PRISON DIARY

From Phansi Yard recounts Sudha Bharadwaj's time at Yerawada Jail and paints a poignant portrait of her fellow inmates

- Latha Anantharaman

FROM PHANSI YARD: My Year with the Women of Yerawada

by Sudha Bharadwaj

JUGGERNAUT

A new addition to India's long tradition of prison lit (soon to get longer, probably), From Phansi Yard, Sudha Bharadwaj's compassionate, highly readable memoir of her time in Yerawada Jail, shines light on the daily realities of women prisoners.

In a Q&A introduction, Bharadwaj talks of the circumstances of her arrest and her life in this "cage with a view". She also explains the gaps in her accounts, since she is not allowed to discuss the details of the case against her. But most of her book is about her fellow prisoners in Phansi Yard. The word phansi means "hanging". She wrote about the women here, she says, because she had the time to do it. In her later stint in Byculla Women's Jail, she was occupied in providing legal help to her fellow prisoners.

These individual portraits also contain gaps. An outline is rapidly sketched but, as in the writer's own story, legal details must not be filled in, and no woman is identified by name. From Bharadwaj's introduction, we know that she had long lived among rural working women, eating and dressing like them. That means she doesn't give the extra detail we might find in a narrative with a more urban, explanatory tone. But that only deepens the authenticity of her portraits and, with all these elisions, a distinct, vivid personality is often created.