 "From Phansi Yard: My Year with the Women of Yerawada")
From Phansi Yard: My Year with the Women of Yerawada
Author: Sudha Bhardwaj
Publisher: Juggernaut
Pages: 216
Price: Rs 799
This is a book of human sketches from the world of an Indian prison. Call it casual ethnography or participant observation, it is the author’s labour of love, brought together with empathy and a touch of wit. You get a string of nano tales of human bondage and its myriad ironies, of love, betrayal, loyalty, desire, and momentary lapses of reason, followed by bouts of rage, remorse and self-pity. These are stories of remediable injustice.
Sudha Bharadwaj takes you on a tour of the colonial prison in Pune. But when she introduces you to the inmates, an absurdity hits you — that most of them have no business being there, the author included. Globally, one in three prisoners are undertrials; in India that figure stands at an astonishing 77 per cent, according to the India Justice Report. Also, the prisoners’ right to legal aid is a misnomer. Characters in Ms Bharadwaj’s stories testify to an unpardonable delay, or denial, of justice.
Sample a few: A little boy has arrived with two elders accused of burning his mother to death — his grandmother, with whom he lives and is attached to, and his father who is in the male ward of Yerawada. But when the grandmother dies of a heart attack, the father is not allowed to keep him. The child will, perhaps, end up at a sanstha (NGO) or with a reluctant relative. “It is Eid today, and the Muslim Warder who has been looking after the boy…has bathed him and applied kajal to his eyes. She holds him close to her when he sleeps at night. Sometime around noon, the call comes to send him for his grandmother’s last rites; his father is waiting outside with the police escort. A bunch of women go to kiss and hug him, and bid him goodbye.”
A lively yoga teacher is suspected to be a “bitcoin agent”, perhaps a small cog in a big machine. She has been there for more than six months even though the law has yet to make up its mind about whether bitcoin is legal or illegal! There is no bail despite this ambiguity in the law. There is another “innocent accomplice” whose husband allegedly participated in a bank fraud. She was “nailed” as the Wi-Fi subscription used for the scam was in her name. Another lady was earlier in a mental asylum. “Is she a beggar? A thief? She can’t remember.” She often breaks into a song, sleeps anywhere, and cries silently. On routine psychiatric checkups, they tell her, rather cruelly, that she is going home and she seems excited. The jail is full of psychiatric patients but medical intervention is mostly confined to a nightly “goli” (sleeping pill) administered one at a time.
When she is not talking about fellow humans, the author describes the change of seasons, hailstorms, birds, animals and trees. Whole sections are devoted to the cats, the permanent buddies, and the mango trees, which evoke playful rivalries, amusement, and some serious mango-wars. It is natural for the reader to wonder why the author is there in the first place. That too in the Phansi Yard once meant for death row convicts. She is one of 16 activists, lawyers, and scholars who are contesting the charge of inciting violence in Bhima Koregaon village of Maharashtra. Most say they were neither named in the FIR nor present at the 2017 event. And after five years of multiple agencies filing endless chargesheets, a proper trial is yet to begin.
The author’s own condition is incidental to the book. It comes glimpsed in between other astounding stories that exemplify Michel Foucault’s theory in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. To Foucault, a mere loss of liberty is never enough — without a trace of torture — in the criminal justice system. Some form of corporal punishment has to be there, i.e., rationing of food, solitary confinement, and other harsh deprivations.
Ms Bhardwaj’s sunless “phansi yard,” is the coldest place in Yerawada. She and Shoma Sen, her co-accused, are not allowed to cover the bars of her cell to block the chilly winds. They have to be visible at all times to the guard outside, a la the Foucauldian metaphor of the panopticon! The process clearly is the punishment here, guilty or not guilty. It took Shoma Sen, who has arthritic knees, a long legal battle to acquire a plastic chair to sit on, but only between 9.30 a m and 5 p m.
Ms Bhardwaj’s bail conditions prohibit her from discussing her own case. At one point, she decided to use her skill and experience as a lawyer to help others with legal aid but the authorities rejected her application. She got to do that informally when she was transferred to Mumbai’s Byculla jail. The book’s editorial team coaxed her into answering some questions about her childhood in Boston and Cambridge, her education at IIT Kanpur, and her days as a trade union activist in Chhattisgarh. Her journey from a mathematician to a human rights defender is described in a really brief introduction. Meant to be a tribute to India’s women prisoners, the book is more than the sum total of its gripping parts; it’s a microcosm of India’s deeply problematic criminal justice system. Despite her peculiar circumstances, Ms Bharadwaj has come up with a highly readable book on Indian prisons, which is compassionate, sombre, stirring and often funny.
The reviewer heads Common Cause, known for its “Status of Policing in India” reports
