Scroll.in / by Ankush Pal

The memoir transforms personal suffering into a forensic examination of institutional decay.
Anand Teltumbde’s The Cell and the Soul: A Prison Memoir stands as one of the most searing indictments of contemporary Indian democracy, transforming personal suffering into a forensic examination of institutional decay.
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The Cell and the Soul – A Prison Memoir

Author: Anand Teltumbde
Publishing Date: Sep 2025
Publisher: Bloomsbury India
Pages: 256

Noted social activist Anand Teltumbde entered the Taloja Central Prison as accused number 10 in the Bhima Koregaon case and spent 31 months as an undertrial until he was released on bail. As an intellectual who was stripped of his freedom, he lays bares the chilling realities of India’s prisons in his gut-wrenching prison memoir. Part memoir, part diary, Cell and the Soul is a descent into the heart of India’s carceral state, ripping open the belly of the beast-the prison industrial complex-and exposing the brutal, pulsating injustice within.

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Also read:
▪ Anand Teltumbde’s Memoir ‘The Cell and the Soul’ is An Important Read to Understand Post-2014 India (The Wire / Nov 2025)
▪ ‘Never Imagined I’d Be Qualified For Arrest, Let Alone Write a Prison Memoir’: Anand Teltumbde (The Wire / Nov 2025)
▪ No mosquito nets, no medicine—Teltumbde recounts life in prison in ‘The Cell and the Soul’ (The Print / Nov 2025)
▪ I never thought I’d qualify for arrest, says Teltumbde (Hindustan Times / Nov 2025)
▪ “The people are naked before the government but the government is opaque to them” (The Caravan / Oct 2025)

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