Political prisoners in India, 1920-1977
This is a study of the politics of 'political prisonerhood' in colonial and independent India. Prison going and the struggles inside the prison had, with the nationalist culture of jail going in the early part of the twentieth century become an integral part of the protest against the colonial state. Imprisonment in its multifarious forms also became the major bulwark of the colonial state's strategy for harnessing recalcitrant subjects. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the process by which the notion of 'political' became a festering issue in the contest between the colonial state and the subject population and later between the state in independent India and the various 'rebel' groups, and also the manner in which the ruling classes assumed the sole responsibility of defining the 'political'. We have confined our study to the peaks of nationalist resistance against the colonial state and popular struggles against the dominant classes in independent India. Through this exploration of the notion of political prisonerhood we also attempt to understand the permanence and ruptures in the forms of repression and the nature of penal sanctions which the state deployed against its political opponents in colonial
Singh, Ujjwal Kumar
History
Political prisoners in India, 1920-1977. This is a study of the politics of 'political prisonerhood' in colonial and independent India. Prison going and the struggles inside the prison had, with the nationalist culture of jail going in the early part of the twentieth century become an integral part of the protest against the colonial state. Imprisonment in its multifarious forms also became the major bulwark of the colonial state's strategy for harnessing recalcitrant subjects. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the process by which the notion of 'political' became a festering issue in the contest between the colonial state and the subject population and later between the state in independent India and the various 'rebel' groups, and also the manner in which the ruling classes assumed the sole responsibility of defining the 'political'. We have confined our study to the peaks of nationalist resistance against the colonial state and popular struggles against the dominant classes in independent India. Through this exploration of the notion of political prisonerhood we also attempt to understand the permanence and ruptures in the forms of repression and the nature of penal sanctions which the state deployed against its political opponents in colonial
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