New Frame / by Alf Gunvald Nilsen

The Indian poet Varavara Rao was arrested in 2018 and is still being detained. His treatment is symptomatic of how the right-wing government is waging war on opposition and minority voices.

“This life in jail is life crippled –
You can no longer
Apprehend your world
…
Here your mind is an injured eye
That flutters shut”

This is how Varavara Rao, an octogenarian poet, writer and radical activist from the state of Telangana in southeast India, described his experience of imprisonment during the second half of the 1980s, in the essay collection Captive Imagination.
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