When Abhishek Verma, an alleged arms dealer known for his flashy lifestyle and tall claims, was released in October 2016 from Tihar Jail, he and wife Anca threw a party at Maurya Sheraton’s Bukhara restaurant. Bollywood actor Rajpal Yadav flew in for the celebrations. Yadav had spent 10 days in jail, after he failed to return ₹5 crore borrowed from a businessman. When Yadav landed in jail, Verma, who was already in Tihar, made his stay comfortable.
“That’s the thing about incarceration—the bonds and memories you make, stay with you for life,” Sunetra Choudhury writes in her book Behind Bars: Prison Tales of India’s Most Famous .
The book is an unusual experiment in chronicling what is behind prison walls in an Indian context, through the eyes of its elite. who have had to spend some time in those crowded hellholes in recent years.
Prisons have done two things to the world of writing: It has offered a blissful isolation for many writers to produce some outstanding literature. From Marco Polo to Jawaharlal Nehru and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, many have written some of their best while in jail. Second, life inside jail has been subject of many popular books, novels, autobiographies and other forms.
In contemporary India, very few have attempted to bring out details of jail life. While L.K. Advani and Kuldip Nayar wrote two significant books about Emergency period in jails, generally jail has remained away from the imagination of contemporary writers. The only recent exception is journalist Iftikhar Gilani’s My Days in Prison about the time he spent in jail while accused of violating the Official Secrets Act.
Against such a context, Behind Bars is a fascinating effort, especially since the book is dripped in palpable anger against the many privileges of the elite, even inside jails. In that, it is a first draft of a sociological mapping of contemporary India, its many immoral famous ones, its heart-wrenching cruelties, the many individual sacrifices and the hidden secrets of its wealthy and powerful.
Through its 13 chapters, the book tells the experience of famous prison inmates—from politician Amar Singh to Maoist-accused Kobad Ghandy, from A. Raja to a young Muslim girl who landed in jail even before her marriage celebrations ended. Each one shares a different experience, making the book a gripping read.
“If you steal 1,000 rupees the hawaldar will beat the shit out of you and lock you up in a dungeon with no bulb or ventilation. If you steal 55,000 crore then you get to stay in a 40-feet cell which has split units, internet, fax, mobile phones and a staff of ten to clean your shoes and cook you food (in case it is not being delivered from Hyatt that particular day)- Incredible India,” Anca describes her jail experience. Probably the foreigner summed up modern India better than most of us journalists/writers, by spending just four years in Tihar jail.
Behind Bars: Prison Tales of India’s Most Famous ; Sunetra Choudhury, Roli Books, ₹395.
