For anyone who has spent time studying modern Indian history, prison writings are central to how we understand political thought, dissent, and the relationship between the individual and the state, whether it is Bhagat Singh’s jail notebook or the prison writings of Antonio Gramsci, both of which in very different contexts show how incarceration does not silence thought but often gives it an important space in history, forcing a kind of clarity that perhaps the outside world, with all its distractions, does not always allow.
Seema Azad’s account clearly belongs to this longer tradition of prison literature, but what makes it striking is how relevant it remains; how easily it speaks to the present moment. Her arrest on 6 February 2010 along with her husband, her incarceration in Naini Central Jail, and the charges brought against her under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act or UAPA, accusing her of waging war against the state and having Maoist links, do not read like an exceptional episode from the past, especially when one considers how long she remained in prison before being granted bail by the Allahabad High Court.
What is particularly compelling about the diary is that it does not try to turn prison into a site of constant spectacle or heightened drama; instead it stays with the ordinary, with the routines that slowly begin to define life inside, with the boredom, the waiting, the adjustments that in many ways shape the everyday existence. It situates itself right from the Preface, where Azad not only narrates the circumstances leading up to her arrest but also frames the experience in a broader philosophical way, especially when she writes in the Hindi preface that the world itself is a vast prison and that women inhabit smaller prisons within it, such as the home and the family, so that the women’s jail becomes only a slightly larger enclosure.
There are moments in the book which seem almost deceptively simple but stay with you for a long time, like her description of winter mornings in the barracks where women would gather in the sun, talk among themselves, pick lice from each other’s hair, apply henna, even find ways to groom themselves despite the constraints. What is interesting here is not just the image, but what it suggests about the persistence of selfhood, of the desire to feel human even in such conditions.
The sections on children in prison are perhaps among the most difficult to read. Azad describes with a certain restraint how some children are born inside jail while others arrive with their mothers, and how their world becomes limited to the barracks, the routines, the restrictions, without access to the kinds of experiences that most children grow up taking for granted.
The diary does not remain confined to describing life inside the prison but repeatedly gestures outward, raising questions about the society and the political system that produce such conditions, asking what it means to accuse someone of waging war against the state, what it means for laws like UAPA to be invoked in this manner, and how the process itself, the long years of being under trial, becomes a form of punishment regardless of the eventual outcome.
Azad’s writing indicates the intellectual and ideological world she inhabits, a world that provides her with a language to interpret her experience and perhaps also the strength to endure it, situating her writing within a broader history of resistance and political thought. This is a world inspired by the writings of Bhagat Singh and Pablo Neruda, the world of an activist and a journalist. The book also connects itself to a wider body of contemporary prison writings, whether one thinks of figures like Sudha Bharadwaj, Kobad Ghandy, or Anand Teltumbde, whose experiences similarly reflect on incarceration, law and dissent, suggesting that Azad’s diary is not an isolated narrative but part of an ongoing archive of resistance and testimony.
In the end, what stays with you is not just the narrative of one individual’s imprisonment but the set of questions the book leaves open, about justice, about the state, about dissent, and about how easily the line between freedom and confinement can shift depending on where one stands, and it is perhaps for this reason that Unsilenced resists being neatly summarized or evaluated, because it continues to linger, asking the reader to confront not just the world inside the prison but the one outside it as well.
Eshan Sharma is a writer, documentary filmmaker and a history researcher.