Prison Days

When Mahatma Gandhi called on the nation to join the freedom struggle, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit threw herself into the movement alongside her father Motilal Nehru, her brother Jawaharlal, and her husband Ranjit Sitaram Pandit. Prison Days is her account of her third and last term of imprisonment, which she served in Naini Central Jail in Allahabad.

She was arrested on 12 August 1942. World War II was under way, the country was effectively under military rule, and people were arrested and jailed without trial. That night several lorries full of armed police came to Anand Bhawan to take away one unarmed woman. She was soon joined in jail by her niece Indira Gandhi, who was 25.

The book is Pandit's jail diary, and much of it records the hardships she and her fellow prisoners endured. Their rations were mixed with dirt and stones, water and sanitation were lacking, they lived on an allowance of nine annas a day, and they slept on bare ground. The pages are filled mainly with the personal, day-to-day details of her life inside.

Behind those details lies the politics of the time: the shared wish to cast off British rule and Gandhi's distinctive methods of non-violence and non-cooperation. That conviction gave Pandit and the others the courage to keep going with their spirits unbroken. At midnight on 15 August 1947, India became an independent nation.