The lightness and laughter of Sudha Bharadwaj

Sudha Bharadwaj was arrested on October 28, 2018 for alleged involvement in 2018 Koregaon Bhima violence

I Spoke to Sudha Bharadwaj for two hours over the phone. Out on bail after spending over three years in jail, where she had been packed off for her alleged role in the 2018 Koregaon Bhima violence, I presumed a mournful, weary voice would narrate her experiences during incarceration. Or a voice raging against those who scripted her arrest on October 28, 2018. But Bharadwaj can laugh as few can. She laughed at how, on stepping into Pune's Yerwada Jail, she was asked to take off her clothes to be searched. She laughed at how she could largely glimpse life - trees and people, for instance - through prison bars of the cells constituting the death row yard, where she had been lodged. She laughed uproariously, stopped to catch her breath and then continued laughing at the question: Is there a class bias in Indian laws?

Life became relatively easier when Bharadwaj was transferred from Yerwada to Mumbai's Byculla Jail. She lived in barracks here, with others. She was laughing yet again as she described how inmates would peer into the bathroom and ask her to hurry up. She said Byculla Jail rooted for film star Shah Rukh Khan's son Aryan to get bail. Haha, she went.

Her voice would, occasionally, turn deadpan. She did not laugh while reminiscing about how she, daughter of a top-notch economist, who graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, shunned a life of luxurious certainties to work among Chhattisgarh's industrial workers. The misery she saw in the labour camp established for workers who constructed the 1982 Asian Games infrastructure had her thinking.

Sudha Bharadwaj was released on bail after spending over three years in jail for her alleged role in the 2018 Koregaon Bhima violence

Then she met Shankar Guha Niyogi, the iconic trade union leader who had formed the Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha (CMM). To Chhattisgarh she went, teaching at schools that Niyogi's union ran, then began unionising workers and also became an interlocutor for workers in their dealings with lawyers representing them in cases involving big corporates. "Didi, become a lawyer," the workers suggested, for who could tell whether their advocates had been bought out? Bharadwaj became a lawyer in 2000.

These details of her life were published in the media. What astonished the middle class was her decision to relinquish her American citizenship. True? She laughed. She said she was an accidental child, born when her parents were on post-doctoral fellowships in the United States.

At 23, she went to the US Embassy to surrender her American passport. She mimicked officials who asked: Had she consulted her father or husband? Did she know she would not be able to ever join the American Army? "Well sir, I don't think I want to join the American Army," she recalled telling them, guffawing.

Her "No" can be as spontaneous as her laughter. Yatindra Singh, the chief justice of the Chhattisgarh High Court between 2012 and 2014, asked Bharadwaj whether she paid income tax. Her income was lower than the lowest taxable slab. Singh inquired: Would she consider becoming a judge? Nah, for who would represent workers?

Bharadwaj, the lawyer, was stretched in jail, where she wrote at least a hundred applications for fellow inmates who had been granted bail but could not raise surety or money to walk out free. Or for their interim bail during the brutal second wave of COVID-19. No wonder, on hearing Bharadwaj had got bail, they danced for her and got her to dance as well. She laughed the laugh of satisfaction typical of those on whom love shines.

She laughed at the timing of her arrest. After working for 30 years in Chhattisgarh, she shifted to Delhi to teach at the National Law University. She wanted to focus on her daughter, who was about to leave school, and earn money to fund her college education. It was then they came for Bharadwaj, tearing her away from her daughter.

From then on, the two met in jail, seeing each other across a glass wall, but only able to talk over the intercom, with the phone placed on the visitor's and the inmate's sides. Bharadwaj did not laugh as she described her pain at not being able to hug her child, who would, occasionally, break down.

Out on bail, Bharadwaj is judicially debarred from leaving Mumbai and Thane. Could she identify with singer Bob Dylan's line: "The birds in the sky are chained to the pathways of the sky"? She laughed: "That's me, tethered."

She said she had to figure out how to earn a living in a new city. Teach law? She replied, laughing, "Now stigmatised by the case, would any institution accept me?" Here is the chance for cash-rich private institutions to live up to their boasts of espousing liberal values. They would fear state surveillance, she said, bursting out.

Bharadwaj's laughter has a philosophical touch. It is her way of negotiating the Kafkaesque world, of creating a distance between herself and the absurdities of life, to not be overwhelmed by the torments of the wretched of the earth. The lightness of her being symbolises freedom, a freedom difficult to completely curb, a spirit impossible to break. You cannot be a Sudha Bharadwaj without learning to laugh.

The writer is a senior journalist
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