The Cell and the Soul: Anand Teltumbde's searing account of state power

The Cell and the Soul

by Anand Teltumbde

Published by Bloomsbury India 

256 pages ₹699

 

In Indian society, children are told if they studied hard and got a good job, they would have the liberty to do whatever they want. Anand Teltumbde did exactly that.  He is an IIT and IIM alumnus, worked in the public sector and rose to become a managing director of a corporation before leaving to become an academic. This successful middle-class background gave him confidence that his indictment of the caste system and demands for social justice would not be used against him by the state. He was wrong. In The Cell and the Soul, he talks about his time in the Taloja central jail, what led him there and his observations about the functioning of the Indian carceral system.

 

B R Ambedkar once said: “Democracy is not merely a form of government. It is essentially an attitude of respect and reverence towards fellow men.” He understood that a fractured society cannot really enjoy the fruits of democracy; differences will be used against each other; until we inherently feel that all fellow human beings are equal, we cannot build a successful nation. But what happens if people who are continuously working to achieve such a society are not only mercilessly targeted but also falsely defamed, that too by the same authorities who are expected to uphold the Constitution?

 

Anand Teltumbde and 15 other academics and activists were arrested in the Bhima Koregaon-Elgar Parishad case, known for short as the “BK-16 case”. In this book, Mr Teltumbde shows how the narrative built against him by the investigating agencies was, in fact, a calculated misrepresentation of information about him or his works that were available in the public domain. The police went on to distribute documents to the media that were not even presented as evidence in the courts. The author decided to file a defamation suit against Param Bir Singh, then the additional director general of police (law and order). Fortunately for him, the courts took note of his transgressions and issued a reprimand. But this judicial rebuke didn’t appear to deter the investigating agencies one whit. Another police official went on to arrest the author while he was under the protection of the Supreme Court, for which he was reprimanded. Yet this official went on to win an award by the Union home ministry.

 

Mr Teltumbde takes us through his experience inside jail and how it shattered his preconceived notions about imprisonment. He tells us how officials exercised unbridled power inside the prison and treated inmates poorly. In his 31 months in prison, he spent considerable time talking to his fellow prisoners to understand what led them there and why they did what they did. His conclusion from these informal interviews was that they reflected a direct indictment of our society. The question is simple, he writes. Should we only blame a person for committing a crime rather than solving the conditions that led a person with limited choices to doing so?

 

His story, though, is a familiar one. Evidence from countless accounts of prison diaries reflects the same practice of prison authorities exercising power without accountability. Still, every such account matters because society at large is mostly disconnected with the dystopian realities of prison life. Accounts such as Mr 

Teltumbde’s deserve to be heard above the mechanisms society puts in place to block any information that might make us feel uncomfortable with the kind of world we 

have built.

 

In 2019 I attended a two-day seminar where activists from all over the country spoke on various aspects of social justice. That was the first time I heard Mr Teltumbde speak live. He explained how he and several other human rights defenders were being targeted in the Bhima Koregaon case because their demands for justice for marginalised communities held a mirror to the failings of the state. He underlined how Indian civil society had collectively failed to safeguard such defenders and also that he had an inkling of his arrest. Sure enough, a few months later, he was arrested.

 

This book is an important addition to the discussion about incarceration, the dilapidated state of our prisons, our judicial system, as well as a reflection on our democracy itself. The BK-16 case is a testament to how far the concept of making “the process the punishment” has been weaponised against any voice that chooses to speak truth to power. Kudos must also go to Siddhesh Gautam for his compelling cover illustration showing the author behind bars but with hands extended outside the bars. It underlines that, despite everything, Mr Teltumbde will not be silenced.

 

The reviewer is a writer and translator from Allahabad and a cofounder of RAQS, a collective working in the city on gender, sexuality and mental health