ABSTRACT
Stan Swamy, an 80-year-old political prisoner, died in prison recently, even as his pleas for a drinking straw reverberated through the corridors of criminal justice institutions in India. His death marks a critical moment in understanding the colonial continuities and post-colonial exigencies of a repressive prison regime in India. Prisons have become inaccessible to outsiders, especially for purposes of research and study. Increased surveillance, physical isolation, and emerging conditions of sociality in a pandemic and post-pandemic world create endemic trials in prison ethnography particularly and ethnography, generally. Against this forbidding backdrop, this chapter represents my fieldwork experience in a prison in Kolkata, India, in the late nineties to explore two themes: the culture of lenience and chaotic everyday lives in an ordered and totalitarian institution. Prisoners’ experiences of repression do not always emerge from the rigidity of discipline and control. Instead, chaotic everyday lives and the unpredictability of rules create contexts of violence, subjugation, and denial. The chapter discusses how the contradictory and irreconcilable aspects of chaos and control unfurled my ethnographic prison experience, illuminating the craft of documenting the unique sitedness of the prison every day in the Global South.
