ABSTRACT
This chapter explores this contemporary interest in the persecution of ‘anti-national’ insurgents in prisons, and shows why and how certain political prisoners survive the physical torture and emotional humiliation of extra-legal incarceration. It will specifically explore the prison experiences of former female cadres of the Naxal movement and 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. The chapter makes an attempt to dislodge treatises on the interior life of prisons, by analysing the politics of play and performance that mature within regimented cultures of confinement. It also contributes towards recent debates in prison studies on romanticizing ‘the female political prisoner’. The chapter reveals that women prisoners can incorporate fluidities in that invented space, and by simply ‘making something out of nothing’, they can openly critique the disciplinary dictates developed by the state-society nexus.
