Experiencing Prison through Affect: Memory, Gender and History in 1970s India

Abstract

Using the Naxalbari Movement (1967-1975) as an entry-point, this paper will chart the everyday experiences of women ‘political prisoners’ in West Bengal, India. By using oral interviews and life-writings (such as autobiographies and memoirs), we will see a nuanced interactions between memory, history and gender, that is opened by narratives of evolving friendships, sisterhood and solidarities. This will map the prison as a “humanizing space” that ruptures the overall idea of the “punitive isolation” in carceral spaces.  Specific examples of adda (unrigorous conversations), cooking together and performing variously reconfigured the prison space sometimes into a performing stage or community kitchen, alternatively as a site of affect. The interviewees in their recall repeatedly mentioned the phrase, jail amader biswavidyalay (jail as our university), which then provides for a re-imagination of the prison. On several occasions, they also choose to gloss over their experiences of violence with overbearing narratives of love, which helps us understand the silences and distortion of individual memory. The paper will illustrate the social and political contexts in which the imaginations of a “jail university” proliferated, that is, the CPI(ML) movement and its politics of rejecting higher education, which was later in a way supplemented through processes of “affective learning”. Simultaneously, it will also narrate how the ‘prison experience’ led to transformations of the individual self that cemented newer subjectivities.