{"id":4109,"date":"2019-03-24T11:20:23","date_gmt":"2019-03-24T05:50:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/?p=4109"},"modified":"2019-03-24T11:20:28","modified_gmt":"2019-03-24T05:50:28","slug":"prison-tales-vi-1965-lives-in-bosom-of-this-generation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/point-of-view\/kashmir-talk\/prison-tales-vi-1965-lives-in-bosom-of-this-generation\/","title":{"rendered":"Prison Tales VI: 1965- Lives In Bosom Of This Generation"},"content":{"rendered":"<\/fb:like>\n

Nostalgia <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Prison Tales <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

1965  Dwell in Their Bosoms <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

ZGM <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

They are no Malcolm X, who has a big story to tell. They are not AlexHaley,\nwho have to share a grand saga of chastisements and confinements of Kunta Kinte\nand his descendants. Nonetheless, they also have their stories to share, some interesting\nand touching, on occasions cascading with wit and humour. I am talking of whole a generation of medicos, engineers,\nprofessionals and senior officers who were students in the sixties and for\nparticipating in the 1965 students movement had suffered long years of internment,\nnow a fading generation. Meet them on any occasion, over a table in a coffee\nshop, on a manicured lawns of a club, at sumptuous marriage dinners or on in\nfuneral meetings; they rarely talk about\ntheir professional achievements and comforts during their long inning in the\ngovernment but often turn nostalgic about their days behind the high prison\nwalls. On relating to their dreadful days at the then notorious Red-16\ninterrogation centre they forgot there ever was a whiff of happiness in their lives, the \u2018laughter from their eyes evaporates\u2019,\nand the reddening\neyes manifest    even  five decades after the anger still dwells in\ntheir bosoms.   <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was not at a  gala get-together but at a  sombre function where many student activists\nof the older generation had gathered that I realized that the stories of pain\nand agony buried in their chests come to their lips just with a soft scratch.\nThe natter started in a  lighter vein when\na medicos friend     remembered  his internment as a second-year medical college\nstudent  said that Er. Anwar Ashai then a\nsenior student at Regional College and general secretary of the Student Youth\nLeauge as kitchen in-charge in jail  behaved like a grandmother and without fail\nincluded tomatoes in the little menu. Those days   Ka\u2019ani Bata<\/em> ,  boiled rice with lots of grains with hulls intact\nwas served to detainees  not to protect\nprisoners against beriberi diseases but as \na punishment. With cooked tomatoes, one could gulp down unpalatable Ka\u2019ani Bata <\/em>with a bit ease. The chit-chat over Ka\u2019ani Bata and<\/em> tomatoes, with a couple more present at the get-together joining\nthe conversations, added episode after\nepisode to the story- the untold story of the mid-sixties that perhaps will\nnever be written.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most of them with a lot of hatred remembered a superintendent jail. In his\nhauteur, he haughtily called himself as a\nprogeny of Amr ibn Hisham mostly known as Abu Jahl- one of the most hated characters in the Islamic history. Almost a half-century after they remembered him for his\nobnoxious behaviour and maltreatment of\nstudents- for their deep hate against him none has pardoned him. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Students arrested under the Defense of\nIndia Rules (DIR) and Preventive Detention Act (PDA) were paid a daily\nallowance of one and a half rupee for\nmeeting their food and other expenses. Ten to twelve students pooled their\ndaily allowance and formed a joined kitchen. Nonetheless, the jail officials\ntook a slice from the little daily\nallowance. Like a terrible dream the spiteful behaviour\nof head wardens Makhan Lal, Beg and a horrible looking warden Kabir still lives\nin their memories. On a mere excuse Makhana, as they call him even today would\nshift any student from a barrack to six\nfeet by six feet cubicle,  cells meant\nfor prisoners on death row or to Zenana-Khanna<\/em>, enclavement\noutside the central jail premises with\nalmost inmates in it-  then there were no\nwomen prisoners in jail.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a dismal scenario, where   superintended jail identified himself with the\ndevil incarnate, and his lieutenants grunted and snorted, we are not priests but\nevil spirits who break you physically and spiritually into submission, there\nwere children of less god, the warden some with noble souls. Mohammad Sadiq,\nmany called him Sidi Mout <\/em>a short-statured warden always with a smile on\nhis face was still ready to carry a message\nfrom the inmate students to his family- for doing this, he never sought favour\nfrom them. Some friends have lots of stories about \u2018hearing-impaired warden\nArjan Nath, the meek and mild fellow, who had mastered the art of smuggling letters outside the jail-\nsometimes he put these under his cap and on occasions between the folds of his\ngreenish-Khaki turban. In the mid-sixties, the Daily Aftab and the Daily\nHamdard were the only two major Urdu daily newspapers; they published stories and editorials on the basis of the\nanonymous letters smuggled by the warden. That the jail authorities were shaken down their spine  when a letter smuggled\nby Arjan Nath was published in the Indian Express, that opium was cultivated by\nsome criminals inside the jail, and it\nhad caused the  jail minister to visit the prison,\nwas one of the stories that youth of\nyesterday and oldies of today still remember.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These youth of yesteryears, on a\nmention of jails and detention forgetting that a lot of time had flashed by, at the drop of\na hat share their stores with the vivacity\nof a storyteller like Dickens. <\/p>\n<\/fb:like><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nostalgia <\/p>\n

Prison Tales <\/p>\n

1965  Dwell in Their Bosoms <\/p>\n

By <\/p>\n

ZGM <\/p>\n

They are no Malcolm X, who has a big story to tell. They are not AlexHaley,
\nwho have to share a grand saga of chastisements and confinements of Kunta Kinte
\nand his descendants. Nonetheless, they also have their stories to share, some interesting
\nand touching, on occasions cascading with wit and humour. I am talking of whole a generation of medicos, engineers,
\nprofessionals and senior officers who were students in the sixties and for
\nparticipating in the 1965 students movement had suffered long years of internment,
\nnow a fading generation. Meet them on any occasion, over a table in a coffee
\nshop, on a manicured lawns of a club, at sumptuous marriage dinners or on in
\nfuneral meetings; they rarely talk about
\ntheir professional achievements and comforts during their long inning in the
\ngovernment but often turn nostalgic about their days behind the high prison
\nwalls. On relating to their dreadful …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4110,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-kashmir-talk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4109"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4109"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4111,"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4109\/revisions\/4111"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peacewatchkashmir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}