Tracing Carceral Continuities: A Review of Recent Works on the Incarcerations of the 'Bhima Koregaon-16'

This systematic review analyses three recent books that focus on the incarceration of the “BK-16”—sixteen activists who were detained in the aftermath of a 2018 gathering to celebrate the bicentenary of the Battle of Koregaon: (1) Suchitra Vijayan and Francesca Recchia’s How Long Can the Moon Be Caged (Pluto Press 2023); (2) Alpa Shah’s The Incarcerations: Bhima Koregaon and the Search for Democracy in India (Harper Collins India 2024); and (3) Sudha Bharadwaj’s From Phansi Yard: My Year with the Women of Yerawada (Juggernaut 2023). The authors argue that, read together, the three works help situate the political and legal context of the BK-16 case within ongoing forms of repression against Dalit, Adivasi and Muslim communities, while illuminating the multifarious nodes of a carceral apparatus. Further, the review draws on accounts of incarceration within these works to analyse the dynamics of gender, caste, and labour that characterise the experiences of confinement and establish the Indian prison as a critical site of collective resistance against state and social oppression. This discussion extends our understanding of law, state, and society in contemporary India, particularly as it is inflected by the relationship between sociopolitical resistance and carceral power, offering a way of reading the present politically.