Colors of the Cage: A Memoir of An Indian Prison
Colors of the Cage: A Memoir of An Indian Prison
“Arun Ferreira gives us a clear-eyed, unsentimental account of custodial torture, years of imprisonment on false cases and the flagrant violation of procedure that passes as the Rule of Law. His experience is shared by tens of thousands of our fellow countrymen and women, most of whom do not have access to lawyers or legal aid. This country needs many more books like this one.”—ARUNDHATI ROY
A powerful eye-witness account of life in an Indian prison shows how abolition is necessary to achieve a democratic transformation of society.
In stark and riveting detail Arun Ferreira, a former political prisoner, recounts the horrors he faced in prison—torture, beatings, corruption, codes of behavior and solidarity among inmates, strikes mounted by prisoners to protest brutality, the general air of hopelessness, and the small consolations that kept hope alive—and describes how others are facing similar situations around India and throughout the world.
Arun Ferreira, a human rights lawyer and member of the Committee for Protection of Democratic Rights, was branded and arrested as the leader of the propaganda and communications wing of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) in 2007. He was acquitted of all charges in 2014 only to be re-arrested in a coordinated police crackdown in 2018. He is currently facing a host of charges, including sedition and terrorism under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, a draconian piece of anti-terror legislation with a wide ambit and vague definition used to target academics, lawyers and human rights defenders expressing dissent.
Naresh Fernandes is a Mumbai based journalist and author. He is the editor of Scroll.in and was previously the editor-in-chief of Time Out India and worked at The Times of India and The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of Taj Mahal Foxtrot: The Story of Bombay’s Jazz Age and City Adrift: A Short Biography in Bombay.
Born in northeastern India, Siddhartha Deb is the author of two novels and the narrative nonfiction book The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India (2011). Recipient of the 2012 PEN Open Book Award and a finalist for the Orwell Prize for his nonfiction, Deb’s journalism, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Guardian, The New Republic, n+1, The Nation, Dissent, The Baffler, and The New York Times.
