Prison Notes of a Woman Activist: Indian writing

Anuradha, B

ISBN 10: 9352907442 / ISBN 13: 9789352907441

Editore: Ratna Books, 2021

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Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: Prison Notes of a Woman Activist: Indian writing
• Editore: Ratna Books
• Data di pubblicazione: 2021
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 9352907442
• ISBN 13: 9789352907441
• Rilegatura: Brossura
• Condizione: New

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

A luminous account of jail from the pen of a sensitive young woman who draws deeply moving sketches of women who sometimes do not even know why they are in prison. Anuradha's stories move from children who are born in prison, with no idea of the world outside their walls - not even knowing what the moon looks like except on television - to old women bent with age serving life sentences and longing for release before they die so that they can die at home. But jail life is also throbbing with humanity in the midst of trauma and sadness. Women share their pain, write petitions for each other, discover histories of the jail where the staff recall other inmates who are incarcerated for their conscience, and unexpectedly the jail library has a copy of one such memoir. The same jack fruit tree bears witness to those who come and sit under its shade and then move to others who come in and may even die in jail before they are released. Every year on 26 January and then on August 15, they wait with bated breath to hear of who is released on those days. Will their names figure, or will they have to wait another year for the mercy of the state to return home, in spite of being a world where there is no place for the many women who cross the line of the law even as they stand up to the torment of caste and gender violence. Anuradha is the scribe in the jail, who tells stories of women and children who are victims of a cruel and inhuman world, and the unexpected legacies of kindness, solidarity and courage - women who sustain a spirit of resistance against the cruel norms in the world outside and in the way the law works. Long after we have finished reading the stories, we stay with Lathi Budhiya; with Paro's daughters outside the jail and her cats inside the jail; with baby Chandini's discovery of the moon on the night of Holi because lock up time has been extended as a special concession to the festivities.

This is a poignant book about a world we need to know and think about: a world that presses against conventional boundaries and is just beyond the prison walls, not so far from us at all.

UMA CHAKRAVARTI, Feminist Historian and Filmmaker

Informazioni sugli autori

B. ANURADHA is a women's rights activist based in Hyderabad. While working for a bank in Hyderabad, she came in touch with the Andhra Pradesh Civil Liberties Committee and worked as an activist from 1990 to 1993 and later, as a women's rights activist. She resigned from her job in 1996 to work in the Chaitanya Mahila Sangam, a state-wide women's organization. She was on the editorial board of the magazine, Mahila Margam. In 2005, she relocated to Jharkhand to work as an activist in the Nari Mukti Sangh. She was arrested in October 2009 and spent four years in the Hazaribagh Central Jail.Anuradha has written several articles and twenty seven short stories. Most of the prison stories have been published in the Sunday special edition of the daily, Andhra Jyothi, as well as in Mahila Margam, Aruna Tara, Sahithi Godavari and the web magazine, Saranga. Sixteen of these stories were later published as a collection by Virasam (Revolutionary Writers Association). Some of the stories were also translated into Hindi and published in Hindi magazines. 'Paro's Children' was translated into Bengali. She has translated The Prisons We Broke by Baby Kamble, Articles of Ambedkar on Women (Feminist Ambedkar), and Feminising the Labour Relations by Dr M. Vanamala into Telugu, and co-translated Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth along with N. Ravi.

GITA RAMASWAMY works with the Hyderabad Book Trust, a not-for-profit Telugu publishing collective. She has co-authored Taking Charge of Our Bodies (Penguin, 2004), On Their Own (Otherwise Publications, 2004), The Oxford University Press Anthology of Telugu Dalit Literature (OUP, 2016) and has authored India Stinking (Navayana, 2005). She also translates from Telugu to English and has translated the book Life in Anantharam (Banyan Tree, 2016).