficult not to be moved by the brutality of human suffering and the experiences that Bhardwaj records without exaggeration. But it is a compelling one for it opens up a much larger history of incarceration and violence in modern India.