“A Futile Activity”: Reflections on Imprisonment in India through Kobad Ghandy’s Fractured Freedom: A Prison Memoir (2021)

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00328855221136202
• Published date: 01 December 2022
• Date: 01 December 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

“A Futile Activity”:

Ref‌lections on

Imprisonment in India

through Kobad Ghandy’s

Fractured Freedom:

A Prison Memoir (2021)

Basil N. Darlong Diengdoh

Abstract

Prison writing in India has not been adequately engaged with, either in its lit-

erary bounds or its implications on prison conditions and administration.

With the majority of incarcerations consisting of those yet to be found guilty

of a crime, the absence of uniform policies or legal provisions concerning

these ‘undertrials’affects in a consequential way the prisoner’s ability to

exercise certain rights, even if limited, especially with regard to personal

expression. This article explores this aspect through the decade-long incar-

ceration ref‌lected upon by Kobad Ghandy’sFractured Freedom: A Prison

Memoir (2021).

Keywords

prison writing, India, prison conditions, memoir, ‘undertrial’

“[L]ess discussed f‌ields of investigation”(Satchidanandan, 2014, p. 1) such

as Prison Writing in India

1

have not been adequately engaged with, much

less in its literary form(s). Ethnographic, anthropological, sociological, and

state-sanctioned analyses of prisons in the country have provided the initial

Dibrugarh University, Dibrugarh, Assam, India

Corresponding Author:

Basil N. Darlong Diengdoh, Department of English, Dibrugarh University, Dibrugarh, Assam

786004, India.

Email: basildarlongdiengdoh@gmail.com

Article

The Prison Journal

2022, Vol. 102(6) 770–789

© 2022 SAGE Publications

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/00328855221136202

journals.sagepub.com/home/tpj

thrust into understanding the complexities of the carceral environment, and

“carceral spaces…provide important counterpoints to the day-to-day security

and mobility, the freedom, that most of us take for granted”(Westall, 2021,

p. 1). The prison, or jail, or detention centre are not necessarily def‌ined by

the boundaries of the facility itself, even as these remain the “chief instrument

of control”of regimes around the world, and it is this setting that inspired a

“growing body of writing”(Jacobs, 1986, p. 95).

2

They are both “spaces of

constraint”(Patil, 2012, p. 2) culminating in dispossession, both material as

well as in terms of one’s autonomy and individual identity, as well as of

excess, in the penality that is imposed upon the imprisoned subject and its tre-

mendous and frightening “isolating power”(Larson, 2010, p. 145).

At the same time, the carceral logic of power and its inherent dehumaniza-

tion may be traced beyond the “distinctly segregated penal institution”into

the broader social landscape (Lynch, 2001, p. 89), from the community-based

segregated and security-driven surveillance of the gated community (p. 91), to

the “culture of the carceral “that penetrates urban social margins, traditionally

“trapped in the metanarratives of deprivation, the clamor for space and the

systematic processes of disenfranchisement,”and now enmeshed in the

everyday “disposable”lives of those on the margins (Bandyopadhyay,

2020, p. 24).

3

It follows that the ‘prisoner’too constitutes a “disposable

body”(p. 24), even as the tenuous social and penal continuum is contended

with, negotiated with (often with little success), conformed to (out of neces-

sity), and resisted (at times by appropriating the very mechanisms of control,

that is to say, the display and use of extreme violence and force). Freeman

(2009) also observes that the growth in social acceptance of prison writing

and literature was spurred by socio-cultural and economic factors as well,

notably, a growing and literate “expanded audience”as well as the concom-

itant “growth of the book trade”in the context of early modern England

(p. 133).

Ghandy’s (2021) Fractured Freedom: A Prison Memoir presents a dif-

fused and importunately anxious carceral subject, vulnerable and aggrieved,

subsisting on the margins of a legal recourse that may or may not be realized.

Beyond the prison, Ghandy (2021) writes that “[e]ven after decades of inde-

pendence…diseases, poverty, casteism, patriarchy, and often a combination

of these”continue to ail our “so-called freedom”(p. 21). Signif‌icantly, these

also manifest and order the carceral template of the prisons in which he had

been interred for more than a decade, lending credence to the need to move

beyond the simplistic notion of the prison as an exclusive jurisdiction of

the authority of the state, and by that logic, a space excluded from the

values of the social order beyond. As Bandyopadhyay (2020) notes, the

neatly cleaved “symbolic and real separation between the inside and

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