Arvind Kejriwal is allowed to take three books to prison. He has chosen the Bhagavad Gita, the Ramayan and Neerja Chowdhury How Prime Ministers Decide.
Whether the Chief Minister of Delhi actually wants to read these books, or whether he wants to be seen as someone who wants to read these books, remains to be guessed. After all, Kejriwal is known for his penchant for political theatre.
Yet there is something deeply telling about the books we turn to when we are cut off from the rest of the world. These are ours Desert Island Drives, that famous BBC Radio 4 program in which guests had to come up with songs that they would carry with them if they were stranded on an island somewhere. In the loneliness of prison, where you are usually isolated and fighting the voices in your head, these books can be your only true companions.
Growing up as a studious kid who was hopeless at sports, I can understand the power of bookmates. Early in the morning, when the house was still moving, I crept to the windowsill in the bedroom I shared with my sister and curled up with my book, drawing the curtains around me, careful not to disturb anyone. That hour of me-time with my book, hidden from the world behind the curtains, was indescribably precious. It sparked a lifelong love affair with books. Every time I traveled abroad, I carefully selected the books I would read during the flight. I recently returned from a trip to the US and was chagrined to realize that, with so many on-demand in-flight entertainment options, I hadn't read any of the books I was carrying. As I retrieved the books and unused bookmarks from my carry-on luggage, I felt a pang as if I had betrayed an old believer.
Obviously, a transatlantic flight, no matter how long, cannot be compared to indefinite judicial detention. But How Prime Ministers Decide is an interesting choice for Kejriwal. The book opens with a scene that many politicians in crisis could empathize with. And that includes books.
Indira Gandhi sits under a jamun tree in the backyard of her bungalow on Safdarjung Road in Delhi. It is April 1977. Her party has just been defeated in the elections and she has lost in her own constituency of Rae Bareli. She tells her visitors Kapil Mohan and Anil Bali from the Mohan Meakin liquor company that she is thinking of disappearing into the hills to a place with a small spring, surrounded by trees.
“I can spend the rest of my life there. And I can read books.”
“Madam, would you like to write a book?” Bali asks her.
“Maybe, but who wants to read my memoirs?” she says somberly.
Mrs. Gandhi never got the chance to write that memoir, although her father's letters to her from prison remain a classic. Other figures from Indian history also used their prison sentences not only to read but also to write – Mahatma Gandhi, Jayaprakash Narayan, Veer Savarkar and Bhagat Singh, to name a few.
In a different time and in a different prison, but largely in the same spirit, wrote Nelson Mandela Conversations with myself. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was sent to the labor camp for criticizing Stalin, wrote about what happened One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich on every scrap of paper he could find. As prisoners of conscience, they had a haloed sense of justice. Mrs. Gandhi, who had lost an election because of the taint of the Emergency, felt like a maligned figure.
Not all prisoners spend their time writing philosophical, introspective memoirs about the meaning of life. Marquis de Sade wrote the highly erotic Justine in 1791 to relieve the boredom of prison life. Sir Thomas Malory was awaiting trial for rape in the 1450s when he wrote his famous book Le Morte d'Arthur about the chivalrous King Arthur. And Miguel Cervantes' Don Quixote was conceived in debtors' prison. So Kejriwal has many genres to choose from when he puts pen to paper.
Kejriwal may look for realpolitik inspiration in the story of Mrs. Gandhi's return, or seek spiritual solace in the Gita. You can see how books about princes in exile and princes on the battlefield might appeal to a beleaguered politician. But it also surprises me that at a time of such great personal unrest, you wouldn't choose books that offer a different kind of comfort, something familiar yet unburdening, a distraction for the mind.
While I was in bed recovering from jaundice for weeks, I finally got around to reading all those cool classics on my to-read list, like War and peace And Moby Dick. But I realized I wanted the comfort of old favorites: detective stories by Agatha Christie and animal books by Gerald Durrell. They were like chicken soup for the soul, part book, part balm, and as long as Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple could solve that murder, there was the reassurance that the world had not completely fallen apart. It was like having old friends visit, telling familiar stories with well-worn punchlines, but in a time of uncertainty you enjoyed them all the more because you knew how they ended.
Therefore, it made perfect sense when I read that veteran journalist Gautam Navlakha, accused in the Elgar Parishad case, had requested a copy of The world of Jeeves and Wooster in jail in 2022. What was funny was that it was initially denied as a 'security risk' until the Bombay High Court intervened. Many were baffled by his choice, but I can see how Wodehouse's idyllic world could provide some comic comfort in difficult times.
I have a good doctor friend who to this day rereads Wodehouse as a stress reducer. As the writer Evelyn Waugh once said, Wodehouse never grows old because he “continues to free future generations from captivity perhaps more wearisome than ours.” In the case of Navlakha, that captivity was all too real.
We take books for granted. Until they are rationed and banned, we do not realize their power. Trade unionist and lawyer Sudha Bharadwaj, accused in the Bhima Koregaon case, needed a special court order from the National Investigation Agency to receive five books from outside every month.
Novelist Leslie Schwartz was sentenced to 90 days in Los Angeles County Jail in 2014 on charges related to drunken driving after years of double-digit sobriety. Schwartz later wrote in the literary portal LitHub that it was books that kept her from falling apart. She was allowed to read three books a week from outside, but also read the books that other prisoners had left behind. She wrote that the arrival of books was “better than sex. Better than drugs or alcohol.” Every time she opened a book, she would inhale the paper and glue and “imagine my entire cell filling up with the words inside.” Most importantly, she had to learn to read each word slowly, savoring it, just to make the book last longer. As long as the book lasted, it was able to block out the sounds of the prison, and the sentences on the page somehow made her forget for a moment the sentence she was serving. “Books may break your heart, but they never leave you,” she wrote.
At a time when I am at my loneliest, abandoned by many allies, I would be grateful for that service. But one must choose wisely. The great actor Soumitra Chatterjee was once asked which books he would like to take with him to his afterlife. He said that without any doubt one would be of Rabindranath Tagore Gitabitan since his poetry had been his lifelong companion, in sorrow and joy. The other one he chose later in life was Abol Tabol, Sukumar Ray's book of nonsense verses. He felt that his quirkiness and nonsense was exactly what he needed forever.
The books that accompany us in our loneliest hours do not always have to reveal to us the deep meaning of life. Sometimes they can offer something much more precious: comfort. As the ABBA song goes: “You and I can share the silence, find comfort together, as old friends do.”
Cult Friction is a bi-weekly column about issues we face all the time.
Sandip Roy is a writer, journalist and radio host. He posts @sandipr