99 – Registers of discipline and resistance: politics of imprisonment in south asian prisons

October 2, 2025
2:00 pm
H14
This panel, that we hope to develop across multiple sections, aims to explore the experiences of political prisoners in colonial and post-colonial South Asia. We are particularly keen to understand the complex interaction between carceral institutions and experiences as reflected in a range of disciplines. We thus hope to make visible those experiences, figures, and relationships of power that have been addressed by scholarship only marginally – if at all. Though often understood as the ultimate site of state-administered power, the seclusion and secrecy of prisons often replicate aspects of the private sphere, therefore existing as a liminal space. On the one hand, abuses of power by agents of the state foster an environment of de-humanising brutality; on the other, prisons see the formation of solidarity networks, coping strategies, and forms of resistance. Scholarship on South Asia has only sparsely focused on questions of political imprisonment, and the elements of control as well as the deviant possibilities within the prison space. Further, these conversations tend to be rooted, and therefore structured around specific disciplines. Since the penal apparatus exists as a space with diverse actors, players, experiences and expressions, this panel wants to initiate an in-depth interdisciplinary conversation around political imprisonment in South Asia. We are interested in exploring the structures political imprisonment, how judicial and administrative classifications shape the prisoners’ experiences, prisoners’ experiences and potentials of resistance shaped inside and outside of the prison, the discourses of empires, nation-states and media –largely, the prison question in South Asia. Categories like class, caste, ethnicity, and gender are some of the windows which will inform our exploration of South Asian political prisoners. Overall, this panel critically enriches the scholarship on South Asian activism, colonial and post-colonial alike, through the discussion of the overlooked yet crucial aspect of political prisoners’ experiences.

Convenors

Jigisha Bhattacharya
Maria Tumiotto

Presentations

A ‘great leveller’? Class, gender and activism in Bengali colonial prisons through the accounts of bhadramahilas inmates
Tumiotto Maria - School of Languages, Arts and Cultures, The University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom
Post-War Carceral Spaces: Affective Dimensions of Tamil Masculinities in Kuna Kaviazhagan’s The Poisoned Dream
Periyasamy Dheebika - Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India
Locating Carceral Heritage in the Indian Independence Saga
Pandey Riddhi - Department of Anthropology and Sociology, Geneva Graduate Institute, Geneva, Switzerland
Incarceration and the Political: A Convict’s Words and the Postcolonial Afterlives of Kālā Pānī
Miyamoto Takashi - Graduate School of Humanities, Osaka University, Osaka, Japan
Political Prisoners or Ordinary Criminals? Defining the Category of ‘Political’ in the Hunger Strikes of Lahore Conspiracy Case Prisoners, 1929-1930
Kaur Kamalpreet - History, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom
Experiencing Prison through Affect: Memory, Gender and History in 1970s India
Halder Madhulagna - McGill University, McGill University, Montreal, Canada
Political Incarceration, Decolonisation and Internationalism in 20th Century India
Bhattacharya Jigisha - University of Cambridge, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Of the Dialectic of Victimhood and Resistance in Prison Memoirs Written by Women Political Prisoners in India
Abraham Mary - Centre for the Study of Law and Governance (CSLG), Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India