From the Prison to the Home: Women’s Friendships and Advocacy
By Trishna Senapaty
I first entered the women’s prison when I volunteered with the PUCL in Rajasthan between 2019 and 2021.This was to be a component of my PhD research on gender and incarceration in India. Over a two year period I met women who were incarcerated, formerly incarcerated or had been stuck in cycles of incarceration and release. I spoke to women in the closed prison, the open prison and in public places around the city while volunteering in the PUCL’s prison program.
Although for many it was their first and only experience of long term imprisonment, this was never their first experience of captivity. Women had experienced captivity in state shelters where madams did not allow them to meet their partners of choice and limited their contact to “blood relatives” whom they feared. They had experienced physical violence and confinement in their natal and marital homes. This made them painfully aware that their release from prison was not a guarantee of their freedom. Freedom was always difficult to describe, sometimes even hard to comprehend for women who had rarely been allowed to leave the confines of their homes.
Shilpa, a formerly incarcerated woman who had been experiencing domestic violence in her marital home looked at me incredulously when I asked if she had ever approached the police.
“I had no involvement with the court or police before this case. I had never even been out of the house. I didn’t know where the roads lead to or where the nearest police station was located”
Women’s freedoms and their mobility were constantly regulated by their families and custodians of their honour. For so many women their imprisonment was the culmination of a “pyaar ka lafda”, (problems in love) or a “jhagda” (fights over land and property) with close relations and neighbours, as one woman explained to me. In both typologies of the circumstances for women’s offences the family was always central to the dispute. In the first women saw themselves as exercising their agency and choice in partnership and deciding whether to leave a marriage or enter a new relationship. In the second, women described being caught as helpless spectators in physical altercations between men. They reported being framed in conflicts between men in which they were uninvolved or passive.
Women were always actively seeking opportunities for escape from domestic violence, to form new romantic relationships and friendships or to pursue a working life, no matter how far out of reach it felt. The story of their incarceration was always one of desire, of escape and aspiration for a better life.
In all their stories, I was deeply struck by two things: Efforts to control women’s autonomy were so often cloaked as acts of “care.” Prison governance was modelled on the structure of the family. Many supervisory and senior staff spoke of prisoners through familial idioms. While the emphasis on caregiving cultivated strong relationships between prisoners, COs, supervisory and senior staff, it displaced a more universal and rights driven approach to prison governance.
Women compared the prison to a hostel, and to an ashram, that is to places where women were disciplined through the control of their bodies and their relationships. The prison warden was very much like a hostel warden who could on occasion counsel you when you were sad and missing home but castigate you if you tried to ask for more or attempted to cross boundaries of prescribed femininity.
In the prison context, rehabilitation for women tends to mean a return to the family, to the family custodian and guardianship which for so many women is the original source of violence. Since their release, the women I spoke to had created new families, these marriages were self arranged or determined and often organized within communities of prisoners. There were others who additionally ran their own small businesses or engaged in daily wage work in the garment industry. While their marriages and living arrangements did not transcend structures of caste and class, they enabled women to dream of futures beyond the ones their families had imagined for them. These encompassed owning their own cell phone, traveling to a new place with their partners and working once their children had grown up and left home.
The prison administration actively discouraged intimacy between women. Once you left prison, they made it difficult to return to meet your old friends, to write them letters or stay in touch with each other. They tell me you have to be discreet about such things. It was equally hard for women to remain coupled in relationships with other women once they left prison for different reasons. As a formerly incarcerated gender non conforming mother, Chand told me:
“women love women when they are inside prison. I am the only one who stayed true to my love for women. Once they come out, they always go back to men.”
The love and friendship between women fights against all odds upon a return to the world outside. Shilpa, showed me a beautiful birthday card painted by a friend from her days in prison. “I have no idea where she is now”, she tells me. “I keep these things as memories from when I was inside”. Sometimes women do stay in touch. “vo meri jigri dost hai. Me usse kahin bhi ja kar mil sakti hun” another formerly incarcerated woman tells me.
Women are so often frozen in images of victimhood and helplessness. Their custodians in the home and the prison, highlight their illiteracy, their inability to understand the law, their hyper emotionality, and their lack of intellect. Incarcerated women are frequently denied access to library books and reprimanded for requesting reading material of a non-religious and moral nature. A sense of being worthless pervades all the stories that women are taught about themselves. I want to tell you some of the stories that women wanted to tell me about themselves. Through all the hardship and isolation, women described their experience of prison as a coming to knowledge, a period in their lives of immense growth and learning, a time of advocacy and a time of friendship.
The return to the outside world could mean the end of friendships and bonds formed in prison. I want to end with short vignettes or sketches of four people I got to know who had been incarcerated at different and overlapping times at the women’s prison. In very unique ways they each created spaces for temporary care and safety for women in prison and after their release.
Rajni is an upper caste, middle class woman who upon her release ran a small eatery business in the city. After her release she continues to maintain a relationship with prison administration who reach out to her to identify and search for the families of women who are ready to be released but have no family members who have come forward to “claim” them. Rajni is a woman who is privileged relative to other women in prison. Despite her proximity to institutional
power (as someone who has previously worked in the prison office and shares a mentoring relationship with prison staff), she expresses to me, a sense of solidarity with other incarcerated
women who are “not like her”. She offers women temporary shelter despite her limited resources and tries to find them jobs.
Chand is a gender non-conforming mother and troublemaker in the women’s prison. He was widely known for his oral and written complaints that had driven prison authorities up the wall. With the help of “more educated” prisoners he wrote letters about the unavailability of prison manuals in the prison library despite repeated requests by incarcerated women, matters like the insufficient availability of basic amenities like soap and toothpaste. While able to write haltingly in Hindi, he didn’t have the confidence to write (the application) on his own. He had written this letter with the assistance of another prisoner, “a lawyer stuck in prison because she was in love with a Pakistani man who did not have a valid visa”. I am reminded of feminist theorist Sara Ahmed’s idea of the complainant as performing counter-institutional work. To make a complaint, the complainer is compelled to invest energy in learning about institutional processes and procedures (while knowing that they often don’t work) while risking institutional backlash and violence. The complainant forms a community in the process of creating a complaint. The complainant as Ahmed tells us is a trouble maker who, by identifying the problem, becomes the problem, and disrupts life as usual in the prison.
The prison is a different place now, as compared to when I was in prison, Shilpa tells me. A former prisoner at the women’s prison, Shilpa too reflects on prisoners’ own labour and knowledge in changing everyday conditions in the prison. She reminisces that when she was first brought inside “there was nothing…”. She recalls teaching other women to read and write by tracing the alphabet on dry patches of sand, and the dustbins placed on her initiative inside each barrack for the convenience of young and menstruating prisoners. The prison wasn’t how it used to be back in 2008. She remembers the introduction of new facilities inside the prison such as the beauty parlor, the tailoring classes, the new equipment.
Years later I know that Shilpa is suspicious of Chand, she does not understand his confidence, his masculine presenting self, his excessive and wilful defiance of all rules. Shilpa is tactful, she believes in cultivating good relations with authority figures, she is strategic. Their paths do not often cross, but I see their lives and labours as intertwined.
I write about women while being deeply skeptical about treating “women’s incarceration” as a separate domain of intervention. If women’s crimes are “social” , so are those of men. If women’s crimes are political, so are those of men. We cannot think about women’s incarceration and freedom, in isolation from the violence men experience and the root causes of violence that are rooted in heteropatriarchal family structures. This requires us to acknowledge that there are fewer women in prison not because women are rarely imprisoned and in fewer numbers than men, but because they are imprisoned differently and in spaces other than the prison. To imagine a world without prisons we must think beyond the binary. We must listen especially to gender non conforming prisoners who shatter the facade of both men’s and women’s prisons with their repeated refusal to be schooled in codes of feminine docility or masculine aggression and indifference. They do not fit into the boxes of the “good” versus the “bad” prisoner. We need to understand that the language of “crime” and labels of criminality are deficient in capturing the complexity of our experiences and that we are never wholly good or bad people. We have all been harmed in varying degrees and are capable of causing harm. But we also have the infinite capacity for love, friendship and the will to advocate for each other.
Note: All names and identifying markers have been changed