Captive Imagination: Letters from Prison

by Varavara Rao

Poet, Marxist critic and activist, Varavara Rao (VV) has been continually persecuted by the state and intermittently imprisoned since 1973, but he never stopped writing during all these decades, even from within prison. When he was subjected to 'one thousand days of solitary confinement' during 1985-89 in Secunderabad Jail, a leading national daily invited him to write about his prison experiences. While prison writing is a hoary tradition, no writer has had the opportunity to publish his writings from jail. VV, however, did meet the demands placed on him as a writer, despite constraints of censorship by jail authorities and the Intelligence section. He decided to test his creative powers in jail on the touchstone of his readers' response and expressed himself in a series of thirteen remarkable essays on imprisonment, from prison.

Genres: Nonfiction, India, Politics

208 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 8, 2010

About the author

Pendyala Varavara Rao (born 3 November 1940) is an Indian activist, poet, teacher, and writer from Telangana, India.

In 1967, Rao formed part of a generation of writers and poets that criticized the Telugu literary community's disengagement with politics. He was instrumental in founding two writer's associations that actively engaged in politics; the Tirugubatu Kavulu (Association of Rebel Poets) in Warangal, and the Viplava Rachayitala Sangham (Revolutionary Writers’ Association), popularly known as Virasam, in 1970. The group was inspired by the Naxalbari uprising

Rao's book, 'Telangana Liberation Struggle and Telugu Novel – A Study into Interconnection between Society and Literature' (1983) is considered to be landmark in Marxist literary criticism in Telugu. He published half-a-dozen volumes of literary criticism and a volume of his editorials in Srujana.

Reviews

[Kandachamy Vijayakumaran]

A rare collection of essays (a combination of poems and poetic prose) from the confines of the jail. Varavara Rao is a rare species with a rare heart. He could write equally about things he is experiencing and that he is not.

[Pranuthi]

Read the telugu version if you can