ABSTRACT
The previous two chapters have demonstrated the ways in which the punishment of certain groups came to take place outside of the prison system. This chapter returns to the jail to investigate a series of hunger strikes undertaken by Indian revolutionaries in the 1930s who demanded better treatment for political prisoners.1 Political fasts put the government in an impossible position: if the prisoner were to be allowed to die, his death might incite unrest outside the jail; if government were to give in to his demands, this would encourage insubordination in the jail; to force-feed the hunger striker would only prolong the whole ordeal, and increase the importance of the strike. On the everyday level, however, the strikes presented quite a different issue. Both political necessity and government instructions dictated that all hunger strikers were to be treated the same. They were to be segregated from other prisoners and force-fed. This opened up a daily battle in which prison officers improvised tactics to cajole, intimidate and compel prisoners to take in some nourishment. Paradoxically, this makeshift state violence was both outside the purview of existing regulations and within the remit of prison officers’ responsibilities because their primary duty was to end the strike. Unsurprisingly, the image of Indian patriots being force-fed made for highly fissile political material. On one level, the politics of representation during these hunger strikes were straightforward. In spite of the fact that, as revolutionaries, the strikers did not adhere to the Congress creed, the mainstream nationalist party aligned itself with these martyrs’ demands for equality with Europeans. And yet, in this period we begin to see the complications which could arise out of these strategies, for the Congress could not easily contain the symbols it had fostered. When the prisoners went on strike again after Congress had taken control of provincial ministries in the latter half of the 1930s, they created a crisis for both Congress and the new constitutional system.
