On a crisp morning in February 2010, journalist-activist Seema Azad boarded a train from Delhi to Allahabad with a bag of books purchased from the World Book Fair. However, she never reached home. By nightfall, she, along with her partner Vishwa Vijai, had been forcibly arrested under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act—UAPA—charged with ‘waging war against the State’, and locked inside Naini Central Jail. Across their two and a half years of incarceration, as she and Vishwa Vijai repeatedly tried and failed to secure bail for themselves, Azad kept a meticulous jail diary, documenting the grim realities of life behind bars.
In this memoir, based on her jail diary, Azad pries open India’s carceral labyrinth: insect-ridden food, dilapidated barracks, deep-rooted caste and gender hierarchies, and the ceaseless indignities of a system built on bribes and exploitation. Woven into this reality are the unforgettable stories of the women prisoners she meets—a majority of them Dalit, Adivasi, Muslim—and the children who have never seen the outside world, all navigating a system designed to crush them. Against this backdrop of shared struggle, Azad chronicles her own legal battle through courtroom farces and media vilification, culminating in a life sentence and, finally, an unexpected release.
Unsilenced is a personal, political, and lyrical testament to courage and the stubborn power of the written word. Translated from the Hindi original, Zindan Nama, this is a searing, eye-opening account of conviction and compassion in the face of injustice.