The Hindu : Karnataka / Mysore News : Three-day national seminar on prison writing begins

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Sep 26, 2004

Karnataka

Karnataka - Mysore

Three-day national seminar on prison writing begins

By Our Staff Correspondent

C.D. Narasimhaiah (left), director, Dhvanyaloka; the Governor, T.N. Chaturvedi; and K. Satchidanandan, Secretary, Central Sahitya Akademi, at the seminar on `Prison Writing in India,' in Mysore on Saturday.

MYSORE, SEPT. 25. Eminent poet Keki N. Daruwalla said here today that the State was appropriating more space for itself to control the lives of the people, structure their opportunities, and make them governable by inculcating passivity among them.

He was delivering the keynote address at a national seminar on "Prison Writing in India" organised by the Central Sahitya Akademi and Dhvanyaloka.

`Barbarisation'

He referred to the "barbarisation" of civil society and cited the example of the Gujarat violence to point out that the State could also be a party to murder and arson by merely watching or letting hooligans have a free run.

Mr. Daruwalla said anything dealing with prisons had to be handled very sensitively and the incarceration of criminals, politicians, militants, insurgents, and terrorists was a civilisational issue that needed to be pondered over.

Dwelling upon prison writing, he said it was a marginalised genre, and just as one of the crucial functions of democracy was to represent people unrepresented in history, literature too needed to be open to all and the unrepresented should be represented in it.

Many kinds

Prison writing, he said, could be of many kinds, including sociological accounts chronicling life in prison, polemical against the State, or it could be creative and literary outpourings.

He pointed out that the subject should not be viewed as only the writings of criminals or those of the pre-independence stereotypes — the heroic non-violent freedom fighter.

In his introductory note, C.D. Narasimhaiah, director, Dhvanyaloka, traced prison writing to historical times and drew examples from Greek mythology to modern times, interspersing it with writings during the medieval period.

He referred to the writings of freedom fighters in the Indian context and quoted Thoreau and said: "Prison is the only place for a just man in our times."

The Governor, T.N. Chaturvedi, who inaugurated the seminar, spoke of works produced in prison by people in different countries and in different languages.

They were important works, he said.

Seminars

K. Satchidanandan, secretary, Sahitya Akademi, said the akademi was trying to explore fresh areas of study through seminars on autobiography, travel writing, the West in the Indian imagination, and minority discourses. Prison writing was one of them, which pointed to a clear shift towards less discussed fields of the imagination, he said.

He wondered whether India had assigned prison writing the same importance it had given to western literary traditions.

He quoted the literary critic Victor Brombert's remarks that: "Prison haunts our civilisation" to draw attention to the canonical writings of Defoe, Wilde, Dostoevsky, Anton Chekov, Tolstoy, Victor Hugo, and several others who wrote in prison.

Mr. Satchidanandan said prison writing was a now a regular subject of study in many western universities, though it was a subject of debate whether it could be categorised as a separate genre of literature.

In India, there were at least four major occasions in the recent past of prison being used as an ideological instrument for suppressing dissent or generating consent for the ruling class, ideology, or group.

The first was the pre-1947 anti-colonial struggle, the second the communist uprising of the 1950s, the third being the Emergency, and the fourth the Maoist uprising of the late Sixties and the early Seventies, he said. All these were occasions when the establishment was challenged and the status quo sought to be subverted from different points of views with varying ideological biases, he added.

Counter inscription

Each of these periods had produced an interesting collection of prison writings of all genres, autobiographies, memoirs, letters, poems, stories, and documentary writings, Mr. Satchidanandan noted.

He said the task of the seminar was to look at prison writing as a form of counter inscription and expressed the hope that the seminar would be a pioneering effort in the study of prison writing in India.

The papers presented during the three-day seminar will be published by the Central Sahitya Akademi.

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