Paper short abstract:

This paper will explore the ways in which Naxal women political detainees in 1970s Calcutta gathered objects within prison compounds (buttons, sari borders, pieces of paper, needle and thread, shards of glass and pieces of wood) to craft together items for entertainment and secret communications. I argue that the performance of collective happiness related the creation and circulation of these objects resisted ‘the smell of death, desolation and despair’ in incarceration.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will explore the prison memories of former female cadres of the Marxist-Naxal movement in 1970s Bengal. It will specifically focus on the oral histories of women who were once captured, incarcerated and brutally beaten by prison officials in the women's correctional facility under the surveillance of the Alipore Central Jail in Calcutta. My ethnography highlights the ways in which women political detainees enacted everyday happiness in the face of torture and anguish, primarily to carry on resisting (their imaginings and understanding) of a violent, elitist, and self-serving state. By playing loud music with pots and pans, and making puppets with sari borders, buttons and soap wrappers to entertain the children of ordinary convicts, groups of women political prisoners refused to allow police guards and interrogators, the lowest rung of a state machinery, 'to break their bodies and their spirit'. I argue that this coordinated performance, especially after a bruised woman prisoner had been returned to her holding cell after 'questioning', exhibited an affective and resilient political aesthetic, which in turn contested repressive cultures of confinement. My analysis attempts to contribute towards a contemporary anthropology of urban prisons. It underlines a particular indigenous narrative of survival within a detention system which enacts routine violence on the bodies of 'others', and yet remains camouflaged by its abstract location in the wider public imagination.