The Indian Express / by Shah Alam Khan

Anand Teltumbde’s The Cell and the Soul shows how incarceration, historically meant to improve a person’s character, today has become the State’s tool for revenge
The arrest of intellectuals as a fall out of the Bhima-Koregaon (BK) violence of 2018 has given us an array of essays, books and poetry that speaks volumes of the beauty of creativity within the precincts of prison. One such book is The Cell and the Soul by Anand Teltumbde.
In her path breaking treatise, Are Prisons Obsolete? (2003), American activist Angela Davis argues that despite its classist, racist and patriarchal foundations, prisons have invisibly crept into our ‘routine’ consciousness as a prerequisite of modern society. Angela wrote this for the largely privatised and brutally capitalist American prison system. The Cell and the Soul shows the Indian prison system is not very different.
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▪ The Cell and the Soul – A Prison Memoir

Author: Anand Teltumbde
Publishing Date: Sep 2025
Publisher: Bloomsbury India
Pages: 256
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Also read:
▪ Voices From Prison: Of Lives Stolen For Dissent (Outlook / Jan 2026)
▪ No mosquito nets, no medicine—Teltumbde recounts life in prison in ‘The Cell and the Soul’ (The Print / Nov 2025)
▪ Taloja Jail: Lives Fading in Silence Behind Iron Walls (Outlook | by Sudhir Dhawale | Sep 2025)
▪ I saw firsthand how callous prison officials and their negligence led to Stan Swamy’s death (Scroll.in | by Arun Ferreira | Jul 2025)
▪ BK-16 Prison Diaries: The ‘ordinary’ in extraordinary times: A captive’s life in Covid-19 (The Polis Project | by Gautam Navlakha | May 2025)
▪ BK-16 Prison Diaries: Sagar Gorkhe on his battle to survive Taloja jail’s brutality (The Polis Project | by Sagar Gorkhe | Feb 2025)
▪ Ramesh Gaichor on the Elgar prisoners’ defiance of the neo-Peshwai prison system (The Polis Project | by Ramesh Gaichor | Sep 2024)
▪ INTRODUCING THE BK-16 PRISON DIARIES SERIES (THE POLIS PROJECT / JUNE 2024)

▪ The Feared – Conversations with Eleven Political Prisoners

Author: Neeta Kolhatkar
Publishing Date: Dec 2024
Publisher: S&S India
Pages: 272
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▪ From Phansi Yard: My Year with the Women of Yerawada

Author: Sudha Bhardwaj
Publishing Date: Oct 2023
Publisher: Juggernaut
Pages: 216
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▪ How Long Can the Moon Be Caged? Voices of Indian Political Prisoners

Authors: Suchitra Vijayan and Francesca Recchia
Publishing Date: Aug 2023
Publisher: Pluto Press
Pages: 247
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