Wednesday, April 7, 2010

REVIEW: Letters from Prison

REVIEW
Letters from Prison: Captive Imagination
Varavara Rao
Penguin-Viking
Rs 350
Pp 208
ISBN: 9780670082575
Hardback

Blurb
Poet, Marxist critic and activist, Varavara Rao (VV) has been continually persecuted by the state and intermittently imprisoned since 1973, but he never stopped writing during all these decades, even from within prison. When he was subjected to ‘one thousand days of solitary confinement’ during 1985 –89 in Secunderabad Jail, a leading national daily invited him to write about his prison experiences.

While prison writing is a hoary tradition, no writer has had the opportunity to publish his writings from jail. VV, however, did meet the demands placed on him as a writer, despite constraints of censorship by jail authorities and the Intelligence section. He decided to test his creative powers in jail on the touchstone of his readers’ response and expressed himself in a series of thirteen remarkable essays on imprisonment, from prison.

Reviews:
My Bloody Valentine Tehelka
Varavara Rao is a prominent Telugu litterateur and a spokesperson of the CPI (Maoist). The author of several volumes of poetry and monographs of literary criticism, Rao is a founder of the Revolutionary Writer’s Association, and was jailed both before and during the Emergency and for a prolonged period in the mid-1980s. These essays were written during the latter incarceration, as a ‘special class’ prisoner, and first appeared in the daily Andhra Prabha.

Rao’s love of books is evident from the authors he cites, from Dumas to Faiz; Benjamin Moloise to Sartre, Stalin to Neruda. Yet his confinement reminds him that books cannot substitute for people. A chapter on censorship describes privacy violated; “second-hand” words reaching loved ones. There are philosophical reflections in his comments on lie-detectors, and the futility of technical devices when it comes to measuring human imagination.

Rao admits he didn’t experience physical inconvenience in prison, but was troubled most by intellectual and emotional isolation. He writes of things that gave him hope, and those that caused him despair. His book is a moving account of the life of a political prisoner; and of his empathy for his fellows, especially those who had no legal help. The incongruities of flowers blooming in Musheerabad jail, the habit of talking to birds, of measuring time against the infinitesimal growth of the shoots of a jackfruit tree, all convey the sense of a sensitive soul nurturing itself through terrible hardship. The section on cats who “fight amongst themselves over food or for carnal desires,” and the mouse who studied the Ramnagar conspiracy case papers is gently hilarious. And there is tenderness, as in his care for a wounded pigeon.
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Creativity at its best - made in prison Thaindian
Countless are the prisoners who wrote in their dingy cells what turned out to be eminently readable and, at times, epoch making literature. Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, both prolific writers, wrote extensively when they were imprisoned by the British. American black revolutionary George Jackson became a writer in jail - and died there. South Korean poet Kim Chi-ha, sentenced to death, wrote his autobiography in confinement, using the floor dirt in his underground cell as ink and making notes on cigarette wrappers procured from friendly guards. Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong’o penned an entire novel on toilet paper. Most prison writing got into print at some point of time. But valuable literature got lost too. Bhagat Singh’s writings before his execution remain untraced. That way, Varavara Rao was lucky.

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