RESISTING PERSECUTION

Muslim prisoners' writings in contemporary India

- SHARMILA PURKAYASTHA

“BECAUSE THIS WAS a setting/ Hence, forget about telling anybody/ What happened in custody.” This stanzaic ending repeats throughout Horror Saga, a prison memoir by Ehtesham Qutubuddin Siddiqui, published in 2024. It makes for unusual reading, by highlighting the author's difficulty in “telling” what happened to him in custody because of a “setting”—a word annotated in the text as a “cooked up plot by corrupt people.”

At the same time, the recurring lines reiterate the author's need to narrate, despite his difficulty, what went on behind bars. Siddiqui's authorial difficulties are not uncommon among writers narrating experiences of prison, as they grapple with the problem of relaying events that are associated with the stigma of punishment and lie outside the purview of public scrutiny. However, Siddiqui's insistence that it was “a setting” begs an obvious question: why does he do so? Is Horror Saga an all-too-familiar tale of a criminal who insists upon their innocence by drawing attention to settings? Or is it that Siddiqui pens a larger story, one that is more than an individual tale of suffering, as he uses the collective pronoun “we” at the end of the text to describe the intolerable conditions of prison?