A Prison Memoir

Joydip Ghosal

13 Years–a Naxalite’s Prison Diary by Ramchandra Singh (Publisher Navayana) is an account of gaol, fetters, and revolution. Told from the core of the inner recesses of the heart this poignant memoir with its raw fragrance offers unprecedented acquaintance with the inmate’s life who was incarcerated due to political reasons. According to VaraVara Rao, this memoir raises naxalites’ spirit and this memoir in fact bears the fragrance of fire. The world was hell-bent on destroying his humanity and imagination but Ramchandra Singh evoked his empathy and humour in the dark cell. With the help of his friends, he smuggled out his diary. “This smuggled-out account exposes the bosom of gulag that India has become”. This representative smuggled-out saga about life and revolution is a deep reflection on society and a gripping chronicle of power play and oppression. While reading the memoir one gets acquainted with the feature that Foucault mentioned in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. It was a state of perennial visibility upon which the automatic functioning of power depended. Angela Davis wrote the foreword of the book. Of course, it is a stunning narrative of the journey one makes through the labyrinth of repression and debased dimensions of pain. Angela Davis is apt when she points out that the author of this memoir develops practices and acquires insights that salvage him from the horrible fate and dehumanising fate the prison is designed to produce. Though it was his own story it was connected with so many political events that were hallmarks of that particular time. Readers of the Western world are familiar with the writings of Antonio Gramsci, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Nelson Mandela, George Jackson, Assata Shakur, and Mumia Abu-Jamal. According to her they are largely unaware of the political turmoil in the seventies which rocked India. Unequivocally she asserted that as the world acknowledges the West’s marking of 1968 as a pivotal year of protests- from the student uprising in Paris to the agitation by athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos–“so also should the Naxalbari uprising of 1967 be globally recognised”. During his internment on the island of Ustica Antonio Gramsci prepared a political project which was emulated by political prisoners in Italy during the fascist regime. Ramchandra Singh’s account reveals the central debates within the political movement, his engagement with ordinary inmates. Readers also get a detailed understanding of the functioning of the prison. Prisons were veritable hellholes. It dehumanised convicts. After their coming out the prisoners were ill-prepared to cope with the harsh realities of life.

As a Naxalite under trial, Ramchandra Singh entered the Hardoi District Jail in September 1970. He was barely twenty then. His life of expanding prospects was dwindled to bleak canvasses of life term. The original title of the book was Thehre hue Terah Saal.

Ramchandra Singh hailed from a working-class background in Bangarmau village in the Unnnao district. Madhu Singh, a professor in the Department of English and Modern European Languages, University of Lucknow did the translation. It first appeared in SamkaleenDastavez, a short-lived literary journal in 1991. That journal devoted its second issue to that prison memoir.

It first appeared in Shaan-e- Sahara, a Hindi weekly from Lucknow. It was its revised version. Madhu Singh in the section Translator’s afterword wrote that during the thirteen years he spent across five prisons in Uttar Pradesh he internalised that jail had metamorphosed into an outdated institution. A heavy colonial hangover pervaded the entire atmosphere. “It was infested with corruption and all sorts of mal practices. An institution that benefitted none-neither the society nor the prisoners and their families, not even the bureaucracy”. No good could yield of a mega structure which wrecked people so thoroughly that they had little opportunity to reform or recuperate from the physical or mental suffering. This memoir also brings to the fore the multidimensional complex of relationship within the confined space of prison. Methods employed to destroy the spirit, ‘panopticon’ nature of prison, surveillance, isolation found prominent mention in this book. Once the prison gates had slammed shut behind the inmates, they learnt to live in a sort of nether world. They were stripped of autonomy. This world was invisible to the outside world. The prisoners were bereft of any identity. It was a prolonged existence of trauma and powerlessness. Translator did justice to the original writing. With evocative prose it retained the earthy flavour. This book is an important document to get a vivid account of prison life.

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Vol 57, No. 6, Aug 4 - 10, 2024