Political Incarceration, Decolonisation and Internationalism in 20th Century India

Abstract

In my paper, I propose to centrally focus on a set of prison-writings across genres from Indian incarcerated writers before and after 1947 to critically engage with the question of decolonization within the Indian context. Focusing on a set of memoirs written under the British rule by nationalist activists, and those then written under the rule of the same nationalist activists ruling the independent nation-state, this paper will argue that political imprisonment becomes a site for organising the nascent nation-state not only materially in terms of its institutions and apparatus, but also discursively in terms of manufacturing public consent. Closely reading an alternative, ‘unofficial’ field of prison-writing as a body that resists the dominant narratives by the ruling regimes – the British Empire and the Indian Nation State, I will ask, how does this body of literature theoretically address the complexities of nationalism, decolonisation, and liberation? Do conditions of captivity change – experientially, juridically, and/or politically before and after the “Independence” – which was largely critiqued within dissident traditions as a false freedom (from the British rule)? How can this set of prison memoirs help us – almost as writing from within — to navigate the questions of the nation-state and its attitude towards dissidence? Through such a reading, I will tease out theoretical approaches to the questions of decolonisation, the nation-state, and dissidence by foregrounding the debate on carcerality and its literary manifestations.