Speeches by Indira Gandhi

What a world of difference there is between hearing and seeing from the outside and the actual experience. No one who has not been in prison for any length of time can ever visualize the numbness of spirit that can creep over one when, as Oscar Wilde writes: "Each day is like a year, a year whose days are long." When day after day is wrapped in sameness, spite and deliberate humiliation. As Pethick-Lawrence said: "The essential fact in the life of the prisoner is that he takes on a subhuman status.

Herded together like animals, devoid of dignity of privacy, debarred not only from outside company or news but from all beauty and colour, softness and grace, the ground, the walls, everything around us was mud coloured and so became our jail-washed clothes. Even our food tasted gritty. Through the barred apertures we were exposed to the loo (hot summer wind) and dust storms, the monsoon downpour and the winter cold. Others had an interview and letter once or twice a month but not I. My husband was in the same prison. After persistent efforts we were permitted a short interview, but soon he was transferred to another town. I kept cheerful and busy, reading and teaching. I took over the entire care of a small baby whose mother I was coaching to enable her to earn her living on her release.

There was no yearning for the outside world, for no one worthwhile was there.