I am revisiting Sudha Bharadwaj’s courageous, revealing and inspiring book From Phansi Yard: My Year with the Women of Yerawada (Juggernaut Books, Rs 799 hardcover, Rs 499 online). Early one morning in August 2018, Bharadwaj was arrested. She is a respected trade unionist and human rights lawyer, who actually gave up her US citizenship and took up Indian citizenship, choosing to work for the rights of the poor and tribals in India, in Chhattisgarh and elsewhere, for over three decades. She was charged under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, UAPA, of inciting violence in Bhima Koregaon village in Maharashtra. At the time Bharadwaj was arrested, she was working as a visiting professor at the National Law University in Delhi, and is raising a young daughter, Maaysha. Arrested along with several other human rights activists, Bharadwaj is contesting the charges in court. She spent over three years in prison, from November 2018 to December 2021, in Yerawada Jail, Pune, and in Byculla Jail, Mumbai, before being released on bail in December 2021. The book is based on her prison diaries, partly initiated by Ajaz Ashraf, senior journalist and mid-day columnist. The bail conditions do not allow her to leave Mumbai or discuss her case.

Bharadwaj was born in Boston to parents who were academics. Later, after securing an MS in Mathematics from IIT Kanpur, she worked in Chhattisgarh as a trade unionist and activist with the Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha “that fought corrupt forest officials and moneylenders and built ponds.” At 39, she also qualified as a lawyer. In 2018, someone told her to watch Republic TV “as I was being ranted about there,” she writes. “I was shocked and served a defamation notice on the channel and its editor and anchor, Arnab Goswami… I was anxious, but actually it seemed more Kafkaesque than anything else.” On 28 August 2018, she was arrested.