Excerpts from 'From Phansi Yard - My Year With The Women Of Yerwada'
By Sudha Bharadwaj
“From Phansi Yard” – being a collection of short vignettes of woman prisoners in Yerwada Jail written by Sudha Bharadwaj – was published in September 2022 by Juggernaut Books. The book has been well acclaimed and has since been translated into Telugu, Punjabi and Bengali languages.
Work
As I watch people work through the bars, I realise how important work is to maintain one’s sanity, purpose and rhythm in jail.
As the gates of the Barracks open at 7am, the work-clock starts ticking. Women begin sweeping the paths and gardens of leaves, swabbing the corridors, each carrying out her allotted tasks.
The way women work, in jail and outside it, carrying out the hardest work for the longest hours, and getting the least credit, angers one, but perhaps it is also the source of their immense shock-absorbing capacity.
Here, most convicts who don’t get any money orders from home either work in the factory or carry out jail work or work in the fields of the Open Jail.
Jail work means doing things like summoning the prisoners (or rather shouting out for them) for mulakat or court; assisting the doctor, psychiatrist and social worker; keeping offices clean and filling drinking water for the jail staff; ringing the gong (called “the toll”) at the appointed times of bandi and unlocking; stocking the canteen; handing out bedding and green saris. The distribution of letters and money orders is done by ‘trusted’ convict daily wagers who are paid only Rs 65 a day, but they are rewarded by becoming the privileged among the prisoners. They are also the ‘eyes’ and ‘ears’ of the jail administration. If the jail actually employed workers for all the tasks that these prisoners perform for little or no money, the State would have to dish out a pretty packet.
One of the most important tasks is cooking for the 350 odd women prisoners. Twelve or thirteen convicts who have worked earlier in the factory and are known to be diligent are selected for this paid work, working under a Warder. They have to report early – at 5am (even when the temperature drops to 7 degrees Celsius) and they work up to 5pm, when the prisoners are locked in. Cleaning and chopping vegetables, cleaning rice and dal, kneading dough and rolling chapattis, cooking vegetables, boiling milk, making tea, washing the enormous cooking utensils, filling water for kitchen use, taking breakfast to the barracks, tea to the staff, and bhatta to the separate yard … Their tasks are endless.
In each barrack, different prisoners are allotted, by rotation, the task of collecting the bhatta for their barracks for all meals except breakfast.
Some 50-60 convicted women go to the Open Jail every day between 8am and 4pm and for half a day optionally on Sundays and holidays. They work in the rice fields, and vegetable farms of the jail, and eat their lunch time bhatta right there in the fields. These farms supply the tomatoes, bhindi, radish, cabbage, pumpkin, beans, capsicum and various kinds of bhaji (green leafy vegetables) that we eat in the jail. We are rarely fed the better-quality rice that is grown in the fields of the jail, that crop is probably sold.
The women who work in the Open Jail are paid nominally at Rs. 50 a day, but more importantly, each day of work counts as a day’s remission in their sentence. Only women who have completed 5-7 years of their sentence, are physically fit, and whose behaviour is certified to be “good” are selected by a Jail Committee for this work. (In the 15 months I was in Yerawada Jail, we saw this Committee hold court only once.) These are usually poorer rural women, for whom the legal system is for all practical purposes out of reach, and ultimately, they have to rely on the only thing they have – their labour – for an early release. Work in the Open Jail is tough and carried out in all seasons – winter, summer or monsoon.
Work in the factory is of five types – agarbatti rolling which is the most common, lowest paid, piece-rated work; the more skilled work of stitching at the sewing machines; the work of weaving strips of pattis which is done by very few women who traditionally do this work; the work of making envelopes and preparing dasti pads (cardboard pads with flaps in which papers are tied together) for jail use which is generally light work reserved for elderly women; and finally work on the extruding machines making automotive lock-set parts, which is given to smarter, younger and educated prisoners, who strut about in their white coats and caps. This work is supervised by a company called Spark Minda, is referred to by all as “Minda work”. It carries on from 7.30am to 4pm with a gap of an hour from 11 to 12 for eating bhatta.
The jails of the State (and maybe even the country) are integrated through their prison industry. Rice, wheat, vegetables, soap, tooth powder, dhurries, sheets, files, furniture – almost all the jails’ requirements are produced by prisoners themselves or by those of other jails. The system works almost like a network of vast state-run barter communes –on pitiful wages. Besides the prisoners also craft objects of great beauty – pottery, furniture, candles, idols, carvings –that earn jails a good sum. The Jail Museum in Raipur is famous for the bell metal sculpture of Bastar, mostly created by the indigent Adivasi prisoners of Jagdalpur Jail.
Exploitative though our system is, I am grateful that we have escaped the fate of prisoners in the United States, where corporate entities sponsor prison industries. This has created a vested interest in long and harsh sentences, because what can produce more profit than a non-unionizable “docile and disciplined” workforce of prisoners. Needless to say, America’s prison population contains a disproportionately high number of poor black males.
Back in Yerawada, I find it interesting that the highest paid monthly rated workers are the Kundawalis or sanitation workers – three or four of them – who get Rs. 1800 per month. A couple of decades back, there were no toilets in the cells of the Phansi Yard but only earthen pots called kundas and the Kundawalis were actually manual scavengers disposing off human excreta. There is no longer any manual disposal of excreta in Yerawada, but the name Kundawali has stuck. The current crop of Kundawalis are not always Dalit, there are also women from Denotified Tribes and various Backward Castes too. They work continuously from 7am to 5pm ( 3pm on Sunday) cleaning toilets, swabbing common corridors, clearing waste, bathing the disabled prisoners, washing the mats and bedding of the staff, helping the Public Works Department (PWD) clean drains and carry out minor repairs, carrying furniture from place to place and generally doing every possible odd job, including climbing the roof to sweep off autumn leaves, disposing of a dead cat or rat, or scouring the utensils in which chicken is brought from the Main Jail which the other BC workers won’t touch, because they think they think it’s a dirty job to clean them.
I too want to work. About three months after I came here, I moved an application to be permitted to use my skill and experience to help the legal aid work in the jail. As I expected, it was rejected.
(I was not to know then that I would be inundated with this work in the future, given to me not by the jail, but by prisoners, when we were transferred to Byculla.)
Corporal Punishment
I often hear that prisoners used to be regularly beaten earlier in this jail, and “habitual offenders” were beaten on admission itself to “break them in” as one “breaks in” animals. That is not the norm at Yerawada today. The younger constables have not seen such conduct and have been trained in a different culture. They would rather scold, show sternness and threaten to complain to their superiors or the court to enforce discipline. Some of the older ones, though, speak nostalgically about the “harder discipline” of the old days. They are also looser-tongued in their anger, particularly in the use of explicit abuses.
In the several months I have been here, I have come across only one case of a constable seriously beating someone. As usual, there was a fight over scarce water. A prisoner was washing her clothes in a bucket near the water tank, and some of the soapy water fell into another woman’s clean water bucket. This second woman, elderly and known to be cantankerous, responded with a steady torrent of abuse. One of the young constables first tried to outshout her. When she didn’t stop, she slapped her hard and pushed her down. When the woman began to protest, she kicked her with her boot. Meanwhile, the daughter of this old woman – also a convicted prisoner, and quite sharp tongued herself – got to know. She had just come in from the Open Jail where she was working. She accosted the Constable and shouted at her. Other constables gathered around and held the prisoner back by her arms, but not before she too was slapped. The jail was abuzz with tension, with women muttering among themselves that ‘the old woman has no control over her tongue and that particular constable is known to be hot-headed’.
Before the bandi all the prisoners of Barracks 1 and 2 were asked to bring one bucket into the barrack, and all extra buckets were to be deposited in the godaam to avoid water fights. (What an irrational solution in the face of a serious water crisis!) Later I heard that a delegation of older prisoners went to the Jailor to explain that the fight had nothing to do with filling of buckets, and that this step would only make things worse. The Constable has never been publicly chastised, but hopefully she was reprimanded in private.
Later, at Byculla jail, I gathered that a lot of the chastening of the behaviour of women Constables, in Byculla and in other women jails in Maharashtra, has happened because of the notorious case of the death of Warder Manjula Shetty in June 2017 in Byculla Jail due to beating by the jail’s staff. After her death, there was what media called a “prison riot”. What actually happened was that the prisoners boycotted all meals and protested vehemently till a First Information Report was registered against the Jailor and five women constables at 10.30pm the next day. Last I heard, these six were facing a murder trial and had not yet been released on bail.
While I was in Byculla, the chargesheets of the counter case of “rioting in the jail” that had been filed against 30 odd prisoners who protested Manjula’s death, were being handed to the seven accused still present there in 2021, and I got a chance to see all the records.
The description of the killing by the complainant and witnesses in the chargesheet is horrifying. Manjula, then aged about 38, had come from Yerawada Jail three months earlier. She had completed 13 years of a 14 year sentence, and had just a few months to go
According to the witnesses, on that fateful day, she had been distributing eggs and pav, and two eggs and five pavs were found to be missing. The Jailor had shouted at her and perhaps she had been rude and impertinent too. Later, six jail staff had stripped her and beaten her with lathis, kicks and punches in the small office at the entrance to the Women’s Jail Compound. Her screams were heard by other prisoners as they lined up in the compound to collect their bhatta. Then the jail staff hung her green sari round her neck and dragged her to her barrack, Barrack No. 5 on the first floor, where they beat her again. Manjula was bleeding and lay semi-conscious in the barrack. At 7pm she asked to be taken to the toilet. While excreting, urinating and bleeding all at once, she fainted. The women shouted and shouted to call the jail doctor. She was taken to the JJ Hospital where she was declared brought dead.
Whether the complainant and witnesses in Manjula’s case will decide to compromise, because of the counter case of rioting, and the accused jail staff is therefore let off lightly, one doesn’t know. But the brave insistence by the prisoners after Manjula’s death on registering an FIR has certainly had its impact.
Jhadti
The biggest shock on entering jail is being subjected to a strip search. A thorough search means not only taking off all one’s clothes including underclothes, but also doing squats to show that nothing has been inserted into one’s private parts… Also one is expected to open one’s braid or bun to show that nothing has been hidden in the hair. All ornaments, wristwatches, etc are of course confiscated and kept away at the stage of admission itself. These searches also happen each time we leave for and return from court. Over several months the shock recedes. One even becomes quite nonchalant about stripping in front of the other three or four prisoners who are being taken to the court in the same van. The thoroughness of the search depends on the mentality and mood of the Senior Constable on duty. Many don’t like seeing prisoners completely naked and ask them to replace their upper clothing before revealing their lower parts.
There are other kinds of searches too. Jhadti, a word that encompasses every kind of search, is a regular and humiliating feature of jail life. Barracks are searched at least weekly if not more frequently. And sometimes there are surprise searches. All prisoners are called out at closing time and the constables file into the barrack, with their boots on. They open out all the rolled beddings, tip out the contents of all the bags, helter-skelter, onto the floor. Usually they wear hankies over their mouths and leave with expressions of distaste writ large on their faces, shampooing their hands to wash themselves clean. What do they look for? Pieces of rope or twine, anything sharp that can be used as a weapon – scissors, knife, spoon, blade, sharpener, nail cutter … Rotting food that people have stashed away, extra sets of clothes – you are only allowed two sets and at most a third ‘good’ one for court … Often they encounter dirty bedding or clothes that haven’t been washed. All such items, never mind if anyone protests, are carried out in a sack. Then the women file past for a body check and pat down before they return to sort out the terrible mess and fight vociferously over missing toothpaste tubes or bottles of pickles.
For us in the high security Phansi Yard, the jhadti is a twice daily routine – at opening and closing. Theoretically, that means the entire cell is searched twice a day. In practice, however, it becomes more of a ritual – we show them our tidily folded bedding, get a quick pat down like the sign of the cross made over our bodies, and a hand passed over the bars at the back of the cell. Just a check that we are well and truly locked in. But sometimes the search is conducted under the eagle eye of the Jailor Madam… “Why so many books?” “Do you really need this enormous chargesheet?” “Put away the extra set of clothes…” “Dahi is not allowed, no fermented foods.” “But Madam,” I reply, “the packet of milk gets spoilt, so …”
Roza
The Rozas (fasts) began in the extremely hot days of May and are now at their tail end. Given how hard at work communal forces are, beyond the gates of Yerawada jail, it never ceases to surprise me how naturally the jail adjusts to the month of Ramzan. At the moment 50-odd of the 280 prisoners are fasting, and mind you, many of them are not Muslims (though it is true that a disproportionate number of convicts are Muslim). Not drinking water until Iftaar at 7pm must be sheer torture. The opening of the BC at 2am by the night shift constables, and the delivery of sehri by the mess workers from barrack to barrack, happens like clockwork. It is the usual rice and chapati, but since the sabzi is made for fewer people and has to be made dry to last, it’s usually more tasty than usual. And they also get tea to wash it down. Those who are observing the fast collect their quota of milk at 7am and their evening bhatta at 4.15 pm with everyone else, but they wait till after the bandi and a special 7pm sounding of the toll for the Iftaar. In the barracks, groups of Rozedaars gather together and make special dishes. Fruit salad and milk/ curd is a favourite, since fruits are sold thrice in the month to those who can afford them. Another is ‘fried rice’ made with rice, pickle oil, farsaan (Gujarati snacks), and chopped onions and tomatoes; and rolls made of chapatis filled with crushed peanut paste and the green chilli thecha (chutney) sold in the canteen, or sweet rolls made of chapatis and jam.
All the non-vegetarian prisoners look forward eagerly to the chicken at Eid, prepared by the Muslim prisoners in the Main Jail. Having been told it is delicious, Shoma Di and I quickly sign up for it, with the cost deducted from our PPC account. And there is Sheer Qurma too, for everyone, a bit watery, but with a bit of luck one can get some raisins and pieces of kaju(cashew nuts).
It feels strange that religious rights are conceded so freely in jail but other kinds of collective activity are looked upon with great suspicion and in fact flatly discouraged. The jail authorities nurse a morbid fear of any kind of organizing or unionizing. Perhaps this is in continuity with colonial times when the rulers did not interfere with “native customs” but stamped down hard on political rights.
And indeed, Yerawada is a very old jail built in 1871, and the Main Jail has Wards named after Gandhi, Tilak, Nehru, etc. who were imprisoned here many times during the freedom struggle. In fact, many important political meetings took place here which the British allowed, despite their aversion to political rights. One of them was the historic Poona Pact, which in my opinion was unfair to the absolutely valid concerns of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar and brought about by a sort of emotional blackmail by Gandhiji. Such meetings being facilitated (say for jailed opposition leaders to meet and discuss things) would be unthinkable for today’s independent Indian government.
Judicial Hostages
They are as different from each other as cheese from chalk. Yet they have something in common, for they have both been arrested for their absconding husband’s crimes and are both mothers of small children. They are classic ‘judicial hostages’, hauled into prison while the man in their lives evades justice. Let me call them A and B.
A is petite and looks like a typical middle-class upper-caste Maharashtrian with her neat synthetic saree, her cultured speech and fine features. She is held under the MCOCA Act. Her absconding husband is alleged to have been involved in gang robberies, and unfortunately for her, the properties he bought with his ill-gotten gains are in her name. She says she knew very little about her husband’s activities and went into a state of shock when she was called to the police station and confronted with three other women – all purportedly “wives” her husband had in different cities. Her pretty, talkative daughter is the darling of the Bais. She walks around the jail holding the finger of one of them and reciting nursery rhymes coquettishly like a parrot. She is nearly four now and has begun going to the jail nursery school just outside the jail campus with the elder kids. But I never see the mother and daughter go to court – possibly the trial will not commence till the main accused is arrested? Also, in MCOCA cases, they need a special armed guard and an officer of at least sub inspector rank, even to be taken to court.
B has Bengali features and sharp canines that make her look somewhat witch-like. She seems a little mentally deficient and speaks incessantly when she starts up. We encounter her in the court lock-up while we wait to be called to court for our case. When she’s brought in, she’s really angry, ”Look at that constable! She’s demanding 2000 rupees from me to get something to eat for my child. My sister had come and she didn’t even let me talk to her!” The Constable, when she locks her in, sees all of us sharing some food another prisoner has gotten from home (no doubt after paying an appropriate bribe). The Constable snaps, “Hey, don’t let that woman eat anything. Don’t give anything to her …”
B’s son is so different from her – fair with curly golden-brown hair. A cute little boy just learning to lisp a few words. Looking at the incongruous mother and son pair an unkind thought occurs to me, that the child’s father has probably used her and then abandoned her. He seems to be charged with gangsterism and is absconding. She readily concurs, “Oh, his Papa, pah, he just left us in this mess and ran away …”