Paper short abstract:

This paper examines various ‘healing relationships’ fostered by petty offenders, criminalised factions, long-term convicts, and former Maoist guerrillas incarcerated in an urban prison in Calcutta, India. It shows how inmates across class, caste, community and ideological divides built co-dependent, caring and comforting relationships in order to maintain peace and solidarity within the volatile environments of marginalised penitentiaries. This paper contributes towards ethnographic depictions of prison cultures, and draws out the role of agency and affect in building social order, especially in restricted spaces marked by violence and conflict.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines various 'healing relationships' fostered by petty offenders, criminalised factions, long-term convicts, and former Maoist guerrillas incarcerated in an urban prison in politically fraught 1970s Calcutta. It was a time when the city was under siege, as the government machinery used extreme force to suppress an anti-state Naxalite movement emerging in eastern India. The local police captured city-based leaders of the insurgency and subjected them to extra-legal interrogation techniques to extract information about Maoist activities. Through the oral narratives of former political prisoners, I explore the ways in which imprisoned men, women and children across class and caste divides built co-dependent relations to survive a system of excessive custodial violence designed by prison guards. In the women's correctional facility, for example, young activists regularly beaten by male police officers were washed and comforted by older women serving life sentences. This display of humanity and maternal concern from strangers and social outcasts enabled the bruised women to cope with their pain and sexual humiliation. The political prisoners in turn offered delinquents literacy classes and helped in drafting court appeals, thereby transforming quotidian relationships into temporary channels of community-building, everyday empowerment and critical intervention. These exchanges allowed inmates to envisage themselves as precursors of peace and reform, despite being constrained within a deprived culture of confinement. This paper not only contributes towards an anthropology of penal institutions, but also raises questions about the role of agency and affect in building social order, especially in restricted spaces marked by violent conflict.