ANAND TELTUMBDE’S ‘THE CELL AND THE SOUL’ is not just a prison memoir., it is a mirror to the Indian state, society and criminal justice system.
It refrains from fitting into the neat category of carceral literature, refusing to limit itself into description of everyday mundane life of prison. The book begins not inside the prison cell but long before it, tracing the slow tightening of the State’s grip on dissenting minds. Written during his 31-month incarceration in Taloja Jail under the Bhima Koregaon case as one of the acclaimed ‘BK-16’, it is as much an account of confinement as it is an investigation of the democracy that produced it.
The memoir opens with a chilling domestic scene: Teltumbde is woken from sleep by his wife, who has just received a call from the Director of the Goa Institute of Management (‘GIM’). The Pune Police have raided the campus — and broken into their house. The description of that moment, cold and factual, carries the weight of a life upturned. Watching a raid on television is one thing; having it at your door, Teltumbde writes, is “like fluid from a festering wound seeping into your being.”
The book’s emotional core lies in Teltumbde’s disbelief. He cannot fathom that a man like him — a professor of Big Data Analytics, an IIM alumnus, a corporate professional and a practitioner of Capitalism — could be treated as an enemy of the State. “I was under the delusion,” he admits, “that because of my qualifications, integrity, and public image, I might not qualify for arrest.”
This moment of naïveté , becomes the entry point into a deeper philosophical inquiry: What kind of democracy imprisons its thinkers?
When Teltumbde’s anticipatory bail is rejected, he realises the inevitability of his arrest. From that point, the narrative takes on the rhythm of resignation. His first court hearing captures the innocence of a man who still believes in the rule of law. Dressed in executive attire, he hopes the Court will see “the absurdity of the charges”. But the State, he realizes, sees nothing and everything — and does what it is told to do.
Inside Taloja Jail, Teltumbde’s transformation begins. Accused No. 10, stripped of agency, learns to observe. Like an ethnographer of his own captivity, he turns his gaze outward — towards the broken bodies and resilient spirits of his co-prisoners. He finds in their stories a microcosm of India’s systemic decay: the cruelty of warders, the casual corruption of the staff, the endless bureaucratic humiliation, delays and buck passing. His reflections echo the writings of his co-accused, Sudha Bharadwaj, whose prison notes chronicled the lives of seventy-six women she encountered behind bars. Both find in the carceral space a brutal mirror of the society outside.
Teltumbde’s analysis extends beyond the prison walls. He draws parallels between underreported Covid-19 deaths inside jails and those outside, arguing that the same callousness governs both. The prison, for him, is not an exception but an epitome — a concentrated image of India’s moral collapse.
“Prison is a mirror image of society,” he writes, “except that it does not pretend to be free.”
The most chilling passages are not about physical suffering but about psychological dislocation — the tectonic shift that occurs when the State erases your identity and replaces it with a number. For a man whose life revolved around teaching, writing, and thinking, the deprivation of intellectual freedom is unbearable. Yet, even in this vacuum, Teltumbde writes with a clarity that refuses despair. His notes are not mere recollections; they are in the words of Czech-French novelist Milan Kundera, “the struggle of man against power “ and “the struggle of memory against forgetting”
In one of his most revealing essays, he reflects on his father’s songs — the ballads on Balya Dhiwar, an outlaw who was hunted by the same police now hunting him. The generational echo is haunting: the marginalized hero of his father’s songs and the scholar-son both find themselves criminalized by the same institution. This historical recursion — the State’s continuous war on its own conscience — gives the memoir its tragic grandeur.
Throughout Prison Notes, the book oscillates between the personal and the political — between the man who missed completing his course at GIM and the citizen trapped in a collapsing democracy. This duality gives the work its haunting tone: part academic essay, part cry of anguish.
“These notes,” he writes, “are not just a glimpse of jail life but a commentary on the system that perpetuates problems while pretending to solve them.”
Teltumbde also turns his gaze to the judiciary — an institution he once revered. He accuses it of deliberate blindness: of obscuring the truth rather than illuminating it. The police, he suggests, operate with a similar logic — a mix of banality and sadism, where corruption is not an aberration but the system itself. His account of how the same State that crushed ordinary citizens bent over backward for the powerful, exemplified in his reference to Param Bir Singh, exposes the farce of India’s “rule of law”.
The memoir’s dedication adds another layer of tragedy. It is addressed to his late brother, Milind Teltumbde, killed by security forces and branded a dreaded Maoist — and ironically, also a co-accused in the same case. Their intertwined fates expose the absurdity of State paranoia: one brother in the jungle, the other in an IIM classroom — both treated as enemies nothing more.
Teltumbde calls the Bhima Koregaon case “a landmark” — not in legal history, but in the story of how democracies destroy their dissidents.
“It was my pursuit to make the world a better place that landed me in prison,” he writes in the prologue. That single sentence condenses the book’s moral gravity.
In the end, Prison Notes is not a lament but a reckoning. It demands that readers look beyond the spectacle of arrests and trials, and into the machinery that makes them possible. It insists that what happens in Taloja is not distant from what happens outside — that the bars of the prison and the fences of our freedoms are made of the same iron.
Teltumbde’s memoir stands alongside the finest of India’s carceral literature — from Sudha Bharadwaj’s From Phansi Yard to Iftikhar Gilani’s My Days in Prison. But unlike most, his is the voice of a scholar dissecting his own persecution. It is a study in how democracies collapse.
The Cell and the Soul leaves you haunted, not by what Teltumbde endured, but by what he reveals: that in India today, to think freely is itself a subversive act.