The focus of this book has been an analysis of women political prisoners in postcolonial India with an emphasis on the seventies, the period of the captive and the political. While the chapter before the seventies demonstrates the vibrant presence of women political prisoners in the colonial times and in the immediate aftermath of Independence, the substantive arguments deal with the contexts and conditions of women’s incarceration in the Naxalite era and during the Emergency period. The post-seventies phase shows a continuity of the framework underlying political incarceration, and it demonstrates the iniquitous and unjust nature of contemporary penal order. The testimonies studied have elucidated the twin themes of solitude and solidarity, and the book has relied on the rich counter-narratives of political lives before and within captivity for demystifying incarceration and for offering the possibilities of solidarity and resistant politics. In this concluding chapter, the analysis towards decolonizing prison power is pursued through discussions on the violence inherent in captivity, on the power of testimony and on the possibilities of further research.

Captivity: Forms of Violence

Beginning with the darkest definition of captivity, a custodial cell in which the police’s writ runs large sans accountability, the book has expanded on diverse forms of captivity that underlie incarceration. Contrary to the commonly held belief that when a person becomes a ‘prisoner’ the person is automatically jailed, the arguments dwell on the experiences of arrest and interrogation that precede imprisonment. And, as the book further demonstrates, even while being incarcerated, the police can hold the right to take custody of the person in connection with the charge levelled. As a consequence, while the term ‘incarceration’ explains imprisonment, ‘captivity’ is a preferred term as it offers a wider room for addressing the gamut of powered relations that accused persons can be subjected to. Although there are two major sites of captivity, the police lock-up and the prison, there can be other forms of captivity which bypass the police station, such as a paramilitary camp or a room in a superintendent’s bungalow, sites where B. Anuradha was interrogated (2014: 26–27). Since impunity structures interrogation, detention can be illegal, as affirmed by Anuradha.