Motherland Prisons Issue

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Prisons INR 100 EUR €7.5

3 CONTENTS 6

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DESTINY’S CHILDREN What happens to the kids who follow their mothers to Tihar Jail.

MALLED IN How we’ve become the shopping hostages of the modern Indian mall.

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TOURIST ATTRACTION A jail nestled in the hills of Sikkim envisioned as a spot for “prison tourism.”

MODEL TOWN In Rajasthan is a different kind of jail where convicts get to live with their families and go out to work every day.

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HOUSE ARREST Peeling away the prison layers of reality television show Bigg Boss.

PHOTO ESSAY: NO PLACE CALLED HOME Portraits from a shelter for people cast off by their families.

30 PRISON BREAK In Bangalore, a former jail was given a new lease of life and turned into a park. But setting a jail free isn’t so easy.

36 MONKEY BUSINESS How Delhi’s monkeys came into people’s homes, then got sent to a dedicated primate pen.

44 CLASS OF ’75 Rewind to the time of the national Emergency: a former student activist recounts his strange fortnight in Delhi’s central jail.

52 MADE IN TIHAR TJ’s, a brand of prisoner-made products, is a business venture that hopes to rehabilitate inmates.

60 INFOGRAPHIC: INSIDE INDIAN PRISONS

62 NAUGHTY DR Pulp fiction. Erotica. Self-help, and more. Meet the convict knocking out book after book from his cell.

68 PHOTO ESSAY: PRISON FOR HIRE In Ramoji Film City, the jail set looks like the real deal.

78 JAIL BIRDS Young, Bangladeshi female inmates have found an antidote to the monotony and hardships of life in jail: romance.

82 DEAD MEN WALKING A perspective on the social circumstances entrapping people in the largely industrial township of Greater Noida.

86 PHOTO ESSAY: DO NOT TEASE THE ANIMALS Captive animals for a captive audience.

110 THE S WORD The journey to legalise conjugal visits in jails.

112 THE YEAR OF THE SNAKE A comic based on one of the most daring escapes from an Indian jail.

CREATIVE DIRECTOR: V SUNIL JOINT CREATIVE DIRECTOR: BHARAT SIKKA MANAGING EDITOR: ANNETTE EKIN STAFF WRITER: ANNALISA MERELLI ASSISTANT ART DIRECTOR: ROSHAN VERMA ART & PRODUCTION: HITESH VERMA, HARISH BAMBA ADVERTISING: MARINA AZCARATE Published and printed by: Mohit Jayal, on behalf of W+K Publishing, B 10, DDA Complex, Sheikh Sarai Phase 1, New Delhi 110 017 Editorial enquiries: annette.ekin@wk.com Advertising enquiries: +91 99990 64820, marina.azcarate@wk.com Subscription enquiries: subscribe@motherlandmagazine.com www.motherlandmagazine.com © 2011/12 Motherland. All rights reserved. No part of this magazine can be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher. While every effort has been taken to avoid error, the publisher is not responsible for the consequences of any action taken towards the publication. The views of the authors of the content published in this magazine are not necessarily the views of the publisher.

Published December 2011 Distributed by: Albatross Infomedia, C-324, Sector 10, Noida 201 301 Printed at: Ajanta Offset and Packaging Ltd., Madani Hall, 1 Bahadurshah Zafar Marg, New Delhi 110 002 Cover image: the image on the cover is not of an actual policeman, but of a commercial model, used for thematic illustration.

Maps and images of mainland India depicted in Motherland are an artistic illustration and do not purport to represent any geographical or political boundaries or territorial jurisdictions of the union of India. As an artistic impression these images are not to scale. Motherland does not warrant any accuracy of these images and is not responsible for any errors and omissions in the magazine contents or artwork.

4 For most of us, our only stints in jail were spent on a square of a Monopoly board, a minor setback by the roll of dice. The prison stakes get higher than three turns and $50 in real life.

What actually happens when someone is incarcerated? In this edition, we explore the contemporary world of Indian prisons, as they are understood both literally and metaphorically, to uncover the unique realities emerging from different kinds of jails.

A prison, as we discover through our stories, can be many things. Behind bars is where a doctor freed his writing voice – averaging about 11 books a year and becoming something of a cult writer of Tamil pulp fiction. It’s the location of a factory where inmates make a prison brand of products that end up in shopping malls. It can also be the very malls that we get trapped inside, with their strategic hexes designed to keep us confined as consumers. And through the lens of cinema, we see how prison spaces can be reconstructed so convincingly, they are practically indistinguishable from the real deal.

And if this artificiality is credible, sometimes the reality can be incredible. In a country with about 400 000 prisoners, we meet the inmates of an open prison in Rajasthan, who get to live with their families and head out of the compound to go to work every day.

We look at other prison initiatives that have cropped up in recent years, ranging from the curious to the progressive. In Sikkim, we take a guided tour through a scenically located jail in Rongyek, to reconcile the paradox of “prison tourism.” And in Delhi’s Tihar Jail, we learn of

5 an endeavour to provide better educational opportunities to the little boys and girls who have followed their arrested mothers to jail.

Stepping back in time to the madness of the mid-1970s national Emergency, a then student activist recounts his fortnight spent in jail, in the company of political prisoners, a murderous barber, and a man running a drug trade.

Outside the jail walls, our contributors have a look at systemic social imprisonment. In the north Indian township of Greater Noida rapid urbanisation has triggered a set of social challenges. We look at how the industrial landscape can sometimes be seen as a jail cell writ large for factory labourers who are compelled to work there. In Bangalore, we stumble upon a strange, heartbreaking phenomenon – told through a photo series – where parents have been cast out of their homes and condemned to spend the rest of their days in a shelter.

Other contributors have explored how the idea of prisons has figured in popular culture.

One piece deconstructs the reality television show Bigg Boss as a kind of televised Panopticon.

And we bring you a comic story which is a fictionalised account of one of the most infamous jailbreaks to have been pulled off in modern Indian prison history.

What happens when freedom is confiscated is the point of departure for Motherland’s “Prisons Issue.” We bring together the more unexpected ideas and expressions surrounding and enclosed by prisons in India today.

Annette Ekin

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DES TI NY’S CHIL D REN For the kids of Tihar Jail, the time spent in prison with their incarcerated mothers can bring unexpected opportunities.

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ANNALISA MERELLI IMAGES

MANSI M I D H A

7 TWO SISTERS, aged six and eight, who arrived at Tihar Jail a few days earlier, sit in the jail’s crèche.

8 It’s a November afternoon in J J Colony, Bawana, a resettlement community in Delhi’s northwest, and the entrance to the colony is teeming with makeshift market stalls and religious devotees. A street vendor sells clothing, laid out on a garment over a mound of soil mixed with rubbish. The tenements are cramped together, and line the narrow lanes that split off from the unpaved, main road. Away from the noisy throng, near the entrance to the neighbourhood, is the office of an NGO working with residents of the area, the meeting spot Sonam*, 17, has suggested.

Sonam speaks good English and has polite manners – the kind that are drummed into girls at convent schools.

She has big eyes that need no makeup and beautifully shaped lips – features that her friends liken, she conveys disbelievingly, to those of actress Priyanka Chopra.

In J J Colony, where she lives, Sonam feels like an outsider. It’s a rough neighbourhood, she says. Some of the kids her age living there already work full-time, and the ones who go to school mostly attend Hindi medium

schools. Sonam, instead, every day heads off to an English medium missionary school.

When she finishes school for the day, she returns to the two-storied, two-roomed house she shares with her mother, a factory worker, her stepfather, a deliveryman, and her little brother. Her other four siblings go to boarding school.

Sonam will graduate from high school next year, and she already has a list of professions she’d like to try her hand at. Rattling them off, airhostess, fashion designer and radio jockey top the list. And she can count on a good level of English, which gives her confidence and puts her at ease when negotiating the big city.

“I’m more comfortable [than the others from J J Colony] when I go outside [the neighbourhood],” she says.

Around English-speakers, she says, “I don’t feel like I [am] not one of them.”

That Sonam has had the opportunity to study at an English medium convent school is the consequence of the

A THREE-YEAR-OLD girl in the crèche’s classroom.

9 YET AFTER SPENDING JUST A COUPLE OF HOURS THERE, MUCH AS IT HAPPENS ON CAMPUSES OR HOLIDAY RESORTS, THE SPACE SEEMS TO REDUCE: THE HIDDEN CORNERS CEASE TO DELIVER ANY SURPRISE, THE SHORTCUTS ARE SOON DISCOVERED, AND THE LIMITEDNESS OF THE SPACE BECOMES ITS MOST SALIENT QUALITY.

peculiar way in which she came into the world: she was born in Tihar Jail. And she spent the initial years of her childhood in the jail with her then imprisoned mother.

In India, when a mother goes to jail, her children are allowed to live with her in prison until the age of six.

A 2006 Supreme Court verdict mandates that these kids must have access to a proper diet, healthcare, a crèche and a nursery, educational and recreational facilities, and separate barracks to share with their mothers.

Some of these provisions have been in place in Tihar Jail since the mid-1990s, a time when large-scale jail reforms were being implemented in the jail. The then Inspector General, Kiran Bedi, now turned social activist, founded the NGO India Vision Foundation (IVF) to care for these children. In 1994, the year Sonam was born, the NGO and the jail authorities started jointly operating a makeshift crèche. A couple of years later, IVF began to expand their program and collaborate with boarding schools in the National Capital Region.

From a very young age, after leaving Tihar Jail, children like Sonam are provided support by IVF to live and study at one of the eight boarding schools currently working with the NGO. This support can continue into their university studies. The outcome of such an initiative has enabled people like Sonam to aspire for more opportunities.

At Tihar Jail, children live with their mothers at central jail number six, the women’s jail. Visitors must pass through two big metal gates to enter the jail. Inside, the buildings

CHANDA ANIS holds her 11 month old son. Anis is an undertrial prisoner and works in the crèche.

10 FOR THE 29 LITTLE GIRLS AND 18 BOYS WHO LIVE IN PRISON WITH THEIR MOTHERS, THEIR PRESENCE HINTED AT BY TWO TINY, YELLOW MERRY-GO-ROUNDS ON THE LAWNS, JAIL NUMBER SIX IS THE ENTIRE WORLD.

are like standard government constructions; solid edifices with grey floors. The bars on the windows hardly stand out; they are not so dissimilar from the protective metal work affixed to the windows of most Delhi homes.

As of September 23rd, 2011, 555 women – 122 convicts and 432 undertrials (inmates awaiting their court verdicts) – comprised the jail’s population.

On a normal afternoon, a few guards keep watch over the inmates milling about the prison grounds. None of the prisoners are in uniform. Convicts are meant to wear

the white salwar kameez, but they often refuse as white is the traditional colour of widows.

Initially, the premises feel expansive, and the spaces varied. There are rooms for vocational training, small gardens, the wards, and a dispensary announced by a strong smell of disinfectant. Yet after spending just a couple of hours there, much as it happens on campuses or holiday resorts, the space seems to reduce: the hidden corners cease to deliver any surprise, the shortcuts are soon discovered, and the limitedness of the space becomes its most salient quality.

For the 29 little girls and 18 boys who live in prison with their mothers, their presence hinted at by two tiny, yellow merry-go-rounds on the lawns, jail number six is the entire world.

Every morning around nine, the children dressed in their uniforms walk to the crèche, which is situated in a separate building on the compound. They stay here until five pm, an hour before the women and their children are locked up in the mothers’ ward until six am the next

CHILDREN’S BOOKS and toys in the classroom.

11 morning. It’s a home-school-home routine in a wardcrèche-ward variation on the theme.

The current crèche, which opened in 2000, consists of two big, colourful rooms. Its bright atmosphere comes as a surprise to the visitor: cartoon characters decorate the walls and the mauve-coloured tiled floors are spotless. One room is the nursery, where the younger kids – some just a few months old – dressed in red and white striped tops spend most of the day sleeping on an assortment of mattresses, cots and cloth hammocks. The older kids, aged two and a half to six, in short-sleeved blue and white striped shirts and white shorts, eat their lunch there.

The second room functions as the classroom. At the entrance is an altar with miniature pictures and statues representing different religions: a Jesus, a Buddha, and Hindu divinities. “We make them respect every religion,” says Dr Ruby Gupta, who has been running the crèche for IVF for nearly two years. Teaching them to appreciate different religions, she says, is a starting point for instilling good manners in the children.

Inside the classroom is a large bookshelf filled with volumes such as children’s versions of Indian epics and the Bible. In front of it, there are two rows of brightcoloured desks.

After lunch, Dr Gupta initiates a question and answer round.

“Our national bird?” she asks. “Peacock!” comes the cheerful reply. “National animal?” she continues. River?

Flower? The answers follow confidently. “And which city do you live in?” The joyful chorus sings out, “in Delhi!”

“Earlier when I would ask them,” says Dr Gupta, “they would say ‘in jail.’ ” It took a while for the children to learn that the jail wasn’t their city, confirms Sakshi Kapoor, 29. Kapoor is one of the inmates who have undergone training to work at the crèche. Prior to her incarceration – she is under trial for murder – she was a teacher.

Growing up in the cloistered and at times violent environment of the jail can pose certain problems for the

OLDER CHILDREN finish their lunch while the younger children play with the inmates employed in the crèche.

12 kids. One of the crèche’s aims, says Dr Gupta, is to keep the children away from the ward and even their mothers during the day. It is in the ward that they pick up abusive language and bad habits, she says. “In spite of them staying here for eight hours, when they go out of here, it all goes to waste.”

Apart from sporadic one-day excursions, the children have no interaction with the outside world. As a result, they have little idea of what life is like beyond the jail walls. Penny Tong, Assistant Director at Prayas, an NGO that works to rehabilitate inmates after their release and provide support to their family members, says that no comprehensive studies have been carried out to determine the long-term impact of this environment on a child’s development and learning. However, she has observed certain gaps in their upbringing.

For example, because of their limited outside exposure, the children are often terrified when they see cars on a busy road or certain animals for the first time. She’s also noticed that at times, male children growing up

amongst female prisoners would refer to themselves in the female gender.

“I was a little happy but quite shocked also,” recalls Sonam of the time when she left the jail, where she lived with her mother until she was five. What she was most startled by, she says, were “the roads, vehicles, the noises.”

According to the 2006 Supreme Court ruling, once the children in a jail have turned six, the jail authorities are required to hand them over to a “suitable surrogate” – a family member or a caretaker – or if there isn’t one, an institution run by the state’s Social Welfare Department.

In both cases the children are vulnerable to a neglected upbringing. The government-run homes lack adequate staffing, ample care and quality education. On the other hand, the caretaker may not be able to support the child properly. Other problems can arise when a child starts living in their parents’ community.

BABIES, in their uniform, spend most of the day playing and sleeping in the crèche.

13 “Many of them also drop out from the school or divert from the schooling system because they feel indignant because of their parents being under the supervision of the law,” says Dr Jitendra Nagpal, a Delhi-based psychiatrist who works on a consultancy basis with IVF. He says they can be more given to aggressive behaviour and that there are many cases of “children who start emulating and role modelling on their parents.” As a result, says Dr Nagpal, “[These children are] much more prone to juvenile crime than the regular population of children.”

But for the children of Tihar Jail, IVF enables a third option. The NGO enrols them at one of the boarding schools partnering with the organisation, and when required, covers their tuition and living expenses until they graduate. The NGO is also open to those who are above six whose mothers are facing incarceration as well as a few (five to date) children whose fathers are in jail. Since its inception, IVF has facilitated the education of about 250 children, most of whom are still under its care.

In one of these boarding schools, an English medium convent school in Noida with over 3 000 students, 30 girls with IVF, aged six to 18, live together in a dedicated hostel. The girls are close-knit, and Sonam who lived in this hostel until tenth standard, misses being there.

Although the girls often remember traces of their childhood in the jail and their parents’ incarceration, they prefer to take refuge in forgetfulness out of not wanting to be perceived as different by their peers, or somehow disgraced because their parents have been in jail. The nuns here say they encourage the girls to not talk about their past.

“The general perspective is […] that it [crime] is within their blood and within their family,” says Dr Mala Kapur Shankardass, an Associate Professor of sociology at Delhi University. She says the stigma associated with someone who has been in jail often extends to his or her children.

The distance from their original community and the privacy that the boarding school affords allow the children to live a relatively normal life, without having to face the social ramifications of people around them knowing their parents have been in jail.

This is the case of 19-year-old Ajay*, who is, thanks to IVF’s support, studying for a bachelor’s degree in business at the Institute of Technology and Science in Ghaziabad.

APART FROM SPORADIC ONE-DAY EXCURSIONS, THE CHILDREN HAVE NO INTERACTION WITH THE OUTSIDE WORLD. AS A RESULT, THEY HAVE LITTLE IDEA OF WHAT LIFE IS LIKE BEYOND THE JAIL WALLS.

He was one of the first kids to join the program. A smart, good-looking young man, he carries himself with elegance, though he’s a shy and somewhat nervous character.

He avoids talking about his past. Both his parents were taken to jail when he was nearly six years old, which led him into the IVF program – he was enrolled at a boarding school, as he was too old to go to jail with his mother.

A couple of years later, when his parents were released, they were both murdered.

“I don’t remember all that,” he says when asked details about his life before school. He remembers everything after that though – the strange feeling of joining a big school, making friends, playing football at a national level on his school team, even competing once in the Andamans, and clashing with a particularly strict warden who’d beat him and the other boys if they stepped out of line.

Ajay, who today lives in a guesthouse in Ghaziabad, is visited every month by IVF’s personnel, who make sure he is well and bring him necessities such as toiletries and stationery.

If things had been different, he supposes he would have been a farmer, working on his uncle’s property in Uttar Pradesh. “They [IVF] are the ones who are doing everything for me,” he says. “I don’t know what would happen to me if they weren’t there.”

Ajay is going to be the first graduate in his family.

Once finished with his bachelor’s degree, he wants to pursue a master’s in Pune, and then find a well-paid job that would allow him to buy a big house in a leafy neighbourhood.

Thirteen years after his parents were taken to jail, Ajay feels entitled to the dream of India’s middle class.

He is a normal, content young man. Except, he says matter-of-factly, “My heart is quite hard.” *Names have been changed.

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SETTING. A N IN ITIATIV E SI K K I M JA I L ON SU N DAY S .

JA I L R E V E A L S W H Y QU I T E G O H A N D I N H A N D .

Panorama of the jail in Rongyek, Sikkim.

T TR A

16 We wait outside the prison gate in the bamboo and timber sentry box. The gate is large, rust coloured and has a wicket door for human passage. The sentry box looks like a registration counter at a fair and appears flimsy beside the solid entrance. A few minutes earlier, we had driven right up to the gate and had startled the sentry by asking to be let in. He had probably anticipated an easy Sunday morning, without the dutiful alert that other days demanded with their court appearances and visitors.

“Down,” he had said, waving us back. “You have to park down at the turning.”

We had parked the car at the bend and walked back up. Sikkim’s state prison at Rongyek – a 15 minute drive above Gangtok – is, like most places in Sikkim, on a slope. We saw it as we drove towards it. It lies on a hillside and its large compound is split by a red roofed spine that zigzags through the complex. From behind the walls, watchtowers loom at corners.

“Today isn’t a visiting day,” the sentry says when we meet for the second time. We hand him a document signed by an officer at the tourism bureau.

“We’re not visitors. We’re here for prison tourism.”

He hasn’t heard of “prison tourism” but considers my application; a signed document immediately confers some plausibility on the petition.

“Wait,” he says, and hails a passing guard who is reporting for duty. This guard has heard something about such a scheme, but is unsure. He ducks into the compound to confirm.

We are made to switch off our mobile phones. There are staff quarters above on our left. A woman wearing a blue, satin-looking nightie walks out from one. Her nightie is lurid against the grey prison walls and the sentry’s khaki uniform. After she leaves, two girls walk up from the road below where we’ve parked our car and deliver food for someone inside. The sentry teases them; they respond with banter. He walks out of his cabin, carbine in

IT LIES ON A HILLSIDE AND ITS LARGE COMPOUND IS SPLIT BY A RED ROOFED SPINE THAT ZIGZAGS THROUGH THE COMPLEX. FROM BEHIND THE WALLS, WATCHTOWERS LOOM AT CORNERS.

hand, to engage them further but they’ve already begun walking back. He retreats to the sentry box.

We wait for around 20 minutes before the wicket gate opens. The previous guard is accompanied by another guard, who is to be our guide. The sentry gives us tags on lanyards to wear around our necks. They say, “Visitor.”

I don’t mind. It sounds better than “Tourist.”

As we go in, the first guard says, “They may ask you for tobacco. Don’t give them any.”

Our guide knows about prison tourism. I inquire further.

“Yes. We’ve had some other visitors before, but not in a while,” he says. “The last ones came around two, three months ago.”

Perhaps they had come in greater numbers in 2010, when the prison authorities and the tourism department had flagged off the initiative, hoping to push the jail as a tourist destination. According to Sikkim Now, a local English daily, a senior jail official said public participation could help rehabilitate inmates. The same newspaper reported that tourists could see “handicraft and handloom items, carvings, paintings and other crafts made by the inmates, dairy and swine facilities, orchid green houses with more than 500 plants,” and could even photograph the inmates with their consent.

We enter a large macadamed parking court. In front of us, there is an altar on a raised plinth with concrete representations of three religions: a cross, a statue each of Buddha and Shiva. To its right is the administrative block, built on a high retaining wall above the parking lot. The block is two storied, painted a pale yellow like most government buildings and similarly proportioned.

Above them the main complex climbs towards the hill’s ridge. On our left, nearer to the valley, we see some blocks.

“What’s there?” I ask, pointing to them.

“The women’s cells.”

“Can we go there?”

“No. They have their own guards. Even we cannot go there.”

Our guide tells me that there are 150 inmates – 74 undertrials and 74 convicts. Of these, one convict and one undertrial are female.

We enter the administrative block. In spaces for which we have been prepared exclusively by the drama of

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WATCHTOWERS in the prison compound.

fiction and film – prisons, courtrooms, emergency wards – the actual visits often disappoint with their banality.

Inside the block, there are a few rooms; two guards sit with a wireless handset between them. The desk, chair, benches are wooden and flammable. It is quiet and moist.

We sign a register, and look around. There is a lockup on the side. Why is there a lockup here?

“That’s where we keep their clothes and belongings,” the guide says. He points to another room.

“Is this where the prisoners meet their visitors?” I ask, looking in. It is a bare, dank room, where the boundary between visitor and visited is some loosely spaced bars.

“We shouldn’t call them prisoners,” my friend says.

“They’re inmates.” Very well, inmates from now on.

We begin the tour. We walk upwards through a covered pathway bounded on the sides by wire mesh.

This is the corridor of the entire complex where all traffic occurs. I recognise it as the red roofed spine we

“TODAY ISN’T A VISITING DAY,” THE SENTRY SAYS WHEN WE MEET FOR THE SECOND TIME. WE HAND HIM A DOCUMENT SIGNED BY AN OFFICER AT THE TOURISM BUREAU.

saw as we approached Rongyek from Gangtok. We pass a library block. A little further up, there are two small sheds to our right.

“We grow mushrooms there,” the guide says.

“Can we see it?”

“It’s locked. Open only on weekdays. Today’s Sunday.

The inmates are resting.”

We walk up. On our right we pass a walled compound, with an iron grill gate. It is ajar.

18 “Undertrials. Have to keep them separate from the convicts.”

The undertrials look young. A few dart in and out of the view given by the open gate. There seems to be a game on. We pass some of the inmates in the corridor; they are unescorted. We reach a clearing. Here the kitchen and mess form a common block with a small court in front.

The inmates have just eaten and a few of them are washing large vessels. I ask the guard about the food later.

“It is good,” he says.

“Meat?”

“Once a month.”

We are told that the undertrials and convicts eat together. In the court, some inmates lounge about after lunch, taking in the sun. They stare at us with a frank, sullen curiosity.

I recognise that look from my years in boarding school. There are parallels between the two institutions.

There is that same sense of irrevocable confinement, the same counting of days, and the same deprivation of female contact. I could argue that the inmates have it better. The guard says they have TVs in their cells. Their lives appear less regimented. Those who believe in karma can blame themselves for their incarceration; pubescent boarders have no such sanctuary. A lifer can be considered for parole after 14 years. I went into boarding school in kindergarten and emerged after Class XII. The tedium of my 14 years was alleviated by a year in Gangtok because of an insurgency in Darjeeling, and two years spent as a day-scholar after expulsion from hostels. Time off for bad behaviour.

“What makes you come here?” The guide asks us.

He is puzzled. I talk about the story I may write. But there is also an unsaid lure – of seeing the interior of a prison without enduring the inconveniences of criminal activity or a career in policing.

“Prison tourism.” The phrase contradicts itself. It suggests the humiliation of spectacle. The term jars even in its visual evocation; it pairs confinement with vistas, the absence of sights with sightseeing. The tours at Auschwitz and those of the Viet Cong tunnels are extremes of this kind of tourism. These places are visited precisely because they are extremes and because their horrors have passed.

But at Rongyek’s quiet jail, which is still in use, could something like prison tourism find favour?

THE SENTRY GIVES US TAGS ON LANYARDS TO WEAR AROUND OUR NECKS. THEY SAY, “VISITOR.” I DON’T MIND. IT SOUNDS BETTER THAN “TOURIST.”

It could. A project like this depends as much on the tourist’s active, dark curiosity as it does on simple publicity. It will find an audience if pushed well enough, for it speaks to our curiosity and our desire for safe morbidity.

But, without enthusiasm, a venture such as this is doomed by its own contradictions. Its success depends on coordination between two unlikely departments – tourism and prison – and already there were doubts amongst the custodians of the scheme. A senior official I met worried whether it was a violation of the inmates’ rights. And signs of withdrawal were in evidence, over a year after its inauguration. We saw these in the sentry’s ignorance and the first guard’s puzzlement.

We cross the convicts’ compound, separate from the undertrials’ compound, and larger. It has three, walled-in blocks whose roofs we can see as we climb higher. We are not allowed to visit these. The handicrafts are also produced here, something else we wanted to see.

There is a cool breeze and the sun clouds over for a moment, bringing on a sudden cold. I’m reminded of winter. The jail is picturesquely located; it is spread over the topmost western face of a rocky hill. The land slopes gently and the compound walls enclose a large part of it like a necklace on a reclining body. But it gets cold here, much colder than Gangtok, which lies around a thousand feet below, and is exposed to bitter wind.

“What about the winter? Do you provide jackets?”

“They bring their own clothes. We don’t enforce uniforms.”

Another advantage over boarding schools. We were allowed to wear our own clothes – “fancy dress” – twice or thrice a year.

By now, our slow ascent has taken us to the highest area of the prison, where the spine-like passage ends. In the foreground, there is an unmanned watchtower. It stands on four concrete columns which have been braced at intervals.

It resembles a community water tank. In the distance, we can see more towers. There is an amiable guard on patrol.

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THE MAIN ENTRANCE to the prison.

“Can we go up the tower?” we ask him.

“No.” We think there are security reasons for this, and profess our harmlessness.

“It shakes. You can feel it moving. None of us use it.

Only that one and that one can be used.” He points to two watchtowers in the distance.

“Still,” I say. The structure looks solid and unlikely to buckle under our weight.

“You won’t get past the algae.”

I look closely. The steps are green or wet grey after four months of rain and my shoes are ordinary. An image comes to me – the Emperor Humayun stumbling down his library’s staircase to his death. I change the subject.

To our left there is a levelled playing field with goalposts. The pitch is smaller than the standard football field and is edged on two sides by the boundary walls. There is

to be a football match between the inmates and the guards later in the afternoon.

“What happens when the ball goes out?” It is a common problem in the hills and the ball’s retrieval, which often causes dispute, is usually assigned to someone who can be ordered about. The guard smiles and we have to infer what cannot be said.

I RECOGNISE THAT LOOK FROM MY YEARS IN BOARDING SCHOOL. THERE ARE PARALLELS BETWEEN THE TWO INSTITUTIONS. THERE IS THAT SAME SENSE OF IRREVOCABLE CONFINEMENT, THE SAME COUNTING OF DAYS, AND THE SAME DEPRIVATION OF FEMALE CONTACT.

20 “PRISON TOURISM.” THE PHRASE CONTRADICTS ITSELF. IT SUGGESTS THE HUMILIATION OF SPECTACLE. THE TERM JARS EVEN IN ITS VISUAL EVOCATION; IT PAIRS CONFINEMENT WITH VISTAS, THE ABSENCE OF SIGHTS WITH SIGHTSEEING.

There is a large open area to our left. Photographs show it to occupy around a fifth of the total acreage. It is partially cultivated with scattered tea shrubs. Our guide says they were planted under a previous official. The plants look neglected.

“We have to turn back,” says the guide, “I’ll take you through the orchid greenhouse.” We begin to walk down.

I cross-check some prison myths with him.

“Are the child molesters kept separate?”

“No. They are treated roughly by the other inmates when they first come. But so is everybody else.”

“Is there any homosexuality amongst the inmates?”

I explain what I mean.

“Nope. There was someone like that a while ago, but he was a bit cracked, so no one took him seriously.”

The orchid greenhouse is shut. We peek in; there are mostly cymbidiums and their flowering season has passed.

Nearby, there’s a pigsty, the swine facility. I remember that the inmates eat meat only once a month and think of the longing the sty may engender. We also visit the bakery, a large room with modern equipment. There is a paper workshop too, but it is shut.

The tour is almost complete. We return to visit the library. It is a neat and single storied structure that stands alone. The lilies in its garden are decaying. The library itself is more like a small seminar hall. There are a few inspirational quotes on the walls and two steel and glass cabinets with books.

“Do the inmates read?”

“No. We even tried making it compulsory.”

We glance at the volumes. They are mostly Nepali and Hindi texts, many of them religious. There is a book on portfolio management and some poetry by Atal Bihari Vajpayee. There are also the poems and speeches of the

current Chief Minister of Sikkim. I commiserate with the inmates’ reluctance to read. No captive audience here.

As we leave, my friend says, “Do you realise something like prison tourism can happen only in Sikkim?”

It is true. There is Sikkim’s reputation as a quiet place; the 1984 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records insisted that Sikkim was the world’s most peaceful place, without a murder in its recorded history. There is no organised crime in the state. There are no famous inmates in Rongyek, a factor that makes the scheme possible.

There is also the state’s infatuation with tourism; anything that can be displayed will be given a shelf. These are our attributes and may explain why, when the scheme was announced, it was applauded without surprise.

The tour is over; I try and tip the guide. He declines and sucks his teeth in admonition. On our way out, we stop at the gift shop, a freestanding bamboo stall. The handicrafts produced by inmates are good and there are buns, bread, cookies, tea and envelopes. There is also a cane chair I like but it has been booked. We buy some tea, which the guard says isn’t particularly good this year, something my mother confirms later.

Apart from the reality of forced confinement, it does not appear a particularly harsh life. Overcrowding, a standard Indian torment, seems absent. Whatever brutality there is, has been pushed to the background. But how much has remained concealed from us! The two female inmates in near solitary confinement. The dead hopes of the longest serving inmates. The recriminations in the visiting room.

We were asked to visit on a Sunday. We realise now that it is the worst day for a visit. There is no activity.

The orchid house, the mushroom house, the handicrafts workshops are closed. The resting inmates risk appearing lazy. Such a basic error makes us wonder how long the scheme will last.

Conception without continuation is an especial Indian malaise, and one which Sikkim has sincerely embraced after its absorption into India in 1975. The banner announcing prison tourism has been taken down from the tourism department’s information centre in Gangtok’s market. There is nothing now to let the casual visitor know that such a scheme is available. Sikkim is littered with paved paths leading to forgotten viewpoints. My friend and I may have walked up one of them.

21

22

HOUSE A REALITY TELEVISION SHOW BIGG BOSS HAS A

23

TEXT

ARREST

FERZINA B A N A J I

THING OR TWO IN COMMON WITH A PRISON.

“OLD GEORGE ORWELL GOT IT BACKWARD. BIG BROTHER ISN’T WATCHING. HE’S SINGING AND DANCING. HE’S PULLING RABBITS OUT OF A HAT. BIG BROTHER’S BUSY HOLDING YOUR ATTENTION EVERY MOMENT YOU’RE AWAKE. HE’S MAKING SURE YOU’RE ALWAYS DISTRACTED. HE’S MAKING SURE YOU’RE FULLY ABSORBED.” CHUCK PALAHNIUK, LULLABY

24 SWITCH ON TO COLORS ANY WEEKNIGHT AT 10.30 AND YOU COULD BE WATCHING A SHOW SET IN A LOCKED HOUSE RATHER LIKE A PRISON, WITH “HOUSEMATES” RATHER LIKE INMATES.

QUESTION: what does a 67 year old alleged serial killer of Indian and Vietnamese parentage, imprisoned in a Nepali jail, have in common with an Indian reality TV show of Dutch origin? ANSWER: a 23 year old woman.

Charles Sobhraj – the notorious, shape shifting convicted murderer of jailbreak fame in India in the 1980s, whose name haunted countless childhood threats from my mother to finish the vegetables on my plate or else – was recently back in the news because Nihita Biswas, his pretty wife (she claims they were wed in secret) had participated in season five of Bigg Boss, the Indianised version of Endemol’s hugely successful reality TV franchise, Big Brother. Switch on to Colors any weeknight at 10.30 and you could be watching a show set in a locked house rather like a prison, with “housemates” rather like inmates, one of whom (Biswas) was there to “be frank” about her jailbird husband. The show is hosted by Bollywood bigwigs Salman Khan and Sanjay Dutt, who have both had much-publicised scrapes with the law and have spent time in prison. In case you missed it, the prison motif looms large. But what does the show’s success tell us

about how we, as viewers, engage with the notion of imprisonment? And how does Biswas, tagged the “cry baby” of the show, play on what we imagine we know of her infamous husband?

A moment such as this comes but rarely in the analyses of cultural phenomena, when a media format built around the notions of surveillance, imprisonment and the performative, coalesce so exquisitely around an individual who embodies such a relationship in the extreme. Biswas’ short-lived profile on the Bigg Boss website was limited to her occupation – she’s a lawyer – and a brief rundown of her alleged marriage to Sobhraj in the Kathmandu prison where the latter is currently held. Biswas’ mother is, in fact, one of Sobhraj’s Nepalese lawyers. But if the traditional sense of prison is that of a space of confinement for those who have broken the law, Big Brother and especially Bigg Boss tease apart the connection between the purpose and form of the prison, making it simultaneously a space of openness with viewers in the millions.

Bigg Boss, like the original Big Brother show, is a hybrid performance genre that incorporates elements of

THE INDIAN VERSION, BIGG BOSS, FIRST AIRED IN 2006 AND ITS CONTESTANTS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN “CELEBRITIES,” ALTHOUGH THAT’S A WORD THAT MUST BE USED WITH A LARGE HELPING OF CAUTION FOR SOME OF ITS PARTICIPANTS.

documentary, soap operas and gaming among others.

Its title is believed to be from George Orwell’s 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, a sci-fi masterpiece set in the dystopian world of a society held in check by the sinister Party, a population rigidly controlled and under the constant surveillance of the Party’s leader, Big Brother both in public (posters loom over the landscape with the reminder, “Big Brother is watching you”) and in private through primitive television devices. Orwell’s is the kind of book that is best read when one is an undergraduate full of righteous indignation about evil establishments trying to control your every move, your every thought, which translate neatly into a moment of happy youthful discovery to find this narrative of suspicion so masterfully spelled out. It would seem that the show’s creators rather liked some of the boxes the Orwellian reference ticked – control, watch, television – while, one hopes, ignoring its more sinister overtones.

The first season of Big Brother aired in the Netherlands in 1999, was picked up the subsequent year by ten other countries and adapted for local tastes. Its advent was decried by critics and loved by audiences in equally

vociferous measure. Today, it is prime time TV viewing in almost 70 countries, a worldwide phenomenon for the 21st century. Its format is simple: a group of (usually unremarkable) people are locked into a house, their every move, every utterance, recorded by cameras and microphones. The so-called housemates are forbidden contact with the outside world and all communication is monitored, or rather, limited to spoken or physical form that can be captured by recording devices since there are no pens or paper, no computers or telephones.

The Indian version, Bigg Boss, first aired in 2006 and its contestants have always been “celebrities,” although that’s a word that must be used with a large helping of caution for some of its participants. All housemates must speak Hindi, which makes for amusing viewing given that this season had an Afghan participant who was, along with two others, penalised for slipping into English. At regular intervals, the housemates are invited to nominate other housemates for eviction. Spectators are invited to vote and housemates are thus evicted until the last one standing is declared a winner. This year, Biswas was joined by the usual, vaguely famous, small-time household names with various

Pages 22-23: the confession room. This page: Biswas, second from the left, with housemates. Opposite page: entry to the house. Courtesy of COLORS, Viacom 18.

25

26 THE EXTENT TO WHICH SPECTATORS ARE BUILT INTO THE EVOLUTION OF EACH SEASON’S NARRATIVE DEMONSTRATES THE NEW WAYS IN WHICH THEY ARE INVITED TO CONSUME VISUAL MEDIA.

claims to fame, including socialites, ex-VJs, models, actors, a well-known transgender activist and a female wrestler.

She was also not the first jailbird-bait (to coin a new but apt term) on the show: former gangster moll Monica Bedi had trod the path before her in 2008. The line-up was received

by TV critics with a yawn; none of the participants were especially exciting. This season’s house, purpose-built in Karjat, Maharashtra, is a confection of swirly lines, primary colours and futuristic furniture: a sort of liveable version of the set of CBeebies or other programming targeted at viewers under the age of six. Questions of taste aside, it certainly makes for visceral viewing. The composite show is, as a Deccan Herald TV reviewer commented, “one hour away from the realities of our own lives.”

According to the show’s creators, the original idea behind it owes much to a pop-anthropological experiment, to answering the question: how do very different people behave when confined to a limited space? But quite quickly it was apparent that participants learned how to perform to please their imagined viewer/captor, thereby shifting the locus of the question: how do people change their behaviour when they know they are being watched? The

peculiarity of surveillance and performance is fascinatingly explored in Michael Haneke’s haunting film Caché (2005) in which the lives of a successful Parisian couple are turned upside down when they receive videos that reveal someone has been watching and filming them. It’s a film that hinges on the idea that we cannot avoid performing when we know we are being watched, that once people are being watched and are aware of this, there is little authentic about their behaviour. Applying this paradigm to Big Brother/Bigg Boss reveals that the show has less in common with its purported Margaret Mead style of observation and documentation and more with the sinister Panopticon designed by 18th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham.

Bentham designed a prison of the future, “an all-seeing” building, where a few observers could supervise many inmates. Key to the concept and to the design, however, is that the inmates are unable to tell when they are being watched or not. Their behaviour depends, therefore, on them thinking that they are under constant surveillance, rather like the housemates of Bigg Boss who play up to cameras that record their every act assuming that viewers are watching it all; although, of course, it is usually only an edited highlight that the average viewer watches.

27

Bentham’s Panopticon was to be a new mode of gaining power over the minds of the inmates. Big Brother/ Bigg Boss updates this, however, by not seeking power over the housemates but, as with TV for profit anywhere, over its spectators. Palahniuk’s comment, quoted at the start of this article, reveals a modernised Big Brother/Boss who doesn’t merely watch but rather actively interacts and contributes to the show’s proceedings. Further, the show’s explicit invitation for spectator participation is a partial explanation for its popularity.

The extent to which spectators are built into the evolution of each season’s narrative demonstrates the new ways in which they are invited to consume visual media. A traditional visual media format, rather like traditional scholarship, tends to focus on genre, modes of production, on meta-narratives of nation or gender and so on, relegating spectators to a passive role and ignoring the fact that meaning is born in the consumption of the visual product. Commentators who refer to Big Brother/Bigg Boss as a moment of cultural zeitgeist are implicitly hailing, therefore, the advent of a new approach to understanding visual media itself via the role of the spectator, eager to participate and alter

the body of the text in a hyper-mediatised world. So who is Big Brother in this visual landscape? My suggestion is that it is not only the show’s creators or editors who mediate the footage thereby manipulating spectators’ sentiments but spectators themselves who are hidden participants in the show. Each viewer is a fragmented Big Brother in the Orwellian sense, with the power to intercede and shape, and is increasingly, as the show’s online forums and social networking connections reveal, rarely anonymous or unseen.

We, the viewers, are the judges, the jury and executioner. We are invited to decide what the housemates will do to pass the time, how they will interact, what they may or may not eat, how the narrative of the show will evolve. We decide who wins in a process that can only be described as the bizarre love child of democratic process (voting telephonically for our pick) and gladiatorial sport (evictions by popular choice).

We are also invited to guess at the hidden motivations of the participants, to discern what Orwell called “doublespeak,” to imagine from their behaviour an interiority that lurks behind the performative. When asked, Biswas

The Bigg Boss studio audience. Photographs taken for Motherland at BIG ND Studio, in Karjat, Maharashtra on October 29, 2011.

WE DECIDE WHO WINS IN A PROCESS THAT CAN ONLY BE DESCRIBED AS THE BIZARRE LOVE CHILD OF DEMOCRATIC PROCESS (VOTING TELEPHONICALLY FOR OUR PICK) AND GLADIATORIAL SPORT (EVICTIONS BY POPULAR CHOICE).

28 THE EVENTUAL WINNER ASIDE, INDIAN AUDIENCES SEEM TO PREFER THE MORE RAUCOUS, TROUBLE-MAKING PARTICIPANTS OVER THE QUIETER OR WHINIER ONES.

commented that her motivation for appearing on the show was that Sobhraj “wants Indians to know more about me.

I have nothing to hide.” Aside from being plain annoying to her fellow housemates, however, it’s not what Biswas had to hide but that she had so little (of Sobhraj) to reveal that made her uninteresting to spectators. Housemates must play a cautious game of revealing apparently hidden truths about themselves to the audience – via the confession room – or to their fellow participants or both, and Biswas’ failure to expose some tremendous secret about her infamous husband or their scandalous relationship perhaps doomed her chances. She was the first evictee of the season. The eventual winner aside, Indian audiences seem to prefer the more raucous, trouble-making participants over the quieter or whinier ones, which Biswas appeared to be.

Biswas’ participation in the show helped revive interest in the terrifying bogeyman of the 1980s, less than halfway through an 18 year Nepali prison term. Within the first day or two of the show, a fellow housemate asked Biswas whether she and Sobhraj had consummated their marriage. A question in poor taste, certainly, but one that nonetheless reveals an ongoing curiosity about

the cipher that he remains to the general public, since the question “who is Charles Sobhraj?” is still frustratingly unanswerable. We still know little about him and Biswas’ claim that he has never been proven guilty for the crimes he was accused of remains in the realm of conjecture. Had she dramatically revealed some startling new insight, chances are she would still be on the show.

Her inclusion in the line-up, as a sort of substitute for Sobhraj, suggests that Bigg Boss’ spectators and producers expected the traditional prisoner (Sobhraj, who we cannot see or judge) be enacted out through Biswas for our viewing and judging pleasure. For this reason, her most interesting clips remain those where Sobhraj is mentioned and her exit interviews were also marked by prurient questions into their relationship.

She was asked, for instance, what she hoped to achieve for Sobhraj through participating in the show; her response was a peculiar prevarication: “What happens to me, happens to my husband.” With apparently no sense of irony, Biswas then commented that she would now like to return to normal life, one that presumably conflates on a daily basis the hidden, the performative, the hyper-visualised and the overt.

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30

PRISON BANGALORE’S FORMER CENTRAL JAIL BECAME A PUBLIC

PARK THREE YEARS AGO IN WHAT WAS HAILED AS THE LANDMARK CONVERSION OF A HERITAGE BUILDING INTO MUCH NEEDED GREEN SPACE. BUT FREEING A JAIL ISN’T AS SIMPLE AS IT SOUNDS.

TEXT

KAVITHA R A O

Former Central Jail watchtower, Freedom Park. All pictures courtesy of Mathew & Ghosh Architects Private Limited.

31

N BREAK

32 A bright blue, uncompromisingly modern wall, parts of it covered with colourful murals of Sachin Tendulkar, and parts perforated with slits like castle windows; it’s a loud façade that makes Bangalore’s Freedom Park in Gandhi Nagar hard to miss.

While it may look contemporary from the outside, there are nearly 150 years of history behind these walls.

What is now a park was, not too long ago, a jail.

Built in 1867 over 22 acres of prime land in the heart of the city, this former Central Jail has housed freedom fighters and regional leaders from all over Karnataka.

Many ordinary students, villagers, and clerks inspired

by Mahatma Gandhi were thrown in there for hoisting flags or burning foreign goods during the Quit India Movement. Amongst the freedom fighters were Hosur Narasimhaiah, who went on to become an educationist, winning a Padma Bhushan for his work, H R Dasegowda, H S Doreswamy and writer Patil Puttappa, who would later become well known figures behind the formation of the state of Karnataka and the development of the Kannada language. For older residents of Bangalore, the jail has long held a sense of mystique and nostalgia as a place symbolic of the idealism that emanated from these figures, and of the Karnataka movement.

Drawing from the fascination a jail often holds, and from the unique, architectural heritage of older prisons, the past couple of decades have seen former jails, in other parts of the world, be revamped and put to new use. Examples are the conversions of Charles Street Jail in Boston and the Sultanahmet Jail in Istanbul into luxury hotels, and the Oxford Castle Prison, now a shopping arcade. But in India, Freedom Park is perhaps the only prison to have been remodelled as a public space; a place of seclusion transformed into one of openness. “Some jails have been turned into museums, like the Cellular Jail in the Andamans, but this is the only jail I know of that has been turned into a park, diametrically opposite to its intention,” says Soumitro Ghosh. Ghosh and his wife Nisha Mathew Ghosh are the founders of the award winning firm Mathew & Ghosh Architects; they’re the architects who took Bangalore’s Central Jail and made a park out of it.

The duo were selected over 86 others firms to take on the project in 2000. This was when prisoners from the overcrowded jail were transferred to a larger jail on the city’s outskirts and the Bangalore Task Force, a partnership

between prominent citizens, corporates and administrative agencies, decided to turn the abandoned site into a green space for the city that could also double up as a designated spot to hold rallies and protests. Architects were invited to submit their proposals, and Mathew & Ghosh Architects – a firm that was at the time only eight years old, fairly small and relatively unknown – were chosen for the job.

“I fell in love with the possibilities of the area – the light, the space, the surrounding areas – it was ‘love at first site,’ ” says Nisha Mathew Ghosh.

But it took nearly a decade and a fair amount of wrangling to get the new site up and running. There was a dispute with the police who wanted to secure part of the park for police rallies, and the former mayor had to be persuaded that the middle of the expanse was not the best location for building the world’s tallest tower. Nine years and ten crore rupees later, it was finally opened in 2009.

The conversion of Central Jail into a green space in a city starved of them, while preserving aspects of the jail’s

BUT IN INDIA, FREEDOM PARK IS PERHAPS THE ONLY PRISON TO HAVE BEEN REMODELLED AS A PUBLIC SPACE; A PLACE OF SECLUSION TRANSFORMED INTO ONE OF OPENNESS. heritage combined with the architects’ contemporary flair, has been lauded as a milestone restoration project.

But two years on, the much trumpeted cultural facilities in the original plan, like an art gallery and a café, have yet to happen, mostly because of government delays in budget approvals. The park’s timings are restrictive to the point that it is almost always quiet. And with various other curtailments, including the old structures being inaccessible, some wonder if much of the traces of its historical relevance have been lost in the process.

The first thing that strikes about Freedom Park is the stark contrast between the original structures and the architects’ additions. “Our insertions are simple, geometric and bold, like sculptures on the landscape,” says Nisha Mathew Ghosh.

“The old is the anchor for the new markers, but we wanted the public to be able to clearly tell the difference between the two,” she adds.

33

ARCHITECTURAL MODEL of Freedom Park.

The architects’ distinctive, contemporary style that tends to privilege function over form is often discernible in their buildings through their geometric forms, bold colour accents and deconstructed spaces, which are elements they’ve brought to Freedom Park.

The challenge, say Mathew & Ghosh Architects, was to turn a forbidding, dark, inward looking place into an inviting one, with space and light, for people to use and

enjoy. “India doesn’t have public spaces for people to eat, watch events or simply stroll around, except for malls, which are not exactly memorable destinations,” says Soumitro Ghosh.

The blue wall shields most of the old buildings from outside view, but peeping through the slit windows one can glimpse the old yellow façade with the sign “Bangalore Jail.” Certain parts of the jail were kept intact in the

34 new park, including most of the barracks, the watchtower and cells. Others, however, were modified, such as the hospital block. “The rooms were very small and dark, so we took off the old roof and put in a new floating roof, all to bring in light,” says Mathew Ghosh.

The unconventional restoration has its fans. “Overall, I approve of the revamp. Mathew & Ghosh started with a closed, cloistered structure and have made it open and airy,” says conservation architect Krupa Rajangam, who is also a consultant for INTACH (The Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage) and the state government. Rajangam is in favour of heritage buildings being reinterpreted in a contemporary way. “There are people who think anything old needs to be fossilised, but I disagree. You can’t leave it completely untouched, you have to make your own statement,” she says.

But there are also those who think Mathew & Ghosh Architects’ conversion erases the history of the jail. “They have made a clean sweep of history,” says Anupama Prakash, a curator and programme executive at the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA), an NGO that works to safeguard the arts.

Apart from being staunchly against the “jarring” modern restorations, Prakash is also fiercely critical of the Bruhat Bangaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP), the government body responsible for the park. “Crucial bits of the park’s history have been lost because of the BBMP’s carelessness. The original gallows, for instance, went missing — maybe they were stolen, maybe they were sold for scrap — now there’s just a mound where they used to be. That should have been a significant spot,” she says.

PRAKASH ALSO DISCOVERED MANY INSTRUMENTS OF TORTURE USED BY THE BRITISH DURING PRE-INDEPENDENCE DAYS, INCLUDING WHIPS, FETTERS, AND A GRUESOME RACK THAT WAS USED TO STRETCH PRISONERS.

THE FORMER jail barracks.

THE OUTSIDE WALL of Freedom Park, with the old jail building in the background.

35 Prakash has more reason than most to be angry over the way the space has been structured. In 2009, the IFA was invited by the BBMP to research material for a prison museum that would focus on Central Jail as well as on the history of prisons throughout Karnataka, and was even given a seed grant to do so. Prakash and a colleague travelled to seven central prisons of Karnataka, making a detailed record of every element of prison life, from artefacts such as dental kits and typewriters to photographs, prison records and reminiscences of prisoners and wardens. Prakash also discovered many instruments of torture used by the British during pre-Independence days, including whips, fetters and a gruesome rack that was used to stretch prisoners.

After the study, a detailed proposal was presented for setting up a prison museum in the park, properly preserving the old buildings and educating curious passersby. The museum would probably be the first of its kind in the country, painting a remarkably detailed picture of the past criminal justice system, but nothing has yet been done to set it up and the collection of prison memorabilia curated by the IFA is currently collecting dust in the old jail’s warehouse. The BBMP says that it is still considering the proposal.

When asked why this space was so special, Prakash is vocal. “These halls were once full of freedom fighters, people who formed the state of Karnataka, people who fought for a cause. Now, our jails are full of politicians, but they are there because they are obscenely corrupt,” she says. “This jail marks the shift of history.”

That bygone idealism was evident last summer, when Freedom Park was the venue for massive rallies in support of anti-corruption crusader Anna Hazare. “The government suggested the park because it has been designated as a place for public rallies,” says Prithvi Reddy, one of the rally organisers. “But we also chose it over other venues because it has this old time charm and so much history.

We could tell Anna’s supporters about the sacrifices that were made by the people in this jail, and remind them to be ready for sacrifices themselves.”

Latha Adhikari, 65, a long time resident of the area, was at the park to support the Anna Hazare protests along with a group of her friends. “I am really happy that we now have a space in the centre of the city to protest,” she says. “Earlier we would have to queue and

obstruct traffic on MG Road. And this space has so much more meaning.”

But now that the Anna movement has come and gone, the park seems to have gone back to just being a park, almost like any other. There are no boards explaining what it used to be, save a cursory one at the entrance, and most of the historic parts of the jail, such as the watchtower and cell yards, are locked and out of bounds.

Furthermore, it’s only officially open from 4.30pm to 7.30pm, which limits the number of visitors. For the few hours it’s open, it’s mostly quiet. The few strollers, mainly college students looking for a place to chat and cuddle, seem to have no clue about its history.

“I didn’t even know this was a jail. It looks like a new park,” says Mallika Nagraj, 18, who is ironically a history student from a nearby women’s college. When shown the jail structures, she looks bemused. “Now that you are pointing them out, I can see it, but otherwise I would not have noticed them, because they are overshadowed by the new buildings and the fountain.”

Venkatesh Murthy, 36, an accountant who works nearby, is craning his neck to see inside the closed cell yards. “I didn’t know it was a jail. I just came here because it’s a nice place to get some fresh air,” he says. “I wish they would open all these locked off buildings, otherwise nobody will know about the past of the park,” he adds.

One barrack still has the plinths on which the prisoners slept, packed 100 to a barrack, but a description of what they used to be is nowhere to be found.

“When we were children and young students, we always used to hurry past the park [when it was a jail] thinking of all the murderers and robbers inside,” remembers Adhikari, who blames the park’s decorative elements for masking its history. “The murals of Sachin Tendulkar should not be used outside; what does he have to do with the jail? They should have murals or photos of the people who contributed so much to Karnataka history.”

Perhaps, once the facilities currently on hold are completed, the park will better keep alive the memory of these historical heroes. As the walls of Freedom Park celebrate India’s biggest contemporary hero, armed with bat and cap, the memory of the freedom fighters who were once housed here seems, for now, to be locked up inside the inaccessible remains of Central Jail.

36 MONKEY BUSINESS

TEXT

SHIVAM V I J IMAGES

VIKAS MAURYA

Food left by Hanuman bhakts at a temple near the monkey sanctuary draws the monkeys there.

IN THEIR TIME, DELHI’S MONKEYS HAVE CAUSED ENOUGH TROUBLE TO EARN A PLACE IN A SANCTUARY ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF THE CITY.

37 From 2009 to early 2011, I lived in a south Delhi barsati which had an enormous terrace area. When I moved in, this open space looked sad and empty, so I spent many thousands of rupees doing it up with all kinds of plants.

Then came the monkeys. A team of five to ten. On finding the kitchen locked, they would break the pots, and sometimes eat the plants. No flower was allowed to bloom.

I replaced the mud pots with heavy cement ones.

The monkeys broke fewer of them but ate more shoots and leaves. They would come at night. Soon they’d come at dawn, and make such a commotion I’d wake up terrified. Mild banging on the door wouldn’t ward them off, nor would the other tactics I tried. I was afraid of them. They could be aggressive and strong and these traits were amplified because they operated in gangs.

I felt caged in the small room of my large barsati. All I could do was share my misery on Facebook. “Be careful,” a friend warned in a comment, “they once killed the deputy mayor of Delhi.”

In October 2007, Sawinder Singh Bajwa, the then deputy mayor, was trying to fend off monkeys from the balcony of his home. He fell off the terrace and died.

Ironically, in the election he had recently won for the Bhartiya Janata Party, the opposition Congress had made the “monkey menace” a major issue. Apart from stealing food and clothing like dacoits, biting people, and scaling the parliament building, they’d also been known to create a scare on occasion by running through a Metro carriage or through the airport. After the death, mayor Aarti Mehra started worrying about monkeys. She said Delhi had only five monkey catchers for an estimated 20 000 monkeys. The Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) had also begun fining Hanuman bhakts for feeding monkeys in public places. But the monkeys would not relent.

A month later, a lone monkey went around Shastri Park in East Delhi, biting 25 people in a single weekend. People eventually beat him down with metal bars and sticks because they feared it was going to snatch infants away.

“Primal Invasion,” the Hindustan Times had panicked on the front page.

If Delhi’s monkeys make less news these days it may be because since then, the New Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC) and the MCD have hired more monkey catchers, raising the number from five to 50 odd, and

have raised the reward for every monkey caught to as much as Rs 650. Private contractors act as go-betweens to find monkey catchers from across India, not an easy task because not many would want to be cruel to Lord Hanuman, the monkey god, the god of strength. The captured monkeys are sent to a monkey sanctuary on the outskirts of Delhi. But that we hear of them less is also because the monkeys have effectively been displaced from the media glare, from the areas of south and central Delhi, and no longer infiltrate the Defence Ministry and scatter files as they did in 2004, or kill children as they did once in a while.

My curiosity about Delhi’s monkey problem led me to the leafy neighbourhood of Asiad Village, where a very warm Iqbal Malik welcomed me inside her lovely apartment. There was nothing to do with monkeys in the shelves of the drawing room of India’s best known primatologist. Over the next two hours or so, she answered my questions, one after the other, explaining to me where it all began.

When Malik saw Delhi’s urban monkey population explode in the 1990s she wasn’t surprised. She’d seen it coming.

Malik had started working as a primatologist a decade earlier. In the late 1980s, she was studying a group of monkeys at Tughlaqabad Fort, having selected two sets of monkeys for comparative study and given them all names (such as Bluff Ram and Daagi Ram) and hired a team of eight to observe them round the clock. Soon, her monkeys started disappearing and her research was affected. She found that the monkeys had been trapped and taken away by the MCD – their way of keeping monkeys off the streets. “But what I then saw was that monkey families were disrupted. The mother is away, the infant is here, the father monkey unable to take care of it, and so on,” says Malik. This chaos caused monkey groups to be divided, one into two and two into four and so on. Their ecological balance thus disrupted by selective trapping led to what Malik calls “chaotic fission,” and they started entering houses to look for food. That is how monkeys came into our homes.

To begin with, the monkeys were shy with Delhi residents, but the people were more forthcoming, welcoming them with food. Malik asked some such people why they fed monkeys. “Lord Hanuman, who helped Ram defeat

38 Ravan, good defeat evil, has come to our house!” they would say excitedly. But this religious enthusiasm lessened when people realised Lord Hanuman gets angry and aggressive when not given food, helps himself to the fridge and even takes away clothes and causes destruction.

“I would see people come to Tughlaqabad to feed the monkeys, and give so much food the monkeys won’t even eat all,” she says. Later, when monkeys became a menace, she started hearing such complaints as, “God has no fear!”

Thanks to media interest in the monkey issue, Malik’s research brought her such fame in the late 1980s that she would get calls from strangers asking her for advice. “The monkey is in the bathroom and I am afraid,” she remembers one such caller say, “what do I do?” Her views on tackling monkeys have been sought

by Rashtrapati Bhavan and by the courts. Once, an army officer met her to enquire if monkeys could be trained to work with landmines. She shooed him away like others do monkeys.

While the 1990s saw a proliferation of monkeys, it is not the case that the “monkey menace” did not exist earlier.

A quick dip into the archives shows a report in The Miami News from 1950 titled, “New Delhi Seeks MonkeyCatcher.” There reportedly hadn’t been any monkey catchers since 1947, and when they found one, a Muslim, he soon left for Pakistan. Hindus wouldn’t take up the job, because, well, how could they be tormenting Lord Hanuman? The report said, “Besides perpetrating such annoyances as swiping golfballs right off the greens, the monkeys are occasionally vicious. Captured monkeys will be deported rather than killed. Municipal president Yudhvir Singh thinks they might bring some much-needed dollars in U.S. trade.”

Which points to the original sin that Iqbal also discovered: around the time India became independent, Indian monkeys became slaves to American scientific research. One of the first studies on the Rhesus macaques

THE WALLS of the monkey sanctuary in Asola.

APART FROM STEALING FOOD AND CLOTHING LIKE DACOITS, BITING PEOPLE, AND SCALING THE PARLIAMENT BUILDING, THEY’D ALSO BEEN KNOWN TO CREATE A SCARE ON OCCASION BY RUNNING THROUGH A METRO CARRIAGE OR THROUGH THE AIRPORT.

39 in India, by an American anthropologist in the 1920s, said that monkeys were present in groups in forest areas from Delhi to Dehradun. These groups or monkey families were disturbed by the American demand for middle-aged male monkeys. “I found that the sex ratio of monkey groups was not normal, and particular age groups were being taken out [of the country] for years,” says Iqbal.

That was when she started her research in 1980, two years after the devout Hindu Prime Minister, Morarji Desai, banned monkey export to the US. The ban happened partly because of reports from the US that monkeys were being used not just in vaccine experiments but also by the US army to test the impact of weapons, in contravention of the agreement between the US and India on the monkey trade. American newspaper archives suggest that the number of Indian monkeys taken out ranged between 20 000 and 50 000 a year.

Add to that the realisation that a lot of today’s central and south Delhi was once jungle and the natural habitat of the monkeys, forests, were replaced by Hanuman worshippers as the monkeys’ source of food, and there are plenty of reasons why the simians should live amongst us.

The MCD and NDMC’s inability to see the root of the monkey problem means that monkey catchers with cages, bait and sticks only make the problem worse; dividing groups makes them more aggressive. And catching and releasing them elsewhere also spreads the problem, as do langurwalas, introduced in 2001, whose langurs frighten off the smaller rhesus monkeys, and send them running.

In 2007, the Delhi High Court passed an order asking civic agencies in Delhi to ready monkey traps in ten days and to start shifting monkeys to a newly created monkey

LANGURWALAS, like Lakhan, who is about 18, are hired to scare away rhesus monkeys with their langurs.

THEIR ECOLOGICAL BALANCE THUS DISRUPTED

BY SELECTIVE TRAPPING LED TO WHAT MALIK CALLS “CHAOTIC FISSION,” AND THEY STARTED ENTERING HOUSES TO LOOK FOR FOOD.

40 sanctuary in Asola, on the outskirts of Delhi. This was after the Supreme Court had transferred its own monkey case to the Delhi High Court, exasperated with several state governments’ refusals to take Delhi’s monkeys. On the Supreme Court’s orders in 2004, 250 monkeys had been shifted to the Kuno-Palpur Wildlife Sanctuary near Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh. When the Supreme Court ordered another 300 monkeys to be shifted there, the MP government refused; it said they disrupted the park’s ecological balance.

and keep driving straight for about 14 kilometres, past a Hanuman temple (!), until you hit a dead-end near Bhatti Mines. Drive through the village there and you’ll come to a tall, sturdy wall of green sheets enclosing an area, with a built-in gate.

In February-March 2007, the matter had become urgent. Three hundred monkeys had been lying in cages in Rajokri in Delhi and had to be moved somewhere.

So began the relocation of the monkeys to Asola.

You could be forgiven for thinking this is a secret military installation. But the door is at times open. Children go in to fetch water. Monkeys come out for reasons they know best. Despite the open gate, the monkeys climb up the sheets. They try to pull them down. They do so in unison and sometimes on their own, pulling to remove them from the iron structure that holds them. This is a jail, and jailbreak is common. No wonder the monkeys find their way into the city again.

The Asola Bhatti Wildlife Sanctuary is where Delhites go on weekends for bird-watching. It is such a large sanctuary you may not see monkeys, because they have been settled at another end. To get there, you must go to Chattarpur

Just as no one can simply enter and meet the inmates of a jail, entry here is prohibited. The guards call up their superior, who tells me no one is allowed in, and gives me the number of D M Shukla, Delhi’s chief wildlife warden.

MONKEYS on the outside of the sanctuary.

ONCE AN ARMY OFFICER MET HER TO ENQUIRE IF MONKEYS COULD BE TRAINED TO WORK WITH LANDMINES. SHE SHOOED HIM AWAY LIKE OTHERS DO MONKEYS.

41 One of the guards says a monkey once bit him. In the village just outside the reserve, monkeys try to snatch rotis from kids and from the women making them for breakfast before their children go to school. The women respond by brandishing their lathis. The monkeys careen through the neighbourhood as one resident says, using “the [electrical] wires like the Metro, causing us outages.”

Every second person here seems to have been bitten by a monkey at least once. Dr Samar Sarkar of the neighbouring Fatehpur Primary Health Centre says he gets at least ten monkey bite cases a day.

D M Shukla sits in a government office at Vikas Marg. He is incensed that the subject of monkey bites is being brought up. He says that since 2007, 13 537 monkeys have been sent to Asola. He is not willing to discuss much beyond. “There is no problem with monkeys. We’re following the court orders. Why don’t you worry about real problems such as national security?” he asks.

Clearly, monkeys have been escaping, defeating the purpose of the sanctuary? “You can’t put them in a prison,” he says. “They like to go out but eventually return because the food source is here.”

He says enough food is provided in the sanctuary; but the trees planted for self-sustenance will take five to ten years until fruition. According to court orders, Hanuman bhakts deposit food at the Hanuman Temple in Connaught Place and Yamuna Bazar on Tuesdays and Saturdays, then the authorities deliver it to the monkey sanctuary in Asola. The authorities are to arrange for food if this collected food falls short. It likely does, if the monkeys have to snatch rotis from two year olds. What also attracts monkeys out of the sanctuary is the food left by Hanuman bhakts at the nearby Hanuman temple.

Iqbal Malik had given the Delhi government a detailed plan for how the Asola sanctuary should be planned, but she says none of it has been followed, because of which

SIKANDER SINGH, 27, lives next to the sanctuary. His son was bitten when the monkeys first came in 2007.

BUT THE DOOR IS AT TIMES OPEN. CHILDREN GO IN TO FETCH WATER. MONKEYS COME OUT FOR REASONS THEY KNOW BEST.

42 monkeys are still going out. She is not allowed into the sanctuary either.

Sonya Ghose of the Citizens for the Welfare and Protection of Animals, an NGO, is one of four members of a High Court-appointed committee to oversee the monkey relocation. She insists that Asola is India’s most successful monkey translocation programme, but admits that monkeys are not being caught in groups, and that remains a problem.

They’re training the monkey catchers better, she says.

Ghose estimates that there are at best 5 000 monkeys remaining in the city limits. However, just a year after the translocation began, she was quoted as saying: “There are hardly any monkeys left in the city. A few stragglers can be spotted but that’s about it.”

The Wildlife Institute of India, Dehradun, could conduct a monkey census in Delhi but hasn’t been asked to. In the absence of numbers, and with the authorities not allowing any external scrutiny at Asola, it is difficult to believe that Delhi’s monkey problem is over. A few

minutes at the gate of the monkey sanctuary, however, make it clear that for the monkeys it is a problem by itself, an imprisonment for the misdeeds committed by their more developed form.

And the problem is certainly not over for residents who still have monkeys as unwelcome guests. In late 2010, Dr Pratul Sharma in Mayur Vihar was showing his child how they could stand next to the Resident Welfare Association (RWA)-hired langurwala’s langur, and it would not bite. The langur leapt and bit Dr Sharma on his arm.

The RWA fired the langurwala. Soon, the monkeys returned in droves. A maid was passing by when a monkey, crouching behind a car, ran out and bit her. She was down with fever for days. The RWA was in a fix and called the MCD for help. The MCD sent across their langurwala. “Now my children are afraid to venture out as they are afraid of both monkeys as well as the langoor,” Dr Sharma told a newspaper.

THE GATE of the monkey sanctuary.

THE MONKEYS CAREEN THROUGH THE NEIGHBOURHOOD AS ONE RESIDENT SAYS, USING “THE [ELECTRICAL] WIRES LIKE THE METRO, CAUSING US OUTAGES.”

43

44

CLASS OF ’75 A FORMER STUDENT ACTIVIST SENT TO TIHAR JAIL DURING THE EMERGENCY RECOUNTS HIS FORTNIGHT THERE AND WHAT THE JAIL WAS LIKE, BACK IN THE DAY.

Mrs Gandhi, the then Prime Minister of India, represented the Rai Bareli seat in the Lok Sabha.

On June 12, 1975, she was unseated on charges of election fraud and misuse of state machinery in a landmark judgement by Justice Jagmohan Lal Sinha of the Allahabad High Court. Fakhr-ud-Din Ali Ahmad, the then President of India, declared internal Emergency on the recommendation of a pliable cabinet presided over by Mrs Gandhi. The people of India lost all civil liberties for a period of 21 months.

Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), set up in Delhi in the early 1970s as a postgraduate centre for interdisciplinary research, had emerged as the most politically active university, and those of us who were students then were part of this agitation and protest.

And so the news that the campus was going to be raided any day between the 6th and the 8th of July 1975 was received as a matter of fact. Our sources were reliable – police informers who had enrolled themselves as students at JNU.

Trade unions were emasculated, political opponents arrested, newspapers censored. The only place where a semblance of freedom survived were the universities, and most were in turmoil – student unions were being banned and activists picked up and thrown in jail.

It was well past daybreak on the morning of the 8th.

I jumped out of bed with a start. Someone was banging on the door. I opened it to find myself looking into the eyes of a tall CRPF (Central Reserve Police

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45 Force) type. He grabbed me by the arm.

“Come along.”

“Can I change?”

“Hurry up.”

I closed the door and he resumed the door banging routine. “Hang on a moment,” I said. I began to slip into something decent while I leaned over the balcony to explore the possibility of jumping into the one below to try to escape. No luck there. I was staring down into the raised eye of a gun barrel signalling me to get back. Armed policemen had encircled the entire hostel; they were huddled behind clumps of bushes, rock outcrops and the boundary walls. So I shelved any fanciful ideas of escaping the long and rather muscular arm of law, and came out.

As I emerged from Kaveri Hostel the size of the operation dawned on me; JNU resembled a maximumsecurity prison. Apart from Kaveri, around Godawari and Periyar, the other two hostels where students resided, were at least three rings of gun-toting, helmeted troops wearing bulletproof jackets and carrying huge shields. Most had their fingers curled around the triggers of dangerous-looking guns.

Of the 25 hauled up from amongst JNU’s students, faculty and non-teaching staff, only ten were politically active. I was happy to note that except for a couple, the other student union leaders had escaped their net. We had made preventative arrangements and those activists, whose presence was necessary on the campus, had been put on a relay and ensconced in a different room every night. Our scheme had worked. From the core leadership of the Students Federation of India (SFI), only I was taken in.

Apart from the ten, they also picked up three or four admission seekers. The cops had a list of suspects, and on it was a certain professor of international relations who had panicked at the declaration of the Emergency, left Delhi and renounced politics at a press conference in Chennai, claiming he was now just an academic. Not finding him, they arrested his cook. They also apprehended the rather docile general secretary of the Employees Association and also the most popular country western singer on campus – the unfortunate fellow was preparing to join the Central Services of the Government of India.

Poor pickings, considering that over 1 000 police personnel and officers were involved in this hush hush

46 operation that everyone on campus knew about for three days before it was unleashed. We were bundled into the waiting trucks and, with sirens wailing, driven to Hauz Khas police station.

The moment we arrived, we realised that no one had a clue. The regulars had been moved out, and police brought in from Haryana. These fellows were quick to act on orders but were a little slow in distinguishing an image of Karl Marx from that of Acharya Rajneesh (Osho) – at least one arrest hadn’t been made because a constable insisted that the painting of Marx on a student’s window was of the baba and not the revolutionary – not to speak of their utter inability to understand the subtle differences between the SFI and the AISF, one opposed to the Emergency and the other supporting it. They clearly didn’t have the foggiest about the Stalin vs Trotsky debate.

THE ONLY PLACE WHERE A SEMBLANCE OF FREEDOM SURVIVED WERE THE UNIVERSITIES, AND MOST WERE IN TURMOIL – STUDENT UNIONS WERE BEING BANNED AND ACTIVISTS PICKED UP AND THROWN IN JAIL.

The catch of 25 reflected these diverse opinions and the cops were totally at sea about which of these tendencies were to be treated as enemies of the state and which were harmless. We seized upon this opportunity and convinced the newly appointed in-charge that he had picked up a whole bunch of nobodies and when his superiors caught on they would surely cook his goose. And so, incredible as it may seem, before his seniors arrived he let the cook and another 14 people walk free.

Had the top cop arrived a little while later, all of us could have walked out of lockup and back to JNU. Unfortunately, as I was warming to the theme, the intelligence guy in charge of JNU walked in and said to me, “Ah comrade so we caught you.” And all I could say was, “Now you have.”

Tedious paperwork, finger printing and mug shots ensued, followed by homilies about not wasting our time and our parents’ money by indulging in anti-national activities instead of studying like children from good families. We were then informed that we had been charged under the Defence of India Rules-69; DIR 69, read with a host of subsections, clauses and subclauses. All this meant that we

47 had been conspiring to overthrow the state and that we were going to be guests of the state at Central Jail, Tihar.

A few hours later, the huge iron jail gates opened to let in the prison van we’d been bundled into, and then clanged shut with a strange finality. The demeanour of the guards was the first thing that hit me. Gone was the mocking almost friendly banter of the cops in the police station; it was replaced by a crude, almost brutal attitude. The baton-wielding guards appeared menacing. The way they moved towards you was blood chilling. At least that is what I felt.

I asked for a copy of the jail manual. The senior warder turned to one of his minions, “He wants the manual, should we give it to him?” The minion said, “Let it go brother, he will collapse and faint.” My colleagues told me to shut up.

We were taken to ward 13. Like the others, ward 13 was a rectangle enclosed within a wall about ten feet high with sharp pieces of glass jutting out the top. Inside, there were seven large enclosures, three to each long side, and one at the far end facing a

barred door on the fourth side, that led to the road that ran around the jail grounds. This door was kept locked and only opened to admit or let out inmates.

The enclosures, much like cages, comprised metal frames to which huge, vertical, evenly spaced iron

AS I EMERGED FROM KAVERI HOSTEL THE SIZE OF THE OPERATION DAWNED ON ME; JNU RESEMBLED A MAXIMUM-SECURITY PRISON.

rods, rising from the floor to support the roof, were affixed. The enclosures had one or two rows of cement beds, each with a small, inbuilt locker; all the beds had been monopolised by those who had arrived before us.

Out of the seven barracks, three were being used for common criminals – the one opposite ours and the one next to it. A third had been divided into two solitary confinement cells and two rather ferociouslooking serial killers paced up and down inside these.

48 In the enclosure opposite ours there was a young man, someone very well connected and probably from one of the island nations of Southeast Asia. He was serving his term for trying to smuggle some very small, hard, expensive rocks into India. His term was coming to an end and he was slowly winding up his business empire inside Tihar. He ran a lending library of pornographic literature – if I may be permitted to use the phrase – and since many of his clients were illiterate he also provided graphic novels. But this was not the most lucrative of his trades; he controlled the drug distribution network in Tihar and gave loans to needy inmates at interest rates that would have made Shylock look like an apprentice in the business.

Aside from these three enclosures the other four were reserved for political prisoners. The single enclosure at the far end of the ward had been taken up as the temporary residence of members of the RSS and the Jamat-e-Islami. This was an interesting meeting of minds; on the outside these two seemed to be sworn enemies, though inside they were as thick as thieves. Across the communal divide, they shared lifestyles, interests, habits and deportments of

self-importance. They whiled away their time playing chess or cards and cracking vulgar jokes. They’d wake up early, clearing their throats so loudly that everybody else was jolted awake. They wanted to be served before anybody else, and insisted on long siestas after lunch.

HE WAS SERVING HIS TERM FOR TRYING TO SMUGGLE SOME VERY SMALL, HARD, EXPENSIVE ROCKS INTO INDIA. HIS TERM WAS COMING TO AN END AND HE WAS SLOWLY WINDING UP HIS BUSINESS EMPIRE INSIDE TIHAR.

Most of the RSS types were traders who also doubled up as ideologues. Some we were told had been caught on charges of black marketing or selling spurious goods. They maintained that these were false charges and they were caught for supporting the call for the Total Revolution that Jai Prakash Narain was leading.

49 Once there, we learned some things pretty quickly.

You were not allowed to keep razorblades in jail, and for good reason too; they were used less often for shaving stubble and more for carving up other inmates.

A barber came in each morning to give you a shave but we all started growing beards the day we heard that in his village he had used his razor to despatch two of his erstwhile clients to meet their maker.

Criminals come from all walks of life and Tihar, like a small city, needed all kinds of services. Those with long sentences worked to pay for their keep. A doctor, serving a life sentence for his involvement in his wife’s murder, was given charge of the jail library. He did quite a good job. His proddings forced the authorities to properly catalogue the books and, if my memory serves me right, to also start a repair and binding unit.

The head gardener was in for a heinous crime.

Perhaps he’d thought nothing about knifing the fellow whom he had, but if one of his saplings shrivelled up and died, he’d get very worked up.

The jail manual that I had unsuccessfully asked for lays down the duties and rights of inmates and we were to discover that those who had studied up to graduation or above were entitled to draw daily rations

and could ask for the services of a cook and a servant.

Since all ten of us were not only post graduates, we were all research scholars studying for our M.Phils or PhDs, we were entitled to these facilities and our arrival had generally enhanced the average educational level of the prison.

Those who had arrived before us knew how to take advantage of all this. After about a week we realised that all our rations were being drawn by a certain Mr Jain and his cohorts. Our daily rations included firewood, 400 ml or so of milk per head, 50 grams or so of butter, two eggs, cooking oil, wheat flour, pulses, legumes, potatoes, fruits, sugar and tea leaf. This was being syphoned off and sold in the black market inside the prison while we continued to be fed half cooked rotis and dal that had an equal quantity of small pebbles mixed into it. By the time we discovered the

CRIMINALS COME FROM ALL WALKS OF LIFE AND TIHAR, LIKE A SMALL CITY, NEEDED ALL KINDS OF SERVICES. THOSE WITH LONG SENTENCES WORKED TO PAY FOR THEIR KEEP.

50 extent of the racket and began to make a noise, it was time for our mandatory court appearance.

At the court, virtually the entire senior faculty and administrative staff of JNU arrived to bail us out.

A day later, the 15 day remand was over, and of the ten, all were released, except me. There was some problem with my paperwork so I had to spend an extra day there. The others didn’t know why I wasn’t being released and fearing the worst, left what money they had with me.

Everyone in my ward knew that of the students only I had been kept back. They were very sympathetic. The warder even let me walk outside to visit the jail canteen. I jumped at the opportunity. Being locked up for a fortnight had begun to get a little depressing.

The canteen was more like a roadside dhaba, and was run by a former wrestler who had wiped out an entire family in a land dispute. He’d also done in the sole eyewitness when out on parole to attend his mother’s funeral. So when he was sentenced to life, the jail authorities gave him the responsibility of running the canteen.

I had something to eat, a cup of tea, paid the canteen manager and walked back to the ward. But as I entered the barracks I realised that my pocket was unusually light. The pickpockets used to hang around the canteen and someone had taken my money.

I narrated my tale of woe to my friend: the smuggler, drug lord, smut king and ward mate. “Do not worry,” he said. “I’ll get it for you. They can’t touch anyone from my ward. We have a deal. I’ll stop all their supplies.”

That evening I was bailed out. I filled out my paperwork in the room adjacent to the main gate.

For some reason, those being released had to squat on the floor while they completed their forms. Why? Must be some ancient custom. Squatting next to me was a young man, barely out of his teens.

He was also being bailed out. I asked him what he was in for. “Attempt to murder,” he said flatly. “How come?” I asked, hoping he’d been framed somehow; he looked so innocent. “Stupid mistake. I had an argument, knifed the fellow. He survived and identified me. Should have waited to make sure instead of running off.”

51 YOU WERE NOT ALLOWED TO KEEP RAZORBLADES IN JAIL, AND FOR GOOD REASON TOO; THEY WERE USED LESS OFTEN FOR SHAVING STUBBLE AND MORE FOR CARVING UP OTHER INMATES.

A few months later the smut king came to meet me at JNU. One felt a little embarrassed sitting in the canteen with this character sporting Bruce Lee hair, a pink and green flowery shirt, and black drainpipe trousers held up by a thick belt covered in chunky metal studs; he looked every inch the crook that he was. As he slipped into a steel chair and drew on his fancy cigarette he asked me, “Did you get your money?”

“No, but tell me what happened?”

“I called a meeting of all the pickpockets and I said to them, ‘Whoever has picked my elder brother’s pocket had better own up or I’ll fix the swine.’ Later that evening a boy came and gave me the money back. He had spent 15 rupees and smoked one of your nice cheroots; all the rest he gave back.”

“Then who did you give it to?”

“Oh you remember that Islamic fellow, that young man who argued about Islam all the time? He was bailed out the day after you left. I gave him the money and he promised to deliver it to you. He said he knew where JNU was and all that.”

This was incredible. Here was a smuggler and drug pusher who had taken the trouble to travel to JNU to tell me that he had sent me my money. And somewhere out there was this man of God who had pocketed money that didn’t belong to him, that he had promised to deliver.

The case against us dragged on until mid 1977.

The sole eyewitness for the prosecution was a resident of Ber Sarai who had stated on oath that he had wandered onto the campus in search of his buffalo that had gone missing while grazing nearby, and had heard all of us calling upon the students gathered for a meeting to overthrow the government. We informed the poor sod that the university was going to prosecute him for trespassing onto the university’s land with his bovine. At the next hearing he turned hostile and the case was dropped.

52 DELHI’S TIHAR JAIL HAS A BRAND OF PRISONER-MADE PRODUCTS TO CALL ITS OWN. BUT WHAT DOES HAVING A PRISON ENTERPRISE LIKE THIS REALLY MEAN? Soon after Ranveer* was sent to jail, he assumed a new identity. To the jail authorities he was an “RI”; in jail lingo, that means he was sentenced to rigorous imprisonment. As an RI, the then 28-year-old, convicted of murder, was mandated to do hard labour, eight hours a day, for the duration of his life sentence.

Imprisoned at Tihar Jail, the monolithic prison complex located in west Delhi, which houses about 11 000 convicts and undertrials across nine, separate jails, Ranveer’s mandatory labour at first involved electrical servicing work, similar to what he had done on the outside. But he was soon transferred to the prison’s on-site factory, for the opportunity of a new role and a paid

wage. Given some welding equipment and on-the-job training, he was set to the task of building metal frames for tables. Despite being paid work, building desks was repetitive and physically demanding. The monotony wore him down.

“The work wasn’t interesting, I got into fights and did a poor job because I was bored,” he says about his time in the factory. “That work was just time pass, there was no benefit from that.”

In 2010, after serving 16 months of his life sentence, Ranveer was acquitted of his charge and released. Seated in a coffee shop in Connaught Place in late October, Ranveer is a slight man in a fitted red and white check

PACKETS OF TJ’S NAMKEEN ready for distribution.

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53 shirt. Chatty in a somewhat frenetic manner, he’s eager to share his Tihar experiences. After struggling to find employment, the now 30 year old is relieved to have gone back to his original trade of electrical servicing. Since his release, he hasn’t used any of the skills he picked up at the Tihar factory.

Engaging prisoners in factory work is one of Tihar’s many initiatives intended to aid prisoner rehabilitation.

In other words, these are programs which aim to keep inmates occupied throughout their incarceration, equip them with vocational skills and, ultimately, help prepare them for re-entering society when they are released. Over the last two decades, the endeavours have included yoga, dance workshops and art therapy.

But the Jail Factory, around since 1961 and now comprising six units and a baking school, has increasingly become a driving force of the Tihar rehabilitation story. It seeks to provide inmates with a more productive alternative to the existing prison maintenance tasks, such as cleaning, cooking and gardening, that otherwise make up the inmates’ mandatory labour.

The Jail Factory is located on the compound of jail number two, one of the prison’s two convict-only jails.

The compound has few of the trappings one might imagine of prison life. The courtyard walls are muralled and painted bright pink. The lawns are well kept. S M Bhardwaj, the jail’s Superintendent, is keen to show the library, computer room, aviary, herb garden and hair salon, where inmates were trained by hairdressing baron Jawed Habib, who owns a chain of salons across the country.

In the new music room, Bhardwaj instructs an impromptu keyboard-bongo jam session, which is begrudgingly obliged to by two inmates. For the outsider, visits are restricted to these more cheerful places; areas like the barracks, where up to 50 inmates are locked up each night, are off-limits.

E D A M IN AR H I T

Unlike the other initiatives, inmates working in the factory are not only trained, but are also paid a salary for their employment. It’s there that prisoners churn out stationery and desks for government departments, and shoe uppers in a unit run by the jail’s sole private partner. But the prison also sells products to the public under its own brand name, TJ’s, around since 1994. Tihar Jail’s brand of inmate-made products has grown to now include offerings ranging from textiles, to baked products and spices, to furniture, which Ranveer built in his time there. In recent years, the authorities have sought to expand the reach of TJ’s. Behind this brand is an ambitious undertaking to combine the ideals of prisoner rehabilitation with the difficult task of running a financially viable business.

After walking through an ornamental bonsai garden, the entrances to various units of the factory are identified by large, blue, industrial signage. Of the 1 000 odd male convicts comprising jail number two, about 700 are employed here, on the factory floor as well as in supervisory and administrative roles.

Jobs are allocated according to relevant experience and educational level. The majority of Tihar’s inmates haven’t completed tenth standard, while about five percent are university graduates.

In one unit is the shoe-upper factory where Rupesh, 36, is responsible for supervising 70 inmates on the factory floor. Before his conviction, Rupesh was an army contractor. Brought forward by Bhardwaj, he wears the standard white prison uniform and carries a clipboard under one arm.

When asked about the factory work, Rupesh answers impassively, “[It’s] very helpful, it keeps people busy and learning.” But eight years into a life sentence for murder – which in India means serving at least 14 years – Rupesh

54 says he still intends to return to his previous employment upon release, if he can.

paid. It was less exhausting and he figured if he had to come to terms with being in prison, he could at least do work he wanted to do.

According to the jail authorities, recently revised Ranveer, however, believes there is value in wages mean someone skilled like Rupesh can the factory work for inmates who don’t have earn Rs 99 per day, while unskilled workL D vocational skills before entering prison, ers are paid Rs 70. Earnings are spent on I JA U N W or are serving very long sentences. He daily supplies inside the prison (hair E S O O TH , A R D N N IT L , believes their threshold of interest oil and combs are apparently popular T Y U N B U O R 1 A I X H OO in factory work is greater than their purchases), sent to family members S Y 6 CT 19 NG SC GL G willingness to give up as they can outside, or saved up in preparation A F C E I S I NG I N I N R develop a craft so that they have for release. Twenty-five percent of N R K I AS IV A I S P A RE R IH something to survive with once they each prisoner’s earnings are deductB M D T N C CO D A I N E A H E T I O leave jail. ed for a victim support fund which, S A N H A OM F T ITA according to officials, the prison O IL C “There’s a lot to learn,” says .

B E RC E A B ORY management distributes to victims as Ranveer. “[A prisoner] knows that F O R E H ST it sees fit. he’s not going to starve. He can actually come out of jail and [do] something When Ranveer joined the factory productive.” earning money was a motivation, but the Rs 1 000 he says he earned each month for the tirIt’s this hope that prisoners are equipped with ing work was a disheartening drop from the Rs 10 000 employable skills upon release that is cited as one of the he earned outside. What he received mostly went to his central goals of the TJ’s initiative on its website. Moving mother, whom he supported before going to jail. After through the different units, TJ’s signage is scattered nearly two months of working on the desk assembly line, throughout, but it’s once inside the bakery unit that the he returned to doing electrical work for which he was not TJ’s brand becomes most apparent. Inside, steps have

INSIDE the weaving unit of the factory where TJ’s textiles are produced.

AN INMATE employed in the weaving unit.

55 bers of his administrative team. Part of his portfolio been taken to create a proper, standardised food involves managing TJ’s, which he is seeking to expand. production setup. Here, workers combine their standard issue prison whites with hygiene caps and plastic gloves, “Our ambition is that our [TJ’s] products should be as they hand-pack namkeen, potato chips and available at every shop, at every mall, and that you rusk cakes. Taster portions of various baked can buy [them] from anywhere,” he says. goods sit on neatly laid out trays. CertifiY L Currently, the majority of TJ’s products S I E cates hang on the white walls boasting NG DA T H I are sold through government grocery N various quality standards that the R N T O I DE I L stores, outlets within Delhi’s courts, and A O S E EN N R E R factory has achieved; government one-off exhibitions and melas. Along P S I AI AR LA S mandates on hygiene as well as E L I E (H B S P U T with private partnerships and governA R P P SO N OM PO S E N R S working conditions and hours are E Y I P ment contracts it’s proven to be a small U , C L ) S PR D T ES MB D U adhered to, according to Bhardwaj. but reliable distribution network for AN RE N AS M E VE N The mood is sombre and the prisA CH LY S A TIO the brand, contributing to the factory P .

R I R oners quiet, but a splash of colour is AP PU AM , O R A SE revenue, which according to the annual F DE PA EA brought to the factory floor by the report, is a projected 15 crore for the TO T S I R E R E L P cherry red and sunshine yellow TJ’s current financial year.

OU I N O R F packets piled at the end of the produc“Our capacity is huge because we have tion line, ready to be dispatched to various captive manpower,” says Kumar. There are outlets across the city. almost 2 000 convicts housed in Tihar’s male convict jails, two and five, most of whom are eligible to work in the factory. “All of them want to work, because it keeps In the administrative block of the prison, Director them occupied, otherwise they’re wasting time all day.”

General Neeraj Kumar, a career policeman who stepped into the role of head of Tihar nine months ago, sits in And to create more jobs, the prison will need to sell his expansive office flanked by official flags and memmore TJ’s products. The challenge, Kumar says, lies

THE MEETING room where inmates meet their visitors.

All photographs were taken in Tihar’s jail number two.

THE MUSIC room of jail number two.

56 in securing markets and identifying demand. Which is why he’s recently begun the process of contracting professional distributors in an attempt to get TJ’s products into mainstream retail chains across the National Capital Region.

PRISONER. The sunny packaging, says Kumar, is intentional. And it certainly distances itself from negative prison stereotypes.

packs, for example, feature two, smiling, blonde cartoon faces – one a Manga-style visage, the other reminiscent of a character from the American comic strip Peanuts.

At the bottom of the packets, in black, uppercase letters is printed: HELP IN REHABILITATION OF A

In the past, advertising for TJ’s has been sporadic, and the brand has largely relied on its bright packaging to attract customers. However, Kumar is now working with a top Indian advertising agency on a more consolidated campaign. One of their first efforts was a

A PRISONER stands in the jail courtyard.

INSIDE the library which is managed by an inmate.

Social commentator and branding expert Santosh Desai is of the opinion that the TJ’s brand is falling short by giving “Obviously we cannot run at a loss, N O its rehabilitation ambitions such a it has to be a profit-making activity,” T I J ’ S] E I B B [T back seat to what he describes as its says Kumar.

D M A U R U L RY , R E “generic cheerfulness.” Because TJ’s O O L U T Tihar doesn’t publish figures for V H AL “O H A S S T E products aren’t distinctive from profit and according to the prison’s M N A T T similar products in the market, he I S DUC B L E E R Y C A Law Officer, Sunil Gupta, making a U OM V O A O believes it’s even more important E L profit isn’t the main objective for TJ’s, Y PR A I AT T ] FR ” that their packaging and advertising A V , . but he adds that any profit created by A H OP D T H E M E R E more overtly reference their unique H the bakery cycles back into the NGO S T AN Y [ WH origins within Tihar Jail. running this facility, and all other profit Y U N B A “Not acknowledging that, and not goes to the government treasury. making that an intrinsic reason why people As a brand, TJ’s is perhaps most discernwould respond to a brand like this, I think is ible by its bright, retro “TJ’s” logo and the missing a trick,” he says. colourful packaging of its products. The namkeen

57 recently-released, simply-designed newspaper ad for TJ’s’ Another hurdle is the prejudice towards prisoners range of spices. It depicted spices laid out like prison bars that he frequently encounters. “I tell them these products with text inviting customers to “try our spices” and “help are from Tihar Jail and some people say, ‘Tihar Jail? prison inmates support themselves.” It’s a much No, no, no.’ They don’t know what the prisoners do more explicit reference to Tihar and its in there, or how they make the cookies. ‘[They prison workforce than previous efforts. ask] is it hygienic or not?’ ” he says. “There Y N N G, S are myths about prison and right away But branding is not the only chalU S IN , I E G they say no.” lenge TJ’s faces in trying to compete .

R TH CK A M A A L LY in the open market. One of Kumar’s N N U If the barriers Kukreja describes PA S K TIO TA I E L F recently appointed distributors is are common, then it appears that TJ’s’ Y S N R E S A TE C E S IT I V S K Kukreja, who has been selling business model will need to rely on T N E T I I C GA TJ’s products to retailers in Gur. D N goodwill rather than economics to E N S gaon since September. He believes A N STA M N I SO PE reach the kind of demand that Kumar I D RO P R T Y that the quality of the products is O is hoping for.

F E good but getting people to try them ER ST is proving to be a struggle.

A major barrier for retailers, he says, are the margins that TJ’s products offer, which are less than half those offered by competitor brands. “I have success at maybe five percent of the retailers I visit,” he admits. He’s increasingly speaking to corporates and NGOs, using a corporate social responsibility angle to get distribution inside institutions, rather than relying on private retailers.

As a model for prisoner rehabilitation, through training, employing and hopefully preparing inmates for jobs outside the jail, the TJ’s factory initiative is linked to the belief, widely held by prison administrators and NGOs, that employment after jail can protect against recidivism. As Kumar says, “Without jobs they will go back to crime so the society has to take this call [to employ ex-prisoners].”

THE JAIL’S hair salon where inmates are trained in hairdressing.

THE LEGAL aid centre.

58 A 2009 report published by the Bureau of Police Remonths if not years [for ex-prisoners] to even find their footing,” he says. search and Development, which looked at rehabilitation and reformation of released offenders in India supports Vijay Raghavan, Associate Professor of the Centre for this belief. It referenced a clear link between emCriminology and Justice at the Tata Institute of ployment and reduced recidivism but found Social Sciences, leads projects for undertrials that the vocational programs currently with the Centre. He says that vocational S, available in prisons are not adequately training alone isn’t helpful, citing social R R NE preparing prisoners for employment O discrimination against ex-prisoners as S F T I SONT I H E after release. According to the reU a barrier to gaining employment. “For R T F B P E M OF S O T port’s findings, this is because of the R people who have faced social stigma Y E U M L O A RT E X H A difference in the kind of employand have had a traumatic past, it’s R T P FO E M A P X N U E S ON ment available inside prisons comnot very easy for them to get reabLY LE SS E M . sorbed into the private sector immepared with what’s realistically availN I P O M A L TH S E diately,” he says. able outside, as well what is described CO C I C E L E A as a lack of follow-up services.

SO FA R E For Ranveer this discrimination was experienced first hand during his But for former prisoners, employstruggle to find employment after release. ment is only a part of the complex nexus “People say, ‘he’s been in jail, why are you givof social issues that face them on release. ing him a job?’ It’s like [a] stain on your character,” Rohit Kumar, Project Director of Dehli-based NGO explains Ranveer.

Family Vision, which supports in the social reintegration of ex-prisoners, describes how once someone is “I haven’t even told the people I’m working for now released, after the hiatus from normal society the world that I was in jail,” he says. “Every person goes through a in which they now navigate is simply a different place. dark time in their life and that’s what I feel about what I’ve been through.”

“That transition time is a pretty tough one, it takes

OUTSIDE jail number two.

AN INMATE’S painting; Tihar’s rehabilitation efforts include art therapy.

59 19

Infographic by Reshi Dev and Hemant Sreekumar.

62

Naughty D A doctor sentenced to life for Internet pornography-related crimes has reinvented himself from jail as a prolific writer of pulp fiction.

A little while ago, I was rootling through a pile of books discarded by the literary editor of the magazine where I worked. Amid the dusty necropolis where self-published poetry, obscure sarkari almanacs and desi chick-lit had come to rest, something caught my eye: a cheap paperback entitled Maybach Maiden. Its cover depicted, in deft watercolour strokes, a pink-cheeked sylph wearing a large hat, gold hoop earrings and a pink bustier, her hips frozen mid-sway. Looming above her was a hero with an unruly 1970s Amitabh hairdo, and a rifle resting against his chin, while below her, a swarthy lunkhead glowered, resting a curled fist atop a seemingly copied and pasted yellow Lamborghini Murciélago. I thumbed through some pages. A few lines leapt out: “He patted her inviting glutei…” “Alicia’s brains were as substantial as her tits.” “He was indeed lucky to have found a buxom and dishy babe like her. Her ran his huge paws

over her delicious curves and said, ‘Well honey! Don’t take too long…’ ” I eagerly flipped the book over. Beneath a blurb that described the book as “a riveting adventure drama with a finger chewing climax” was the author’s bio, which read: “Amongst other things, Dr. L. Prakash has been an orthopedic surgeon, a magician, an adventurer, hunter, inventor, scientist, and an industrialist. He is presently serving a life imprisonment in an internet pornography case and scribbles away pages in the Puzhal Prison on the outskirts of Chennai, Tamilnadu, India. He claims to be innocent and […] expects an honorable acquittal from the higher courts […].” The author photo at the corner of the book showed a grinning man with a brushy, black moustache, wavy greying hair, a burgundy shirt, and a polka-dotted blue tie, rakishly askew.

I was intrigued. I’d never seen a pulp novel whose author bio surpassed it in salacious immoderation.

The whole thing sounded like one “buxom and dishy” matryoshka doll; art imitating life within life imitating art.

The doll’s obverse – a racy reality that veered thrillingly close to racy pulp fiction – electrified reporters and shocked Chennai residents in December 2001, when Prakash was arrested, and jailed. Overnight, locals, who’d only known him as a successful knee and hip replacement expert and a gregarious fixture at swanky hotel bars, found him frequenting front-page headlines in the form of a metonym of rapidly deepening notoriety: “the L Prakash case.” The “horrific and gruesome details” of the L Prakash case, the police announced,

63

Prison seems to have only occasioned a change of medium. In the ten years since his arrest, Prakash has written profusely and perennially, knocking out 111 books (“26 million words,” he likes to point out) in various genres, including detective, crime, and legal thrillers, “sensual erotica,” science fiction, (exceedingly) graphic novels, mythological works, and even self-help books. In 2007, G Asokan, a veteran publisher of Tamil pulp, stumbled on his work, found it promising and “something different,” and went on to translate and publish a few. A number of them, including Maybach Maiden, come adorned with deliciously lurid cover art

by Tamil pulp legend Shyam. Since then, Prakash has become renowned – both in prison and outside it – for the pulpiest of his crime novels, particularly those that are considered to reflect his lubricious past.

I

lavender shirt in his office; striking a jaunty pose next to a black jeep, and then seated inside it; spotted in a sailboat, and then in a speedboat; beaming next to a dead boar, holding a rifle aloft, and finally, leaning back with a contented grin, with an idyllic island view in the background. In each, he wears an identical expression of wide-eyed, self-enamoured delight.

That delight might have looked decidedly sinister to those who read all about the doctor’s exploits, particularly in the vernacular press, where he began to resemble a subcontinental Dr No of less grandiose ambitions. They said that he lured young boys and TEXT

SHRUTI RAVINDRAN

Glimpses into Prakash’s lively past lie on a foundered was intrigued. I’d never Tripod site he created in the seen a pulp novel whose author summer of 2000. Though the site mentions his “lovely bio surpassed it in salacious wife Latha” and his “little immoderation. The whole genious (sic) of a 5 year old thing sounded like one “buxom daughter,” it’s mostly dedicated to chronicling his and dishy” matryoshka doll; flashy taste and fast life. art imitating life within life He lists the things he loves: imitating art. “islands, deep sea fishing, jetskiing, speed boating, antiques, cigars, four wheel drives, adventure, photography, computers and lots of reading.” Triple triptychs of yellowing photos show him sporting suspenders and a

Drawings by Dr L Prakash for recent, as yet unpublished work: this page, a panel from his graphic novel, “Never Trust the Mirror”; opposite page, a drawing from his graphic story, “Potential Rapist.”

Dr

came to light when a young man from Pondicherry filed a complaint in a Chennai police station, stating that he’d been shocked to find that porn videos he’d acted in had surfaced online. The doctor, their dissipated auteur, had promised they wouldn’t.

64 girls, including his nurses and the students of an IT education centre he ran, to his beach-house in Kalanchikuppam in the then-undeveloped Ennore peninsula, which, in his website, he refers to as “my private island.” The home-made porn that resulted from these trips was sent in video CDs labelled “surgical procedures” to his brother in the US, who put them on websites – www.tamilsex.com and www.realindianporn.com – both unwisely registered under his brother’s name and home address.

One of Prakash’s lawyers, P D Selvaraj, who’d worked for Prakash for several years, and had thus far dealt with nothing more titillating than tax documents, was taken by surprise when the incident surfaced. He first saw a report about the case, which didn’t mention the name of the accused.

“I said to my friend: ‘See what all doctors are also doing!’ ” he recalls, with a laugh. “The next day Prakash called and said he needed my help. Even after that, the first interview I gave I said he has not gone with girls. Later, when he told me he went to the island and enjoyed with girls, it came as a really big shock to me.”

Just over six years after his arrest, on February 7th, 2008, Prakash was sentenced to life imprisonment and a fine of Rs 1.27 lakh. He was found guilty on five counts: criminal intimidation and kidnapping, “publishing information that is obscene in electronic form” under the Internet Technology Act (relatively new when he was charged under it in 2002), procuring women for prostitution and detaining them, circulating indecent material of women, and being in possession of prohibited firearms. Three members of his staff were sentenced to seven years’ rigorous imprisonment and fined Rs 2 500 each for assisting his crimes: x-ray technician Asir, driver Vijayan, and ward boy Saravanan. In the 300-page judgment, the judge stated that the offences committed by the accused “were not only against individuals but against society.”

Internet pornography was an offence of unimaginably exotic depravity when Prakash was arrested – around the time when cyber-cafés were revealing bewildering new worlds to first-time surfers in India. The attendant scandal and the startling news of his consistent infidelity led to his wife Latha divorcing him during the trial.

She also banned him from seeing their adopted daughter Nethra, now in her final year of high school.

Prakash is approaching his eleventh year of incarceration.

When I meet him in the interview room of Puzhal Prison on the outskirts of Chennai, one bright morning

He

was found guilty on five counts: criminal intimidation and kidnapping, “publishing information that is obscene in electronic form” under the Internet Technology Act (relatively new when he was charged under it in 2002), procuring women for prostitution and detaining them, circulating indecent material of women, and being in possession of prohibited firearms.

in October, he greets me with an undiminished air of self-gratification. On either side of him, leaning into the grill, convicted murderers answer their aged mothers’ enquiries in weak monosyllables, looking like dejected pupils in their white shorts and shirts. Prakash is similarly clad, in shorts and a shirt whose front pocket bristles with pens. He is tall, with silvered hair, and a neatly groomed brushy moustache. Peering out through thin silver-framed glasses, he somehow exudes a louche cool. He’s oddly irrepressible, swaying back from the bars, laughing uproariously every time he says something he finds amusing. His orderly, a wiry young man from

65 “I am a sensuous man,” he begins, his lupine grin widening to reveal several mottled teeth, souvenirs from a sedulous chain-smoking career. “The fact is, I had a lot of girlfriends, and I’ve taken lots of pictures of them. But it’s all been voluntary…” They were, he says, lapsing into classified adverts nomenclature, “slim, model-like,” “classy five-star hotel receptionists,” and “part-time models.” They would come to his remote island home and drink lots of “costly booze.”

“My social life was very fancy,” Prakash says matter-of-factly. “During the week, I worked non-stop doing hip and knee replacements – only failure cases! I handled as many as 250 cases a month! But in my free time, I was a devout student of the art of sensuality.”

At the time the trouble began, he says, he was “successfully juggling three girlfriends.” One of them happened to have another boyfriend, Ganesh, whose complaint landed him in jail.

Prakash, understandably, doesn’t have charitable memories of either of them.

Their common girlfriend was “a borderline nymphomaniac,” he says, and Ganesh, “a puny young fellow who turned out to be a school dropout.”

“He was happy to booze and eat as much chicken as he could,” Prakash continues, “and then he and his girl performed admirably for the camera. He tried to blackmail me later, and when I didn’t fall for it, he went to the cops, who found a bonanza when they raided my house and went through my computer.” He guffaws, and sways back from the bars. “They threatened me, and demanded Rs five lakh. I was not intelligent. I was arrogant and aggressive. I acted tough. Said: ‘Go to hell!’ ” That’s when he claims they foisted additional

charges on him. He insists that there was “no victim as such,” and even suggests in his prison diary, Behind the Bars, that the porn films were initially the “uninhibited nymphet” girlfriend’s idea, after he’d shown her “videos of Afro-American men and Swedish blondes doing impossible things.”

The social “morality issue” at the time of his trial, he believes, made matters worse. “Prostitution is seen as a vocation, and photography as exhibitionism!” says Prakash, with a laugh. “I was punished so harshly when I committed no offence except admiring female beauty and exploring human sexuality.”

“Each

of the thousand prisoners I’ve interacted with has given me a story. I consider them the greatest source of plots, sub-plots and characters for my books. I would certainly not have been able to write 65 crime novels if I wasn’t in prison.”

These continue to be the doctor’s abiding passions, consigned for the moment to print in the 111 books he’s written in jail, first in Chennai Central Jail, and since the past six years, in Puzhal. He emphasises, more than once, that his 9ft-by-12ft enclosure is smaller than the toilet of the master bedroom in his bungalow in west Chennai, but the enforced solitude, strict routine, and lack of distraction has made it serve as a writer’s cabin retreat, helping him read and write at a prodigious pace.

“Besides,” he adds, “each of the thousand prisoners I’ve interacted with has given me a story. I consider them the greatest source of plots, sub-plots and characters for my

Book cover images courtesy of Dr L Prakash and Banana Books; cover art by Shyam.

Madhya Pradesh, stands impassively behind him as Prakash chatters on brightly about his rigorous 50-pagea-day writing schedule, his termite-like edacious reading habit (he devours 500 pages daily), the dates-and-fruit diet that helped him drop 20 kilograms in a year, and the unsavoury incident from ten years ago, which got him here.

66 books. I would certainly not have been able to write 65 crime novels if I wasn’t in prison.”

He certainly wouldn’t have been able to write his prison diary, Behind the Bars, which sold a blockbusting 40 000 copies in Tamil. With its ecstatically bubbly narrative voice, it manages to turn the grim actuality of incarceration into a lively setting for adventures, populated by monkey-faced cats, enormous rats, and characters like Laptop Padmanabhan, Mouse Mahadevan, Wrist-watch Williams, and Herculiyah the bicycle thief, all named after the items they were caught purloining. He’s also occasionally a droll observer. Here he is on prison food: “Parboiled rice cakes, Sambhar to the consistency of Bay of Bengal saline, and chapattis slightly thicker than the morning newspaper is hardly an appetizing combination, but a hungry lion has to survive on green grass if that is all that is available.”

“Many of the inmates here are fans of my work,” Prakash says proudly. He turns to call out to a lean black man who gives him a handshake as he passes by. “Sammy! Come here a moment!”

He lopes up to the grill.

“Tell her what you think of my books,” Prakash says to him.

writhing, “glistening bodies” engaged in an “acrobatic display” on a remote island beach, it likely dwells on his wanton weekends.

“My books don’t sell because they are racy,” Prakash is quick to say. “They sell because they are readable and entertaining.” For all their smuttiness, they’re also – and this is an odd thing to say about a 54-year-old convicted criminal – filled with childlike glee. Prakash’s language is as excitable as that of your average Myspace-dwelling teen, and it is just as littered with exclamation points.

“The sea was too vast to swim!” “He looked dangerous despite his appearance. Like a smiling mamba!” “The

Prakash’s

language is as excitable as that of your average Myspacedwelling teen, and it is just as littered with exclamation points. “The sea was too vast to swim!” “He looked dangerous despite his appearance. Like a smiling mamba!”

He peers at me and asks in a fluty, undulating voice, “Are you one of the characters of Prisoners of Time?”

Prakash roars with laughter and sways back from the grill. “I met her for the first time today, Sammy,” he says.

Sammy looks at me with some disappointment.

“I really want to meet them,” he says, and then excuses himself to meet his sister, who has come from Nigeria to visit him.

“Prisoners of Time is my latest book,” explains Prakash. “It’s 3 000 pages, and Sammy has read it twice already! I know it’s destined to create history.

It’s an adventure-romance, and probably India’s biggest novel.” It is also, he says, an autobiography. Judging from the excerpt on his website, which refers to

giant chap was patting a packet of smack or cocaine and not a pistol or a grenade!”

G Asokan, his publisher, who has been in the Tamil pulp novel business since the 1980s, says that he knew Prakash’s books were potential best sellers despite his own “sumaar” (average) English. “I was initially a little doubtful when I met him first in 2007,” Asokan recalls, “though my friend, a lawyer, had recommended his work.

Within a week, though, I read four or five of his books, and I realised that he wrote well.” Asokan has since published six English books under the Banana Books

67 “He might have a particular kind of image,” observes Asokan, “but if a book is good, people will read it.” And then, sounding like a hard-boiled mystery cover line, he says, “He is intelligent and talented, but his dhairya, his boldness, took him down the wrong path.”

According to Asokan, many of Prakash’s fans are women, mostly from Coimbatore, Erode, Salem and Chennai. “Two or three ladies call regularly to find out when the next one is due,” he says. “One of them, who lives in Anna Nagar, even invited us to her daughter’s wedding!”

One woman, in particular, is the self-professed biggest fan of the doctor’s work – Pramila Ramaswamy, his sister, a gynaecologist in Palakkad, Kerala.

“All his books are fast and breezy,” she says, “His Mahabharata is better than a James Hadley Chase, I must say. I’ve passed it on to some doctor friends, and everyone who has read it has been crazy about it.” Ramaswamy has been an admirer of her brother’s work ever since she was a child, and fondly recalls a science fiction story he read to her when she was eight. “It was just like Endhiran, the recent Rajinikanth hit,” she says. “This girl’s father is a scientist, he makes a robot, who she falls in love with. They elope to another planet, where there’s a fire. The robot, he’s made of a waxy material, you see, he melts. I cried a lot after reading it.”

His work continues to affect her. “Every time he finishes a book,” she says, “every page I read, something happens in my stomach. Why did this happen? When murderers and criminals come out after the trial, why is my brother behind bars?”

Vijayan, Prakash’s driver, from Idukki district in Kerala, agrees – despite complaining bitterly about how his seven-year-long incarceration ruined his marriage prospects. “My boss is a good person, a talented person,” he says, “and it’s a waste for society to lock him away.” Vijayan has been managing the doctor’s affairs since his release in 2008. He visits him twice a week, maintains his bungalow, disburses salaries, gets the doctor’s manuscripts typed up and proofed, and brings him fruit, reading material, and art supplies for his most recent hobby – making papier-mâché masks of chimerical creatures. Like his boss, Vijayan thinks his own

One

woman, in particular, is the self-professed biggest fan of the doctor’s work – Pramila Ramaswamy, his sister, a gynaecologist in Palakkad, Kerala. “All his books are fast and breezy,” she says.

sentence was unjust and harsh. “Sex panniyachu (I had), one-two times,” Vijayan says, grinning widely. “If that is wrong, then all ladies and gents should be in jail!” He adds, warming to his theme, “Everybody who works and eats is doing it. That’s all they do on Sundays.”

Every Sunday, Dr Prakash, for his part, writes, draws and dreams of the life that waits for him outside. “I’ll spend time with my dogs and fish,” he says eagerly, “and I have to find myself a good international agent – two offers have come already for movie scripts. How I long for my release!”

Shruti Ravindran is an assistant editor with Open Magazine.

Book cover images courtesy of Dr L Prakash and Banana Books; Tangled Web cover art by Shyam.

imprint, and translated five of them into Tamil. The English ones have met with little success, but two of the Tamil books have been bestsellers – his prison diary, and Tangled Web, the noir tale of a police officer’s ill-starred date, which left him with a blinding hangover and a hideously disfigured corpse. Priced at a pocket-friendly Rs 20, like most Tamil pulp, it sold about 32 000 copies.

Plate

1

Prison for Hire. Just 25 kilometres from Hyderabad, a jail is up for rent. In Ramoji Film City, the world’s largest film studio, the prison set – which stands right next to the set of a nightclub – can be hired for 1.3 lakh rupees a day. But while the outside reveals the prison’s artificial nature, the inside, despite a few details which cast doubt on its verisimilitude, feels like the one of a real, abandoned jail. There

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Jail Birds For these young, Bangladeshi female inmates, romance is a survival strategy and a distraction from the monotony of jail life.

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RIMPLE M E H T A ILLUSTRATION

RESHI D E V

On a hot summer afternoon in June 2011, I walked into a tin roofed room in a women’s correctional home in Kolkata. Dubbed the “ICDS room,” it was here that in the mornings the government-appointed Integrated Child Development Scheme workers would attend to pregnant and nursing inmates and the kids of female prisoners.

When they’d left for the day, I’d come here to interview, for my PhD research, Bangladeshi female inmates who had been jailed for illegal immigration into India. Sometimes, we’d sit in the corner of the room if there was a dance class or another activity in session. The room was

an otherwise bare space, with an idol of Saraswati at the far end, a table and bench, two chairs, and paintings by prisoners tacked up on the walls. I’d been meeting with my research participants almost every second day since last December and today, the five I’d come to meet were excited because a fellow inmate had given birth to a baby girl.

I caught up with the girls, and after a while they started to trickle out of the room. Hasina* and Saleha stayed back. Saleha, 24, a widow and an undertrial prisoner, was normally reserved, but today she was eager to

79 talk about something that had happened at the court a week back.

“There are these two boys who always look at me when I am at the court,” she began. “They have the same court dates as mine and so we always meet in the lockup.

They keep trying to get my attention but I do not care as I am not interested in these things.”

These girls would often narrate stories about how male and female prisoners would flirt during their visits to the court. It was usually nothing more than an exchange of stares and smiles, but this time, the man who liked Saleha had turned violent.

“The boy started hitting his head against the wall in the lockup and started bleeding profusely. The guards took him to a hospital,” she said. When he returned with his head bandaged he was given some biscuits, which he silently placed on her lap before walking away. His friend asked her if she knew why he’d banged his head. She didn’t. “[His friend] told me that he had done it for me, to show how much he loved me.”

“I told him that this was stupid of him to do so,” she said. The incident had left her mystified. Now she wanted to know if she did the right thing, or if she should reciprocate this affection.

notice how meaningful the theme of love was. I went back to their stories and realised what I had been ignoring.

Over the past year, I have spoken to many Bangladeshi women. Most of them had been married off young and had been deserted by their husbands, or had left their families, some planning to return to them after a time.

They’d come to India seeking a better life. Many had planned to pick up work as domestic help. To cross the border into India, they had to pay 3 000 taka (about Rs 1 900) to a dalal, an agent. Many were unaware of the illegality of coming to India this way and, in most cases, the dalal was part of a larger network of traffickers that would sell the women to brothels; it was only once on Indian soil that the women would come to realise this.

As prisoners in a foreign country, the

love they spoke of, and the romantic relationships they’d formed within the prison walls, seemed to be a way of coping with their imprisonment

I told her that these dalliances would end “because all you girls go back to Bangladesh.”

Hasina, who had been sitting there quietly, now spoke up. “Do you [really] think love stories in prison end in prison?”

At the start of my research, I was sceptical about this inkling. I was looking at the interaction these young Bangladeshi women, jailed under the Foreigner’s Act 1946, had with the legal justice system in India, their personal stories, how they crossed the Bangladesh-India border and their experiences in correctional homes.

But it wasn’t long before I realised that this was not the pattern in which they wanted to talk about their lives.

Prem, or love, was a recurrent theme. As prisoners in a foreign country, the love they spoke of, and the romantic relationships they’d formed within the prison walls, seemed to be a way of coping with their imprisonment, an expression of their emotional needs and a desire to imitate relationships of love they had left behind. It wasn’t until Hasina chided me for being insensitive that I started to

This is what happened to Hasina. Just over two years ago, Hasina had walked out of an unhappy arranged marriage.

An acquaintance offered her work procuring fabric in India and ferrying it back across the border into Bangladesh. So she came to India, but when she arrived she discovered that she’d been “fooled,” and sold to a brothel in Kolkata where she was forced to work. A month and a half later, Hasina was arrested from the brothel and taken to a correctional home, as jails are called in West Bengal.

She was 21 at the time.

Initially, she struggled with being in jail. But over time she has come to grips with her situation and has exerted a strong sense of agency. She gets along with the prison staff and is respected by fellow inmates. She’s found small ways to keep herself going. She likes to dress properly in jail and always wears a salwar kameez, a matching duppatta and the occasional bindi; her counterparts would hoard what clothes they had for court appearances or for when

80 they were released. During our sessions in the ICDS room, Hasina would try to ignore her past, and her conversation would be peppered with excited talk of male prisoners; she’d often joke about her many “lovers.”

To

start with, these women were at a prison with both male and female wards.

Here, the selection of “lovers” started as a silent one – no words, just looks, winks and smiles.

Of the 40 odd inmates I have interacted with, it was a handful, Hasina included, with whom I’d developed a level of trust, that would mainly prattle about love. Mostly, between us, it was a conversation starter, especially when they wanted to know more about me. During one discussion between four girls and a female prison warder, the warder said she failed to understand how they could think about love whilst in prison.

Hasina explained that romantic involvements were a source of distraction, sometimes of comfort, to help get them through their time in a place she called “suffocating.”

“There needs to be as much laughter as there is pain,” she said. “If we do not have some entertainment then we will be completely destroyed.”

Another time, Moumita, 19, described how her relationship was a source of frisson, in a place where day to day life was mundane. She, a Hindu, liked Babai, a Muslim convict whom she’d met at the court; their hearing dates would often coincide. He’d offer her food, and although she’d decline as her family would be furious if they learnt she “ate meat offered by a Muslim,” she’d speak of their interactions with excitement.

To start with, these women were at a prison with both male and female wards. Here, the selection of “lovers” started as a silent one – no words, just looks, winks and smiles. Every morning, male prisoners would be sent to clean the garden; a scratchy patch of grass with a jack-

fruit tree, a henna plant, a seesaw and a broken swing repurposed as a clothesline. The women would anticipate the mornings. Some of the women’s cells looked out onto the garden, and this is how they’d exchange glances with men and claim to fall in love. If a man liked someone, he’d send “word” through a male prisoner assigned to clean the female barracks or deliver food there, or even through a guard he was friendly with. He’d send a letter this way, or if he cleaned the garden, he’d leave it there for the woman to collect once the men had completed their chores and the girls were allowed to go into the yard.

The women would send their replies through the same network. On days when they had visitors, they would utilise their walk to the “interview room,” to speak to male prisoners who were on duty or hanging about. Occasionally, male and female prisoners would mingle when the jail celebrated a festival or when there was a sports event.

Some of these men and women had never spoken, but each girl was defensive of her love story, and would get upset if someone belittled it.

The girls would communicate with male prisoners surreptitiously, though the prison staff seemed to be aware of what was going on. They’d destroy their letters periodically, tearing them up and throwing them away, out of fear of being caught with them when the staff carried out random searches in the ward. Sometimes, said Hasina, women found with letters would be questioned by the staff, which was “embarrassing,” because the male prisoner would in turn be questioned.

One medical officer I interviewed had observed how the women found ways to interact with male prisoners.

“What do you expect if you put 20 to 22 year old girls in the prison?” he asked. “The men are often found on top of buildings, trying to peep into the female ward,” he said. “The women sometimes make excuses about body ache[s] or some other illness to visit the hospital. Here they know they can see many men.”

It was in this jail that Hasina met “M,” a convict serving a life sentence for murder, who was assigned to clerical work during his term. She never revealed his name, but she has his initial crudely tattooed with hers, “H+M,” on her forearm. Because of his administrative role, M knew when she was slotted in to visit the interview room. Her only visitor was a friend she’d made at the brothel who would visit with her husband. M would meet Hasina outside this room. After court visits, she’d be able to talk

81 to him on the way back to the women’s ward. She said she would speak with him in front of the prison staff. “I never did anything on the sly,” she said.

In June, the female inmates from Bangladesh were all moved to a women’s jail, and Hasina hasn’t seen or heard from M since.

But for other women under trial, the mandated, fortnightly court appearances has allowed them to keep meeting men. Often, the court lockup room was a dilapidated space with a cell to hold the men, and a small space outside where the women sat on chairs or benches.

Usually the seats were arranged in a way that the men couldn’t see the women, but the women would get up to walk past the cell and take a peek. On these days, the men would bring gifts – snacks, fruit and money – that they’d procured with the help of relatives or friends.

“The men are often found on top of buildings, trying to peep into the female ward,” he said. “The women sometimes make excuses about body ache[s] or some other illness to visit the hospital [...]”

The welfare officer stationed at the women’s jail, who was both a counsellor and a mediator for the inmates, had seen a different side of relationships in prison. Between the women, she’d seen that friendships were transient and volatile; strong friendships were forged as easily as they were broken. But she acknowledged that same-sex relationships, either platonic or sexual, could actually help the prison staff administratively; prisoners tended to be more difficult when they were frustrated by their incarceration, but these relationships, she said, alleviated this emotional strain.

Many of these same-sex relationships were born of women having been deserted by their husbands. These women would call their partner their “best friend,” and say they could spend their life with them and did not

need a man thereafter. It was not uncommon for these couples to tattoo one another’s initials on their hands.

They’d do this with a needle, and a mixture of henna, milk and ink. The pain was akin to that of a “mosquito bite,” I was told.

For these female prisoners, the claims of “love” varied, and most knew that these involvements were temporary and would not continue, nor was it relevant that they did, once they had been released from jail. But they chose to put their energy into these different forms of companionship as a way of emotionally coping with their imprisonment.

Hasina, however, recalls the case of one Bangladeshi woman who was something of an exception to this. The woman had met a Hindu man serving a life sentence at the same jail. “[For] Hindus, you know that if a man puts a sindoor (vermillion powder) on a woman’s forehead they are considered married,” she said. “One day when this man met this woman outside the interview room he put sindoor on her forehead.” When the woman was released, said Hasina, she was sent back to Bangladesh but then she returned to India. “She now stays with his family in Kolkata and he is in prison. From what I heard she used to visit him in prison regularly.”

But for the most part, those who had finished their prison sentence wanted to leave India as soon as they could. The repatriation process, which is undertaken for Bangladeshi convicts who have finished their sentences, is a sluggish one, and the longer this stretched on, the more they’d grow anxious thinking about what they’d find at home; had their husbands remarried, would their families take them back into their lives.

When I saw Hasina recently in November, she was frustrated and angry about her delayed repatriation; she’d been waiting since her sentence ended in June. I asked her about M and if she wanted to see him again. She’s sceptical. “Maybe if I come back I will get to see him,” she said. But he’s far from her mind. She has not had any contact with her family since she left Bangladesh, and she never told them she had planned to come to India.

All she thinks about is home – her siblings, her parents – and worries about the uncertainty of whether they’ll accept her back.

“Right now I just worry about going back,” said Hasina.

“I want to get out of prison.” *At the request of the author, all names have been changed.

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DEAD MEN WALKING A FACE OF THE TOWNSHIP OF GREATER NOIDA IS REVEALED AS A DYSTOPIAN, INDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPE WHERE WORKERS AND INDUSTRIALISTS ARE TRAPPED IN MORE WAYS THAN ONE.

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SUNALINI K U M A R IMAGES

The district and sessions court of Greater Noida.

NISHANT S H U K L A

83 On a muggy September day three years ago a man was murdered inside a factory in the semi-industrial township of Greater Noida. Greater Noida is on the outskirts of Noida – itself a city on the outskirts of the national capital, Delhi. The fact that the victim was no “ordinary” employee but the CEO of the company, combined with the fact that the perpetrators appeared to be workers in the same company, lent a very particular tinge to the public shock over the incident – from the detailed manner in which the death was covered by the media to a rising chorus of demands by prominent business and political leaders for greater security cover in industrial areas. In the three years following the incident, about seventy charge sheets have been filed in the case, most of them against a section of workers from the factory on strike for some months prior to the murder.

A broad range of criminal acts have also been used or considered for use by prosecution in the case; and workers are anxious that these may include not simply Section 302 – punishment for murder – but also the marvellously colloquially named “Goonda Act.” As a researcher working on Indian labour, I know the balance of power between labour on the one hand and management and local administration on the other hand has tilted invariably in favour of the latter since colonial times. The question that interests me in this case therefore is of what chance the accused have of receiving what we may call a fair trial. Even as critical lines of investigation – including statements by the victim’s wife to media persons – suggest that the workers may have been innocent, the latter’s guilt has assumed a life of its own, slowly tightening its deathgrip around the narrative of the event.

This is what brings me to Greater Noida today, a wet winter morning. I have come to see for myself how the case is proceeding in an actual court of law, away from the “trial by media” that pronounced the workers guilty almost immediately after news of the murder broke. That the court is located in Greater Noida strikes me as no mean fact. Greater Noida is a peculiar urban creature in a sense – carved rather suddenly out of vast tracts of farmland adjoining Delhi and Noida, the township is not quite provincial, but it could scarcely be called metropolitan either.

While aggressive local realtors and administration have promoted Greater Noida as a “self-contained township”; a “city of the future” and as a viable alternative to living in Delhi or Noida with their prohibitive property values, in reality, a sizeable chunk of the new residential and

commercial development has remained unoccupied in the new city. Industrial pockets in Greater Noida have been somewhat more successful in terms of occupancy, but as the incident we are speaking of demonstrates, the new industrial satellites of Delhi have remained vulnerable to labour unrest and to serious infrastructural constraints since their inception.

In a sense, the problem may lie in the fact that Greater Noida’s fate as a settlement is almost entirely not of its own making, dependent rather on the fantastical conditions under which its older twin Noida was born.

While plans for creating a ring of satellite towns around the national capital had been around for a while, it was in 1976, during the national Emergency, that the city of Noida was suddenly announced. Noida was to be a model township, its space carefully zoned into industrial, commercial and residential “sectors” – a self-contained alternative to the ever-expanding capital. It was thus to serve as a “counter-magnet,” especially for the industrial activity so loathed by Delhi’s elite. The new township’s rapid popularity lay ironically, however, in an entirely Delhi-centred fact: its ability to meet the chronic housing shortage within the capital. While industrial activity flourished in Noida, it was the retired bureaucrats and the professional middle classes flocking to Noida’s leafy residential sectors, taking with them good schools and hospitals, that truly sealed Noida’s success.

And what is a successful city if it cannot beget its own satellite? Soon enough, Noida needed a “countermagnet” too and in the 1990s was born the satellite of the satellite – Greater Noida. Greater Noida was like a Noida ++, magnifying every promise and every pitfall of the older suburb – a strict separation of industrial and residential zones, even wider roads, parks and “green belts,” but an ever-increasing fear of crime and chaos generated by the sudden, telescoped urbanisation – pushed through with mostly coercive land acquisition and well before adequate infrastructure could be put into place. To make matters worse, Greater Noida’s industries have often simulated conditions peculiar to Special Export Zones (SEZs), wherein management is given a wide license with labour laws to promote rapid economic growth. Today, Greater Noida is a city of high walls and armed gates: policemen patrol wide empty roads; vast lots lie vacant between high-walled factories where workers enter and leave under the glare of watchtowers; residents

84 TODAY, GREATER NOIDA IS A CITY OF HIGH WALLS AND ARMED GATES: POLICEMEN PATROL WIDE EMPTY ROADS; VAST LOTS LIE VACANT BETWEEN HIGH-WALLED FACTORIES WHERE WORKERS ENTER AND LEAVE UNDER THE GLARE OF WATCH TOWERS

of apartment complexes willingly submit the nervous remains of their privacy to CCTV cameras; and when an incident such as the one we are speaking of occurs, district administration appeals to industrialists to apply for gun licenses in bulk.

In the midst of this sub-suburban dystopia is located our murder and murder trial. To be precise, in the district and sessions court of Greater Noida, where I am headed this rainy morning. When I finally reach the court complex, I drive past it, missing it entirely. A small blue sign brings me back to the place, and I see why. Those who have known that unique time-space of a north/west Delhi childhood would know what I mean when I say it resembled, more than anything else, a “DDA shopping centre” – an unremarkable two-storeyed cellular structure, its original colour lost in a uniformly filthy grey. Inside the main building, a pitch darkness on this rainy morning and the ubiquitous smell of urine. As I slowly acclimatise to the darkness and the anxiety that rises in waves from the warm bodies lining the corridors, I stumble upon the courtrooms – medium sized rooms, the size of a college lecture hall perhaps, rather low ceilinged, but brightly tubelit and following a clear spatial order. A desk lies near the door where a court clerk takes signatures from the accused to prove they were at their own hearings, and are thus not “in contempt,” a bench on which police officers and lawyers sit cheerfully exchanging greetings, a prefabricated fibreglass cubicle in a corner not unlike those found in offices, but without any furniture inside – I realise this is the defendant’s/witness’ stand – and on the wall furthest from the door, another prefab partition that divides a fifth of the room from the rest. Behind this

partition three people sit, the ones on the left and right – court clerks – facing the one in the centre – I realise this must be the judge.

All morning, I have fought the feeling of something being amiss. Fed on dramatic, spectacular courtroom climaxes from Hindi movies, I find the scene hard to digest; this utterly quotidian, distressingly bureaucratic process of law, enacted in a tubelit college classroom on a rainy morning inside a DDA shopping centre in an unnamed sector of a city that appears like it’s still on the drawing board of a maniacal town planner. Who can stay real in a place like this? Even the accused workers from the case, just arrived for the hearing, behave like they are in rehearsals for a play that is still being written. They shake hands warmly, ask after each other’s children and exchange bits of sundry news. Except that these impoverished working class migrants to the national capital are here this morning to defend themselves against charges of cold blooded murder. Of a CEO, no less. Given that this is what the workers’ defence lawyer refers to as a “high-profile case,” the prosecution may well ask for a life term in the case of a clear conviction. It’s all brought back to us when standing with our backs pressed against the walls of the narrow corridor, suppressing a giggle at the girly voice of the court clerk, two small-built men are led by policemen past us into the courtroom. The men are prisoners, one can tell by the bodily modes of attachment; treated not simply to the lover’s grip of the police constable – interlaced fingers – they are also tied to each other by a thick rope. The two are colleagues of the workers, perhaps the most sharif – decent – in the entire list of accused

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THE MEN ARE PRISONERS, ONE CAN TELL BY THE BODILY MODES OF ATTACHMENT; TREATED NOT SIMPLY TO THE LOVER’S GRIP OF THE POLICE CONSTABLE – INTERLACED FINGERS – THEY ARE ALSO TIED TO EACH OTHER

BY A THICK ROPE.

their bodies convey their pain – a humiliation so severe that their co-accused grow silent, look away when they shuffle past.

It begins to dawn on me as I leave the courthouse that despite the case being tried in a “fast-track” court, it has dragged for three years. Perhaps this is the real verdict or sentence in the case, one that the workers are already serving. Consigned to defend themselves in different courts on different dates, their meagre life savings spent on lawyers, rent and travelling to hearings, the best (and somewhat unlikely) outcome the workers can hope for is an acquittal in a few years. They are convinced however, that they will be unemployable even if such an acquittal occurs. With the permanent glut of labour in the Indian manufacturing sector, no company will probably exercise the option of hiring men with a tainted reputation.

I can’t help but feel that this case has become entwined with the fate of the industrial township; the city needs to succeed, its industrialists need to feel safe, and whether that was anybody’s intention or not, seventy-odd arrested workers seem to have achieved that. A city often imprisons its workers, holding them for their adult lives within the space of the factory or the slum. Eventually, perhaps, they will be unable to tell those spaces from those of a real prison.

This page and facing page: images of Greater Noida’s landscape.

according to the workers who I have been conversing with for a few months now. These two have, however, been named by prosecution witnesses as key agents of the violence that tragically claimed the life of the CEO. Arrested again and again since the incident, under different laws and different jurisdictions, the two workers have also been unable to secure a decent lawyer for the price they could afford. As a result, these two men have spent the bulk of the past two and a half years in jail. Incarceration.

Prison. An unambivalent status, even though the guilt of these gentle-looking ex-workers, who in a play would be cast as school teachers or wandering mendicants, is as slippery in the multiple narratives I have heard and read of the murder as that of any of the other accused. Having finally relinquished all the trappings of free men, habituated to the gait imposed by the rope, the workers allow themselves to be led silently by their captors, betraying no expression when asked by the judge to look up. Only

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DO NOT TEASE THE ANIMALS

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A visual tour of Delhi National Zoolog ical Park, where about 1 500 birds and animals are contained, for a captive audience.

Photog raphs by Bharat Sikka, 2011.

88 MALLED IN Deciphering the modern Indian mall and how it ensnares us. By Aditi Saxton

Recently, at the local mall, I stepped into this British dreamland called Lush. Less store, more story, Lush is a dark den jewelled with fresh handmade cosmetics. Would I like a slice of the Mandarin Tea Party bath soap with preserved citrus slices and crystallised ginger? Yes please.

Perhaps some Ring of Roses butter cream with larkspur, honeysuckle, marigold and cornflowers? Don’t mind if I do. Once at the mall, whether I was running late for an early movie or making a pit stop to restock groceries, I’d find myself entranced at the entrance.

Was this magic? Or was it the invisible hand of the “invariant right,” that habitual turn everyone takes when they step off an escalator? The modern mall, a few hundred thousand square feet of retail space, is designed to crowd shoppers into programmed patterns of behaviour. Regulars at any mall have an eureka moment, when after the first few visits they believe they’ve figured out the trick.

The revelation comes as a set of interconnected rules and variables; if I park on this level, go in through that sliding side door, start with those stores, cut across these corridors, I can be in and out in a matter of minutes.

The illusion of potential efficiency is one of many that malls maintain; it’s integral to that larger fantasy of free will in consumerist confines.

Once penned in, whether you’re being served or serving a mandatory mall sentence is up for interpretation.

Though it is another pen and a different sort of sentence, also British, which draws me now into Lush. My consumer fantasies began with feasts. Scones and shortbread, treacle tarts for tea, picnics with sardines and strawberries and freshly-picked plums, ginger beer and lemonade fizz, and other Blytonian banquets. Pre-lib India’s clamp down on imported goods left lots of room for imagined goodies.

Slotted against dull dal, potted meat and clotted cream

seemed inscrutably delicious. I didn’t even know that my daydreams were boxed in by the canned stuff of post-World War British rationing.

In 1991, the bars on the economy lifted and in the aftermath the lack I’d grown up with grew lacklustre.

Nimbu pani soda and lemonade fizz which had till then been contained in separate holding cells rushed to merge and both liquids lost their fluidity. Nothing shutters an imagination as effectively as reality.

As the millennium turned, I found out (there was just one of me, not Five Find-Outers to make this dismaying discovery) that tinned tongue actually was, well, tongue. Once I’d tasted its dubious delights, that decisively closed the chapter on my fabulous feasts of fantasy.

Lush presented a portal to the past, that part was easy to deduce. But I couldn’t quite figure out how I kept showing up very, very late to the tea party of my childhood, when jams and jellies no longer held the fascination they once had.

I worried at the problem like Blyton’s characters worried at loose teeth. Had I been determined by the Gruen effect?

Named for Victor Gruen, the modern maker of malls, his planning precept states that an undefined desire can be diffused over a lot of things. It’s the “if you like x, you’ll love y” sales pitch writ large. When I’m feeling a tad nostalgic for Blyton, I can probably be persuaded to purchase a fruit-cake soap, a bicycle, some invisible ink

Because now I had morphed into a pinball being paddled from cookie kiosk to sushi stand to sunglasses stall until I finally got swotted in to a map which omnisciently knew I was here and told me so.

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and a dog. Lush maybe was Blyton configured for consumers, with the mall as its milieu. Was I being trapped again in a fantasy not of my own making? Could I escape?

The idea of creating agency in a space designed to dictate your desires was an adventure worthy of Julian, Dick, Anne, George and Timmy the dog. To begin my quest, I circled the perimeter and chose a different entry point to the mall. Skipping the escalator, I took the elevator and was confronted with a blank area. This is mall architecture 101, prospectives need a blank perspective, a prep step to gear for the immersive retail assault to come.

Determined to thwart the invariant right that would inevitably propel me to Lush, I came up against a one-way right-turning passage. Textbook, if not storybook. To deal with my initial setback, I merged left and then the plot thickened. I entered a large central atrium ricocheting noise meant to send me scurrying for the relative quiet of the cellular stores. In my role as amateur detective, I’ve cracked a secret code. The tap of shoes on a passage can tell me all about a given mall. A hollow knock reveals an identity crisis, an emptiness at the core that forces shoppers to take refuge in stores. A solid sound shows confidence in the mall’s selfhood, a stated assurance that its offerings are irresistible. Malls in India tend to go for the hollow echo.

Ever since they did away with the headless mannequins that were a prominent feature of my night terrors, storefronts have gotten more inviting. Much as I was inclined to prowl like my adventurous, famous, fictional counterparts, a well-lit arcade is really more of an avenue for promenade. I couldn’t recast my solitude as strength and felt bored and compelled to browse. That’s scripted disorientation, said my brain ticking with the precision of

Frederick Algernon Trotteville’s, without clocks or visual cues to the outside, time becomes relative. Also, the bigger the mall the smaller you feel. Right on cue, paraphernalia rushed at me to give shape to the amorphous blob of need I was becoming.

If you’ve read your Blyton, you know perseverance pays and I sidestepped the shops to forge ahead, only to find that while I was using logic, the mall was deploying dark magic. Because now I had morphed into a pinball being paddled from cookie kiosk to sushi stand to sunglasses stall until I finally got swotted into a map which omnisciently knew I was here and told me so. Impressed with its powers of prediction, I decided to follow its direction to the exit. Two rights off a corridor, a slow shuffle (so the heel-toe tap-tapping couldn’t clap me in the mall trap) through the halls, a sharp left to take an escalator down, and I slid right back into the little wormhole that was Lush. Let’s skip to the last page where I find myself celebrating my lesson learned; don’t mess with the grand Gruen design.

In all our cultural skirmishes with the West has anything adapted more variously, more hilariously, than the way we shop? We’ve held on to the fabric of national costumes, lent Hermés the sari to redress. The dominion of desi food is absolute and only encroached by roaches at the margins. We’ve rebranded our cities with de-anglicised names. How we brand ourselves, the way we buy, has become mired in a hall-of-mirrors where at first glance things look like they are supposed to, but distort at different viewing angles. The mall in India stays internally true to the prototypes of its Western predecessors.

Contextually, it’s a whole other story.

Which is why I still recall with dazzling clarity that first awesome glimpse from a decade ago of a suburban Indian

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shopping avenue on a hazy winter’s night. The neon of the mall lights was so bright it parted the sea of fog that a million car headlights had tried and failed to fathom. Like a fleck of spit that morphs into a perfect prismatic diamanté on a backlit screen, I stared at it mesmerised for a while and then wanted to use my sleeve to wipe it off.

The scale defied all sense. I understood a mall, a single one, a cluster of stores where a big anchor tenant with commercial clout attracts traffic and then disperses it through other retailers. I get the principles of indirect commodification and adjacent attraction, schmancy ways to say if you dump some dried petals in a tupennyhalfpenny bowl and put it next to a Victorian chandelier and a Persian rug you can sell it as calla lily of the valley potpourri. Stuff can be transformed by context. Without a Blyton backdrop, I wouldn’t get all in a lather over Lush.

Put that soap on a rope in a shower at the slammer and it takes on a whole other meaning.

What though, could be the purpose of three or eight or eleven malls in a row, often tunnelling into each other?

They not only sprouted overnight but then started spawning like zombies in a horror flick. The answer perhaps lies in a desi definition; as a descendant of not the department store but the bazaar, the clusters hint at the genetic imprint of markets massed together in guild fashion to offer an assortment of barely distinguishable goods. It happens only in India.

Back when reading Blyton wasn’t a nostalgic exercise, I would have been thrilled if presented with the spectacle

What though, could be the purpose of three or eight or eleven malls in a row, often tunnelling into each other? They not only sprouted overnight but then started spawning like zombies in a horror flick.

of a mall. Let’s hop quickly past the Atlantic and to the wonder years when cable was solidly on the table.

The mall was after all the whole mise-en-scène for the madness of this line from Mallrats, “Listen, not a year goes by, not a year, that I don’t hear about some escalator accident involving some bastard kid which could have easily been avoided had some parent – I don’t care which one – but some parent conditioned him to fear and respect that escalator.” It was the iconic site for Joey Tribbiani’s perfume sling-off with all its attendant awfulness of being a grown-up, even one with stunted maturity, stuck working at a mall. American malls in the 1980s thronged with sexual promise and obscure video game references and in those bizarre bazaars, shopping seemed secondary. They were everything I’d never known and Blyton hadn’t helped me imagine.

I missed out on being a teenager at an Indian mall, just like Indian teenagers at the mall may have missed out on Blyton. The great indoors of elsewhere malls have now become shorthand for sterility, an accusation not easily levelled at India on any level. Ours are now home to squalling infants in movie theatres, brides with traditional bangles that jangle as they snap their spaghetti straps, families of six with six shopping bags apiece.

To sell something as simultaneously sexy and family friendly is as neat a conciliation as a combover. By the time the mall marched across India, my teenage trysts with destiny had already been gutted by a glut of goods.

My initiation into conscious consumerhood came instead via the neighbourhood kirana. In a placement policy that Lush has since adopted, pretty pink plastic containers of fruit-flavoured yogurt glittered next to grain in gunnysacks and dusty stacks of double-lined copy books.

I spent seven cycles of pocket money on that slightly sickly sweet treat before I could acknowledge I didn’t really like it. Malls put me back a fair bit more to reach the same conclusion.

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ALETTA A N D R É IMAGES

SONU MADHAVAN

FOR THE INMATES OF A PRISON IN SANGANER, RAJASTHAN, PAYING BILLS AND LIVING WITH THEIR FAMILY MEMBERS IS AN EVERYDAY REALITY IN THIS UNCONVENTIONAL INSTITUTION. Forty-five-year-old Urmila Jain has precisely 11 and a half hours of freedom each day. This is until every evening at 6.30 pm, when she has to report at the entrance of her community along with 143 of her neighbours. Once they are inside, the curfew starts and the gate is closed, only to re-open at 6am the next morning. During the dark hours, Jain and her neighbours are reminded of who they are: convicts, serving time in prison.

A shy, soft-spoken woman, with a tall, strongly built frame, Jain was convicted of murder in 1994. After serving seven years in a regular prison, she was sent to Sanganer’s Sri Sampurnanand open prison camp, Rajasthan, where inmates are trusted to come and go outside of curfew hours.

For Jain, it’s the little, daily differences that make this a meaningful change from her previous confinement in a women’s jail. “There, the discipline was strict. We had to wear uniforms and eat and work at set hours,” Jain recalls. “Here, my time is my own. I can dress how I like, sleep when I want, cook what and when I want, watch television whenever.”

“It only feels like a prison for one percent of the time.

When there is a family wedding or a holiday, I cannot go.”

Only the most well-behaved prisoners stand a chance of being sent to this khula bandi, open jail;

it’s good behaviour inside a regular prison which can earn an inmate a place in this more lenient institution. Only five guards keep vigil and do the twice-daily headcount.

Outside curfew hours, inmates are allowed to roam freely as long as they stay within a six kilometre radius of the gate.

The concept of open prisons came about in the 1960s as the Indian prison system underwent a transformation to develop jails as reformation centres, on the heels of UN-backed recommendations for changes to the country’s correctional system. Rajasthan’s prison reformers took the advised changes a step further, finding inspiration from countries in northern Europe.

There, open prisons had been functioning as a first step towards social re-integration for convicts in the last phase of their sentence. Sir Alexander Paterson, a British prison reformer who established the first open prison camp in the UK in the 1930s, said of the idea: “You cannot train a man for freedom under conditions of captivity.”

The Sanganer facility, which opened as Rajasthan’s first open prison camp in 1963, was modelled on the closest thing to what the largely rural population of prisoners would call home: a village. Though other states have introduced open jails – there are 32 of them in the country – in Rajasthan the concept has gained

93 momentum in the last couple of years, with the addition of ten more camps, bringing the state’s total up to 23.

This was after the Rajasthan High Court deemed that the system should be present in each of the state’s 33 districts. The unique Rajasthani model allows convicts to live with their spouses, children and other family members, and head into town every day to earn a living; in open jails elsewhere in India, they would normally practice agriculture within the jail compound. This concept has found success. According to a retired jail official, R K Saxena, who was a key figure in bringing about the reforms that led to the adoption of this system in Rajasthan, the rate of recidivism amongst former open prison inmates in the state is close to zero. The concept’s proponents see it as a way to help alleviate the crowding issues of overburdened regular jails, and also to allow inmates a gradual immersion back into society. In Sanganer, inmates live together peacefully, interact with the local town’s residents and have the responsibility of their own welfare.

Arriving in the town of Sanganer, via the bumpy stretch of road from the state capital of Jaipur, it’s easy to miss the gate of the prison; over the years, shops, a flyover and three-storied houses, much higher than the jail compound’s low walls, have grown closely around this settlement, obscuring it from sight as it has become an organic part of the town.

At first, Sampurnanand prison looks deceptively like an ordinary village, despite the low walls enclosing it.

The camp consists of single-storied homes with courtyards built around a large, stadium-sized sandy open field with desert scrub and a small temple rising from the centre. Each house has a small plot of land, but water has become too scarce for the residents to cultivate the land.

Many keep domesticated animals, mostly goats, which often congregate around the temple. Every so often a camel ambles through. There is a small, white-washed building – a daycare facility – and a few metres away lies an open-air classroom, which is attended by about 50

A WARDER in the open jail in Sanganer, Rajasthan.

94 kids in classes one to five, including children who don’t live in the camp.

On a recent afternoon, save some goats, a few turbaned, elderly men seated in front of their homes and some women pottering about their courtyards, the camp is quiet, and deserted. Most of the prisoners, 129 men and 15 women, are out in town earning a living. This is the small price of relative freedom: the prisoners have to bear their own living costs – mainly food, electricity and water bills. Most prisoners go out for daily wages, but some earn modest salaries up to Rs 10 000 as tutors, security guards and small business owners and there is even a doctor who runs his own homeopathic practice in town. “Luxurious lifestyles” are not allowed according to a senior jail official, though some would be able to afford them. One man, it is said, earns lakhs of rupees every month running his own stone business and “even pays income tax.”

The government provides land, guards and some one-room dwellings, but it’s quite common for the people here to build their own, slightly bigger houses, which

MOST PRISONERS GO OUT FOR DAILY WAGES, BUT SOME EARN MODEST SALARIES UP TO RS 10 000 AS TUTORS, SECURITY GUARDS AND SMALL BUSINESS OWNERS. they then hand over to the new entrants who take their place once they are released.

Jain lives here with her husband, a bank employee and her 22-year-old nephew who is like a son to her and studies at a nearby college. She is happy to be able to live with her husband and nephew, and relishes the evenings when they eat dinner together. When asked if she has children of her own, Jain silently nods “no” and swiftly changes the topic of conversation, drawing attention to her house. “I built this house for myself, with two rooms, so that all my relatives can stay here.” Family members and spouses living in the camp can go as far from the prison as they want and don’t have to apply for parole if they want to spend the occasional night elsewhere. But

DAYAL SHASTRI, 34, an inmate of Sanganer’s camp stands in front of his home. He’s moved his furniture outside for the day, while he paints his house.

95 when they’re in the prison, they need to stick to the curfew times. Family members living outside can sometimes stay here.

With her husband and nephew out of the camp during the day, Jain, a BA graduate, coaches her fellow inmates’ children in various school subjects. When she has time, she visits her sister who lives in town. She is also the deputy sarpanch of the jail’s panchayat.

One of the panchayat’s responsibilities is to divide the monthly water and electricity bills equally amongst the prisoners. This is one of their easier tasks, says Jain, as most prisoners own the same basic appliances: a television and a cooler.

The inmates generally get along, and celebrate religious festivals together. “There are hardly any fights,” says Omkar Gujar, 48, the sarpanch. He supports his parents, wife and seven children by buying and selling buffaloes. He earns Rs 30 000 profit per buffalo, but says it can take months to seal one deal. Sometimes tension can arise, says Gujar,

when, for instance, “someone’s goat enters another house and eats food, or if someone gets less water.” He says, “No one gets physical, but they are angry at each other and come to us to complain. Then we mediate.”

“It’s the best job,” says Head Warder Prahlad Singh Doi, 41, a cheerful-looking man with dark brown sunglasses, while drinking tea at the home of Lakshman Singh, a 46-year-old murder convict. “All prisoners are my friends. We play volleyball together and sing religious songs.” Doi spends day and night in Sanganer, and visits his home in Jaipur one day a week. Apart from a few rounds and the roll call twice a day, there isn’t much work

INMATES’ FAMILY MEMBERS AND SPOUSES LIVING IN THE CAMP CAN GO AS FAR FROM THE PRISON AS THEY WANT AND DON’T HAVE TO APPLY FOR PAROLE IF THEY WANT TO SPEND THE OCCASIONAL NIGHT ELSEWHERE.

LAKSHMAN SINGH, 46, a convict, and his wife Janpa, 36, live together in Sanganer’s open prison.

96 for him and the guards that work under him. “We never have to search the houses or bags. It’s not necessary. They are all too scared to be sent back to the closed prison, so they discipline themselves,” he says. According to Saxena, the former jail official, all the inmates have served years in a regular jail before coming here, so the risk of getting sent back deters them from breaking the rules or escaping.

In the past three years, only one person has reportedly escaped from this prison. When he was captured, he was transferred back to a regular jail. Since then, there haven’t been further incidents – the credit goes to what Saxena describes as a “fair and thorough screening” process to select inmates.

“One badly behaved inmate can spoil the entire image of open jails,” says Saxena, who sits in his living room in his Jaipur residence. Though retired, he is active in advocating for a better probation system and for wider implementation of the open prison system.

“WE NEVER HAVE TO SEARCH THE HOUSES OR BAGS. IT’S NOT NECESSARY. THEY ARE ALL TOO SCARED TO BE SENT BACK TO THE CLOSED PRISON, SO THEY DISCIPLINE THEMSELVES.” Professional criminals, explains Saxena, or those who have murdered for a specific purpose, such as personal gain, would not be considered by the advisory committee that selects candidates for the open jail camps.

Nor would convicts of crimes such as rape or crimes against the state. There are certain criteria which an inmate must meet, and if an inmate is eligible, then the committee also determines that they are physically and mentally fit, and therefore able to earn a living.

Being married is one of the official criteria for a potential open prison inmate, because a married person “has roots in his family and is therefore less likely to run away,” says Saxena. By allowing couples to live together, he

INMATES of Sanganer and of the nearby Durgapura camp, where this image was taken, mostly have the same appliances: televisions and air coolers.

97 says the disintegration of a family – whose support is seen as integral to an ex-prisoner’s settling back into society – can be prevented.

“There was a land dispute,” Mala Ram remembers.

“At least 50 people were involved. Three of us were convicted of murder.”

Currently, about 300 convicts are on a waiting list out of the total 18 000 prisoners in Rajasthan. There are close to 700 convicts living in open prisons in the state today.

As soon as there is an opening in one of the camps, a convict at the top of the list – which descends in order from the longest-serving prisoners – moves there.

Most open prison inmates tend to be murder convicts, because they have the longest sentences and therefore top the waiting list. But, says R K Saxena, in Sanganer, despite there being inmates convicted of a grave offence like murder, “Now the people of Sanganer completely accept the prison, and even employ the convicts because they understand that these are the well behaved ones.”

In the Sanganar camp, says Saxena, the inmates “are mainly agricultural labourers who are readily accepted back into their societies.”

And according to Anshuman Saxena, a lawyer who represents several of these convicts, “they are often just poor men, who could not afford a proper lawyer,” which is how they may have ended up in jail in the first place.

He cites the example of his client, Mala Ram Gujar, who was an agricultural labourer and a 21-year-old father of three when he wound up in prison 13 years ago.

Mala Ram, for example, works as an instructor teaching yoga to families in town, and brings in Rs 6 500 a month. The tall, thin 34-year-old with soft, friendly eyes and a face roughened by years spent in prison picked up yoga in the jail where he served the first ten years of his sentence. He lives in the open prison with his wife, while his children remain with their extended family near Ajmer.

Teaching yoga and interacting with his clients in Sanganer has given him confidence. “Even when the ladies

THE TEMPLE around which Sanganer’s inmates’ homes are built.

98 of the families are at home alone, they allow me to teach them,” he says, after demonstrating some yoga poses in front of the prison’s office.

Evidently skilled, Mala Ram has received invites from all over India and even abroad to join ashrams and yoga centres. Soon, he hopes to get special parole permission to go to Pondicherry for a yoga conference. Occasionally, he’s allowed to visit his village on parole. “It’s still my home,” he says. “I can live with my joint family any time and the people there treat me with respect. They don’t see me as a criminal.”

Urmila Jain, too, doesn’t see herself as a criminal. She has spent ten years here. She maintains she is innocent and has been framed. As she reveals only later in the day, she was convicted of murdering her two young children and attempting suicide herself, which is a punishable offence.

Asked for details, she says quietly, “I don’t want to remember. I was poisoned, along with my children. They died,

I survived.” After serving 17 years of her life sentence, and having earned six years of remission – time taken off a sentence as a reward for good behaviour – Jain hopes to be released soon, and be with her family as she wants, when she wants.

The return of motivated prisoners like Jain into society, by way of the open prison system, is, according to Saxena, the ideal way to end a sentence. “People tend to think that a prison is a dustbin of society. But if you plan to send prisoners back into society, it’s very important to think about how they should be treated while in prison,” he says.

“And by now it’s proven: they can handle the open prison system. Most problems are imagined. The world is not as bad as we think.”

Later in the afternoon, as the curfew hours draw closer, the older school kids return to the camp on their bikes. Jain’s husband and nephew make it on time too. A few minutes later, the gate closes and the curfew begins again.

THE CRITERIA for joining an open prison includes being married. In Sanganer, inmates live with their spouses and many with their children too.

99 INDIAN MEMO RIES IN MEMORABILIA

100 No Place Called Home by Vivek Muthuramalingam In a small centre for destitute elderly people in Bangalore, I spent much of 2007 photographing and listening to men and women telling me stories about the circumstances which had led them to poverty. When they were younger, these men and women had jobs, homes, raised children who went to good schools and would never have expected to end their days within the confines of a shelter for the homeless.

Urban destitution as I witnessed in this shelter transpired because of the disintegration of families. In most cases, these people belonged to the urban middle class and were made homeless, not because they were penniless, but because they had been disowned by their own families; the age-related incapacitation of these people was the reason they ended up here.

Some of these old people had been cast off by their families after a bitter quarrel. Others were literally abandoned by the side of the road, often sickly and without money, by their own sons or daughters, for whom they now seemed to represent nothing more than an extra mouth to feed, and a hindrance while struggling to make ends meet for their younger nuclear family.

There were also cases where a spouse had been deserted by their partner, either because they had found someone younger, or out of desperation because of the inability to bear the other’s medical expenses.

For some of the people in these pictures, the anguish of the separation from their families has taken a toll on their mental balance. Many of them have instead tried to come to terms with their lives, accepting a turn of events that caught them completely unprepared, and make friends with one another to ease their pain if not heal it. *These photographs were taken at The Home of Hope in Doddagubbi Village, on Bangalore’s outskirts. In 2007, there were about 150 residents.

According to its founder, Auto Raja, there are about 370 people at the shelter there today.

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