From the Belly of the Prison: Anand Teltumbde’s The Cell and the Soul

Anand describes the deplorable condition of prisoners in the Taloja jail, Maharashtra, where he was incarcerated for 31 months, a portrayal that would be true for most prisons in the country. The book is also a dissection of caste and Indian society – a soup of life, misery, identity and structural violence. It measures the insouciance of a society that loves to discard its poor, with the prison being the most suitable dumping ground.

Anand discusses the social dynamics of the prison as if it is a living organism with a heart, lung and a brain. He writes about the hierarchical subtleties and informal economies that exist within Indian prisons. He describes a crime as something that is “what the police think it is” – an appropriate definition in a republic that jails its young intellectuals like Umar Khalid for crimes that are still undecided and unwritten.

The prisoners of the BK violence are prisoners of consciousness. Most of the intellectuals and activists have shared their experiences of interactions with fellow prisoners from inside the jail. Sudha Bhardwaj’s “Phansi Yard” (2023), or Varavara Rao’s A Life in Poetry (2023) are books within the same genre. Anand’s book too meanders into his relationship with other prisoners, men of authority in jail and more.

He devotes one chapter each to two of his co-accused in the BK violence case – Stan Swamy and Varavara Rao. As he describes his conversations with Swamy, the Priest-activist whose subsequent death due to mismanagement of his COVID made headlines of ignominy – he delves into identity, vulnerability and the rights of tribals (for whom Stan worked all his life) and rebellions. Terming their complicated conversations on revolution- the ‘Rule of the Poor’– Anand recalls how he used to tease Stan asking where the revolution would come from so “we might send her a pick-up”.

The Cell and the Soul is a poignant repository of our times. It is a labyrinth of injustice, hate and hope in our consciousness where Anand’s words celebrate life and death on equal terms. The deep pain in the description of the life and death of his brother is like a whisper in a forest sleeping in the moonlight –- only loud enough to be heard by the relevant.

In a poignant chapter he describes the suicide of a fellow prisoner, an ‘innocent illiterate’ man named Bhola, who was even unaware of his charges. Indian prisons are surely where darkness and night live.

In Prison Notebooks (1946), Antonio Gramsci wrote more than 80 years ago, that the capitalist state rules through force plus consent –- political society is the realm of force and civil society is the realm of consent. The Cell and the Soul is a scream against all realms of the capitalist and the authoritative. It breaks the monologue of hierarchy and gives us an insight into what’s wrong with the Indian justice system and what can be done to rectify it.

The Cell and the Soul needs to be read urgently particularly by the youth of a country that is burdened by the weight of majoritarianism, casteism and communalism. This book is a wonderful luminous antidote.

The writer is professor, Department of Orthopaedics, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi