The Narendra Modi government of India utilized the first few months of the COVID-19- induced nationwide lockdown to counter a problem that was neither the rising number of COVID cases nor the constant deaths of migrant labourers walking thousands of miles to reach their homes without government assistance. The government, very strategically, used this lull when people were confined within their homes to hunt down the activists, especially students, who had been involved in the anti- National Register of Citizens and anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protests in late 2019 and early 2020. The Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and its extremely vague parameters of assessing threat were once again the talk of the town. The NRC itself had resulted in the detention centers filling up in Assam. People had also started wondering about the condition these “illegal immigrants” were being kept in. However, it need not be explained that these terrors had not been completely unforeseen. Draconian laws against anyone the State of India deemed to be a “terrorist” without an iota of proof, have always existed, as have detention centers full of men and women who barely even realized why crossing an extremely poorly patrolled border was such an unpardonable crime. Let us travel back to West Bengal of the 1970s to examine how India has handled dissent in past.
The MISA or the Maintenance of Internal Security Act was brought into existence in 1971 to help Prime Minister Indira Gandhi crack down on the opposition. This law – broad and ill-defined like the UAPA, POTA, TADA, AFSPA and OSA – was used without restraint because it gave the police sweeping powers to practice whichever degree of brutality that they saw fit to suppress the Naxal rebels. The Naxalite era, closely followed by the Emergency, made people realize, at least to some extent, that the possibility of being arbitrarily detained due to no fault of their own and without a fair trial, was not remote. Just as people can now get arrested for making a joke on stage or drawing a satirical cartoon about the ruling dispensation, back then people could get locked up and tortured simply for being young and for vaguely fitting the profile of a Naxalite. However, during the course of my research (particularly through a close reading of the prison memoirs of two Naxalite women—Minakshi Sen and Jaya Mitra), I have been convinced that political prisoners, or those who were arrested under that guise, were not the only ones who were more sinned against than sinning.
Despite being arrested under the MISA and being brutally tortured in police custody, neither of these women wrote about their own plight or that of their comrades. Jaya Mitra, in fact, wrote in her dedication, “The book belongs to those whose stories shape this book. Who am I to dedicate it?” So, who do these stories belong to and why did Mitra and Sen decide to write about them instead? The reason is one that not many people are aware of or want to think about too deeply. Prisons not only contain innocents as an exception or a mistake, prisons contain certain innocents as a rule.
A week before Shokhi Khatun is set to be released from jail, her three-year-old son asks her a very pertinent question, “If the warden doesn’t come with us, who will lock us up at home?” To Jaya Mitra, this question is not bizarre by any means. As she explains, Shokhi had been arrested exactly three years ago. These children, born and raised inside the prison, represent one of the many categories of non-criminal prisoners who undergo what Tabish Ahsan in his TISS survey calls an “invisible trial.” The other categories include non-criminal lunatics and those kept under safe custody. Minakshi Sen, Jaya Mitra’s cell-mate, speaks extensively about “Pagolbari” in her book Jailer Bhitor Jail (Jail Within the Jail, 2014) while Mitra explains the sheer irony of the term “safe custody” in her memoirs, Hanyaman. Both Mitra and Sen do appear in the narratives but only as inquisitive voices who coax out the life stories out of their fellow inmates.
Who are these fellow inmates and why are their stories so important? The reason for the latter question becomes evident when one ponders upon the question of Shokhi Khatun’s three-year-old-child. This child has never seen a dog or even a flowering tree. The reality that this child has been forced to inhabit is so severed from the reality beyond the prison walls that it is not just he who has a problem in visualizing what life might be like on the outside – it is equally impossible for those of us outside to perceive the reality that exists inside. John Edgar Wideman had remarked that “Prisons do their dirtiest work in the dark. The evil they perpetrate depends on a kind of willed ignorance on the part of the public” (as quoted in Doran Larson’s “Toward a Prison Poetics”) When the inmates of Presidency jail in Kolkata dared to complain to a visiting minister about the quality and quantity of food they were being provided, the minister exclaimed, “Isn’t it already more than enough that curry is being provided at all in jail? Rotten chapatis and water should have been enough.” Jaya Mitra was not taken aback by this. She understood that not only did the prison system believe that life should not be comfortable in prison, there was a tacit agreement among those who had never been inside prison that all the inmates inside deserved less inherently because they had been imprisoned… But while some may feel that it is justified to keep criminals half-starved, what justification could the state provide for claiming that the children of non-criminal lunatics were not supposed to be provided food at all? Why did non-criminal prisoners like Hasina, Madina and Hawa Bibi have to go on a hunger strike to demand 50 grams of mashed potatoes for their children? Why were they locked up in solitary confinement for three days at a stretch and why did Madina, a completely sane woman, have to be sent to the pagolbari on her fourth day in prison?
Mitra and Sen know that they cannot make the public see what they do not want to see, they just want to make sure that the public knows who it is that they are avoiding looking at. The truth is that there’s a sizeable portion of the prison population who are either completely innocent or have been disproportionally punished. It is widely known that the majority of the prison population in India is comprised of undertrial prisoners. According to the data provided by the National Crime Records Bureau, in 2011, 64.7% of the prisoners in India were mere undertrials. But even if one overlooks the plight of the undertrials and feels that the unjust treatment meted out to them is a well-deserved one because of their criminal records, one has to remember that non-criminal lunatics and the ones under the safe custody of law also had to live in similar conditions, fighting tooth and nail for a fraction of their basic sustenance. Jaya Mitra wrote extensively about raped minors who ended up in safe custody because the burden of providing the evidence was put on the victim herself:
“In most of these cases the accused is released because there’s no witness apart from the victim usually. Or even if he receives a seven-year sentence, he can challenge the court’s decision by appealing to the High Court while being out on bail. But the victim, in most cases, ends up in prison. Mostly because very few of their guardians actually fight the case or wish to take their daughters back home. No case is lodged against the girl. Therefore, there are no chances of getting sentences or reaching the end of that sentence. These girls stay in prison, the protective law of the state calls this a safe asylum. Safe custody. There’s no possibility of getting released unless the guardians of these girls provide a proof of their identity in court and take these girls back.” (translated)
Not only does this seem illegal, but the treatment that these girls under safe custody received in jail seems even more unbelievable. Though undertrials and convicts were supposed to be housed separately and though the former were further supposed to be classified into the categories of repeat offenders and newcomers, this rule could not be followed in the women’s section of Alipore jail due to limited space. Both the female ward and the pagolbari were smaller replicas of the larger prison structure, which meant that both of these wards had gates of their own where the entrants were checked once again despite being searched at the main gate of the prison. Even though the female ward and the pagolbari didn’t have an open pathway within themselves, the inhabitants of the former were very frequently transported to the latter under the directions of the matron of the female ward. The individual cells in the female ward were used to isolate the political prisoners or to punish those who rebelled or misbehaved, rather than to separate the criminals from the non-criminal inhabitants. Similarly the pagolbari had no divisive structures to separate the non-criminal lunatics from the criminal lunatics.
What this resulted in is another unthinkable atrocity that was a routine procedure in prisons. The ones in safe custody tried to grasp at any means of escaping prison no matter what the consequences might be. There was a well-oiled system of smuggling these girls out of prison into prostitution rings. All someone had to do was claim to be a family member of the girls in court and to agree to take her out of safe custody. The fact that these girls willingly chose this life for themselves to escape their “safe custody” in jail, said much about the quality of protection that the state was offering to these victims of rape and abuse. When Mitra tried to stop a girl called Noorjahan, who was in jail for being abducted and raped, by reminding her that one day her parents might come to take her back home, Noorjahan asked, “Do my parents even know that missing people can be found in prisons?”
The answer, is no. The fact that victims of rape are stuffed into prisons with hardened criminals, is not common knowledge to most people. It is also perhaps not common knowledge that it is deemed logical by the state to keep women with mental illnesses crowded together, chained to the metal bars of their cages completely naked irrespective of the season, inside the Presidency Jail. Vivid descriptions of the insides of pagolbari can be found in Minakshi Sen’s memoir. The doors of pagolbari were kept firmly shut for any outsiders. She and her fellow Naxalite inmates only managed to witness the horrors of pagolbari when they forcefully entered the premises while they were being brought into the prison after a court visit. Itwas used to imprison anyone who went against the prison authorities and not simply mentally unstable women. Sen had lost many dear friends to that place over the course of her stay in prison. Therefore, she needed to see how they were being kept. This is how she described her first impression:
“Where have I come? Why did I come here? I cannot remember. I don’t remember anything. A black veil has descended over my feelings and perception. But my eyes remain open. I can see everything clearly.
Cages! Not one, a few. . . No walls, no ceiling, nothing. And these cages hold human beings. Yes, these bodies belong to human beings! . . . The people inside the cages are all naked— all of them fastened to the bars with handcuffs. . . . The girl from Kumartuli, Shahnaj… is Shahnaj here? I search desperately. But all faces look the same. All emaciated skeletal bodies. They sit like bound animals with their knotted hair.” (translated)
She is unable to find Shahnaj or any of her other friends who had disappeared inside these walls. These caged bodies are quintessentially representative of what the Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life” in his seminal book, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. The logic that the state had in creating this institution of the pagolbari can perhaps be found in Agamben’s theory of the state of exception. Sovereign power, according to Agamben, asserts itself by pushing a select few away from the realm of law and politics. This excluded figure, or the homo sacer (a Latin term which could mean both the sacred man, or, the accursed man), is bound by the law even though he is abandoned by it. The homo sacer is denied the rights and protection that are granted by the state to its other citizens; hence the homo sacer can be killed off without the murderer being accused of homicide. They exempifly the state of exception, – which, by its very existence, confirms its contrary, – the realm of the law. Since these people are stripped of their political life, all they are left with is “bare life.” The Ancient Greeks differentiated between two distinctive concepts of life, bios or privileged life, and zoe or bare life. Agamben uses the latter concept to posit the idea of “bare life,” a life stripped of all privileges that are presumed to be inherent to the human existence, a life reduced to biological life and nothing more. What these writers saw in the prison, the pagolbari and other such spaces could be seen as a blatant display of the violence of the state in the form of the imposition of the state of “bare life” on the recalcitrant bodies of the prisoners. The pagolbari represents a similar space where every life is converted into bare life.
Agamben continues, though the homo sacer is supposed to occupy the periphery, he has gradually been dragged to the centre so that the sovereign can establish its rule by asserting its power over the exception. Therefore, the state of exception is no longer a temporary suspension of law, but a stable and generalized condition. For Agamben, the concentration camps during the Second World War were sites that gave this state of exception “a permanent spatial arrangement.” One could draw a parallel between these and our prisons, a permanent state of exception perpetuated by the state.
Interestingly enough, the inhabitants of the pagolbari sometimes had to be presented to the upper management or the visiting ministers to justify the existence of this establishment. During such occasions, the visitors were never taken inside the pagolbari for obvious reasons. The hospital for the female ward was the only space which the outsiders could visit and hence, this was where a few handpicked lunatics were brought and cleaned up for the interview, – imparting on them, perhaps, vestiges of what they have so violently been stripped of, – a simulacrum of bios or privileged life. Cleaning up not only involved washing off the feces and the urine that they used to live in but also cleaning the deeply infected wounds that they inflicted on one another, which remained untreated for months otherwise. This was possibly the only instance of the hospital truly functioning as one to keep up pretenses.
This hospital of the female ward of Presidency Jail, Old Alipore, is a highly significant site. For example, the moment Jaya Mitra is brought into Presidency Jail, she witnesses a bizarre sight. Due to her ailing health condition, Mitra is taken to the hospital where she first meets Shikha. Shikha is a threat who looms large over the prison population and occupies a sizeable space in both Mitra and Sen’s narratives because of her sheer brutality and vulgarity. When Mitra first lays her eyes on Shikha, she is standing at the hospital door, dressed in nothing but her petticoat. Mitra slowly comes to terms with two facts: the hospital is not truly a hospital, it’s Shikha’s home—the locus of all the power in the female ward and second, Shikha has perfected the technique of using her nudity to appall and terrorize the others. The hospital room is where Shikha and her cronies, Laalmoti, Shoroju, Meera and Arati, live permanently. Therefore, if any situation demands that the hospital be used for its intended purpose, this inconveniences their leisure time greatly. In this context, Minakshi Sen presents the horrifying tale of Shobha.
Shobha was not a criminal at all. She was the accuser, in fact. The man who had impregnated her had denied all accusations of ever having married her or having had a sexual relationship with her, which is why she had approached the court to seek justice. The justice which was offered to her stated that it was she who had to be confined inside the prison. Only after the child was born, its blood could be tested to find out its true parentage. Therefore, she was condemned to remain stuck in jail till her accusation could be proved or disproved. Shobha lived with the pipe dream that her husband would eventually take her back after the parentage of her child became evident. Nothing was more important to her than this unborn child. Unfortunately, her fantasy could not protect her from the horrific reality of childbirth in prison. When her contractions started, the other inmates forced Shikha and her gang to allow her to occupy a bit of space in hospital. But that didn’t mean Shikha was happy about sharing her room with a woman going through excruciating labour pains. She made her displeasure evident by loudly throwing expletives at her for having a child out of wedlock and laughing at her misery. But this was still the least of Shobha’s problems. She eventually did manage to give birth to a healthy baby boy and fell asleep, relieved. In the morning, she saw that her son was dead. A deep blue bruise bloomed over the baby’s neck. She realized the baby had been strangled while she was sleeping.
The nightmare didn’t end here. Shikha and her gang started discussing how Shobha herself had perhaps suffocated the baby in her sleep by rolling over the child. Soon the rumour spread like wildfire that she was the one who had murdered the child, not merely as a result of her carelessness but with malicious intent. So, this woman who had lost her child hours ago was now subjected to an interrogation by the Super and the O.C. Thankfully, she was not charged with the murder eventually because it was ascertained that the child had died of contracting tetanus. Naturally, Shikha had felt it unnecessary to provide any mattress or bedsheets to cover the rusted metal bed while a woman was giving birth. Jaya Mitra’s book has another horrifying account of a non-criminal lunatic who is brutally beaten up by Shikha, Laalmoti and Shoroju while she is heavily pregnant. The matron punishes her for fighting back by laying her down on the ground and fastening her legs to the bars, a few feet above the ground. The child dies simply because it cannot escape the womb while the mother is suspended in that position. The entire female ward can do nothing but wait for her screams to die out eventually. Ironically, Jaya Mitra ends this account with a caustic mockery of the question she was constantly asked after her release, “Did they torture you?”
This again leads us back to a key feature of these narratives: the agony of others. The pain inflicted on her or on Minakshi Sen is not the torture that haunts them. Mitra clarifies that she, as well as the other Naxal prisoners, knew what they were signing up for. They had consciously chosen to risk their lives. However, Shobha or Noorjahan or Shokhi Khatun had not. While Mitra was being transported to Behrampur jail, she asked her transporters where she was headed. On receiving no answers, she said, “Let them drive on. Wherever they go, there’ll be people there; people in pain.” This is her only consolation. That she’ll always have people who understand her, and whom she can understand in return. These people make her who she is. They constantly justify the rebellion that she was a part of before her arrest. So, when someone asks her “Did they torture you?” The “you” cannot just be her and the tortured body in question cannot just be her own. Hanyaman begins with a tortured body being brought to the Mednipur Central Jail in a stretcher. This body is Mitra’s own but somehow, she feels distanced from it; unable to feel the pain. In fact, the narrative is infused with a heavy dose of dark humour whenever she speaks about herself. Since she was considered a dangerous political prisoner, she was kept apart from everyone else in a cell for the entirety of the day, with the small exception of fifteen minutes during which she had to take a bath surrounded by male sepoys:
“They initially allowed me fifteen minutes of freedom from the cell to take a bath. It was my own fault that I lost that allowance. To ensure that I did not grow wings and fly away, past the eighteen feet tall wall, two sepoys were stationed to guard the bathing area near the well. Informing them that the begums of Murshidabad also had such servants and butlers accompanying them, has deeply wounded their egos.” (translated)
After this, a bucket was kept outside the bars of her cell, from which she had to scoop out water with a mug and bathe inside the cell itself. The constant lack of human company worsened her already poor health and she started experiencing nausea and a constant pain in her head. The following exchange occurred when the Jailer was forced to come and talk to her:
– Are you facing any problems?
– Do you think a person is confined to a pit for twenty-four hours a day to ensure that they don’t face any problems?
– If you are allowed to leave your cell for a while every day, can you promise that you won’t try to escape?
– I most certainly will try. I will try as much as I can. You hire sepoys to act as an obstacle for that exact purpose.
(translated)
Though Jaya Mitra’s health suffered greatly in jail, she vehemently refused privileges that the other inmates did not receive. This meant not staying in the hospital for prolonged periods of time despite the privileges that it provided. It was not only for the sake of punishment that Naxalite prisoners were kept isolated from the rest of the prison population, it was also because these educated prisoners knew about their rights and could demand facilities that the other prisoners didn’t even realize were meant to be made available at all. It was also easier for the Naxalite prisoners to revolt regarding the issue of being provided insufficient food or maltreatment by the warden than it was for the other prisoners because the former had very little to lose. This is why most hunger strikes began after having consulted the Naxalites. The jail authorities were clearly scared of prisoners like Mitra or Sen and thus, both of them used it to their advantage by aligning themselves to every common people’s revolt that happened inside the prison walls even if they were not directly affected by the issue.
Naxalite prisoners were not the only ones who displayed this spirit of selfless camaraderie. When Shoburjaan’s mother was sent to the pagolbari, another inmate called Shanti Mashi stepped in and took her place immediately. It must be remembered that child-rearing in prison was not an easy task. Mothers had to supplement their children’s food by making cuts to their own and had to constantly linger around the hospital premises and suffer the wrath of Shikha to beg for nutritious food like fruits or milk. Many hours of hard manual labour would fetch a single banana or guava. And this hard labour was expected from the non-criminal prisoners as well since no special diet was assigned to them. Yet, many women like Shanti Mashi adopted these abandoned children without a second thought. Shanti Mashi herself was arrested for being an illegal immigrant. Continued domestic abuse had made her escape her home and her country. On crossing the border, she had been promptly locked up. To this day, thousands of such women crowd the correctional homes of West Bengal.
Inexplicable acts of cruelty as well as kindness crowd the narratives of Hanyaman and Jailer Bhetor Jail, and both are equally hard to wrap one’s head around because both happen due to the construction of a collective “we”, transcending the confines of the “I”. In Everyday Life in Prison: Confinement, Surveillance, Resistance, Mahuya Bandopadhyay quoted a warder’s advice to new prisoners:
“… you are alone here, keu karur noy– you do not belong to anybody in any way, once you are here you are a prisoner- that is your identity till you walk out of the gates with a final release or bail order.” (translated)
But, as Bandhopadhyay’s own survey results prove, the jail fails to inculcate this mentality in the prisoners. It is impossible to adjust to the elusive rules and routines of everyday life in prison unless one fully immerses themselves into the prison society. This rings especially true for those who have not committed any crime and hence, have no release date in sight at all. Similarly, the efficiency of Shikha’s gang also stemmed from the loyalty that they displayed towards each other within the group. For example, whenever one member of that group developed a romantic interest in one of the other inmates, the others immediately relinquished their claims upon that person. Moreover, isolation cannot be practiced in most Indian prisons simply due to the lack of infrastructure and management. As Mahuya Bandhopadhyay reminds us—prison facilitates familiarity. One cannot live in close quarters with sixty other people where twenty people were supposed to be housed and not develop close relationships. The creation of a prison collective is an inevitability. But what is truly interesting is how these collectives are formed despite class, caste and religious differences. People who would never interact outside prison become inseparable inside it.
Shobha, – the death of whose son had driven her to madness, – was nursed to health by Nani, a 75-year old Pakistani woman who had been detained in the aftermath of the Bangladesh Liberation War. A prostitute named Bapi-di actually got herself arrested so that she could give Jaya Mitra some grapes and a few red glass bangles to cheer her up during her illness. She casually explained, “You weren’t being able to eat anything at all. Got two more clients than I had expected yesterday. If I had given these to those monsters at court to pass it on to you, you wouldn’t have received anything. So, I got arrested today.”
The world that Jaya Mitra and Minakshi Sen introduce us to is run by strange rules and inhabited by people who, in a more sensible world, would never be there in the first place. For example, Nilima was someone who not only frequented the jail a lot; she was also locked up in solitary confinement (degree-ghor) very often because it seemed to amuse the matron as well as Shikha. Nilima was both a lunatic and a prostitute and apparently switches between these two states of being. Minakshi Sen wrote:
“Nowadays other inmates get confused whether she has been hauled in for prostitution or for her insanity. Only when she occupies the degree-ghor beside us and becomes our neighbour, her voice, – cries, laughter or her screams make it evident why she has come here this time. Mad Nilima or Prostitute Nilima.” (translated)
Nilima is locked up so often that everyone stops questioning whether she deserves to be there at all; whether she deserves the torment that she receives regularly. Actual criminals like Shikha seem to be a minority in prisons and this is perhaps why Mitra and Sen feel comfortable while vanishing within the larger “we” of the prison community. They do not have to explain the scenarios of their own arrests to justify why the treatment that they received in jail was unfair. They both realize that there are scores of better stories within the prison walls which, once revealed to the outer world, would make even the staunchest believers of the present police system unsure about its efficacy.