Book Recommendation: Sudha Bharadwaj's 'Phansi Yard'

Sudha Bharadwaj is one of my heroes. I excitedly looked forward to the release of her latest book,?Phansi Yard, and ordered it as soon after its release. It is an extraordinarily perceptive book.

Sudha Bharadwaj is a former trade unionist, a humanitarian lawyer, and a law professor. A US citizen by birth, she finished her undergrad at IIT Kanpur, afterward renounced her American passport, and took Indian citizenship at the age of 21. After college, she moved to Chattisgarh to help workers fighting for better rights.

In 2018, she, along with a few others, was arrested under UAPA for the?Bhima Koregaon case. After three years in jail, the Bombay HC ordered her release on bail.

Viktor Frankl, in his book "Man's Search for Meaning," tells us that “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Going by the stories in her book, you feel that compassion, the same attitude that took her to Chattisgarh to spend the next three decades helping tribals get their rights given to them by the Constitution of India, remained the defining attitude during her jail time.

Her diary entries during her jail time form the basis of the book. Many pages are about the stories of her inmates and their behaviors. Along with it, she also shares about the condition of the jail and the facilities inside. However, these observations are just fleeting details. Humans are the center of her writing.

As a reader, we go to different places, from small villages far away from the cities to slums inside the metropolitan cities where these criminals( or victims) live. She often leaves the judgment about these individuals to the readers. As Nida Fazli warned us in?this?famous couplet(har aadmī me? hote hai? das biis aadmī, jis ko bhī dekhnā ho ka.ī baar dekhnā), an individual has multiple identities inside her. Her stories amply bring these complexities to the fore.

I like this book and recommend it.