While lodged in Mumbai’s Arthur Road Jail for over a fortnight, Shah Rukh Khan’s son Aryan is said to have coped by reading. It’s anybody’s guess whether it was a question of (desperate) optics, but according to some newspaper reports, Aryan borrowed religious books from the meagre prison library. It was news to me that only very specific religious and philosophy texts are permitted in jails. Apparently, world over, prisoners are not always deemed worthy of the flights of imagination that fiction allows. Alas, in a penitentiary, even the freedom to choose what to read comes with strict riders.
At the most basic level, for centuries, the idea behind incarceration has been to create an atmosphere that induces remorse for committing crimes. The severity of towering prison walls, barbed wire fences and dank, cheerless cells intentionally imparts fear that serves as a deterrent or a dire warning of the misery which awaits the unhappy being trapped within its walls. For someone suddenly thrust in a cell, chances are that the prevailing sentiments would be anguish and terror, much more than contrition for wrongdoings. How do you get inmates to reflect on their unsavoury behavior? There’s certainly no penance in reading Stephen King. No wonder then, prisons focus on ancient religious and spiritual books that provide some sort of blueprint for a conscience — the presumption being that a lack of empathy and a flawed understanding of concepts of right and wrong landed one in jail in the first place.
One of the greatest challenges of this Covid year was to stay constructively occupied, on guard against the mind leaping all over the place. It’s a pity that humanity hasn’t come up with a more humane form of punishment for deviance than stripping someone of their liberty and locking them away, without both emotional and intellectual sustenance.
In The Critique of Judgment, Kant argued that appreciation of beautiful things — symphonies, art, literature — leads to moral improvement. Not only is sensory deprivation unnecessarily cruel, the sublime power of books to positively impact those dealing with excruciating confinement cannot be estimated.
The writer is director, Hutkay Films
