Book: “Captive Imagination”; Author: Varavara Rao; Publisher: Penguin/Viking: Pp 193; Price: Rs.350
Countless are the prisoners who wrote in their dingy cells what turned out to be eminently readable and, at times, epoch making literature. Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, both prolific writers, wrote extensively when they were imprisoned by the British. American black revolutionary George Jackson became a writer in jail – and died there. South Korean poet Kim Chi-ha, sentenced to death, wrote his autobiography in confinement, using the floor dirt in his underground cell as ink and making notes on cigarette wrappers procured from friendly guards. Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong’o penned an entire novel on toilet paper. Most prison writing got into print at some point of time. But valuable literature got lost too. Bhagat Singh’s writings before his execution remain untraced. That way, Varavara Rao was lucky.
A celebrated Telugu poet and an ideologue of Maoist politics, Varavara Rao was repeatedly imprisoned for his adherence to the politics that arose from Naxalbari. It was during his thousand days of solitary confinement in Secunderabad in 1985-89 that Arun Shourie, then editor of Indian Express, asked him to write a column for his paper. Thus were born the 13 pieces – a combination of poetry and prose – that form this book. Moving and creative, they were written originally in Telugu. Though what he wrote was subjected to censorship, Varavara Rao was allowed to write, even provided a chair and table by a state his Maoist politics has vowed to destroy. “It was the intellectual, emotional, cultural and political isolation that troubled me.”
Varavara Rao remains firmly committed to Naxalbari, one of the better known overground faces of an ideology that believes that political power grows out of the barrel of the gun. Yet he despairs over the execution of prisoners. “Shouldn’t civilised society be ashamed of allowing the cold-blooded conspiracy by which governments hang a human to death, even if he might be a murderer?”
Varavara Rao came to communism through poetry. And it was poetry that gave him immense relief from “the boredom and monotony of the political prisoners’ existence”. His other companion in distress was books. He compares books to “darlings in one’s loneliness… like wings for prisoners…food for thought”. Indeed, the helplessness of prisoners gradually turns many into bookworms.
Prisons, he says, are always pitch dark – even during the day – and empty of love. So he relishes the company of pigeons and the ever multiplying cats, koels and parrots; and thick vegetation that includes jamun, lemon, tamarind, neem, mango and guava trees. But freedom is lacking.
From his cell, Varavara Rao can only hear the distant chugging of a train and factory sirens, changing gears and tyre bursts. The other windows to the outside world are, surprisingly, All India Radio bulletins as well as newspapers even if they are partly censored and blackened out. What he thirsts for are revolutionary magazines. “What is the use of having eyes if one is not able to read them?” he asks.
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