Roads to Freedom: Prisoners in colonial India by Mushirul Hasan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Roads to Freedom: Prisoners in colonial India by Mushirul Hasan David Arnold Roads to Freedom: Prisoners in colonial India By Mushirul Hasan. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016. Jawaharlal Nehru, whose own experience of colonial imprisonment ran to almost nine years, remarked in a letter to his sister Vijayalakshmi in June 1930 that "Life is prison is not meant to be exciting—it is about as uneventful as the existence of the average turnip" (cited by Hasan in Roads to Freedom, 179). Nehru's remark was no doubt intended to be flippant, even if it revealed an inner truth about the spirit-breaking boredom and crushing isolation of prison life. But, over the last twenty years, scholars have begun to see in the history of the colonial prison something more momentous than the "existence of the average turnip." One factor in this must surely have been the impact of Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, first published in 1975, though the assiduous reader will search in vain in Mushirul Hasan's account of political prisoners in colonial India for any reference to Foucault's work. Another contributory factor, which his book does amply demonstrate, is the abundance of archival and published material relating to prison life in British India—not so much the official record of prison policy and jail administration, which is a minor concern here, as the rich and varied outpouring in poetry and prose, in letters, memoirs and histories, produced by those who suffered imprisonment for their political convictions. Many of these are works have only relatively recently come to light or been published, or they have acquired fresh significance from being considered as forms of prison testimony. Hasan's main approach in Roads to Freedom is to focus on individuals or groups of prisoners whose writing illuminates their prison experiences or more broadly demonstrates their commitment to, and suffering for, the cause of Indian freedom. Thus, there are chapters tracing the life and works of two prominent Muslim politicians, Mohamed Ali and Maulana Azad, a set of "progressive" Urdu poets (Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Ali Sardar Jafri, Hasrat Mohani and Maulvi Zafar Ali Khan), and the communist M.N. Roy. The largest single section of the book is devoted to the Nehru family and to the letters, autobiographical writing and histories produced by Jawaharlal Nehru during his long, often tedious, periods of incarceration. Hasan's choice of prison subjects and the written work they produced is highly significant. His interest is clearly in those who were not merely nationalistic but also "progressive" or socialistic in their outlook, like the Urdu poets or Nehru and Roy, men who saw their prison ordeal as ultimately serving the interests of the people or whose prison-born work made a significant contribution to the literature of the time. By contrast Hasan makes scant reference to those one-time prisoners, like V.D. Savarkar and Bhagat Singh, who have become heroes of the Hindu Right. By placing particular emphasis upon Muslim politicians and Urdu writers, he demonstrates the importance of the Muslim commitment and self-sacrifice to India's struggle for freedom and the attempts of figures like Mohamed Ali and Maulana Azad to devise for themselves and their community a more progressive and constructive role within modern Indian society. Rather than being a place of intellectual nullity and cultural sterility—the life of the proverbial turnip—prison emerges from these chapters as a site of positive engagement with the religious diversity and cultural heterogeneity of India's past (as, preeminently, in Nehru's historical writing). That creative energy not merely exposed and reflected upon the immediate cruelty and tangible oppression of colonial rule and its prison regime but also enlarged upon the future a self-governing India might justly anticipate. In this sense, Roads to Freedom employs history to deliver a present-day message—about the need for the "younger generation" to remember the "toil and sacrifices" (5) of those who made India's independence possible and the place of Muslims, of Urdu culture, and the progressive outlook Nehru and Roy embodied, in engendering a now endangered freedom. One can but laud Hasan's intentions, but as a work...