ABSTRACT
The decades of the 1960s and 1970s in West Bengal were turbulent moments in history. The impact of food riots in 1966, the radical uprising of peasants collaborated with the urban students and youth activists in Naxalbari movement, refugee migration from Bangladesh as an impact of the Bangladesh war and eventually the emergency declared by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi between 1975 and 1977 marks these decades with violence and violation of human rights. There have been several jail narratives, diaries, and poems on the experiences of imprisonment. By focusing on a few jail narratives by women activists like Minakshi Sen’s Jailer Bhitore Jail (A Jail inside Jail) or Jaya Mitra’s Hanyaman (What Cannot Be Killed), this essay attempts to discover an intersubjective introspection in women activist prisoner’s account which represents women as essentially displaced subject across history. Women’s narrative traces the collective experience of women as essentially displaced, homeless, and nomadic subject connected through the trauma of displacement and confinement. While the youth activists of Naxalbari movement all over Bengal were trying to unsettle the façade of liberal democracy of existing governance and bring revolution, it could be argued if and how the discourse of vulnerability and precarious belonging of women inside prison can provide a counter-narrative to the normative understanding of home, identity and national rootedness sold by the nation-state. The political question in this essay would be to think if the feminine narration of experiences of displacement inside prison can subvert all hetero-patriarchal statist grand narratives of emancipation, as such narratives through an assertion of a stable and calculable path of justice abjects all counter-narratives of displacement and unbelonging.
