Of the Dialectic of Victimhood and Resistance in Prison Memoirs Written by Women Political Prisoners in India

Abstract

Prisons serve as institutions of the State’s repressive apparatus through mechanisms of discipline and punishment that seek to control resistance and indiscipline. Within women’s prisons, however, these disciplinary mechanisms of control (sometimes more repressive than men’s prisons) are quite similar to the social control that women outside it experience. Surveilling women’s bodies into docility, punishment within women’s prisons is historically constituted and gendered. Further, women inmates are assumed to be a homogenous category, devoid of any subjectivity, adulthood or sanity. Their punishment aims at fitting them back into their roles within the society outside.  My paper looks at prison memoirs/letters/texts written by women political prisoners (colonial & post colonial India) such as Mary Tyler, Joya Mitra, Anjum Habib, Soni Sori, Urmila Shastri (among others) and draw upon shifts in the political landscape and its impact on the structures inside prisons. I analyse how these document the realities of incarceration of the women inmates, of how they are far from the passivised subjects that they’re made out to be and exert resistance and challenge the patriarchal and hierarchical order that exists. I argue that this dialectic of resistance and servility, situated in their agency and identity formed at the intersections of caste, class, race and gender, make an evaluation of these prison diaries important from the framework of a feminist analysis