Hierarchy in jail is formed by class: Anand Teltumbde on his prison memoir ‘The Cell and the Soul’

Scholar, civil rights activist and management professor Anand Teltumbde had two books published in quick succession late last year—The Cell and the Soul (Bloomsbury India), a chilling account of life in prison where he spent more than two years as an undertrial, and The Caste Con Census (Navayana), part history and part critical examination of the hotly contested caste census. Teltumbde, an IIM-A graduate, was teaching at Goa Institute of Management till he was accused of having a role in the 2018 Bhima Koregaon violence and arrested in 2020. He was granted bail only in 2022.

In an interview with Lounge, he discusses the writing of his prison memoir, why class trumps caste within the confines of prison, and the pitfalls of a caste census. Edited excerpts:

‘The Cell and the Soul’ is deeply personal while also providing the larger picture of society and the prison system. How did you plan the writing of this book?

I have not gone about it in a deliberate or designed way. I was very sure that after coming out—if I came out—of jail, I would write about (my experiences). I had gone with a preparation to die there. But when I realised that I can read and write, I started making notes on what came to my mind. So this book comprises 22 notes that I wrote out of about 100.

You could say that jail imposes some amount of clarity on you. Your routine goes away. Mobility goes away. You are left with only two things: your mind and the system that seeks to crush you. At that moment, the personal and political become inseparable. The book emerges from such conditions. It doesn’t become very personal in the sense because every experience inside a person is shaped by power hierarchy, by the violence embedded in the system.

Did you see any metaphorical resemblance between your time in jail and the fact that society is not free in the same way for all people?

Prison becomes like a magnifying glass, in a way, of a society. One can say it becomes a concentrated form of control. Outside of jail, the same thing happens with something like surveillance. Surveillance is explicit in prison. But in free society surveillance is ambient—CCTV cameras, digital footprints. So you internalise the gaze and police yourself.

In prisons, movements are restricted by tall walls. In society, movement is restricted by class, caste, gender, geography. Most people are free, but only within the narrow boundaries the social location allows. Prison is supposed to be a punishment. Time in prison is a punishment. But in society, precarious work, joblessness, all those kinds of things are the ongoing punishment.

In prison, we find the authorities arbitrary because the jail superintendent becomes a lord, because it is opaque to society. But society is not different. (Authority) hides behind bureaucratic procedures, law and order, rhetoric and market law. Arbitrariness does not disappear. It only probably gets civilised.

How do caste and class play out within prison? What are the other power dynamics in such a confined place?

Some people amplify how caste operates in prison, but I have not experienced such a thing. One of the things I came across was the prison guards or prison officials identifying me as Dalit and behaving in a (certain) way. I have heard that caste determines who cleans the floor, cleans the toilets. I have not come across that… The cleaners who happened to be on my floor were Brahmins because those two guys were Nepalis. They might not have been Dalits. Downstairs, Muslims were doing these things. I do not smell caste everywhere.

Class certainly operates. Hierarchy in the jail gets formed by class. Whosoever has money automatically becomes a Brahmin. Say gangsters, they have lots of money, so they can buy out their freedom and prestige in the jail with the prison authorities and vis a vis the inmates, because they will have lots of money to buy from the canteen and distribute to the people who cannot afford it. For example, on Sundays we would get chicken, so these fellows would buy chicken for everybody and distribute it, so people would feel obligated to respect them. Of course there would be bribes as well. That’s how the hierarchies get formed.

Murderers are taken as macho people, they are quite proud that they have murdered. The rapists are downplayed—nobody admitted rape. Pocso becomes similar. When people get into denial mode, it becomes difficult to discern what really happened. And then we were there—political prisoners. We were odd men out, so we were respected that way.

Do you see anything changing, for better or worse, in terms of the way we protest or resist?

No. In one way, you can say that this was the process (the arrests related to Elgar Parishad and Bhima Koregaon), the process of getting control of everything. Having accomplished that, there will not be much need to put people behind bars, as it happened during the early years of the regime.… Civil society cannot be controlled. It can only be controlled by such examples… It is happening sporadically everywhere, as recently as with (Sonam) Wangchuk’s arrest. Here onwards the country is driven to a dead end. I do not see any kind of future because the opposition is dead…. As we see, there is hardly any resistance. People have been terrorised to normalcy.

Isn’t caste-based discrimination very much a part of our society and in fact worsening?

Not many people notice it, but that is perfectly right. It is not about Hindu versus Muslim, but at the bottom of it is caste. In rural areas, all these castes, including Dalits and dominant castes, have been pushed into crisis by neoliberal development. Everybody feels the heat of development. The dominant caste used to have traditional privileges. No more because neoliberalism has eroded that base.… In course of time, even after educating their children, jobs have not come. (Dominant castes) would say that these people (Dalits) are the culprit, those people who have been getting reservations. This manifests as demands by the rural dominant castes for reservations. There is no caste which has not demanded reservation.

The lower caste crisis manifests as demand for enumeration. So the caste census comes in. It is basically the reaction to the same neoliberal order which dismantled public good and concentrated wealth. We are at probably one of the worst gaps between the rich and poor, globally and nationally. And in the Indian context, every group is articulating its survival in the language of caste because caste becomes entitlement.

Karnataka recently completed collecting data for its caste census. It made news for implementation challenges, people from Bengaluru choosing to not participate, and so on. What’s your take?

Once you make it optional, it is expected that upper caste people would not unnecessarily expose their privileges. They would be scared of getting their privileges exposed because ultimately you are a millionaire, you are a billionaire and you happen to be a Brahmin or some such upper caste. So the survey would lean towards associating your caste with the riches that you got.

It’s not a very good idea to have a caste census. As a data person, I would not detest more data being available, but as for the politics of census, I am against it. Because enough challenges exist in society and it’s going to further create that kind of caste dynamics. What are we to do with the data? Data does not automatically do anything. Data does not formulate a policy. Data is data. What happened with all the claims that they are going to undertake redistributive measures and policies? There has to be political will to do that. Are they going to do land distribution? Are they going to equalise wealth because wealth is also very vulgarly, unequally distributed? They only are talking about representation. It’s not social justice that data brings in.… It’s not a matter of data. We are not discussing data. We are discussing the ethics of it. So there should be a differentiation.

Prachi Pinglay-Plumber is an independent journalist and professor of practice at Central Campus, CHRIST University, Bengaluru.