Prison-turned authors

Writing is said to be a lonely profession. And where else could one find uninterrupted loneliness, other than in prison. The two main pillars of literary contribution could be found, one in universities across the world and the other in various prison cells. The former teaches experiences gathered from other people’s lives and the latter is the place to gain firsthand experiences by not following the regular norm.

Prisoners are great story tellers. Whether their tales take the form of a message tapped in code through concrete, graffiti traced on a cell wall, a conversation through the pipes of an archaic plumbing system, a lament spoken through bars in a visiting room, or written testimony left behind by the condemned, storytelling is an integral part of imprisonment.¹ Incarceration lends itself to telling, and narratives of crime and punishment take many forms and serve myriad functions on both sides of prison walls. A prisoner assimilates into the hierarchies and cliques of the society of captives by telling a heroic tale of rebellion or a pathos-ridden fall from grace.² Convicts are often compelled to write in order to convey to the uninitiated on the outside what transpires on the inside. Stories of brutality, dehumanization, and radical deprivation are counterbalanced — often in the same narrative — by accounts of solidarity, salvation, and enlightenment.

The prison narratives with which readers are likely to be most familiar are stories told by and about inmates that expose the horrors, the ephemeral joys, the entrenched bureaucratic processes, and the mind-numbing routines of incarceration.

The real prison was the one which kept coming back— a prison of dark, dank dungeons with moldy bones in rusted chains, the prison that held the Count of Monte Cristo, Jean Valjean, Saint Paul—the real prison was the prison in his mind”.

The prison is a “total” institution distinguished by a high degree of bureaucratic regularity. A very fine piece of work is seen in the movie Shawshank redemption, which elaborates on a prisoner’s confined lifestyle.

We should be careful to note, however, that the public’s intimate knowledge of the commonplaces of prison life antedates the recent proliferation of media reports and testimonies, not to mention the maturation of the prison as the modern total institution we are familiar with today.

 The long list of canonical writers who were incarcerated and subsequently wrote about the imprisoned and the condemned—Silvio Pellico, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Oscar Wilde, and Jack London, William Sydney Porter to name just a few—attests to the cultural and literary significance of the prison and prison narratives.

Although “prison writing”—a term that encompasses journals, letters, autobiographies, and novels—have received some attention in scholarly studies and anthologies, scant critical work has been done on the prison novel as a literary form. Bruce Franklin to hypothesize in his 1978 book, on American prison narratives that “in our society the two main competing intellectual centres may be the universities and the prisons” 

Prison has proved to be a site not just for personal enrichment and edification but also for writing. Some Indian contribution from prison cell were, Jawaharlal Nehru’s, “Letters from a father to his daughter”, the other  not so known writer from Indian freedom movement days was the young revolutionary, Bhagat Singh. His “Jail notebook”, 404 pages dairy, which gives a vivid picture of the socio-political conditions of those days.

The tradition of the prisoner-turned-writer/poet dates as far back as François Villon, who wrote Le Testament a collection of poetry, composed in 1461, which has over twenty independent poems in octosyllabic verse. A series of fixed form poems mostly like an autobiography.

The current convict turned would be author is Nupur Talwar, the mother of the murdered Aarushi Talwar, who is going to recount the actual story.

Among studies of the literature of incarceration,