Poet, Marxist critic and activist, Varavara Rao (VV) has been continually

persecuted by the state and intermittently imprisoned since 1973, but he

never stopped writing during all these decades, even from within prison.
When he was subjected to ‘one thousand days of solitary confinement’
during 1985–89 in Secunderabad Jail, a leading national daily invited him
to write about his prison experiences.

While prison writing is a hoary tradition, no writer has had the opportunity
to publish his writings from jail. VV, however, did meet the demands placed
on him as a writer, despite constraints of censorship by jail authorities and
the Intelligence section.
He decided to test his creative powers in jail on the touchstone of his
readers’ response and expressed himself in a series of thirteen remarkable
essays on imprisonment, from prison.

Collected for the first time in English, the essays in Captive Imagination are
fiercely personal in their experience and evocatively universal in their
expression.
Varavara Rao is a well-known Telugu poet and an ideologue of Maoist
politics.
He is one of the founders of VIRASAM— Revolutionary Writers’
Association, the first of its kind in India, directly inspired by the Naxalbari
and Srikakulam adivasi peasant struggles. He has published ten volumes of
poetry and his work has been translated into a number of Indian languages.
He was also one of the spokespersons in the first ever talks held between
the Maoists and the Andhra Pradesh government in 2000.
Captive Imagination is simply phenomenal in the quality of its writing,
thought, politics and cultural reach.
—Ngugi wa Thiong’o
CAPTIVE IMAGINATION
 Translated from Telugu by
Vasant Kannabiran, K. Balagopal, M.T. Khan,
K. Jitendra Babu, N. Venugopal and Jaganmohana Chari

Foreword
by
Ngugi wa Thiong’o

PENGUIN
VIKING
VIKING

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Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies

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This collection published 2010

Copyright © Varavara Rao 2010

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-670-08257-5

This digital edition published in 2016.

e-ISBN: 978-8-184-75226-7

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or
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publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
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 CONTENTS

Foreword: That which the imagination makes possible

by Ngugi wa Thiong’o

1 The endless wait

2 All things bright and beautiful

3 All creatures great and small

4 Where the mind is free

5 Letter and spirit

6 Mother image

7 The truth that cannot be concealed

8 Stone walls do not a prison make

9 The agony and the ecstasy

10 Hope and despair

11 The word is the world

12 Suppressed freedom

13 A shared life

14 Context and constraints: An epilogue

Notes
Acknowledgements
 Foreword
That which
the imagination
makes possible
Ngugi wa Thiong’o

Among the many telling stories that Varavara Rao narrates in these
brilliantly written prison letters is that of an illiterate prisoner who squats by
a heap of newspapers each of which he holds in his hands and then stares
blankly at for a long time. Asked about it, he says that he is just looking at
the pictures. Rao reads more into this: through the senses of touch, sight,
smell and feeling, the prisoner can certainly grasp some news. The news
may not be necessarily what is in the newspaper but does exist in another
reality—in some ways more real and vital—provided by his imagination.
His imagination carries him into the spirit of the letters—which he cannot
read—and in so doing, takes him beyond the walls of his confinement. In
the man’s imagination, the words become the world.
The title, Captive Imagination, is ironic. Of all the human attributes, the
imagination is the most central and most human. An architect visualizes a
building before he captures it on paper for the builder. Without imagination,
we cannot visualize the past or the future. Religion would be impossible,
for how would one visualize deities except through imagination? How
would one undertake a purposeful journey without imagination, the
capacity to picture our destination long before we get there? The arts and
the imagination are dialectically linked. Imagination makes possible the
arts. The arts feed the imagination in the same way that food nourishes the
body and ethics the soul. The writer, the singer, the sculptor—the artist in
general, symbolizes and speaks to the power of imagination to intimate
possibilities even within apparently impossible situations. That is why, time
and again, the state tries to imprison the artist, to hold captive the
imagination. But imagination has the capacity to break free from temporal
and spatial confinement. Imagination breaks free from captivity and roams
in time and space.
The real subject of these letters is imagination. In prison, Rao looks for
meaning even in the apparently trivial and inconsequential. He looks at
birds that fly and they speak to him of freedom. He looks at nature, flowers,
and he sees images of motion, change and growth. Through the windows,
Rao can behold the enormity of a sky that no prison can contain. Nature that
speaks of endless motion, interconnection of being and endless possibilities
is his companion. He also finds companionship in history: from a whole
array of Indian writers of times past and present to imprisoned artists and
intellectuals across cultures and continents. These voices from the world
range from the Korean poet Kim Chi-ha to the African American George
Jackson. Nelson Mandela speaks to him from South Africa as the very
image of a spirit that would not die or quit the struggle. Pablo Neruda from
Chile tells him that the word is born in blood, the word is blood itself. In the
American Walt Whitman he hears the call and the challenge of solidarity:
Who but I should be the poet of comrades? The Russian Yevtushenko tells
him that a poet’s word should cut through silence like a diamond. In solitary
confinement, it is Faiz Ahmed Faiz of Pakistan who assures him that those
who brew the poison of cruelty may put out the lamps ‘where lovers meet’
but ‘they cannot blind the moon’. Varavara Rao experiences this and exalts
in recognition of the truth in Faiz’s words:

Faiz has written this poem for me, in this condition. Yesterday afternoon, marking the beginnings of summer, I bathed
and walked in the yard. I saw the sun set before me and the moon rising behind me. The cool breeze blowing in the
moon’s farewell after lock-up is exactly as Faiz describes it—on the roof’s high crest the loving hand of moonlight
rests. As the lights go off, the moonlight glides like mercury over my body and mind.

On a personal level, I felt touched that my own words, forged in similar

places of confinement in Kenya, reached him.
These letters from prison are really from the heartland of resistance. They
are a celebration of words that sing solidarity with those who struggle
against confinement in and outside prison walls. They are lyrics to freedom
and social justice everywhere. Imprisoned in order not to make history with
others, the poet, through words, still makes history. Rao’s book, Captive
Imagination, stands in the frontline of resistance literature in the world. It
speaks to the human will to freedom.

Irvine, California
November 2009
 1 The endless wait

A day without toil

A night without love
A waiting on the shores of history …

Of the four days of life for which we have begged, two are lost in hope and
the rest in waiting, said Bahadur Shah Zafar. In life outside, there is action
to separate the hope from the waiting. Action could, of course, lead you to
more hope and more waiting. But, lost in activity, time seems to slip
through your fingers, your toes, from before your very eyes. Life in prison
is not like that.
You are no longer a part of social practice, of history in the making. You
are but a spectator, a witness to the present, a symbol of the past. Time
reminds you of this every moment.
This morning we rose early, at half past five. It was a rare opportunity
today—to watch the live telecast of the opening ceremony of the Seoul
Olympics. (It was also rare for me to spend some time with the detainees).1
At 5.30, white letters appear on a blue screen: 05.31 … 32 … 33. Below
that an announcement goes on and off, declaring that the next transmission
would be at 05.45. To confess the truth, what I like most about television,
with which I have made acquaintance in jail, is the sight of the electronic
seconds flashing on the blue screen at the beginning of each transmission.
As the seconds flash past they bring to mind the beauty of birds flying
across the morning sky. I wonder whether you have ever counted seconds.
A second is but the blinking of an eyelid; outside prison has anyone ever
counted seconds thus, for even five minutes?
Except in love, there is no such waiting in one’s life, save in prison. The
difference is this—in love, waiting is intense, a longing filled with sweet
desire. In prison, waiting is a habit turning slowly into addiction. Often, one
begins to wait for the petty and the inconsequential.
Even in normal life, it is hardly worth one’s while to look forward to each
day. Prisoners who have turned regulars—who know that they will be back
again, and yet again—what do they look forward to?
Unlocking … chai … ablutions … khichri … rounds … and the locking
or unlocking according to each one’s needs … labour (for convicts) … chai
… ginthi … batni … locking …2
This is the prisoners’ routine every day, from sunrise to sunset.
And during sleepless nights, the pain hidden behind words is not
extinguished like the beedi that goes out when you speak. And regardless of
the sympathy or the sharing of joy and sorrow, the prison remains pitch-
dark and empty of love.
But even outside prison, what does this system offer people that can give
them knowledge, wisdom and happiness? Writing about cinema,
Premchand remarked that during the All India Congress Committee session
in Bombay all the cinema halls remained empty. (Those were the days of
Mohandas Gandhi. In these days of Rajiv Gandhi, the same political party
celebrated its centenary in the same city. Perhaps people did not need to go
to the cinema this time around with Amitabh Bachchan decorating the
Congress dais.)
Where there is no possibility of an activity that would impassion the
youth or the aged, that would allow the mind to expand and grow, in such a
society isn’t it naive to expect that someone should spare a thought for the
needs of convicts, the unemployed, the women imprisoned in their own
homes?
 In the prisons of Andhra Pradesh, political prisoners wait in the same
manner as the regulars wait. They wait to return again and again to prison,
and in between, to be in police custody. What is the liberty they wait for? In
the present situation even this privilege of waiting for liberty is reserved for
a fortunate few. The political prisoner has to choose between visible
imprisonment in jail and the invisible freedom of going missing.3 Replying
to the prosecutor’s counter-affidavit filed in the Warangal Court, I said that
I was asking for bail because these three years in jail had taught me that
freedom was more valuable than life.
My daily routine may not be like that of the other prisoners. It may be
different even from the routine of the other political prisoners in the jail.
Technically, mine is not solitary confinement. But these thousand nights I
have been alone. During the day there are few with whom I can speak.
Birds, trees, plants and the sky keep me company. The papers arrive.
Friends send me books every week. I have no work to do except read.
And yet my unconscious self is filled with echoing chimes, the pulse of
this waiting …
I have nothing to wait for really, between the unlocking and the locking
of my cell door, save the day’s papers. I wait for the water to come. I wait
for the time to go to court. For the bell that announces the batni. For the
rounds to finish so that my papers can arrive. If they don’t, it is time for the
ginthi. And so there is always something or the other to wait for.
Waiting for the news on the radio. And if the radio in our block refuses to
cooperate will I be able to hear the news on the Circle radio?4 Fear that the
Circle radio might be tuned to some other programme. Waiting for the
Indian Express that comes in the evening.
However, every afternoon, whether I wait or not, Vividh Bharati comes
on the Circle radio. The music is low and it does not disturb my study. It is
the old-fashioned lot like me that puts in the song requests. They always
play old, familiar, bearable tunes. When Chaudhvin ka chand ho ya aaftaab
ho plays on the radio, I could somehow reconcile it with the late afternoon.
But I was caught off my guard by Aadha hai chandrama raat aadhi, which
left me wondering for a minute where I was, what time of day or night it
was! (On our way to my village after our marriage we had halted in a
meadow midway between her village and mine on just such a night. As we
had not yet learned to speak to each other, we were too tongue-tied to say
‘Reh na jaaye teri meri baat aadhi …’.5
 Chalam once declared that a certain writer’s Telugu rendering of
Gitanjali had spoilt his taste for chicken curry.6 I too, have grown
accustomed to these untimely tunes. But to the best of my knowledge, the
Telugu radio plays the song Entha haayi ee reyi nindeno enni naallakee
brathuku pandeno7 only on full moon nights. Then, waiting for that song in
my solitary cell, I greet the moon from the window. Such an experience will
not come your way unless you wait for the song. As for the dark nights,
alas! That star in the corner, Angaraka or whatever it is called, watches me
as I pace in my cell tirelessly through the night

Singing in solitary glory in that remote corner of the dark sky

More beloved than the others
What are you called, my pretty star?
Whatever your name
There is on earth a signal
Far more precious
That lights my path.

waiting for the hearings in court …

Those visits, allowed once a week, last half an hour within the range of
listening ears and under watchful eyes.

Waiting …
When the day comes
From noon onwards
The big hand of the clock
Rises on its toes
For a fleeting moment
And listens
For the footsteps of time
In my heart beat.
Neither one nor two,
Not a sound and its echo
But a call and a response,
Maybe the signals of two hearts
From long parched silences.
We stretch out cupped palms
To cool springs.
Words touch the heat
Of anguished lips
To evaporate instantly without a trace.
It is but our selves
Our familiar selves and yet,
The moment the heart unknots itself
Silence bursts forth.

My visitor and I are trapped in the maze-like interview,

Unable to speak to each other

Unable to gaze at each other
Strangers amidst a crowd of foes
Until …
Like milk boiling over suddenly
Before our eyes
Into the fire,
A sudden smell warns us that time is up.
Startled from our preoccupation
We wake realizing
That this is but the sound
Of our waiting
Buried in despair.

In prison they strike each hour of the day. At night they even strike each
quarter of the hour and proclaim: Sab theek hai! Wave dissolving into wave,
the silence of the prison becomes a disturbed lake.
But these strokes are relentless on the waiting mind that knows no sleep
—like the nails hammering Jesus to the cross. Then I begin to feel surely
that Ngugi wrote his Prison Diary8 for my sake. And I begin to understand
how precious is the freedom Mandela has been waiting for, for twenty-six
years. I recall Sahu’s literary endeavour in the Warangal jail over the last
five years.9 Then I think of the Jodhpur detainees whose waiting knows
neither beginning nor end.10 Bengal prisoners from afar11 and the
revolutionary leader Ravoof in the next cell blaze in my mind like
undertrial Mandelas.
In November 1974, in this very jail, I saw Bhoomaiah and Kishta
Goud.12 They had been waiting for the last two years. For what? For
execution?

For revolution.
Fixing their lives
To the noose …

In that way, they twice climbed up to the gallows and down again, and
spent their time waiting till 1 December 1975.
For a civilized code of law composed in a cultured society, condemning a
person to a solitary cell, to wait for years on end to be hanged to death, is
inhuman.
Only those who have experienced it can comprehend that the waiting
itself is punishment while one waits in prison for freedom.
It is not as if the waiting or the prolonged detention depresses,
demoralizes or breaks the spirit of prisoners, especially political prisoners.
Nelson Mandela has spoken only of the boredom of his long imprisonment.
It has not destroyed his spirit, it has not defeated him.
The imaginative political prisoner’s waiting is like an eternal flame. It
burns bright and clear as hope, flickering constantly in the winds of liberty,
never for a moment ceasing its vigil.
It was thus, perhaps, by one of those apt but strange coincidences that a
friend from Delhi sent me, as New Year’s greeting, a copy of the
transcreation into Telugu of the well known Soviet writer Simonov’s poem
‘Wait for me’, that I had done way back in 1965:13

Wait for me, and I’ll come back,

Wait and I’ll come.
Wait through autumn’s yellow rains and its tedium
Steel your heart and do not grieve,
Wait through winter’s haze,
Wait through wind and the raging storm,
Wait through summer’s blaze.
Wait when others wait no more,
When my letters stop,
Wait with hope that never wanes,
Wait and don’t give up.

Wait for me and I’ll come back;

Patience, dear one, learn.
Turn away from those who say
That I’ll not return.
Let my son and mother weep
Tears of sorrow,
Let friends insist that it’s time,
That you must forget.
Do not listen to their kind
Words of sympathy,
Do not join them if they drink
To my memory.
Wait for me! Let those who don’t—
Once I’m back with you—
Let them say that it was luck
That had seen us through.
You and I alone will know
That I safely came
Spiting every kind of death,
Through that lethal flame,
Just because you learned to wait
Staunchly, stubbornly,
And like no one else on earth,
Waited, love, for me.
 2 All things bright and
beautiful

You do not have to come to this particular jail to see that it is a monument
to the fragmentation of the Communist Party in 1965.1 But to understand
that it is a living testimony to communist traditions and culture you must
breathe the air of this enclosed space.
Many of the seedlings they planted in those days may not be alive now.
They have died before their time, some by force and some, following the
course of nature. But the few that have survived and grown into trees have
become sources of friendship, and illustrate the dialectics of nature to those
who speak of it, and come to jail through their involvement in class
struggle.
Till 1973 there was little I knew of the shape of a jail, the high wall
surrounding it, the huge gate set within which there was a small gate—like
the mouth of a python. From 1968, I often used to pass by the jail gate,
either on my way to college or on my way to the press on Srjana work.2 But
unless you go in once or you have someone of your own inside, how do you
develop a bond with a jail?
In 1970, I met Kaloji3 once in jail, but that was in the interview room.
Till then I had thought that all the cells in the jail (I did not know then that
there were barracks too), were only as high as that little gate at the entrance.
I had thought that there would be scarcely enough room to sit or even to
sleep huddled. I had thought that it would not be possible even to stand up
erect in jail. And so, when I entered the Warangal Jail in October 1973 as a
detainee, I went prepared to live with bowed head and cramped limbs.
To my surprise, the courtyard was full of neem trees, and rose and
jasmine bushes. The room in which I was had a high roof and windows on
both sides. Whichever way I looked, there were flowers, creepers and trees.
It was not the season for jasmine, but the roses were in full bloom.
The plentiful light, fresh air and flowers that I enjoyed there brought
home even more acutely the freedom I had lost and the loneliness I had
gained. Almost as if to make people believe that flowers bloom even in jail,
I used to pick a kerchief full of roses for my visitors before every interview.
It was when I came to this jail (Musheerabad Jail in Secunderabad) as an
accused in the Secunderabad Conspiracy Case4 in 1974, that I saw

Birds perched on the barbed wire of the jail,

Jasmine shoots springing up from prisoners’ sweat.

And, as my poet friend, M. T. Khan, said,

The moon trapped by the barbed wire of the jail.

 Till then I had not learnt to take heart in these silent tidings. Never before
had I had the kind of opportunity that I seemed to have now, to understand
the minds of trees and the languages of birds—not in Musheerabad Jail nor
in any other jail where I had been, nor during the Emergency, nor among
companions and comrades whose literary tastes and political consciousness
were close to mine, regardless of how much time I spent with them.
From this courtyard where I am now, whether there are people or not, if I
am to speak of close friends who know my most intimate thoughts, then I
must speak of plants, trees and birds.
That a courtyard could be so beautiful! Mango trees flank the entrance.
There used to be a jasmine bower entwined in the mango tree in front of the
steps. This is not Kanva’s ashram, of course, but as Basavaraju Appa Rao5
sang,

A jasmine creeper weaving around the mango tree.

Now perhaps like Sakuntala it has pined away in separation.

Enter and you approach a water tank. There are custard apple, guava,
lemon and pomegranate trees. In 1974 these trees were absent. It was here
that, one day, Cherabanda Raju, firmly stamping on his clothes, told KVR,6
‘Look, this is the right way to wash clothes!’ and fell to the ground. While
he was being treated for the fall, they discovered that he had a tumour in the
brain. Whenever I approach the water tank I feel that the pomegranate buds
are blooming in his memory.
When children play for long under trees, one often hears mothers
affectionately reprimanding them: ‘What treasure have you buried under the
tree?’ Often, it is said out of irritation if the girls are not helping with
household chores. In the case of boys, it is because they are not on time for
their meals. As for me, call it a fond illusion, but I seem to sense my
mother’s living presence in the trees outside my window, watching me from
the open sky, the mango trees, her outstretched arms.

Providing new tastes again and again

My mother’s hands are like honey.
Telling me her story time and again
My mother’s voice is a melody.
Drawing me close
Those hands turn into the vision of spring—
The koel’s song
The rasa’s taste
The cool shade

In the years 1986 and ’87, in summer, I used to read mostly under the
shade of those trees. The mango tree outside my window fell during the
gale of 21 February 1988. Then I truly felt as if mother earth had lost one of
her arms. Such a big tree uprooted so easily! As the hailstones pelted down,
as the strong wind blew and the rain fell, the slender jamun plant bound to a
bamboo moved restlessly, but the string did not snap. The guava tree rocked
back and forth wildly, as if possessed. Only the stalk was left of the rose
bud that would have bloomed in a few days. The petals fell scattered around
the plant.
As I said, not all the trees in this courtyard were planted by human
beings. Some of them were planted by birds. What was strange was, that
beside each tree that grew thus because of birds, another kind of tree grew
alongside. In a jasmine bed there was an almond growing, in another, a
soapnut tree, a kanuga, not to speak of the rela. And in the rubbish heap in
one corner, there grew a neem, a jasmine, a tamarind and a rela. There are
so many plants growing here that I do not know some of their names.
(Perhaps Cattamanchi Ramalinga Reddy should not have criticized Potana’s
description of the forest in his Gajendramoksham.7)
During the three summers that blazed down on us, tending the trees we
had planted was like caring for infants. With joy, I watched the green tip of
the jackfruit grow inch by inch, picked off the worm-eaten leaves of the
jamun, and looked at the neem trees shooting into the sky, measuring the
days of my imprisonment against them. Watering the plants on summer
evenings, talking to the birds that fearlessly join me and gracefully drink the
water I pour, a thought flashes through my mind bringing a feeling of
shyness in its train: this love of plants I have learnt so late is one I must
cherish privately. A love which must never be shown in public except as the
proverbial three flowers that bear six fruits.
The monsoon that had failed for some years came at last this year. And
so, during the interview, I produced a list of flower and fruit seedlings that I
wanted. Orugallu Chinni,8 giving me subabul and parijatha plants, said,
‘This time I will get you some fine crotons.’ I said, ‘Don’t bring me
crotons, bring flower and fruit trees.’
Whenever I wanted to plant trees at home, or now when I want to plant
them around my cell, it is Kalipatnam Rama Rao’s short story ‘Jeevadhara’
that I recall. He satirically describes the luxury of a rich man’s garden
where only crotons and bougainvilleas grow, where there are no fruit or
flower trees.
Chinni asked me, ‘Why flowers then?’ By that she meant if flowering
plants spread fragrance, crotons were pleasing to the eye. I only said, ‘The
forest division is next your office. Get me some champak, jasmine and
sapota.’ Our Aruna9 remarked, ‘They give eucalyptus free of cost, but there
is nothing else to buy there!’ It is not just bore wells, but eucalyptus too,
that suck out the strength from the earth.
To plant trees in a remand jail is perhaps the most selfless occupation.
After all, who wants to remain for long in a jail? Warders and regular
prisoners like me of course, do not have much choice. In general, whether
prison officers or prisoners, people do not stay long enough in this kind of
jail to enjoy the fruits of their labour.
In jails everywhere, there are only prisoners and guards. Lock-ups, high
walls, electrified wires running over the walls, gates every ten feet, bells,
undertrial and convict (CT) numbers, prisoners’ uniforms, khaki uniforms.
In these surroundings which perpetually remind you of your imprisonment,
pomegranate buds nod their heads and tell you secrets; lemon trees
blossom, guavas are half-eaten by parrots, the high branches of the mango
hide koels. The custard apple fruit is like tinkling laughter. Who knows
which Sabari tasted the fruit and sent it here? Black jamuns brought in by
birds. All these are your strength, your support.
One morning a rose bush puts forth a bud. Remember when you planted
that cutting, wiping your mother’s tears in your heart, there was a desire for
a new life to take root? And wherever a heart is wounded and stitched
together again, a new dawn seems to be twittering to life.
As I write of that experience it is as if the pollen of those wounds bursts
forth from my fingertips. Whether in humiliation, or amidst felicitations, in
suffering or in joy, the spirit of these trees as I have understood it in these
last three years has infused my tastes and my values.

When a curled-up flower

Meets a cluster of thorns carried by the wind
Or is tickled awake by a ray of sunshine
It’s the pollen’s passion that spreads
On our hearts and spills over.

It seems as if my feeling for these plants is like the bond experienced by

O. Henry’s invalid with the leaf outside her window.10
There was a mango plant in the same patch as the lemon tree. It sent out
its branches from under the lemon tree and grew tall. We trimmed and cut
the branches, and it bore fruit. I thought I would plant this mango that had
grown in the shade of the lemon in the same spot where the other mango
tree had fallen. I dug deep with care. This was on 18th September.
But the roots of the mango were firmly twined with those of the lemon.
When pulled out, some roots were severed. The memory of a friend who
had been operated and had lain groaning in the agony of nerves cut apart—
this very day three years ago—began to dance before my eyes. I steeled my
heart and planted the mango in the bed of the fallen tree.
The previous day, I had watched on television a programme on how to
plant grafted mango trees. Although this was not a graft, I observed all
precautions. I also watered the plant in the prescribed manner.
Just as my dear friend had closed his eyes forever under my very gaze,
that other dear friend, the mango, also withered and died within days.
Like the space in my heart, the plot outside my window lies empty,
waiting for a companion.

From bare stalks haunted by

Memories of fallen flowers
Fresh shoots appear.
Hidden in the leaves of the present
The invisible future
Koel-like, pours forth
The pain-drenched sweetness
Of the past.
 3 All creatures great and
small

Isn’t it for better for the bird to lose rather than keep the wings that carry it
into the trap in the search for grain?
—Premchand

Surely it can’t be a pleasant thing for birds, as symbols of freedom, to be in

jail? And yet how can I claim that they are not cheerful and contented?
Whenever I see pigeons inside the jail I wonder. (Perhaps, as Bertrand
Russell put it, I am merely attributing my emotions and state of mind to
them.) Memories of bygone days come rushing back when I look into their
eyes or watch their movements.
Bhaava sthiraani, jananaantara souhridaani1 —the hamsapadika verse
from Abhijnana Sakuntalam flashes through my mind. And the sight of
these pigeons reminds me, not of people forgotten, but of the bonds that
must be forgotten; not of past lives but of the past trapped in the present.
 The perturbed murmur of the lone dove from its nest sounds like the
anguished cry of a lover searching for his true love. Some time ago,
Suraiya, the Hindi film actress of old, spoke of her first love in the
Illustrated Weekly. She describes movingly the despair caused by religious
beliefs dividing those whose hearts unite them. Since then, the murmur of a
pigeon evokes for me the distant pain of the solitary lovebird on Marina
Beach.
When my cell was near the Phansi Ghat (gallows), there were pigeons
cooing everywhere—perched on trees, on the wall around the gallows, all
around the water tank above the prisoners’ kitchen. When I was shifted to
this part of the jail in March 1986, there was not a single pigeon here. One
summer afternoon, a pigeon fell to the ground electrocuted by the wires
running along the top of the walls. That was the first pigeon I saw around
here. Like a piece of the moon falling to earth, a dead bird fell at my feet.
But there was no prince to claim the bird as in the Jataka tale,2 nor did I
have the power to bring it back to life.
But then, I don’t quite understand how these surroundings have grown so
congenial over the last two and a half years and why there are pigeons
everywhere now. In the trees, in the courtyard in front of my cell, on the
barrack ventilators, before the staff kitchen, near the water, above the ledges
of the barracks behind my cell—they are everywhere, like blue-grey clouds
that have come down from the sky. The sounds—their rustling against the
tin window shades, pecking at each other, the fluttering of wings—form a
background to the silence of my solitary existence. They have grown so
familiar that I have stopped going to the back of my cell fearing that I may
disturb them when I walk briskly in the evening. Sometimes I go there,
stepping softly, barefoot, to watch them. Even at night, as I pace inside my
cell, I do so in perfect silence, for fear of disturbing the pair of pigeons
nesting in the ventilator.
My days and nights slip by, spent in these lovely pigeonholes, and as I
drift into sleep

Dream pigeons rising from my mind

Alight on my eyelids,
Fearful perhaps
Perhaps careful
Lest my opening eyes
Ensnare them or clip their wings.
This is no sleep—
That you know, too
But then, I am afraid they are
More doves of peace than birds of freedom—
They might even be accustomed
To imprisonment
Picking morsels near the kitchen
Pecking at grains under the trees
Quenching their thirst in the plant beds.
Looking heavily into my eyes
They tread the earth clumsily
Like hens or peacocks
That can only fly up to a tree
Or into their nests.
I do not see these birds
Flying into the sky
As the silence of dusk
Fills the lock-up,
I only see pigeons huddling in the corner.
Fresh winds hot with the breath of conviction
Never blow across these walls.
Blindfolded, bullock-like
Chewing the cud of old memories
I crave the winged speed of letters
Which, hampered by melting thoughts
Stubbornly refuse to stir.

One morning, a pigeon sat on the kitchen roof. It looked helpless. It kept
fluttering its wings but wouldn’t move when I waved my hand or sprinkled
some grain. I took it into my hands and saw that it was badly wounded.
Someone must have hit it with a stone. I brought it in and fed it. I kept it in
the ventilator safe from the eye and the hunger of the cat. But it died the
following morning. As I buried the dead bird under the lemon tree, I
remembered the lines I had within after the Meerut riots.3
After visiting Meerut, Asghar Ali Engineer made a significant comment
in the Indian Express. He said that while the Muslims told you how many
Muslims had died and the Hindus gave you the number of Hindus dead, the
human beings who could tell you how many human beings had died were
rare. I wrote:

In the land where Valmiki’s tears over

a dead curlew grew into an epic.
In the times of Salim Ali, for whom
birds were his eyes and wings and his very life,
Why this dearth of humans who love
other humans?

In a culture of inequality, the value called love is always the first

casualty. You don’t change the system merely by shedding tears of
sympathy. Nor do you change it by patronizing, reacting or commenting.
Isn’t that why Marx said that you cannot change society unless you become
part of the change?
There is an awful silence here in summer, more silence than in other
seasons. The sound of changing gears on the Hyderabad–Secunderabad
road in front of the jail, of vehicles halting, of noises ranging from those of
horns to punctures to tyre bursts and sometimes even accidents, can be
heard. In the midst all this, a koel, drunk on tender and juicy shoots as the
Telugu poet Potana puts it, visits our courtyard, bringing pleasure.
A train chugging in the distance, sounds of its arrival and of its departure
followed by the quickening throb of its gathering speed; factory sirens
measuring out workers’ lives—signal to me the passing of time. Through
the it all, koel’s song—calling sweetly from the top of the mango tree
behind my window. Either enamoured of the sweetness of its own voice or
echoing the song of another koel, the song, once begun, is without end.
These summer evenings are particularly pleasant. Locked up even before
sunset, I stand at my window till the star from the corner greets me in the
dark, or the moonbeams filter through mango branches from over the prison
walls, or the ginthi is rung and the radio begins to play, and the invisible
koel’s spring song reaches my ears.
No, not all my companions here are dear to me. To say that they are would
not be true. And though I have lived with them all these days, no bonds
have sprung up between us.
There are so many cats in this jail. One or two cats must have entered the
jail unnoticed but now they have multiplied inside. They never try to go out.
Perhaps they have no need to.
Unlike the elephants that ravage the peasants’ sugar cane fields in
Chittoor because the forests have vanished, or the hyenas that go hunting
for newborn infants in Anantapur, the cats here have no need to hunt for
mice. Besides, these cats have no fear even of dogs. Barracks and cells
don’t have any doors, only iron bars. So the cats here do not fear people nor
do they fear being locked up. And they have no need to growl or look
angry. They only fight amongst themselves for food or for carnal needs, and
it appears as if they do not need to struggle even for survival.
Many of the prisoners tend the cats with a lot of affection. They feed
them milk and rice and curds, brush their coats, carry them under their arms
or on their shoulders and pet them. On Sundays, wherever the cats go, from
the godown where the meat is distributed, to the kitchens and to the
barracks, they receive meaty welcomes and bony greetings. On those
evenings how heavy the cat’s tread is, eyes glittering between those half-
closed lids!
I have no great fondness for cats, nor do I dislike them. But, as the curds
in our mess grew continuously less, I suspected that it must be because
someone was adding more water to the milk, or a smaller amount of milk
was being set aside for curds, or someone was drinking it up. We could not
discover the exact cause and carried out all kinds of inquiries. At last we
discovered that one of the detainees, out of sheer love for his adopted child,
was keeping the cupboard unbolted and allowing the cat to have its fill of
curds. The man himself was not particularly used to eating curds. So from
then on I took on the responsibility of guarding the curds. The cat, realizing
that I did not go to sleep till the wee hours, would come slowly on velvet
feet, but then I would awake instantly at the sound of the lid on the pot of
curds falling.
If the cat is annoyed with me it must be because of this cautiousness of
mine. But, now, ever since last week, I long for the cat to enter my cell
confidently rather than hesitantly. A mouse has got in among my books and
magazines. I feel disinclined to dust and tidy them, for every day, I find
more shreds of paper torn up by the mouse. Sometimes I see the mouse
disappearing. It usually remains safely hidden among the books and papers.
A writer reviewing Sri Sri’s Anantham said that every artist should learn
to edit his experience before speaking out.4 Only then can the editor who
agrees to publish his ideas have some peace. I think I answered the
questions of the Indian Express reporter as a responsible and disciplined
political prisoner should. But he has done some editing—perhaps due to
constraints of space and time. Since it was not the jail interview, it was only
the editor’s pen and not a censor’s scissors that cut it. I wonder what the
mouse thought about it all as it gnawed the paper. I shook off the shredded
bits and let the mouse go its way.
And now the mouse has taken to studying the Ramnagar Conspiracy
Case papers.5 The charge sheet and other documents which I got fourteen
months ago were kept in a plastic bag. A whole year has passed. Perhaps it
was full of flavour for the mouse, as aged rice is for the human. This
morning, I finally made the effort and pulled out the papers from the plastic
bag. Not a single paper had escaped its attentive teeth. But the mouse’s
remarks were marginal.
What could happen to this case because a mouse had struck at it? After
all it was not closed even after the judge struck it down. The second
additional metropolitan sessions judge struck down the detention saying he
had no jurisdiction either to try or hold up the stay order brought by the
prosecution from the high court and the Supreme Court. I am not so naive
as to believe that this mouse can unravel the TADA6 net and rescue me like
the mouse which freed the lion in the Mitralabha fable.7 Small comfort
though, that the mouse can set its teeth on the letters already on the paper,
but it cannot cook up new words or add new numbers. It certainly cannot
change A 4 to A 14.8 This is as much as one can ask for. It is a thousand
times more than anything that I can hope for.
 4 Where the mind is free

Balagopal1 sent me a copy of his book on D.D. Kosambi’s historiography,

with a note: ‘While not in a position to participate in the events that shape
history, you may make use of this temporary rest period in studying history
instead.’
I feel that all prisoners of conscience continually suffer the agony of
being barred from the making of history. Hence the anxiety to make the best
possible use of the imposed ‘rest’; their helplessness gradually turns the
prisoners into bookworms.
Taking into consideration the alternatives available, the study of history
can take two paths. Denied the opportunity to shape the future, one can
study ancient history, that is, study the ancestors for greater clarity. This
creates a craving for books. On the other hand, having been tossed into jail,
removed from the political track, banned from participating in the shaping
of the present, I now read newspapers hoping to fill the hunger for
information about day-to-day events.
 Ngugi wa Thiong’o vividly describes this state of mind in his Detained:
A Writer’s Prison Diary. For a political prisoner, newspapers provide a
living contact with the outside world and keep him aware of the march of
history. For people behind bars, themselves invisible to the people outside,
these newspapers are one-dimensional windows to the world outside.
People addicted to reading newspapers, particularly those living in urban
areas, do not have to wait long to obtain the object of their addiction. At
home, newspapers woke me up each morning. In prison, it is not so. There
is a long and tortuous wait involved. I listen to the morning news,
particularly the regional news bulletins, on the radio. I know that if you
miss the bulletins, then you will not know which particular news item in the
newspaper has been censored and blackened out with ink, thus blocking
your sole window to the outside world. Then there is anxiety as to how a
particular piece of news you heard on the radio will be presented in the
newspaper—details omitted? Twisted?
This is why a prisoner who wants access to news that is of particular
interest to him is generally not satisfied with reading a single daily. Hence
my desire to go through all the Telugu dailies and, if possible, the English
dailies as well. The political prisoner’s eagerness for newspapers creates
some difficulties because newspapers are like delicate blossoms to them—
they handle them with care, almost afraid that the words might blow off
from the pages. The various colour pages of a newspaper are a source of
much annoyance to political prisoners. The coloured illustrations and the
cinema advertisements on the front page and the last page, and the
supplements, do not reach them in good condition. These pages get soiled
passing through various hands before reaching them. And yet these are also
the pages which carry significant news items or articles. There is a long
wait and a mounting anxiety—Why have the pages been held up for so
long? Is there any important report? The prisoners experience heightened
eagerness, restlessness and increasing tension until, finally, the pages reach
their hands. Then, after scanning them carefully, they find hardly anything
significant or worth the longing and the tension. The news is scarcely
rewarding—like finding a single grain in a heap of husk. Such experiences
are common enough on Sundays when the dailies are accompanied by
colour supplements.
Apart from a vague idea of the activities that form the background for the
printing of newspapers, most people are not aware of the actual processes.
Only those who have worked in newspaper offices know exactly how facts
are suppressed in what is eventually published in a daily. That is why my
fellow accused who come to the court from different parts of the state on
the days of hearings, discuss and exchange information on news items
published in the Vijayawada, Tirupati or Hyderabad editions of the regional
dailies.
Like an ant gathering grain from unseen and unknown places, a political
prisoner forms an opinion about a particular news item by sifting through
dailies, weeklies, fortnightlies and monthlies of various hues. A mosaic
slowly begins to take shape, an opinion is formed. Later, you compare and
check this opinion against the views that appear in journals like Swechcha,2
Frontier or the Economic and Political Weekly when you can lay hands on
them. These journals are like touchstones.
Everything that I read is absorbed instantly like water by dry earth.
Throughout the day I read newspapers and journals—front to back, without
missing a single link. But then, there is no one with whom I can share my
opinions or discuss what I have read. A full three years have passed since I
have glanced through any magazine of revolutionary nature. Magazines
with such writing must have blossomed in hundreds. What is the use of
having eyes if one is not able to read them?
In the newspapers I read, I find nothing about class struggle, or struggles
for democratic rights or civil liberties; nothing about tribal revolts, dalit and
women’s liberation movements or environmental movements. There is no
word in these newspapers of revolutionary organizations, their journals, and
how these organizations are reacting to caste and communal clashes, and a
host of other issues. Not a single ray of light penetrates the pervasive
gloom.
There was another detainee in the block I am in. He was illiterate. But he
would squat on the steps of the block with a heap of newspapers by his side.
He would then hold each and every newspaper in his hands, one after
another, and stare blankly at the pages for a long time. When asked what he
was staring at he would reply, ‘Just looking at the pictures.’ I have my own
suspicions. By touching the printed words with his fingers, by looking at
photographs, by smelling the ink, by feeling the density of the paper, he was
certainly extracting some news. Like him, I browse through all the pages
whenever I get the paper for the news that is not there. If everything is all
right then the paper is not, in truth, reporting the march of history.
 When a man bites a dog it is news for the men outside jail; but for the
people inside, what is of significance is the news that has not reached them.
Unless you listen carefully to the news broadcast on the radio—news
bulletins in English, Hindi, Sanskrit and Telugu, and the news broadcast in
Telugu and Urdu from the Hyderabad station of All India Radio—and note
and compare variations, omissions and twists in each language bulletin, you
don’t feel as if you have heard the news at all. Brief and truncated news
broadcasts and censored newspapers. That is real violence!
Aristotle said ignorance is bliss. Under these conditions, perhaps he was
right?

Far from the turbulence, the crises, the agitations of the present which can
set the blood boiling, denied the pleasure of sharing my views with others,
with no opportunity of taking either my views or experiences out into the
world, I lay aside the wisdom and the crystal tears. Quietly I enter the world
of books where feelings, experiences, knowledge and, sometimes, emotions
of pure grief or happiness can be shared.
It seems to me that most political prisoners read books on philosophy,
history and political theory. They arrange for a supply of the latest
publications of the Hyderabad Book Trust, as well as Prajasakti and
Visalandhra.3 I am not one of them. My passion is literature. And cinema.
Out of their concern for my loneliness in jail, and out of great affection
for me, many friends send me books from different places. These books are
sent with a sincere desire to expose me to a whole array of topics—they
range from a book on Satya Sai Baba by a foreign devotee, to one on
Charlie Chaplin; or books on Jiddu Krishnamurthy’s philosophy or a book
by Jaroslav Hasek. Living in the monotony and agonizing melancholy of
prison would have been hard indeed without the perspective offered by
Naxalbari which had opened my eyes. Thanks to the awakening that came
with Naxalbari I could transcend this indiscriminate reading. Now I have
the satisfaction of discovering a wisdom that I did not know existed.
Gorky said, ‘Books are my constant friends. They deepen the love for
human beings.’ Like Wariinga (the heroine of Ngugi’s novel Devil on the
Cross) who enters the solitary cell of the author when he is writing his jail
diary, ‘half of heaven’4 always keeps me company when I am pacing up and
down in my cell. She follows me closely, disappearing at the window,
becoming the star in the sky. She is not merely an African woman, she is
also the Madia woman from the Bastar forests in the drawings of Chitto
Prasad.5 She is the reflection of the beauty of the Gond girls’ bright faces—
the girls who sang and danced their traditional dances all day long in
ecstasy when the memorial for martyrs was unveiled in Indravelli.6 She is
also the rebellious one who has taught me to hate imperialism and male
chauvinism.
As I look out, standing by the window of my cell, I can see—with the
eyes of my imagination, as in Petals of Blood7—the rain in the forest, the
hunger march of tribal people in the city, the innocence of lovemaking on
moonlit plains.
The last part of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath describes the sufferings
of a family—the mother, the father, and the daughter who has lost her
newborn. The family is exhausted after the long continuous trek through
incessant rain. Finally the family reaches a hilltop. There they find a man
starving and at the point of death. The mother asks the daughter to save his
life. Without hesitation the daughter takes the man to her breast, with the
same joy and love with which she would have fed her own child. The novel
which speaks of the cruelties of imperialism ends with this supremely
humane gesture.
This scene always reminds me of what happened once in Telangana.
Young mothers working as labourers in the fields of a feudal landlord,
Visunuru Deshmukh, felt their breasts tightening with milk. When they
begged the landlord for a break so that they could feed their children, who
had been left outside the fields, he sent for small earthen pots and ordered
the women to fill the pots with their milk. The women were forced to obey,
cursing the man in their hearts. Visunuru Deshmukh then snatched the pots
from the women and threw the milk over his fields. I am struck again by the
contrast between Deshmukh’s exploitation and the humanity of the young
woman in The Grapes of Wrath.
 This time in jail, I have also learnt a great deal about Chile. I read a lot of
Pablo Neruda. What I had learnt about that country in 1973 were half-
truths. And whatever little I have learnt about Latin American struggles is
from that wonderful book, Days and Nights of Love and War, by Eduardo
Galeano, a writer and political activist from Uruguay. I believe that Allende
fell heroically like Purushottama defeated by Alexander. I am equally
convinced that Neruda, like Cherabanda Raju, did not die a natural death; I
salute the Chilean people who, after suffering under the heel of a tyrant for
fifteen years, rose like a storm against the Pinochet regime. I laud their
passion for freedom. The Chilean people and martyrs like George Jackson
of Soledad Brother prove the truth of the saying: ‘Ants can break iron bars.’
Books are absorbing. They make you oblivious of the world around you.
One day, when I was reading The Count of Monte Cristo, I was informed
that someone had come to meet me and I realized with a start that I was in
jail. Our Vijayawada Chinni warned me that I may forget all the people who
love me, because of my love for Ngugi.
Books are darlings in one’s loneliness; they bring you freedom in
detention. Indeed books are like wings for prisoners. They are food for
thought. I was once reading Days and Nights of Love and War outside the
court, sitting in the police van. Until I was taken out of the van and was on
my way to the courtroom I was blissfully unaware of the presence of my
friend Chalasani Prasad, who had been waiting for me outside the van for a
long time.
Later, when I mentioned the incident in a letter to him, he replied: ‘Books
are bloodless substitutes for life, and letters are lifeless substitutes for love.’
A bitter reality, no doubt. In jail, the characters in the novels I read are like
companions with whom I have lived. They provide strength, and support
one another with good deeds. If the characters did not keep me company, all
the knowledge, experience, emotions and values, the consciousness which
has no hope of reaching the stage of practice, would vanish into loneliness
and the long silence of imprisonment. Reading, then, becomes a selfish act.
At death, one’s self-interest ends, what endures is sacrifice. And so I was
prompted to write:

Amidst books,
Meanings ploughed by men
Neat furrows of letters
Reel past my eyes.
In books—
Elongations, accents,
Repeated stresses.
Like compound words
Wave after wave of people
Rises incessantly
Branded on my heart.
Past actions and
Rebirths vanish
As wiping my brow
I smear blood
Across stale
Sweat-filled existence.
Like sunlight in space
Not to be erased
Unfading, impalpable …
From the book I hold in my hands
People grasp me.
Forgetting myself
I enter the world
of the book spread out on my chest.
Indeed I feel the touch,
Reading silently I feel
Their unblinking gaze.
As my lips move and my tongue stumbles
The secret of creation pours into my mouth
Sending tremors rippling
Down my navel
And yet I know
That this is a kindred experience
Not my own.
From my bones
I raise men
And yet
Like Pavlov’s dog
I am conditioned
Both to the underground streams
Buried in the very depths of my being
And to volcanoes belching fire.
And yet,
Can I who am accustomed to reading
Men like books
Ever find in books
A substitute for men?
 5 Letter and spirit

I remember reading about an Egyptian farmer whose land was taken away
by the government when the Suez Canal was being dug. He filed a case
against the government of Egypt and argued naively, but with anger, that his
father had never once told him that the government was his kinsman!
Little did I imagine until 1965—no, not even in a nightmare—that at
some time the state would be all things to me: my darling, my friend, my
mother, my child, my close relative. Then I became a Marxist, dreaming
that the state would wither away and these emotional relationships would
become real without its intrusion.
It was when I was working in Delhi that I realized that letters could be
censored and that strangers might read them. In the early 1960s I was
studying at Osmania University in Hyderabad and occasionally visited a
classmate who stayed in the MLA Quarters. It was then that I became
acquainted with Pillalamarri Venkateswarlu, then the leader of opposition in
the legislature. (This friendship extended only to the three of us seeing a
few films together.) At some point later, the friend I used to visit must have
mentioned to Pillalamarri that I had joined the Department of Audio Visual
Publicity (DAVP) in Delhi. He wrote a letter to me asking what the
requirements were for central government advertisements to be published in
Visalandhra and I replied. When I came to Hyderabad later, a friend
working in the postal department asked me whether I had been
corresponding with a communist leader. I explained the matter and then
asked him how he had come to know about my acquaintance. He explained
that as a result of this one exchange my letters were now being censored.
‘Meaning?’ I asked. He answered, ‘The intelligence chaps are reading your
letters.’ I was amazed.
Those were days of innocence, and, as companions at university, as
admirers of Chalam, we used to read each other’s letters but this was always
sanctioned by the consent and approval of the person concerned.
If a passing acquaintance with Pillalamarri could be cause enough for
censoring my letters, then how can one who is connected with Naxalbari
expect any privacy until private property itself is abolished?
Censorship of letters is not an inconvenience that is associated only with
jails. I have lived with it for the last twenty-three years. The heated debates
about the postal bill and the tapping of telephones, and the mutual
recriminations between the Congress and other parties, are amusing to a
communist who has been used to this from the very birth of his party. This
discussion of an open secret seems to me like Brahminical sophistry.
The difference between letters being censored while in jail and while
outside is that, out there, you cannot claim they are being censored although
you know the truth. Besides, outside jail, we seal our letters and then post
them. They are delivered sealed (unless the one who reads them is too lazy
to seal them again). In jail, the letters are handed over without the pretence
of sealing them. Letters that arrive are torn open, censored, stamped with
the jail seal and signed by the concerned official, before being delivered to
the addressee.
Our loves, friendships, bonds, tendernesses, ideas, innermost feelings,
passions, dreams, truths—the most private and secret chambers of our
hearts are laid mercilessly open by the surgeon’s knife. The gaze of
strangers and aliens falls on them and they are returned to us, unstitched.
What stubborn hearts these, that even in such conditions they continue to
throb with feeling!
 When I was first arrested in 1973, the mere thought that someone would
read my letters would paralyse my pen.

Love—
This is my blood calling, the breath of love.
The doors of your heart still untouched by feeling,
Letters gleaming with desire,
Currents flashing over my body from your eyes.
What shall I say to you that can be sullied by other
hands?
What can I write with this knowledge
That my words will reach you second-hand?

Love’s message reaching second-hand is not unique to me after all. It

happens when people lose power. It happened to Rama and Sita. It
happened to Nala and Damayanti. It has also happened to all those who
were objects of either the anger of the state or its mercy. It happened to the
yakshas and yakshinis, and to Malli and Nagaraju.1
From time immemorial, clouds and birds and monkeys have listened to
these messages of love and conveyed them to the beloved. Why should we
object to a few humans reading them? But the difference is, that the clouds
that ‘know our hearts’ would melt with love and shower affection on the
beloved.2
What is so special in these letters that one writes from jail or that one
receives while one is in jail? Separation, tears, desire, sighs, the lies (that
we are well), the truths (that we cannot forget).
Love, friendship, human qualities—these are values that anyone can
adopt. But there are certain qualities, such as consiousness, for which one
has to strive. Now, prison life is a part of my consciousness, and as the
years pass, I have learnt to accept the fact that others will read my letters. It
is as natural as introducing my companions to others. Uncertainties and
hesitations no longer trouble me when I write.

Mad one,
Is it new
For others to read
Our letters?
Don’t we print stuff
So that all can read?
Yet when strangers
Read without
Our approval,
We object not because
We crave secrecy—
Only that
We desire privacy,
That’s all.

My sister writing from Visakhapatnam says the same thing. ‘Someone

reads whatever I write to you even before you read it. How do you manage
to write so freely despite knowing this?’
I read a Russian novel that was set in the time of the Second World War.
All the young men were going to war. In one family, the son has to leave for
the front the morning after his bride had arrived. The whole village comes
on tractors to the station to send these men off. The mother says to the
bride, ‘There is no use feeling shy, go now and bid goodbye to your
husband.’ That morning, the platform was a public stage on which many
tender private farewells were enacted. When would those who were being
parted come together again? How many years would it take, if at all?
Moturi Udayam3 has described in a book, how she publicly embraced her
husband in Cuddalore Jail so as to pass on some party literature to him. But
in Nazi camps, those who had no hope of returning, no hope of meeting
again, embraced for purely human and personal reasons. Waiting to be
hanged, in cells facing each other, not knowing if the other was being taken
away. If the Czech journalist and poet Julius Fuchik, a communist who
fought against Nazism, had been allowed to meet his wife Gusta for a last
farewell how would it have been? Did anyone ever ask her who managed to
survive?
Engels has said that freedom is the recognition of necessity. When
repression becomes an everyday reality and when there is no end in sight,
how long can we postpone our needs? There are some needs which are just
for material comforts or resources—these we can postpone. But when there
is a need for feelings and experiences, or for a freedom which includes all
the above—comforts, resources, feelings and experiences—then how can
we possibly postpone a need which is synonymous with freedom? In
confinement, one cannot but treat necessity and freedom as equal.
So the real issue is not whether others read your letters. The anxiety is
whether or not they will reach those for whom they are intended. The
interval of waiting—should each day be measured by the length of a human
day or a devata day or a rakshasa day? Or by Brahma’s cycles of time?
This is something I have yet to figure out even after these last three years.
After writing a letter, the long wait until I receive a reply—indicating that
the letter had reached its reader—is the most difficult. For a reply to arrive
takes about a month, during which there are four interviews. At the first
interview I casually mention that I have written to so and so. After two
weeks pass I keep asking whether they have received my letter. So you see,
the waiting is not deferred until the month is up.
It starts after two weeks. It begins with ‘Did they get my letter?’ and
builds up to ‘Why is there no reply even after a month?’ After that, it
intensifies. To those friends who are not in the habit of replying promptly or
who cannot reply for some reason, I often wish I could give a thermometer
with which to measure the rising temperature here. Poor sinners—let us
give the devil its due—it is not the ones who cannot or do not write, but the
ones who do not or cannot give me the letters, who are the target of my
mounting suspicion, anger and impatience.
The people to whom I write and who write back to me are all immersed
either in public service or in literary and cultural movements. I tend to
forget what a bad correspondent I used to be when I was outside, similarly
preoccupied. Now that I sit ready with my pen poised on paper, I am quick
to fall victim to impatience, misunderstanding or anxieties because those
whom I write to don’t write back. Even those who are not busy expect
letters from me, but do not reply. When they try to write, their hearts weigh
heavily on their pens! And so they expect me to continue to write without
hoping for a reply!
To tell the truth, for those convicts who do not have anyone who can
come to meet them, and who depend completely on letters and wait eagerly
for them, it seems the jail manual has understood their anguish. It equates
an interview with a letter. If only the spirit of the understanding existed in
practice—what more would you need?
Although once a week someone meets me for an interview. Although we
meet regularly, we wait for each other’s letters, like a mother waiting for
her child to return from school or the child in school waiting for the mother
to come, we wait. If you were to ask what there is for me to write in these
letters then words would fail me.
Although in my political activity I never compromised or bowed before
anyone, for these letters, from the minute I expect them to arrive, I seem to
turn into a beggar—hands outstretched.
In Hanumakonda, there is an old woman who lives in front of our house.
She gets an old age pension by money order. The postman would come to
our house every day. She would stand near our window from the morning,
waiting for the postman, and as soon as she saw him, ask him whether her
money order had come. She never grew weary of waiting. ‘When it comes
he will call you and hand it over to you, why do you come every day?’ we
asked. She feared that her son or daughter-in-law might persuade the
postman to hand over the money to them. Fear. Suspicion. Actually she
handed over the money to them. But she found a great satisfaction in taking
the money first—it was hers by right—and then handing it over.
When letters arrive for me, the jail or intelligence staff will have to hand
them over eventually. Yet, I would ask them for the letters every day lest
they keep them. I behave exactly like that old woman next door,

Who knows
The letter is wrought through the sweetness of friendship
And great friendship always fears evil.

Where there is a delay of a couple of minutes or hours in the announced

interview, one is extremely agitated during the waiting. Similarly, while
waiting for letters (sometimes even for letters which never come), the
waiting period is filled with tension—waiting days on end, waiting
endlessly. If I set aside my inhibition, the letters are my companions who
enter my cell, nestle in my hands, fill up my eyes, my heart …
 6 Mother image

The great mother image in its duality exists in every aspect of our being.

—Ritwik Ghatak

When a weary cloud

Chokes the voice of justice
No blood flows
No tears rain.
Lightning turns to thunder
Raindrops swell to a hurricane.
As a mother wipes her tears
Beyond the prison bars
The poet’s melody
Soars forth …
I wrote these lines when Benjamin Franklin Moloise, South African poet
and leader of the liberation struggle, was hanged by the Botha racist
regime.1 They were written in response to a news item I read about his
mother. It described how, the day before he was hanged, his mother met
him in prison, bade him a last farewell and came out of the prison bearing
his message to the people to continue the struggle for liberation. At that
moment, she was neither a symbol nor an aggregate of maternal qualities,
she was just Moloise’s mother to me—that’s all.
An outline of my poem on the concept of the mother was just beginning
to take shape—like a newborn babe, all swaddled, opening its eyes. I was
not in jail then.
When, after a year in jail, I saw these verses in print, new meanings
sprang forth. I was amazed. I had not written those verses then, either for
myself or my own mother.
Barely six months later, Balagopal, by chance, translated the word
mother as mother earth. Mother and mother earth are synonymous both for
the revolution and for revolutionary culture. I wrote,

Children, sing of the revolution

That is like a mother …

Gaddar2sang, seeing mother Godavari herself in Peddi Shankar’s3

mother,

When the sun and the moon come as kinsfolk

Giving them water to wash their feet she sheds tears …

NK4 said, in his well known poem, ‘Lal bano, ghulami chodo, bolo
vande mataram’, which revolutionized the meaing of the concept of
maathrubhoomi (motherland), fusing these three sentiments into a single
image:

Adilabad is my mother.

Generally, revolutionary prisoners draw inspiration from the feeling that

they are in prison to liberate mother earth. Such faith, in this place where
one cannot reach out even to wipe a mother’s tears!
What lies behind your eyes?
It is not that I will not look
Behind those eyes
Nor even that I cannot.
For Mother, when you are in anguish
What I have seen in your heart
Will bring back for you
What is before those eyes.

Each man sees every mother embodied in his own mother, and then
imagines all the mothers in mother earth. And so they make promises. They
try to console her. A consolation (as Jack London said in some other
context) which probably gives them more strength than it gives her.

The poet Dronacharya Ghosh said

What is there to be afraid of Mother?

After I am gone many boys will come and stand by you,
You will feel pride in me.

Give me your finger to clasp:

I will wander and play
Go to school
Count the stars
Finish my lessons
And before the sky darkens,
Reach for the dreams
In your tears
And turning them to daggers,
I shall fight.
Across the seven seas I speed
Swift as an arrow let loose from a rainbow.
On the finger that I grasped
To take my first steps
Shall I place
A flashing wheel of light?

Beyond these shores

Reaching the recesses of your heart,
Shall I cry ‘Mother’,
Sending the sound echoing and re-echoing
Through the depths of your soul?

And so in this jail, in this cell, where there is no one save us and this
emotion, no one even to watch us, we turn into little children.

I need companions who are children like me,

At least you must turn into a child for me.
Who else will be my companion, tell me?
You walk
Gathering shells with me,
My steps too small.
I stop you.
Placing small hands on your feet
I build sandcastles
Imprisoning your feet.
Clapping and running along the shore
With newly found wings
I spring away from the sand nest.

Far away
Like a lighthouse
You keep watch on the horizon,
Upright, unswerving.
Your blood-red tears
Are not wasted.
Focused they cleave the sky.
Paper boats
The colour of your dreams
Rise above the waves
Reaching the shores of light.

In my cramped jail cell, this perception of the mother revolutionized

brings me a sense of the expansive earth.
In 1974, when my wife asked whether there was hardship in prison, I
answered that this emptiness was hardship indeed. Now, I say to my mother,
‘Set me down, from this soft cradle that suffocates me, on to the earth,’ and
tell her, ‘Nothing is harder for me than the suffering in your mind.’ It seems
as if this time I have brought memories of my mother into prison along with
me.
When I think of this, it is a revelation even to me. To give you a glimpse
of the intensity of this emotion let me reproduce a few lines from my diary.

I had a dream last night. As the tears flowed I woke up. How much of the night was left? It was still dark. Even after I
woke up my grief would not cease. As in the dream, Mother’s image was vivid before my eyes.

It was not a house, not even an attic, but I had to climb with some difficulty. There, Mother who had cooked
something appetizing, something like a ragi gruel since rice was scarce, was waiting for her children. A stranger and I
climbed the ladder with difficulty, and found my cousin and many others, eating and pleading for more and still more,
‘Why did you cook, aunt? How did you cook this? How good it tastes,’ they praised her, smacking their lips. On seeing
me, she said, ‘How could I say I had cooked this for my children?’ She wiped her eyes with the edge of her sari. I was
filled with grief and I woke up.

When Mother died, I wept beside her body until all the buried emotion in
my mind melted away. I left the place soon after, unable to bear the sight of
a false grief. That was the end of my bond with my mother.
I think of how Mother suffered for me, for us. Why did I think of Mother
last night? Perhaps, it was because I had been reading Namboodripad’s
autobiography How I Became a Communist. He was deeply attached to his
mother. The part about her was written with deep sincerity. Reading it I
thought of my own mother and I was filled with grief. But it was only in
jail, in 1987, that I realized how deeprooted my bond with my mother was.
As our Venu cried out when he had been in a serious car accident and was
literally reborn:5
In a place where
I don’t know whether
It is a wounded path
Or a soft cradle of life’s secret emotions,
I translate the ancient anguished cry
As ‘Mother’!

In all situations
Mother, when I was ever without you?
In this imprisonment
Each fibre of my body
Every layer of earth outside my window
Is charged with your presence.

Yes, Mother …
Quickening when I stir,
Walking me to and fro
Holding the finger of my fancy,
As I am locked into a darkness
Frozen immobile,
Watching me read …
A moonlight touch
Stroking my sleepless body
Lighting this darkness with a star …
Fretting lest sickness
Lay its hands upon me,
No matter how many years I bear
I remain a child to you, Mother.
Though you claim each waking thought
Of mine as yours
You seem but a child to me.

When the skin of my body is cracked all over in this cold, and my head
throbs, my heart longs for the soothing touch of the mother of the folk song,
who gently combed out Siva’s matted locks.
After the Emergency was lifted and the Maintenance of Internal Security
Act (MISA) was withdrawn, within a week I was released from jail and I
went home. As soon as I reached my mother took me in her arms feeling
my limbs to see whether I was the same. I was then thirty-seven years old.
The father of three children. For the last twenty-one months what had I
eaten? She ran her hands over my stomach searching my eyes for signs of
my condition.
Between those who are in jail, and their mothers or their children, or
anyone else, there can only be an exchange of words and looks. Touching
your dear ones is out of the question. Isn’t it?
On the mornings when we would leave for adjournments in court,
especially on Mondays, many mothers would stand in the jailyard looking
anxiously at the faces in the van. With Dhoorjati Chattopadhyay, my heart
cries out silently:

Mother, having lost everything

Gripping the jail gate,
Whose face do you want to find, separate
from the crowd?

Like a star that opens up the world to me, like a secret chord connecting
me to the world … a ray of light … a vibration. With gratitude I sing with
Sivasagar:6

… to flowers that have fallen,

Birds that are wounded,
You taught me to give life.
You taught me to listen to
A cotton pod bursting open at night.
You showed me the whirlwind raging on the mountain,
You taught me to swim against the current,
Held a feeding cup to my lips.
When death drew near
Before it whispered to me
My last desire was
To cross the barriers
To see you once more, Mother.
For having borne me,
Revolutionary salutations!
 7 The truth that cannot be
concealed

Poetry is
Truth that cannot be concealed—
People with no need of a government,
Life that doesn’t require nectar.

Searching pockets
Shuffling papers and books
Rifling cupboards—
You can prise open
The inner cells of my heart
Like a rare flower.
You will never grasp
The fact that it is my dangerous character
That is the secret of this poetry.
Look
At the moonlight
Trapped in this rectangle.
I raise my head
And see my poetry
Gleaming like a moonbeam
In the sky.

You see, it is so strange,

Quite amazing, the moonlight that
Floods this room—
I cannot even see the moon outside.
To relieve this solitude
I draw out my blood
And transfuse it
With poetry that is heavy
With the sound of handcuffs.

Chain them if you will …

The birds of freedom
Will break into flight
To the sound of pioneer songs.

Watch carefully,
Poetry burns quickly
Spreading like a forest fire.
Watch more carefully,
Poetry can stir people.
Fling your deadly bait
And wait and see—
Before your very eyes
It will swim
The river of consciousness.

Poetry is an open secret

That destroys the disquiet
Stirring in my heart.
It reaches in a trice
Those it is meant to reach.
Suddenly the ones who need to,
Will understand.
Rising in my thoughts,
It inspires movements.
The secret is,
My poetry was born
From the pangs of struggle.
Cover it if you must—
You will see it escapes through
The spaces of your fingers,
Its vibrant, anguished notes
Snapping in anger,
Setting tears on fire
And flowing forth—
A river of blood-red syllables.

A saying that grew popular with the Revolutionary Writers’ Association

was that a poet is one who stands on each side of the one who toils. (The
first letter ‘ka’ and the last letter ‘vi’ of the word kashtajeevi (toiler)
becomes kavi (poet).) The question that a poet should ask of himself is
whether he has stood on at least one side. If he has, then the other side is
inevitable. Sartre has said somewhere that if you are part of the problem
then you are also part of the solution. Poetry, which is a synonym for
suffering, should also be synonymous with the struggle to end suffering.
They call it sharing trouble. They say the weight of suffering grows lighter
if you speak out. They also say that only those who have actually suffered,
can fully grasp the meaning of suffering. This means in essence that, given
certain circumstances, you will inevitably move towards a particular
solution. Whether it is the problem or the solution, it is the toiler who is in
the forefront. The poet, with his consciousness, can be but an undercurrent.
Only time will prove whether I have stood on at least one side of the one
who toils. But here, my poetry has stood firmly on both sides of me. Silent,
echoing in my heart like a beloved, inner flame, also a companion shielding
the flame from cruel blasts, a cover.
 The poetry I write, the poetry I read, are my eyes here. To see the world
with, to let the world see me …

To share with people

To condemn the oppressor
To lighten my solitude
To relieve your solitude
To know myself
And to know ourselves.
Sharing with each other
Despite repression cutting us off,
Through intractable hedges
Through the thorns
I reach music
To those who are voiceless.

I seize a pen—
In this culture
This blind imprisoned culture,
I do not write because
I have the freedom to write.
I write because
I have nothing to lose but my chains.
Words rise and swell in my heart
Like blood
For a world that is just and free.
These handcuffs,
My tools, I write
I write
I write to escape death,
To exorcise the demon
That haunts me.
Isn’t it the same with us all?
Struggling with death
For immortality?
I do not speak of the mere fact
That individuals die,
But of building a world,
That allows space
For our individuality.
Not to speak of my wounds
Or of my suffering,
But of my suffering,
Of these experiences
The bitter and the sweet—
To share these with you.
What other tool has my heart
But this poetry?

It is the way I speak to the world outside. Poetry is like a hand stretched
out in friendship, a human bond. It is like the flutter of a heart held in an
open palm.

Like Mayakovsky, I came to communism through poetry. But in jail I see

how communist prisoners come to poetry and I feel,

On
those callused palms
roughened by struggle,
let poetry’s balm pour forth
soothing your wearied spirits …

In January 1985, for about a week, I was with a hundred political

prisoners in Warangal Jail. The very first day we discussed my long poem
‘Samudram’. We spent almost three hours discussing poetry. A friend who
had been in jail for years had written a lengthy Oggukatha.1 It contained
nearly thirty songs in various styles, and ranged from the history of
Gondwana to Komuram Bhim’s story, from Indravelli to Satnala, covering
the struggles of the Gonds.2 He knew the styles and had employed them
adroitly through song. That night was memorable, we were transported to a
night around a bonfire in Pitta Bongaram.3 Outside jail, he has composed
excellent songs about children who make a living through washing pots and
working in hotels, and has written very good short stories about the Gonds.
But with Oggukatha he rose to the stature of a great artiste.
Why, even now, I notice that political prisoners read with great interest
poetry published in magazines. They try to understand, analyse and assess
the poems critically. They discuss literary trends. They develop an
understanding of poetry. Not necessarily in the hope of becoming poets or
critics, but in order to live their lives with a measure of enthusiasm, some
emotion, some liveliness. This is a felt need, a subculture that has grown
through necessity.
Like revolutionary movements, prison life often turns political activists
into poets. If Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the Vietnamese communist party,
had not been subjected to such a long prison term, perhaps he would not
have produced as great a work as his Prison Diary.
Sivasagar’s poetry was sharpened through revolutionary politics and it
matured through life in jail. There are many songs written by him which
recreate every aspect of the Srikakulam struggle. Political prisoners in
Visakhapatnam Jail who had not been known as poets wrote popular poems.
Most of the contributions in the collection Sankharavam are by the political
prisoners in Visakhapatnam Jail.

Blood is spilt in Srikakulam,

The mountains turn red.
—Anonymous

Ask, whence these revolutionary fires?

And they cry out, look towards Srikakulam!
—Manchi Venakatanarasayya

Like the songs that lighten the burden of a labourer, poetry gives relief
from the boredom and monotony of the political prisoners’ existence. It
begins with an interest in reading poetry and ends with the desire to write
poetry. As the prisoners reflect on their struggles and experiences before
they came to jail, they begin to feel that they can speak much more
effectively than those outside.
In the Secunderabad Conspiracy Case, apart from famous poets like KVR
(his famous collection of poems being Jailu Kokila) and Cherabanda Raju,
there were two political prisoners who wrote poetry continuously. Inguva
Mallikarjuna Sarma published his poetry under the pen name of Mallik,
after the Emergency. I don’t know whether he continues to write poetry but
I don’t think he had any poetic leanings before he came to jail.
Poetry is a tool that can turn every circumstance to advantage, filling it
with meaning, change and novelty. In the Secunderabad Conspiracy Case
there were six of us who were members of the Revolutionary Writers’
Association. When we went for the court hearings we felt that our songs
and slogans should be indelibly stamped with the VIRASAM mark. It was
with this in mind that Cherabanda Raju wrote his ‘Pallavi’. He felt that the
song had the power to transform slogans into poetry. Even our handcuffs
had the taste of poetry. One handcuff is put on one wrist and the other hangs
loose if no one is chained to you. Holding one handcuff and beating time
with it on the other we would even forget that we were handcuffed.
When I think of our slogans and songs during those trips all the way from
Chanchalguda Jail to the special court during the Emergency, Brecht comes
to mind:

Will there be art and poetry in dark times?

Yes, there will be art and poetry about dark times.

During the Emergency all the prisoners from various jails all over the
state filed writ petitions in the high court and wanted to argue their own
cases. They were all brought to the Secunderabad Jail. It became a centre
for political lessons and literary discussions. We even brought out a
handwritten literary magazine. Because of the social context and the level
of political consciousness, the poetry written then was either by already
established poets or by prisoners-cum-poets, and was mostly about people’s
struggles, movements and the events outside. They expressed their grief
quite spontaneously through elegies for their comrades killed in
‘encounter’.
The freshness with which a tender-hearted poet pours forth his emotion
was evident in Tarakam’s ‘Neeku Cheppane Ledu’ (I Never Told You) that
he sang in Nadi Puttina Gonthuka (The Voice of the River). They arrested
him at midnight during the Emergency and he was not allowed even to
inform his family.4
The fact that jail already become known for poetry is illustrated by
Souda’s Jailu Nunchi Premalekha (Love Letter from Jail).5 Perhaps all
political prisoners practise their hand at poetry in jail. Sometimes I hear the
songs written by other prisoners as we travelled in the van to court. They
had all begun writing only in jail. The struggles in the forest and agency
areas, the inequalities, the girl child’s humiliation from birth onwards, were
all excellently described in beautiful songs. These are to be absorbed
through the ears and the heart, not the eye.
As someone who is a solitary political prisoner, as ‘the night descends,
step by step, down the stairway of stars’, it is Faiz Ahmed Faiz who speaks
to me.6

Those who brew the poison of cruelty

Will not win, tomorrow or today.
They can put out the lamps
Where lovers meet,
They cannot blind the moon.

The 14 February 1987 entry in my diary says,

Faiz has written this poem for me, in this condition. Yesterday afternoon, marking the beginning of summer, I bathed
and walked in the yard. I saw the sun set in front of me and the moon rising behind me. The cool breeze blowing in the
moon’s farewell after lock-up is exactly as Faiz describes it—on the roof’s high crest the loving hand of moonlight
rests. As the lights go off, the moonlight glides like mercury over my body and mind.
Correction: I read ‘prison of cruelty’ for ‘poison of cruelty’ each time—it seems a fault of habit not of vision.
 8 Stone walls do not a prison
make

What will you write of in captivity?

Freedom
What will you think of in solitude?
The world
What will you speak of under a ban?
The truth
What do you seek in exile?
The solution
What will you bring to mind in forgetfulness?
History
What do you think about in silence?
Humanity
What do you dream of day and night?
The future
If the answer is implicit in the question and if it is possible through a pun or
turn of phrase to grasp material reality, then

Imagination is man’s life here.

It is a curse.
And a colourful rainbow too,
Is an extraordinary material reality.

Let me offer an analogy to clarify this point. To see how a man sustains
himself in the midst of ruin, the questioner has to enter the man’s mind and
see for himself.
To travel and to arrive at your destination, you must use your legs or
other means of transport. But in jail, what is the distance you need to travel
or the destination you need to reach?
Within the confines of a prison, whether it is a circle, a rectangle, or a
square, the feet can only move to and from the starting place. It is not
possible to go beyond its boundaries. Just as the earth revolves around the
sun while rotating on its axis, the limbs of night and day could help you
overcome distance and move towards your goal. But here, there are no
distances to cover nor is there any location you can walk to. There is no
question of aches and weariness from walking. On the contrary, your legs
are cramped due to lack of exercise, and disuse affects your knees.
And yet, since you are human, even if your legs don’t move your eyes
will travel. If your sight is obstructed by walls, can your eyes look beyond
them? Or look inwards?
How can a man work if he has no hands? How does he fly without
wings? How can he journey without his legs? Whether you speak of legs or
wings, literally or metaphorically, freedom still remains a dream, a fanciful
thought. Eyes, desires, the passage of time—they are nothing but
imagination and dreams.
‘An idle mind is the devil’s workshop,’ they say. But can you say that of
the idleness inflicted on a prisoner? One cannot claim that the prisoner will
while away his time in a daydream or find himself in a nightmare. Jail
turned the Count of Monte Cristo into a philosopher and a scientist. Even if
we dismiss this example as a product of fiction, there have been many
slaves, writers and intellectuals, who spent their life in exile, who were able
to face life supported on these two limbs—thoughts and dreams. They were
able to look into the future while evaluating the past through thoughts and
dreams. They were able to give shape and meaning to the lengthy hot days
and cold nights while living through them.

One step is a memory,

Another step a dream.
You don’t feel as though you have walked.

How does time pass for those deprived of human company? Many feel
bored if there is no one to talk to. There are some who find it hard to pass
time without some occupation to keep them engaged. Others feel that it is
no hardship to spend time reading or doing something, in solitude.
A few can see that a person may also be engaged in imagination and
dreaming. Those who think that they can suppress a person’s sense of
freedom by subjecting him to solitude and/or imprisonment do not
understand the power and scope of these two faculties.
Whether the men here are in cells or in barracks they have all been
separated from their dear ones. Whether they are working or resting, in their
minds lingers a world of their own. They can’t avoid its presence even
while they work. Once they return to their solitary worlds after lock-up,
awake or asleep, they go back to it.
The whole day one pulls hard at time as if it were a roadroller. At night,
the nine hours during which it is decreed that one must sleep, not talk—one
cannot sleep, one secretly smokes bidis, sucking at old memories, and one
looks at the fan on the ceiling, fancying that, with its rays, it will turn into
the sun in the morning.

Time will not move,

This mind
Will not be still.
Pull, pull time,
Pull, hilessa!
Move on prisoner,
Move …
On …
The soliloquy continues.
 The mind will not stay put even when time does not seem to move. It is
this characteristic of the mind, which refuses to remain still, that can be a
curse or a boon depending on the person’s nature or the circumstances in
which he finds himself.
This does not mean that for a prisoner ideas fall from the sky or are born
in the head. Nor does it mean that he will dream dreams unconnected with
his past. But whatever the dreams may be, because of the material
experience of confinement, they are dense and fragile, and full of emotion.
I begin to pace from the moment I wake up in the morning till the rounds
at 9 o’clock. And I pace from lock-up time until 9 at night. During these six
hours I give myself up exclusively to thoughts, memories and fancies.

These sleeping dreams

Are not personal
Nor created by me
Nor are they in my control,
In my mind’s journey
Through these dreams
And thoughts,
For a while
I am on track.
Suddenly I plunge
Into the depths of time
Into memory’s ancient caves.
I am lifted
On invisible waves
Beyond the veil of dreams.
I fly like a fancy
Taking off from the past
Into a world
Never before glimpsed.
As the signal stops dawn and
I open my eyes,
All the stations looking similar
Rush past, changing names.
Dates change …
Yesterday’s dream
Is a weapon.
The warm feeling enveloping you,
Preventing you from rising
From the cold of a broken dream
Is a vehicle.
The language of the soft rays of the morning sun
Stamped and kneaded
Under the potter’s feet,
Will rise again
Creating a new world
Of feeling.

When I read We Were Making History,1 I wondered how many of the people
who made history in this country and elsewhere in the world, since the
beginning of human society, have been able to tell us their stories. I asked
myself how so many disappeared into the womb of history without telling
those stories. How do we extract the history of those countless and
nameless people who were denied expression? How do we reconstruct their
stories?
Within these walls, prisoners’ dreams and fancies bloom. How does one
reveal to the world outside the creative power of these prisoners? What do
these walls convey to those outside? Do they tell of the men behind them?
Do they communicate that prisoners are not merely the accused and
punished, but are also those who dream and have vision?
When I read the news that the Central Bureau of Investigation sought the
court’s permission to take Amita Modi to Delhi and interrogate her with the
aid of a lie-detector, I was amazed at the falseness of the system in which
we are living. The world has been split so clearly that we are no longer
confident that we can arrive at the truth through human interaction.
 How would it be if there were a technical device for registering our
imaginings and dreams? Like a cassette which can be inserted either in a
portable tape recorder or a video cassette player. It should be possible to
adapt it to the structure of our body. An additional device that could be
fixed in a healthy body without having to replace any part such as the heart
or a kidney! While we slept, the instrument would register the flights of
imagination.
If such a device had been available to me these last three years, I would
not have had to take the trouble to say that imaginings and dreams have
been my only companions here. How easily I could have shown you the
rare films taken out of the archives of my mind; the films ‘preserved in the
mind but lost to the eyes’:2 the films which played before my eyes and
stayed alive there; the images that thrilled every fibre of my being while I
looked at them, heard them and touched them.
Since I have such faith in human resources and technical knowledge, I
wonder why I had not asked Dr Ramanadham3 if such devices were
available. Then again, I doubt if I would have felt the need for a device to
share my imaginings and dreams if he were still alive.
I am told there is an instrument called the electroencephalograph to
record dreams, but it cannot record dreams that are in colour because they
are not recorded in the temporary memory recording centre of the mind.
And all my dreams are full of colour—rainbow-tinted dreams of the future.

A life convict in Warangal jail once said to me, ‘What dreams do we have
left except daydreams?’ Those were the days when life imprisonment was
interpreted by the Supreme Court as imprisonment for life. I cannot
describe to you the despair that lifers felt.
Before 1974, life prisoners in jails in Andhra Pradesh were released for
‘good behaviour’ on the recommendation of an appointed board after six
years of imprisonment. Whether it was those who had committed a crime
on the spur of a moment and repented thereafter, or those who came to jail
in connection with land disputes, in jail they were all equally trustworthy
and dependable. They did nobody any harm and were on good behaviour in
accordance with the rules. Most of them ended up staying in jail for more
than seven years. (A life sentence was considered imprisonment of fourteen
years. Seven years meant fourteen years if day and night were counted
separately.)
After the Supreme Court verdict, a lifer told me, ‘Both the days and
nights were counted earlier. Wasn’t that just? For in jail, the duration of a
night is like that of a day. The night isn’t about sleeping or dreaming, but
one long wait for dawn with swollen eyes.’
Once term for life came to mean the full term of one’s life, there was no
differentiation between days and nights for life convicts. All that was left
was lock-up and the lifting of lock-up.
Whether it is lifers or regulars or political prisoners, whatever the length
of time they spend in jail, it should be only imprisonment, it cannot become
a lifestyle. It must not.

How long
Can prison walls
And iron bars
Cage the free spirit?
Insistent,
A statue
With broken limbs
Forces its past beauty on you.
The sea roars
Crashing night and day
Against the shore.
Wings trapped in the mind
Flutter wildly
Seeking to soar
In freedom.
The mind is too cramped
To hold you …
What you need is
The space of the earth
Rolling outwards,
Reaching the edges of the sky.
 9 The agony and the ecstasy

Spring never comes alone

Summer follows.
Moments of waiting grow in length
As the length of dreams decreases.
Moonlight never comes alone
But brings the night.
Dreams do not appear
Except in restless slumber.
Wakefulness
Appears like a sunbeam
Plucked from the womb of a dream.
Joy seldom comes without
Wetness lightly weighing your lashes.

One does not recognize happiness when there is no trouble. Compared to

big problems, smaller problems seem almost comforting. Slowly they
prepare the ground for courage.
We need companions to share our distress and joy, our restlessness and
cheerfulness. These emotions can make a person heavy or light of heart.
Whatever one’s nature outside prison, jail life, especially prolonged
solitude, makes human beings susceptible to even the most trivial emotional
triggers. In fact, jail requires a person, however excitable, to cultivate
restraint and repose. If one cannot cultivate patience and equanimity in the
face of grief as well as of joy, imprisonment is certain to become distressing
and oppressive.
For lack of occupation even trivialities seem to assume gravity here.
Sometimes we look forward to meaningless events and are elated by small
happenings. Similarly, we are pained on account by the insignificant.
All prisoners are troubled by problems concerning their families. Those
problems can result in fleeting moments of happiness, if there is even a
temporary alleviation. When a prisoner expects his kith and kin to come on
a particular day for a mulaqat or a court hearing and they don’t turn up, he
is anxious till they arrive or at least till there is an explanation for their
absence. The day on which a bail petition is heard or the day the judgment
is delivered, a prisoner is under considerable tension. The outcome may
lead to profound restlessness or pleasure. Under any circumstances,
insufficient information, or the lack of it, causes a prisoner to feel extreme
disquiet.
To political prisoners, their personal problems are of less interest than the
problems of political movements. This does not mean that they do not look
forward to meetings, family news, information about bail or release, etc.
When the Supreme Court transferred the Ramnagar Conspiracy Case—
which had remained suspended in Trishankusvarga1—to the chief
metropolitan sessions court, although it did not discharge the case like the
second additional sessions court had, the other Naxalite undertrials in the
case breathed a sigh of relief. It was because the ball that we had thought
was stuck near the penalty goal would now be on the move. Whether we
could score a goal or not, the game would progress before our eyes. We
could participate in it. Isn’t a bird in the hand worth two in the bush?
There is little scope for political prisoners, especially these days, to
entertain hope of release. Therefore, the intensity of restlessness and
pleasure is less in comparison to that experienced by ordinary prisoners. At
the same time, who would want to remain in jail forever?
 Political prisoners tend not to get obsessed or depressed over the subject
of their release. As far as possible, they treat it as a piece of news, regarding
the matters of their release as one among many issues of concern. They
discuss it in a matter-of-fact manner and consciously divert their attention
to social issues. This disciplined attitude then becomes a way of life. But
the desire for freedom is ever present, like subdued background music, in
the course of the daily routine, discussions, thoughts and dreams. It remains
hidden, an interior flow, whose current is visible only to the eyes of the
prisoners.
In terms of abstract value, a political prisoner possesses, more than
others, the strongest and most passionate desire for freedom. The only
difference is that it does not render him open to misery, cowardice,
surrender or frailty of mind. Like iron enduring the flames in a furnace, the
desire for freedom continues to burn. And with the awareness that it will
become an instrument to gain freedom in the course of time, the iron suffers
the hammer strokes.

On 19 July 1988, I wrote of Nelson Mandela who has become identified as

the symbol of political imprisonment throughout the world:

You define
The consciousness of a political prisoner.
You are a symbol
Of freedom.
Defying imprisonment
You seem to say
Freedom means revolution.
What is life
But a day and a night.
What is an occupation
But a house and a profession.
If one’s goal
Apart from certain death
Were freedom.
He is like the rising sun
For the people.
A fragrance in the air
Even in exile,
Slowly like iron
Turning red-hot in fire,
He waits in jail.

It might be presumptuous of me to say that, identifying myself with

Mandela, I wrote this when the judgment of the Secunderabad Conspiracy
Case was adjourned for the third time from 19 July to 19 August. At the
same time, not to admit it would certainly be a lie. (That the judgment was
adjourned eight times between 19 July 1988 and 27 February 1989 is a fact
known to me, but perhaps not to my readers.)

Lately, political prisoners have been troubled by the phenomenon of

‘missing’. Comrades going ‘missing’ has become as common as encounters
and lock-up deaths. The intensity of agitation caused when one hears about
someone going missing depends upon one’s acquaintance with them. It
rankles like a thorn in the heart until one knows what has happened to them.
For a solitary prisoner like me who has no one to converse with, coming to
know of someone ‘missing’ results in real mental torture. I experienced
great distress when I heard about Balagopal’s disappearance.2 How good it
would be if all other instances turned out to be equally false!
It was my personal misfortune that I could unburden myself to my wife
and children only through letters or meetings, sharing with them the agony
or the ecstasy I experienced concerning news about Balagopal. But when
statements, refutations and fantasies poured forth from the radio and in the
press during those three days, to whom could I confide how critical and
close to my heart the matter was?
Aruna3 comes for an interview every Saturday. If Hema4 or the children
come from Warangal, they visit me on Saturday and Monday. Then they
return to Warangal. The period between that Monday and the next Saturday
is twelve days. One Monday Hema informed me that Venu5 had met with an
accident and that she was leaving. She did not know the details of what had
happened. I asked her to send me a telegram about Venu’s condition as soon
as she could. But even the telegram, like a letter, has to undergo censorship
before I can see it with my eyes.
Since any untoward happening would be reported in the newspapers, I
scanned, with lighted wicks in my eyes, every nook and corner of the
papers. Even as I write about it today, the memory of that solitary torture
makes my hairs stand on end. The pain was similar to that which one
experiences when regaining to consciousness after an accident.
Unless someone meets me in an interview that takes place once a week,
or during court hearings, my confusions, ecstasies, experiences, agonies and
thoughts pile up, exceeding all limits. They allow me no peace.
Just as constraints of place and situation affect writing, the interviews
too, suffer from the limitations. Confiding in someone lightens the load—
like boiling milk taken off from the fire. It is difficult otherwise to swallow
your own tears, to break within yourself the waves swelling in your heart.
If this is my condition, what of my people outside who might feel an
overwhelming longing to share their emotions with me?
On 21 January 1989, my mother came for an unscheduled interview. She
came to weep her grief. But the jail is a place where grief has to be held
sternly behind the eyelids, and a smile can be hinted at by the biting of the
lips. I wrote a lullaby for my mother to sing to me, becoming an infant
again that night.
When Hema comes, even though she comes from our home where
personal experience has fused with social struggle, the attempt to speak
does not result in the movement of her lips. Instead, it is her eyelids which
move to conceal her heart!

A water lily in one eye

A water lily in the other—
Look!
There is a water lily
Filling both eyes.

While a black lily and a red lily lay limp, petals torn in vicious sport, our
daughter Sahaja, who, due to her tender years, doesn’t know that grief is
meant to be hidden, was ready to pour out her load the moment she arrived.
As she rested her head on my shoulder, how could I tell her that this was
neither the time nor the place for crying?

There was not a single day that went by without a news item about an
‘encounter’ in the entire year of 1989. I may not have been an acquaintance
of all those who were killed, yet I felt agony and distress as though I had
read about the death of a friend.

A man dying perturbs me.

You may say he was a martyr
Or that he has turned into a star,
But when a man dies
Humanity holds its breath.
What is his name?
Where does he come from?
No one cares
But surely the murderer knows
His victim was a man.
The tree which rains flowers
Knows—
The wind sprinkling a fistful of earth
Knows—
A man is not alone
He is
A part of society,
A bit of earth which has absorbed
The warmth of the sun,
The moisture of the sea.
If his breath is blown out
His mind grows dark.
I may not know him
I may never have heard his name
Not seen him in a photograph or face to face
May not ever place him.
Yet once we know that this was a man
How can he be nothing
To you or to me?

The system has deprived us of pure and deep relationships so that even as
our eyes fill with tears for Japa Lakshma Reddy, our minds are
apprehensive about the other civil liberties activists. Where is the time for
us to grieve for the dead?
Dharmavyadha, a butcher of Kashi, says in the Mahabharata that
violence should not affect one’s nature even when one practises violence
out of professional compulsion. It is expected that, since man possesses the
power of discrimination, he should continue, as far as possible, to abjure the
violence which is unavoidable in nature. While inequality, oppression and
exploitation are the expressions of violence on the part of the exploiters,
hatred, rancour and revenge are expressions of counter-violence by the
exploited. The consciousness of the people alone can result in revolutionary
violence that will unveil non-violence. Only that can assure us of a future in
which agitation has no place.
Some incidents leave in their trail only pain and agony. But the people’s
response to those incidents can give fresh impetus to democratic struggles.
Safdar Hashmi’s death is a rare example of a loss that could prove to be an
influential factor in forging cultural unity. Beyond the boundaries of Delhi
and his party activists, his name may not be known to many people. But the
protest against the feudal-capitalist culture which took his life brought
about spontaneous unity in proletarian culture. Cutting across party barriers,
people participated in his final journey.
Safdar Hashmi’s political ideology, Shabana Azmi’s political viewpoint,
and my political vision are not one and the same. But when Shabana,
condemning Hashmi’s murder on behalf of artistes and cultural workers,
rushed up to the stage at the inauguration of an international film festival,
with a finger pointing towards the culprit, I felt as elated as I had by Sri
Sri’s boycott of the World Telugu Conference of 1975. (On both these
occasions I was in jail.) Sri Sri was arrested along with some writers and
students. I am convinced that even today people will set aside their
differences to work with literary and cultural forces to resist imperialist and
feudal powers. Like Safdar Hashmi’s companion. Moloyashree, and the
Jana Natya Manch team of artistes who, defying death, continued with his
street play Juloos, we too will cherish our revolutionary hopes, in detention.

From jail I greeted

The new year.
Crying out
In the streets of Delhi
With the ecstasy
Of breaking forth into the world
Hulla bol—
Hulla bol to the year that is gone!
Hulla bol to the culture of the past!
Hulla bol to a culture that murders!
 10 Hope and despair

There are people behind those papers, the lawyer Kannabiran1 reminds his
colleagues when discussing a case. I would like to add that those people are
troubled and some of them are behind bars.
The papers that request an escort to produce a prisoner in court may be
unimportant to the jail authorities or to the police escort. To the court that,
having glanced at the paper, grants an adjournment leaving the accused
waiting in a van in the court precincts, it is just another paper. But those
folded, crumpled, tattered scraps represent human beings.

Their shattered present

And their waning dreams lie there …

This jail being essentially a remand jail,2 the main problem for the
prisoners here is getting an escort. They look out eagerly for the escort on
the dates of the court hearings. For weeks, for months. When the escort
comes, they fervently hope that the magistrate will call them inside and
inquire about the case rather than send them back from the courtyard! If he
does call them, and if they have pleaded guilty, they hope the magistrate
will call them again and offset the remand period against their sentence and
release them. Those with several cases pending against them wish that they
would all come up for hearing in the same court, and that the sentences
would run concurrently. Be it a petty offender or a regular, legal aid is dear
and difficult to secure.

Open
Those dockets
And you will see our faces in those papers.
You fold us lengthwise
And like mailbags sealed
Addressed and tossed aside,
You scribble adjournments on our backs
And cast us aside.
Between adjournments,
Arguments and counterarguments
Men’s heads roll
And their hearts are frozen
Between penalty and goal
In the court halls
Of justice.

While the description ‘undertrial’ may indicate hope, in fact, a large

number of undertrials who have no legal help probably feel greater despair
than the convicted ones.
If you inquire of convicts who have served long sentences in jail what
they think is the most hope-inspiring event of recent years, they will
unhesitatingly say that it is Benazir Bhutto becoming prime minister.
Don’t be so surprised.
As soon as she became prime minister, Benazir Bhutto announced that
she would release 17,000 prisoners. She promised to release all women and
all old people. She said she would set aside the sentences of those who had
been sentenced to be hanged to death by the military regime.
That’s why!
 She and her mother had both tasted jail life under military rule; and her
father Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto was hanged. She knew well what a terrible
burden jail life is to human beings, whether they are guilty or innocent.
When I read an extract from Benazir Bhutto’s autobiography Daughter of
the East in the Indian Express, my eyes filled with tears. The tears were not
connected with Bhutto’s politics, but were induced by human bonds.
Half an hour. Another half hour. She is saying goodbye to the person she
loves the most. Grief threatens to choke her. But she must not cry. She
cannot increase the burden of his suffering.
I am not going to describe here that half hour in either her words or mine.
But shouldn’t civilized society be ashamed of allowing the cold-blooded
conspiracy by which governments hang a human to death, even though he
might be a murderer? Are decency, patience and forgiveness virtues
preached to the people but are not necessarily applicable to governments?
Does government mean institutionalized cruelty? Should the government be
the noose that throttles society’s voice of freedom? Is it a knife in the hands
of the blind goddess of justice?
The time is up. Benazir clutches the bars of her father’s cell and pleads,
‘Please open this door. Let me say goodbye to my father.’ The
superintendent denies her request. ‘Please. My father is the elected prime
minister of Pakistan. I am his daughter. We meet for the last time. Let me
hug him and bid him goodbye.’
I don’t need to add that she was not given permission. If she had not gone
through this experience perhaps Benazir would not have had such humane
feelings towards all prisoners?
Since the Naxalbari struggle began, thousands of revolutionaries and
sympathizers have been rotting in jail. It was only during the Emergency
when a whole class of future central government ministers entered jail that
white-collared folk realized there were human beings in jails.
I do not know how many ordinary prisoners the post-Emergency Janata
government released, but with the lifting of the Emergency and the
repealing of the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA). many
political prisoners like me were released. Those who had been jailed during
the Railway Strike were too, released.
Why this concern with affairs of neighbours or memories of the past?
Because prisoners despair, realizing that the rulers of today have no jail
experience, and have not experienced the agony of jail life. Except for a
couple of central or state ministers, how many have seen the inside of a jail?
It is at moments like this that I remember the open letter that Rajan’s
father wrote to Sanjay’s mother.3 How good it would be if everyone could
memorize the short poem by the poet Vaseera! It expresses the thought that
one can go around the earth without wetting your feet but you cannot go
through life without your eyes getting wet.
Those with lengthy sentences wait endlessly for the day when prisoners
will be released in large numbers. They know by rote commemorative
events and the birth and death anniversaries of freedom fighters and wait
for those days.
In 1987, ordinary prisoners hoped that, with the celebration of the fortieth
anniversary of Independence, there would be remission in sentences. The
papers had announced that the fortieth anniversary of Independence and the
Nehru centenary would be celebrated on a large scale by the Indian state.
Although there was no further mention of the first, the preparations for the
Nehru centenary were on and so the hopes of long-term prisoners kept on
flickering till 14th November.
The centenary celebrations of the Congress, the fifth anniversary of the
Mahanadu, five years of Telugu Desam Party (TDP) rule—however small
or big, on every such event prisoners expect some remissions and at least a
few releases.
As I write this, a TDP member of parliament has pleaded for a review of
genuine cases to release a few prisoners on the occasion of the sixth
anniversary celebrations of TDP rule. Lifers are hopeful that the
government will accept the recommendations of the committee headed by
the home minister, and that life sentence will be reduced to ten years.
Whatever may happen, none of these—no part of it—will apply to
Naxalite prisoners. As a matter of fact, how many political prisoners have
been sentenced? You can count them on the fingers of your hand. And yet,
in many cases the remand period equals the sentences awarded to ordinary
prisoners. The accused in the Parvatipuram Conspiracy Case, or those
detained during the Emergency, have been in jail for the last eight years.
Political prisoners, therefore, don’t pin their hopes on anniversaries and
celebrations. They look to the outcome of democratic struggles, and the
national and international implications of those struggles.
 In 1988 when the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee (APCLC)
observed Dr. Ramanadham’s anniversary as the Rights of Political Prisoners
Day we all felt we were part of that meeting. When we heard that the All
India League for Revolutionary Culture (AILRC) Calcutta Conference had
heard the message which Comrade Aziz ul Haq4 sent from prison, and that
it had passed resolutions demanding the release of political and cultural
activists, we felt as happy as if we ourselves had actually been released!
Whether the setting aside of the death sentence of the Sharpville Six and
the release of Nelson Mandela and had been secured by democratic
struggle, or not, we felt we were shining drops on the huge wave of
brotherhood thrown up to the sky by democratic movements worldwide.
Although information about what was happening in jails in Chile and
Burma was obtained only through the radio, we knew that, in spite of the
repression which people suffered there, they would rise again and again,
and more strongly, unlike the failed illusions in the Philippines and the
current illusions in Pakistan. We were confident that the wave would touch
the banks, and our hopes would kiss the waves on those banks and on the
horizon.
Though the Indian Penal Code differentiates between the accused and the
convicted, political prisoners are viewed as Naxalites by the government.
Since 1985, they have been subjected to a new experience of the draconian
Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Prevention Act (TADA).
There is no hope of bail for these prisoners. No hope of an escort. No
hope of a hearing. Except for a few like me, there is no hope of even legal
help. There are hundreds of such prisoners lauguishing in the jails of
Andhra Pradesh for many years now.
Just as underground revolutionaries practise primary health care, these
prisoners learn laws. When the high court released five prisoners on their
petition that for years no escort had been provided to enable them to be
produced in court, the judgment had the effect of making us believe in the
efficacy of petitioning for legal aid, among other things.
Political prisoners know the meaning of hope but they do not know the
meaning of despair. Chera called me a frightful optimist for this, and yet I
must honestly admit that although I have known pain, suffering and anxiety
along with hope, happiness and enthusiasm, never have I been plunged into
despair and frustration even in the most trying times.
 In personal matters, I have felt a sorrowful indifference at moments and
said, ‘Let troubles and hardships come if they must.’ I have felt detachment,
but have never yielded in to cynicism even for a moment in my solitary cell.
And I can claim, strengthened by my experience, that there are many
political prisoners who are facing imprisonment in a steadfast manner. Far
more meaningfully than I.
 11 The word is the world

Here is where silence was gathered up

In the completeness of the human word.
For a human being not to speak is to die.
Language extends to the hair tip,
The mouth speaks without the lips moving—
All of a sudden the eyes are words.
I take the word and go over it
As though it were nothing more than a human shape.
…
Without speaking I approach
The limits of the word and the silence.

The Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, said the word is born in blood, the word is
blood itself.
Given that every sentence has a verb, I feel the word is an action-oriented
creation. From out of such a world of words I have stepped into the silence
of imprisonment. Into such a silence that there is a dearth of words even to
express this silence.
In what soliloquy are the words of the past hidden? The words inside me
are in a tangle. ‘The heart struggles in my throat,’ but never breaks out.
‘Your silence, so hard to comprehend …’ wrote a friend about a book of
dalit stories translated from Marathi into Telugu.
To a disciplined political prisoner imprisonment is true silence.

When the step falters

And to speak is to stammer,
The mind swallows hardship …
Silence is existence.

As for me, except when I sought solitude, my nature, my work and my

struggle have been but words, words woven together, not silence.
If you don’t spare a moment for silence and contemplation, you end up
with bankruptcy of the spirit, says Chalam.
The jail has been giving me the opportunity to spare many a moment for
silence during the declared and undeclared Emergencies.
As an activist of the Stree Shakti Sanghatan1 wrote: ‘If you were outside,
you would have been immersed in the events of people’s lives. You found
the time and the space to meditate on the meaning of my words only in jail.’
Suffice it to say here that these friendly but bitter words are true.
It was during the last days of the Emergency that I wrote:

Breathless,
The struggle and passion
Driving me earlier
Held me erect.
Now the iron fist of captivity
Chokes me
Turning me into steel.
These walls towering around me
Have taught me to soar sky-high
To look from a vantage point,
To turn inward,
Seeking to rise to the heights
Of free birds in flight.

Seedlike, I thought, I had sprouted in the soil of Naxalbari. But like a

plant which grows stronger if it is trimmed, in detention, silence had
nourished me and my words.
Let me tell you of a study I conducted on this silence which was later
tempered in a group discussion. When, in 1973, I was arrested for the first
time under the MISA, I was subjected to solitary confinement for thirty-six
days, culturally as well as politically. This preventive detention is called
nazar bandh (out of the line of vision) in Urdu.
What happens if the eyes which should see are forcibly shut? When they
cannot see the exterior world they turn inward with acuteness. It was with
such eyes that I read William Hinton’s Fanshen.2
During the Emergency the book came out as an abridged translation in
Telugu titled Vimukthi. When I simultaneously read the History of the
CPSU (Bolshevik) and Vimukthi, I recognized the mass line implied in the
Naxalbari struggle. Mao had said casually that revolution is like washing
your face, sweeping your house and facing a trial every day. These words
were translated into practice in the political-economic form of land reform
in the Chinese villages, in the personal form of a man conquering his
selfishness, etc. These aspects of the revolution have been depicted most
effectively in Fanshen and are part of the inexorable process of confronting
the gate.3 The word ‘fanshen’ means change, and is here concerned with the
transformation of basic values.

Even more than striving for victory,

The struggle for values
Is a touchstone.
War must end
In victory or defeat
But this struggle will last
As long as the heart beats.

Dissolving in the clash of contradictions

New values take birth again—
Barely visible streams on hillsides
They do not grab you with the brilliance of lightning
Nor do they have the power and the glory
Of the roaring waterfall of struggle.

Values from the path

Lit by a lamp
In the dark
After sunset
Into which you have poured
The oil of your consciousness,
Which you have kindled by your look.

Values infuse
The mind hiding behind words
The creation behind work.

Save as a touchstone
Values have no victory marches,
Just the continuing search
For life’s unending truth.

Unless this enforced silence is broken, the culture and use of words which
can articulate the silence of many cannot come into existence. Silence may
be golden, but in troubled times one needs speech to cut through it like a
diamond, says the Russian poet Yevtushenko.
This speech, like a diamond, now cuts through my heart. In jail, there is
no need for words except for daily necessities.
During the morning checking, it is enough to hum wordlessly to indicate
you are alive. It is enough to move—there is no need to talk. For your daily
needs, and so that your tongue may not grow rusty, you speak, but there is
no one here with whom you can exchange ideas. In terms of culture, this is
indeed solitary confinement.
 Like the blood which journeys from the heart back to the heart, all my
words flow back into my silence. There, they sustain and nourish the health
of my body. But that happens only when the body, the mind and the heart
are set to work. Now and then, I fear that I might forget words. I wonder if
words have grown as dear as gold!
When I need to ask about cultural matters, unlike queries related to health
etc., I now need to rehearse the words in my mind. I find myself in a state
of painful excitement like that of a student who seeks to clear his doubt in
the classroom.
During interviews I experience two kinds of problems connected with my
loss of practice with words.
Just as one chokes on great gulps of water if one drinks thirstily, I sink
into silent pauses, searching for words. That I should run out of words even
for that half hour in a week is a strange experience.
If I happen to talk fluently on some topic, then my throat aches when I
return to the cell after that half hour. I feel worn out, like a student after a
debating competition.
When I come back after talking to fellow prisoners in the van during the
trips to court hearings, or with the lawyer at the court, or with those who
come to meet me, I feel exhausted. Even when I used to teach three classes
in succession at college, my throat was never affected as it is now. In jail

Except for the rustle of the bulbul’s wing

The sound of mango blossoms falling to the ground
The sound of silence in the hot air
Not a word that you desire …

Being human, we would like to listen to words and to explain the

thoughts in our minds. We want to share feelings of love, friendship and of
consciousness. Just as much as we wish to confess our innermost feelings to
someone, we would also like to receive others’ confidences.
Talking to family and friends who turn up at the court so that they can
speak to you is entirely a matter of chance. Unless you are taken into the
court hall, and unless the court permits, you are likely to remain in the van
the whole day while those who have come to meet you wait in the court
premises.
 Once I did not get a chance even to take a good look at a friend who had
come to the court from Visakhapatnam, leave alone to talk to him.

You came
Like the east wind
To tell me hot
Raw stories
Poured out by the tearful Godavari
To the sea.
I stood with mouth open,
Unmoving
Like a stricken tree.
Between us
Who stood speechless,
I lay this song
Unburdening myself,
Bridging the yawning chasm.
Whether this comes as a
Bird, a flower
Or a silly breeze
Please be gentle with it.

Even after fourteen months my ‘unburdening song’ lies with me ‘like a

peacock feather pressed in a book’.

The days are piling up on me like age. An equal number of days must have
passed for those of whom I took leave when I came here. But there is a vast
difference between the experience all of us would have shared if I had been
free, and my jail experience that I cannot share with anyone. The load in the
basket of silence on my head grows no lighter because of this. Added to the
heaviness is the burden of words massing up each day. As a consequence,
my days and nights have come to a standstill.
 And so, I wrote to a friend—who turns with words the night into day—
wondering whether I would recover from this act of suspended breath and
speech, and speak as fluently as before.

The words lie buried

Underneath the boulders of the mind—
I must try to rouse them
Move them.
Like the forgetful sky
Learning afresh the meaning of rain,
I long to be drenched
In a sound-filled universe.
Sprouting again from the earth,
I want to learn words
Once more,
To pick words
From schools
From crowds
From children,
Each single furrow of history.
If there is no sound
How can I break through
This heavy silence layering my mind?
Without the sound of words
How do I light the vision
Hidden these long days in my eyes?
I must speak and listen to my people
and learn my words again—
If a man loses words
What is left?
 12 Suppressed freedom

This life in jail is life crippled—

You can no longer
Apprehend your world
See it with your eyes
Hear it with your ears
Feel it with your fingers.
You can no longer
Walk forth into it
Nor speak to others
As yourself.
Here your mind is an injured eye
That flutters shut
Watching the sparks flying
From the flint of darkness.
Watching again and again
A single wave
Severed from the sea of emotion,
Your captive heart.

In a world where sweat continues to be transformed into tears, freedom will

remain an alien concept. As long as my blood turns into sweat, into sorrow,
into wounds, and my suffering is a pearl, a joy, a song to someone else, it is
not merely that labour is being exploited, but that human values are being
eroded. It is the loss of freedom as a result of man, losing his humanity.
If the labourer is not free, neither can the master be free. When all
relations are defined by oppression and subjugation, and human
relationships have vanished, the oppressor fears the future. At present, the
oppressed are physically subjugated. (As long as they keep me in jail, they
have to keep me under guard. As Sri Sri said, even a jailer is a prisoner. The
jail staff are as bound to the jail as I am!)
It is only within the precincts of the jail that this condition prevails. Can
the rulers who have chained revolutionaries and arranged armed escorts for
them move freely in the midst of the people who elected them? Can they
survive outside their protective cages?
As Marx said, the liberation of mankind is linked with the liberation of
the workers. As long as exploiters control the forces and the means of
production, fear and insecurity will always haunt the class that has control.
In jail, you are always mindful of the fact that you are not your own man
even for small pleasures and needs. It is said that if the mountain does not
come to Mohammed, Mohammed himself has to go to the mountain. But in
jail, whether it is the mountain or the sun, both must come to you. You
cannot choose to go to anywhere. In jail, both nature and human beings
must come to you, and it seems they too, must suffer imprisonment like
you.
On a moving train, it seems as though objects come towards you at your
window and move away while you travel on. In jail, nothing moves, and
your waiting is related to the waiting of history—for you, beyond the wall.
When I was outside, it used to be a pastime on holidays to go to the
crossroads in the morning, stop at the news-stand, take a quick look at all
the papers, buy the one I liked, and on the way back stop for a coffee with
friends. Though you can drink all the tea you want at home, drinking a cup
of tea at Kohinoor at midnight with friends is different. I had the rare
privilege of having someone who was close to me always there to see me
off or to receive me though I travelled a lot.
When setting out for a court visit, I am shoved out of the gate like an
object, handcuffed. Like a dog on a chain to be produced by the escort!
Well, after you surrender your head, body and hands to a ginthy, a jadthy
and bedis, you become a mere salthy.1 How can you hope to be a person?
How many times a day are we numbers for a ginthy! ‘One UT less,’ or
‘One CT extra,’ is how we are referred to. I have never heard, ‘One man
more,’ or ‘One man less.’ Not that this is a condition specific to jails. The
jail is, in one sense, an institution that drives home the sense of alienation
experienced by ordinary people.
As Sri Sri put it, ‘This set-up is a slave to a slave to a slave.’ And to
perpetuate this status quo, as Cherabanda Raju sang, ‘The country itself has
turned into jail.’ History has taught us that imperialism means war. But did
we understand clearly that imperialism also meant death until the poisonous
gases of Union Carbide enveloped Bhopal?

When imperialism nurtures

The harvest of feudalism,
Breath turns dangerous
Sight becomes darkness
The mother’s breast, death.

I have always had a few doubts about certain points in the Indian Penal
Code. Since 1974, the remand period is taken into account in case
punishment is meted out and the time already served is taken into
consideration even if the verdict is delivered much later. But what if one is
found not guilty? Leaving aside the loss of health, family and material
comforts, who will compensate for the freedom and the time lost?
The young men who were accused in the Secunderabad Conspiracy Case
have now entered middle age. Those who entered prison in the prime of life
have now grown old. One student has had a mental breakdown. The sick
daughter of an employee who was under suspension for fourteen years
committed suicide because her father could not get her medical treatment.
Cherabanda Raju died of cancer of the brain, rather, cancer of the
conspiracy case. Only Raju’s wife Syamala could come to court on the day
he was declared not guilty. Ravinder Reddy and Parsaiah who were released
on bail have been killed in ‘encounters’.
Raavi Subba Rao, who was among the lawyers in the magistrate court,
and Panchagnula Satyanarayana who was engaged by the Legal Aid
Committee later during the trials too, have died. Pattipati Venkateswarlu
who, as the advocate of political prisoners, spoke about civil and
democratic rights was also imprisoned with us throughout the Emergency.
Kannabiran argued our case till the very end. Like a rishi performing
penance, he ended up dedicating one-third of his professional life to our
cause.

Trapped motionless
Under the blood-spattered claws
Of the three-faced lion,
The dharma chakra lies
Defining its configurations.

The lengthening shadows

Have reached the plinth.
Who will answer then
For these lives battered and lost?

Whenever a murder takes place, it becomes a prosecution case. That is,

the police have to register the case, investigate, inquire, and ensure justice.
What happens when suspicion is directed against the police?
Or when the rulers themselves are the accused? Where the government
has to accept responsibility? Do we need more damning evidence of the
prevailing situation of helplessness than the status of the Bhopal victims?

Brokers light chimneys

In the heart of the city.
The green revolution plunders
Life’s essence.
The blood of the villages
Spills on the grounds of cities
Crushed in the embrace of multinationals.
Carbide sheds crocodile tears
In the raging flames of the land’s sorrow,
Sparks will be extinguished
Leaving nothing but ashes.
The hand of the state
Hands out a verdict irreversible
To hands groping in darkness,
Shutting the doors of life,
Shutting off the paths of the past
The future
The present.

You don’t need jargon to explain that the country today is trapped
between the drawn swords of imperialism and feudalism. The Bhopal
episode is like a peeled fig placed on your palm.
The jail is but a microcosm of this complex, turbulent and enslaved
world.
Not just the jail, not just the country, but the whole world is in fetters.
Ask Salman Rushdie who had never imagined that there would be any
problem in a country where parliamentary democracy and the rule of law
have been in existence for centuries! He wrote about Islam and was hunted
by the messengers of death. He earned a death sentence for the freedom of
expression.
I, as a person in jail on yet another conspiracy case after the earlier one
was struck down, if asked, would say: ‘The idea of freedom is embedded in
the material reality of subjugation, like a flame burning brightly, imprisoned
in a chamber of glass.’
A prisoner’s subjugation is compounded by the materiality of the four
walls within which he is imprisoned. And he believes that release means
freedom, but release may bring him no freedom at all! A bitter truth I often
hear from my visitors is, ‘You are in a small jail whereas we are in a big
jail. That is the only difference.’
 The anxiety of a prisoner of conscience is philosophically analysed by
Ngugi wa Thiong’o thus:
For those who wait in prison, as for those who wait outside prison, dreams of freedom start at the very minute of arrest.
Something might just happen; maybe somebody will intervene; and even when everything seems against any possibility
of release, there’s the retreat to the final bravado: The plight can only end in either death or freedom, which I suppose
are two different forms of release. So release of one sort or an other is eventually assured.2

Wasonga Sijeyo, a fellow prisoner, told Ngugi never to build up any false
hopes regarding the certainty of release.

It is good to have faith, to keep on hoping. For what is life, but hope? Never prevent man from hoping, for if you do,
you are denying him reasons for living. To hope for a better tomorrow, to dream of a new world, that is what is human.
But don’t be so certain of the hour and the day as to let it break you if the hoped-for freedom does not come at the
expected hour and day.3

Yet, I am thrilled today with the idea of freedom. I feel as though the
country will blossom from my body.

Shall I water the furrows of your struggle

From the springs of freedom
Gushing forth from my heart?
Where limbs are bound and mouths gagged
Where love is banned
Where the brightness of the meaningful glance
Is stitched up with a needle and thread
Tightly into the darkness of the sack,
Even there
Our breath which is free touches us
Our touch is still free,
The feeling of freedom will throb in us.
What your toiling hands uncover
And my shackled ones long to reach,
Held in our fists
Stuck to our palates
Hidden under our eyelids
Rooted in our hearts
Is freedom
Wounded and tremulous,
Freedom nevertheless.
 13 A shared life

1
Who are my companions here?
Each waiting breath, and
Faith in Naxalbari.

September comes, bringing heavy rain clouds, laden with sorrow. It was in
September 1985 that I lost two friends dear to my heart. Dr Ramanadham
and Gopi both were sahithee mithrulu.1 One life ended on 3rd September
and the other on the 18th. ‘Those who are born must die.’ But these deaths
were not natural. I feel in my heart of hearts that they gave their lives for
me. In my eyes—or is it in my heart?—I hold unshed drops of blood for
them.
Just before September 1986 the Godavari experienced the worst floods in
recorded history. The unheeding river rushed into the sea, washing away
both joy and sorrow. After the waters receded, long after the earth had been
ravaged and human lives washed away, the memories of these two losses
remain raw. They survive unerased. I am amazed by the power of these
memories.

September 17 was a day of horror; a horror compounded by nature and

society. Despite the fact that it was the day Ganesh idols were to be
immersed in the Hussain Sagar Lake, the court sent an escort for me.
Avoiding the usual route, the van threaded its way through many lanes and
by-lanes. But it could not escape the mass of people who had come to
witness the ceremony of immersion. On our way back the growing crowds
resembled flood waters swelling to the danger-mark.
I returned from all that bustle to my solitary cell. In the enclosure where
my cell was housed, there were two detainees in the last barracks. I turned
on the Urdu news in the evening only to hear the news of Salandra’s death.
Shocked, I could not believe what I had heard. I waited, listening not so
much to the news in Telugu which followed as to the loud beats of my
heart. Yes, Salandra Lakshminarayana, the Andhra Prabha reporter and
poet, had died of sudden illness in the Osmania General Hospital.
Choma’s drum was beating wildly as I stood in the cremation ground.2
To whom could I turn and say that this man had been my friend?
My association with Salandra had not been merely because we were both
members of Virasam. He was a neighbour of my friend, the friend with
whom I usually stayed in Hyderabad. Salandra was always busy, seldom
available at home. I was impressed by his discipline, his self-reliance and
enthusiasm. When I did find him at home, he would always offer me a glass
of buttermilk saying, ‘I know you always drink tea but in our house you
must drink this.’ I do not remember a single occasion when we just whiled
away time in idle chat. It was work which drew us close and bound us
together.
It was then I wrote the poem ‘Thodu’, lines from which open this chapter.
I will write the evangel-poem of comrades and love,
(For who but I should understand love, with all its sorrow and joy?
And who but I should be the poet of comrades?)
—Walt Whitman

Jail rules forbid a political prisoner to mix with non-political prisoners. So

even if there are other detainees, their presence does not lead to any
companionship.
I established rapport with two comrades as soon as I arrived in the jail.
The jailer asked, ‘So-and-so is in the gunj.3 Would you like to stay
there?’
‘Why a gunj? I would choose even hell if I could be with him!’ I thought
to myself.
In Secunderabad Jail, the gunj is for prisoners who are to be hanged. Its
premises are neat, comfortable and very pleasing. There are flowering
plants in front of the cell and you can even glimpse the moonrise on some
evenings. But come out and you will also see the Phansi Ghat.
In one cell, there is a comrade from Nalgonda who has been in and out of
jail for forty years, from 1946 to 1986, since the time of the Telangana
Peasant Struggle. In another, there is a young man who was identified and
arrested as a Naxalite although he was only doing trade union work. I met
him in this jail. I met the Nalgonda comrade in the Warangal Jail during the
Emergency period. I spent two months in their company. The first month
flew past like the flood of time and the second like the flood of youth. The
Nalgonda friend had travelled widely through the country and was well
read. He is a living example of the saying that knowledge rises out of
practice. The experiences he recounted! The three of us used to loiter in the
yard till lock-up time listening to his stories. He had a habit of walking
while reading. I borrowed novels by Charles Dickens and Napoleon’s
biography from him.
I was shifted to an enclosure where detainees are normally housed
towards the end of February 1986, after my two friends were released. This
jail was meant for Rayalaseema detainees who were sent first under the
National Security Act and, from November 1986 onwards, under the
Prevention of Goondaism Act. There were also some who came under the
the Prevention of Blackmarketing and Maintenance of Supplies of Essential
Commodities Act. I was never alone for more than a week in the three-year
period. Even if the high court and the advisory board do not set a detainee
free, the period of detention is fixed by the Act under which they are
arrested. As they came and went, some of them would ask me when I would
leave. My answer was that my cell was like the guard’s cabin to this three-
barracked jail train. How could I walk away along with the passengers?
Once again, in 1988 I enjoyed rare political comradeship in that jail. By a
strange coincidence, this pair too, was made up of one comrade whose head
was grey with political experience and the other, a fiery young man. They
were in the barracks next to mine. As long as they were in jail, although the
nights were lonesome, I was hardly aware of how the days glided past. The
younger comrade’s interests, like mine, ranged from literature to films. He
also got me addicted to solving crossword puzzles, and enriched my
knowledge of plants.
My fellow accused in the Ramnagar Conspiracy Case were my
companions in the van on the day of the court hearing.

He is always working
Unruly locks masking the smile trembling on his lips
The laughter sparkling in his eyes.
Always talking
To a cold, glowing ember,
To water or dirt.
The jokes threading his talk
Free of any trace of malice or envy.
Softly hummed,
The song of
His raw hidden reality
Sets a wild beast roaring
In me.
Murmured through clenched teeth
Like water gurgling under rock
His song like a brilliant sunbeam
Pierces the darkness.
So busy is he in jail
That even Jesus on Christmas Day
Could scarce check his impatience.
Pleading for a look, a word,
A dreaming, though
With intense longing—
And when Jesus spoke of green grass
He thought it was the green glass
In which he served the tea.
That was all that made sense
In his world of service.
I waited eagerly
To hear his answer.
He took up his work with both his hands
(Not unusual this)
Tossed his hair back
Shifted the weight of his smile from his eyes
To his lips and moved away,
As if to say
That this life
Was after all in a world of sinners.
As if to say
For one who is trapped
In the jobs and sorrows of prisoners
Where is the time to speak
To gods and their messengers?

The only bond I have with ordinary prisoners is a word or a smile or a

small service; with those who give you tea, food, papers, items from the
canteen, who iron your clothes and fetch the mail or summons from the
authorities concerned. Some of them are in charge of certain duties. Some
of them are warders on duty. They call out to you: Have you eaten? Did you
sleep well? Are you doing well? Here is your tea, your paper and look,
there are your clothes. They are a band of well-wishers who look after your
physical needs. Chess has been a bond with a couple of prisoners in this
section.
A silent bond too, can lead to a sense of belonging, to a relationship.
I look at all these ordinary prisoners from a distance while sitting in my
room or walking in our enclosure. Especially at the convicts who work in
the kitchen. They toil here without sparing themselves. Have they come to
the jail because, in this country, there is no work for a pair of hands to
provide for the belly? Or do these hands work under compulsion only?
Suddenly a sense of wonder and pain strikes me.
I did not have the opportunity to mingle with these ordinary prisoners. I
could only write down my observations—I did not know them.

2
Only the camp belongs to the enemy,
The feet that walk in step with the cross
Belong to friends.
Only the chains are the enemy’s,
The bond that connects the hands holding them is of friends,
The duties are laid down by the enemy,
The helplessness in the eyes which watch belongs to friends,
The cage belongs to the enemy.
Perhaps the gods who do not see the man in the dock are blind
But the men who recognize him embrace him.
It is not the people who conspire but the system
It is not men who accuse but the crime.
What does it matter if we are the accused?
New human relationships spring up
As convicts with defiant hands uncover
The conspiring mask of the guilty state.
A humane existence will wake again
In the embrace of this world.
When you visit the court because you have been involved in a case for
fifteen long years, how can opposite parties keep from smiling a greeting to
each other? Even the high seat of justice gives out a genial smile!
In the fourth week of May 1986, I was taken to the trial of the Mill
Colony Police Station Case which was transferred from Warangal to the
second additional metropolitan sessions court of Hyderabad. A day earlier, I
had seen a newspaper report that said that two of the accused in the case
were ‘encountered’ on 20th May. When I was escorted into the court hall, I
addressed the judge with great pain: ‘We have names, yet you address us as
A-1, A-2 and so on. A-1 and A-2 (Ramakrishna and Nageswara Rao) were
two human beings and they have been “encountered”. Even if you ignore
the duty to learn about them as human beings, doesn’t this court still have a
need, a responsibility, to know why they are not present as accused in a case
that is still being tried?’
The judge was moved. He knew that behind the word ‘accused’ were
men, and behind the papers were human lives. Not just in this context but in
others as well. Tenderness is an attribute of human beings, but not of the
system, right?
2 July 1986: the day of the hearing of the Secunderabad Conspiracy
Case. I read in the papers that the judge of our special court had been
transferred to the high court as registrar. This meant the trial would come to
a halt once again. I protested to the court: ‘This was the case which the
people’s poet Cherabanda Raju suffered political persecution and ill health
before he died. Can you tell me if this trial will be over before another
conspiracy case is foisted on revolutionary writers?’ I then pulled myself
together: ‘Whatever it is, this is the day of Cherabanda Raju’s martyrdom.
Let us remember the revolutionary poet today.’
The judge as well as the public prosecutor nodded in assent, out of a
genuine regard for the poet. (By this time, all those who were working for
democratic and revolutionary movements, who were members of student,
youth and rythu kooli organizations5 had been named as accused in the FIR
of the Ramnagar Conspiracy Case. When the chargesheet was filed, the
names of all the others were removed, and only Gaddar and I were left. We
came to know this only around 20 August 1987.)
The judges, advocates, clerks and attenders who have been working in
the same court without promotion for fifteen years have become thoroughly
acquainted with the history of the conspiracy case. So also, the whole
contingent on the side of the prosecution, including the Central Crime
Station Police and the escort. How can my acquaintance with all these
people, in spite of the many limitations, not become stronger? They are
human beings after all!
Our society is divided, the bonds of humanity negated, but the horn of
plenty—the Marxist perspective—in our hearts helps bring together these
fragments.
Except for the revolutionary writers, I became acquainted with those who
were framed along with me only through the case. Even conspiracy cases
have earned me plenty of friends.

Pity the solitary ones—

The poor policemen
Exiled from sleep and refuge
Yawn from hour to hour,
‘Sab theek hai.’

Now about jail. As far as I am concerned it is an institution of

compulsory free education. But for Cherabanda Raju the Secunderabad
Gandhi Hospital became his permanent address from 1980 until 1982. In
his letters he would refer to it as Gandhi Roga Nilayam.6 If only the
educational institutions had remained centres of learning, and the hospitals,
centres of health, there would not have been any need for prisons in this
country.
On Mondays, there is what is known as the ‘prayer round’ in jail. That is
when the problems and needs of prisoners are represented to the jail
superintendent. Not that they cannot be recounted on other days, but on that
particular day the superintendent comes to you inquiring about any troubles
you face. It is left to the staff of the jail to look after the well-being or
otherwise of prisoners who are separated from their parents, spouses,
children and homes. And so, the bond between the jail staff and the
prisoners is like the bond which exists between the patient and his doctor
and nurses.
All prisoners are not necessarily criminals. Those who have this humane
outlook and consider jails as houses for reform are never forgotten by the
prisoners. Nor do the prisoners have a quarrel with those who think that,
although the prisoners may be criminals, as jail staff they themselves are
not concerned with the crimes committed but are merely custodians of the
accused.
However, on account of the government’s attitude towards prisoners with
revolutionary politics, the expression of my bond or relationship with the
jail staff cannot be spelt out.

3
Mother,
Holding me in your arms
What do you dream of
As I raise my hands
Gurgling with laughter
Before your unseeing eyes?
Seeking to close your eyes
I slide my fingers across
To find a warm wetness
Like blood
That cuts like a knife
As I try to wipe it.

Mother in tears?
In whose arms will you cry
If the world itself rests in you?
In whose warm belly
Will you hide your face
As the tears pour forth?
Wrinkling your nose
You smile and nectar rains,
The clouds in the sky vanish.
(Does that smile come from your lips, Mother
Or your eyes?
Those cheeks, those dimples?
It pours out like a flood
Washing away puddles.)

Secretly
Lest someone should see
You scrape the tear from your eye
With your fingernail
And toss it away.
What a riot of colours springs from that fallen tear!
Mother, look!
The Milky Way
Blazes on your finger tip!

Those who come to meet me:

She comes, expecting a pathetic song from me, but then looking at me
composes herself to sing a lullaby. However, what she makes of the
situation makes her sing a carol and a lal song, and thus inspires confidence
in me like a mother does in her child.
Sahaja is the image of my thoughts and emotions. Quiet and level-
headed, yet stubbornly pursuing what she thinks is right, is my critic Anala.
A precocious chatterbox, unsure whether if the term is one of reproof or a
compliment, and fretting impatiently in rebellious adolescence, is Pavana.
These are our children. These are the companions who have virtually been
our limbs these last four years—not only mine but their mother’s as well.
And oases to each other.
Since we understand each other better, Venu and I do not pour out our
thoughts and feelings in letters or conversations. He has started coming to
interviews recently.
These—my kith and kin—have been the people coming to meet me in
jail. Other relatives and friends too, see me at the court periodically. And
yet, compared to the actual number of friends, relatives and acquaintances I
have, how few these are!
I have but half an hour to speak to them once a week or on the day of the
hearings. I am overcome by the realization that the rest of my time is a
vigil, a breathing, a waiting, for these meetings.
 The restlessness that fills me before I meet these, my people; my
imagined letters to them; my thoughts and emotions on reading their letters
and meeting them—all these make it clear that they have been with me all
through my detention.
Unlike the thirteen who surrendered Jesus Christ for the asking
(surprisingly, it was also thirteen companions who consented to surrender
me to court at my request), these ‘unthirteen’ letters have been with me in
my imagination during this detention.
Apart from those whom I waited for, relied on, and treasured in my
memory, my commitment to Naxalbari has remained secure and
unwavering.
There are many others who will not forget me, but hold me in their
thoughts, and whom I hold in my thoughts wherever we may be.
It is not just the thought of all this love, but also the values left behind by
those who have departed that are my companions here.
In my very first letter from jail I urged my companion who shares my
love and its measure of joy and sorrow to wait for me.

Surrounded by darkness
On our rooftop
Do you remember
The light from the signal tower
Flashing across the sky
And vanishing in a moment?
Whatever I do
You too sweep through my mind.
To escape from you in separation
What a world I have created
And yet you haunt me there.
I am your world
And you have
Stolen my dreams
Hidden my secrets
Shielded my cowardice with a smile
Patiently borne my weakness
Cloaked my lies with your dignity.
Even now
In our separation
Your waiting
Scans the darkness
Like the beam
Of a searchlight.
Each moment
Of my journey
Your cautious wishes
Reach me
And I could fly
And land safely before you.
And so
Should I say again
Wait for me?
I shall return after
Undoing death.
 14 Context and constraints:
An epilogue

In August 1988, Arun Shourie, editor of the Indian Express, asked me if I

would write a column for the paper from jail.
You should be able to tell us what it is like to live as a prisoner confined
in a small space for such a long period. You should be able to show us the
anxieties that characterize the small society inside jail. You must make us
understand which news from the outside world reaches you and how it
appears in the light of the reality inside.
While meeting with this three-fold demand, I had to suffer three
constraints in jail. I had no opportunity to discuss the quality of my writing
with anyone. My writing, good or bad, had to face the censorship of the jail
authorities and the censorship of the Intelligence branch.
In spite of these limitations and constraints I decided to express myself. I
decided to test my creative powers in jail on the touchstone of my readers’
response.
 There are probably no writers in the world who do not write in jail, too!
Some writers who were able to send out such writing came to be known by
their pseudonyms. In most cases, jail writings see the light of day only after
the writers are released. But to the best of my knowledge, no one else has
had the opportunity to publish his writings from jail.
Unnava Lakshminarayana’s novel Malapalli1—written in jail and
smuggled out, and published after his release—is probably the first instance
of jail writing in Telugu. Having been forced to carry pots of urine on his
head in a British Indian jail, he was ‘de-classed’, and was able to gain a
realistic perspective on the plight of the inhabitants of a village of
untouchables. He wrote it while imprisoned, when neither pen nor paper
was available. (Mary Taylor’s My Days in an Indian Prison was palpably
realistic because she had lived in close contact with prisoners in a Bihar
jail.) I cannot imagine the circumstances in which Kancherla Gopanna2
sang the compositions of Ramadas in Taneesha’s jail. But if you have read
Notes from the Gallows, you can imagine how Julius Fuchik wrote a
brilliant song from the mouth of the gallows. No other writer has perhaps
had to face such torture, thinking each time that this would be his last
chance to write. He achieved immortality waiting for death at the hands of
the Nazi firing squad. That he was able to write in such difficult conditions
is a testimony to the power of his dreams of a new world.
It was jail again which made a writer of the black revolutionary George
Jackson. He wrote letters with a wonderful awareness of history, to his
family, to his friends and lawyers. The American government killed him in
jail. His letters were published later under the title Soledad Brother and
became extremely popular.
Kim Chi-ha, the South Korean poet who was sentenced to death, wrote
his autobiography in jail. He wrote in the darkness of the cell, in solitary
confinement where paper and pen were forbidden. Mucking up the floor
dirt in his underground cell to use as ink, making a pen of the twig with
which he brushed his teeth, he wrote on cigarette wrappers begged from
sympathetic sentries on guard. He sent out the bits and pieces through his
lawyer. The government then confiscated his Autobiography of a Priest
which was cited as his confessional deposition, on the grounds that it
applied Mao’s theory of contradictions. The poet was set free later in the
wake of protests from around the world.
 Ngugi wa Thiong’o wrote his novel Devil on the Cross on toilet paper in
a Kenyan jail. This was in 1978 when President Jomo Kenyatta had
clamped down an emergency. As Ngugi kept awake writing in his cell late
into the night, the sentry would ask him, through a chink in the door, to go
to sleep. Finally those papers were confiscated in a search by the jail
authorities. When the jail officer was changed (probably after Kenyatta had
decided to lift the emergency), those papers were not only returned to him
but fresh paper was supplied for writing. During the Emergency in India, in
1976, Bojja Tarakam who had been in the Chanchalguda jail was granted
parole. By then he had not only written some poetry (which came out later
as a book, Nadi Puttina Gonthuka), but had also recorded the experiences
of a peasant guerrilla from Telangana (Comrade Bandru Narsimhulu), and
prepared a rough draft of a novel based on these experiences. When he went
out on parole, those papers and his diaries were taken away by the
Intelligence branch of the police. They are yet to be returned to him.
I do not need to describe the murder of writers’ literary creations in the
course of watches, searches and raids during imprisonment, when it is
inescapable even in the world outside.
It is true that beginning with October 1973, I have written intermittently
while within the embrace of prison bars, but not sitting ‘on the hard floor’.
This I wish to confess in all humility. I always sat on a chair and wrote at a
table either as a detainee or a special class prisoner. I was always allowed to
write. I never experienced the slightest inconvenience in the matter of
physical amenities, either. It was the intellectual, emotional, cultural and
political isolation that troubled me.
When I decided to write from jail, I thought of doing thirteen pieces on
different aspects—on my ‘unthirteen’ companions. And I have done so.
I came out of prison at about the same time as I completed my creative
task. I wrote my last piece on 8th March and handed it over to the jail
authorities. A few days before I was released on bail, the Intelligence
department sent back the last piece, describing it as objectionable. It could
not be forwarded through jail and permission was withdrawn. Since I was
released on 21st March, the last of the pieces saw the light of day without
any undue mutilation.
Now that I can no longer write of jail experiences, from inside jail, I will
put a stop to this exercise for the moment.
 If I feel like writing about jail and my jail experiences after mulling over
them in the bigger jail outside, or after letting them churn in my mind, I’ll
write again.
Though originally commissioned by Arun Shourie for the Indian
Express, I wrote these essays in Telugu, and they were serialized every
week in the Telugu daily Andhra Prabha, by the then-editor Potturi
Venkateswara Rao, Burra Subrahmanyam and others. I am grateful to them
for making possible a Telugu readership for these essays.
As far as I know, the criticism which these essays generated is that they
are ‘personal’. Every reader has the right to judge whether there is a
universal quality to my experience and its expression. But I think, it is the
revolutionary political prisoners who would have the experience necessary
to make such a judgement. Whosoever it is, will have to take into account
the limitations and the constraints I mentioned earlier.
There were many who welcomed the essays, perhaps with more affection
than necessary because I wrote them in jail. However, I wish to conclude
with the conviction that both kinds of readers will provide me with critical
inspiration to write in future.
Notes

1. The endless wait

1. Usually kept in solitary confinement, I was locked up with two

comrades that night to watch TV.
2. Ginthi is the counting of prisoners and batni is food distribution.
3. During the severe repression of 1985–89, the Andhra Pradesh police
adopted the infamous Latin American trick of liquidating people leaving no
trace. More than sixty people went missing during that period.
4. In the centre of the jail, there is a radio fixed on the watchtower called
Circle.
5. Chaudhvin ka chand ho ya aaftaab ho = Are you the bright moon of
the fourteenth night or are you the sun?
Aadha hai chandrama raat aadhi = The moon is a perfect half and it is
midnight …
Reh na jaaye teri meri baat aadhi = Let our words not remain unspoken
…
6. Chalam (Gudipati Venkatachalam, 1897–1979), a highly regarded
Telugu writer who introduced the theme of women’s emancipation in
Telugu literature.
7. Entha haayi ee reyi nindeno enni naallakee brathuku pandeno = How
much pleasure has filled this night, after how long has my life come to
fruition …
8. Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Kenyan novelist and professor of English, wrote
a prisoner’s diary in 1978 when detained for his writings. The author
translated it into Telugu while he was in prison.
9. A revolutionary activist and writer, Sahu co-authored the historical
novel, Komuram Bheem.
10. The Sikhs who were arrested in the Golden Temple, at the time of
Operation Blue Star, were kept in Jodhpur without a trial.
11. Such as Aziz ul Haq.
 12. Activists of the peasant movement who were given the death
sentence and finally hanged on 1 December 1975, during the Emergency.
13. ‘Wait for me’ was written by Konstantin Simonov (1915–1979) in
1941.

2. All things bright and beautiful

1. The first split in the Communist Party of India took place in 1964, and
the leaders of the newly formed CPI (Marxist) were imprisoned in 1965.
2. The author used to walk past the gate of Warangal Central Prison when
he was teaching in a college in Warangal. And Srjana was a monthly
journal he edited between 1966 and 1992.
3. Kaloji Narayana Rao (1914–2002), poet and freedom fighter
4. The first conspiracy case in which the author was implicated along
with five writers and forty Naxalite activists. The case dragged on for
fourteen years until the author was acquitted in 1989.
5. Basavaraju Appa Rao (1894–1933), romantic lyricist
6. The poet Cherabanda Raju and the poet and literary critic K.V.
Ramana Reddy (1928–1998) were both founders of the Revolutionary
Writers’ Association (VIRASAM). They were co-accused in the
Secunderabad Conspiracy Case.
7. Cattamanchi Ramalinga Reddy (1880–1951), pioneering literary critic,
objected to the fifteenth-century poet Potana’s description of a forest.
8. The author’s daughter
9. The author’s niece
10. ‘The Leaf’, O. Henry

3. All creatures great and small

1. Strong, sweet memories of a previous life linger on in the present life.

2. The story of the swan wounded by Devadatta that was claimed and
cared for by Siddhartha (soon to be the Buddha).
3. In May 1987, personnel of the Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC)
in Meerut killed many innocent Muslims during a communal conflict and
threw their bodies into the river Ganga.
 4. Popularly known as Sri Sri, Srirangam Srinivasa Rao (1910–83), was
the founder president of VIRASAM. His memoir is titled Anantham.
5. After the arrest of Nalla Adi Reddy—secretary, CPI (ML) People’s
War—along with five of his associates in April 1986 in Ramnagar,
Hyderabad, the government foisted a conspiracy case on them, also
implicating the author who was already in jail.
6. Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act
7. Composed between 800 and 950 BCE, Hitopadesa is a collection of
fables and maxims. The first book of the collection is titled Mitralabha or
‘Gaining Friends’.
8. The author was Accused no. 14. The prosecutor mischievously tried to
attribute the charges against Accused no. 4 to the author.

4. Where the mind is free

1. K. Balagopal (1952–2009), writer and human rights activist

2. The monthly organ of the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee
(APCLC)
3. The Hyderabad Book Trust is an independent publisher. Prajasakti and
Visalandhra are publications associated with the CPI (M) and CPI
respectively.
4. After Mao’s description of the woman holding up half the sky
5. A Bengali artist famous for his portraits of the 1942 famine and the
Telengana Armed Struggle
6. A small town in Adilabad district where several Gond tribals were
killed in a police firing on 20 April 1981.
7. Novel by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o

5. Letter and spirit

1. Malli and Nagaraju are lovers in the Telugu film Malleeswari.

2. Kalidasa in Meghadutam employs a cloud as messenger. In the
Ramayana, Rama uses the monkey Hanuman to send a message to Sita. In
the Mahabharata, Nala and Damayanti use the swan as a go-between.
3. Leader of CPM, wife of Moturi Hanumanta Rao
6. Mother image

1. The black factory worker and poet Benjamin Moloise was hanged by
the Botha regime of South Africa on 18 October 1985. The author wrote
this poem on 23rd October.
2. A revolutionary balladeer associated with the author
3. A revolutionary killed by the police in Maharashtra in 1979
4. A poet, the author’s associate in Revolutionary Writers’ Association as
well as Srjana
5. The first stanza of six lines is by N. Venugopal. The author continues
and completes the poem.
6. The lines quoted are from a poem by Sivasagar, a path-breaking
revolutionary poet. Sivasagar is the pen name of K.G. Satyamurthy, a
popular Naxalite leader of the 1970s.

7. The truth that cannot be concealed

1. Oggukatha is a folk form.

2. Komuram Bhim, a tribal leader who fought against the Nizams and
was killed by the police in the 1930s.
Indravelli is the name of the village where the police opened fired on a
Gond tribal meeting in April 1981, killing a number of tribals. The number
of deaths was estimated between 13 and 60.
Satnala is a place in Adilabad district, one of the many villages where
tribals resisted the police.
3. Pitta Bongaram is a village near Indravelli.
4. An associate of the author in the Revolutionary Writers’ Association at
that time; later, a famous advocate and Dalit leader. ‘Neeku Cheppane
Ledu’ is the title of one of Tarakam’s poems and Nadi Puttina Gontuka is
the title of the collection.
5. Souda was another associate of the author in the RWA, and Jailu
Nunchi Premalekha is the title of his collection of poems.
6. The author is not sure which English translation of Faiz he had with
him in jail and is therefore unable to provide details of the source.

8. Stone walls do not a prison make

 1. We Were Making History: Life Stories of Women in the Telangana
People’s Struggle is a collection of interviews with the women participants
of the Telangana armed struggle. This oral history was published by Stree
Shakti Sanghatan.
2. A line from the author’s own poem
3. The author’s close associate in Warangal. A pediatrician by profession,
Dr Ramanadham was active in the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties
Committee and was killed by the police in September 1985.

9. The agony and the ecstasy

1. The world of Trishanku—suspended between heaven and earth, and

belonging to neither
2. K. Balagopal, the then-general secretary of the Andhra Pradesh Civil
Liberties Committee, was travelling from Hyderabad to Calcutta in 1987
and missed an appointment en route in the Visakhapatnam station. The
times were such that he was thought to have been whisked away by the
police. The entire state was anxious for over two days until he reached
Calcutta safely.
3. Aruna is the author’s niece.
4. The author’s wife
5. The author’s nephew

10. Hope and despair

1. A well-known civil liberties lawyer

2. ‘Remand’ is a legal term denoting the period of trial. The jail in which
the author was mainly housed undertrials, not convicts.
3. Rajan was an engineering student killed by the police in Kerala. He
was one of hundreds of such victims, and his father, Echara Warrier, fought
the case post-Emergency. As part of the fight, he wrote a letter to Indira
Gandhi, after Sanjay Gandhi’s death, about the pain of losing a son.
4. A senior Naxalite leader from West Bengal
5. The Sharpville Six were six South African protesters convicted of the
murder of the deputy mayor of Sharpeville, and sentenced to death. The
convictions were widely condemned by the international community as
unlawful and racist. International pressure finally led to sentences being
commuted to 18–25 years in prison.

11. The word is the world

1. An organization of progressive women formed in the post-Emergency

democratic resurgence
2. Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village records
William Hinton’s account of land reform in a Chinese village during the
revolution.
3. ‘Confronting the gate’ is a rough translation of a Chinese expression
for passing the test—the purification of cadre ranks.

12. Suppressed freedom

1. Typical jail parlance: ginthy is the routine counting of prisoners, jadthy

is search, bedis are handcuffs and salthy is an object.
2. Detained, Ngugi wa Thiong’o (n.p.: Heinemann, 1982), p. 146.
3. Ibid., p. 150

13. A shared life

1. Literally ‘Friends of Literature’. The phrase also refers to the

collective that brought out Srjana, a literary monthly, edited by the author
between 1966 and 1992.
2. Chomana Dudi (Choma’s Drum) is a novel by Kannada writer K.
Shivarama Karanth.
3. Gunj means a cell for one condemned to death by hanging.
4. Peasant/agricultural labour organizations
5. Gandhi Illness Centre

14. Context and constraints

 1. A leader of the national movement for freedom, Lakshminarayana
wrote his epic novel in Telugu during the early 1920s.
2. Kancherla Gopanna was a government official under the Qutb Shahi
dynasty in the sixteenth century. He misappropriated public funds to build a
Ram temple, and was imprisoned for the crime. In jail he wrote keertans
(songs) eulogizing and criticizing Ram.
Acknowledgements
I had been in prison for three years when I began writing these ‘letters’ for
the Indian Express. I never wrote a diary outside, but the notes I scribbled
in the loneliness of jail, I wanted to include here. The notes turned out to be
poetry when it was dense and intense. The division between poetry and
prose is fluid in these letters from prison. Appropriately, the written
tradition in Telugu literature began with the champu style that blended
prose and poetry.
People’s poet Kaloji wrote a detailed preface to the Telugu original of
this book, Sahacharulu, in 1989, and he is not alive to see this English
rendering.
In the twenty years since it was published in Telugu, my children have
got married and my grandchildren started visiting me when I was again in
jail during 2005–06. Jail became a part of their imagination and experience.
And the desire for liberation as well.
Sahacharulu was dedicated to my close associates and friends, Doctor
(Ramanadham) and Gopi, who sacrificed their lives for me.
In 2008, when this book came out in Hindi as my jail diary, I dedicated it
to Hemalata, my companion of four decades of crisis, who had become
synonymous with waiting because of my political beliefs
Balagopal, one of my ‘unthirteen companions’ in this book, left us
suddenly on 8 October 2009. To put it in his own words, he passed away
from ‘making history’ into eternal ‘rest’.
With tears of camaraderie…