MUMBAI, Nov. 1 -- The haunting strains of Hum Dekhenge, Faiz Ahmed Faiz's timeless song of resistance, filled the auditorium at the Marathi Patrakar Sangh on Thursday evening, setting the tone for an evening of remembrance, reflection and resistance. The occasion was the launch of The Cell and the Soul, a prison memoir by scholar and human rights activist Dr Anand Teltumbde, written during his incarceration in the Taloja Central Jail under the Elgar Parishad-Bhima Koregaon case. Published by Bloomsbury, the book was unveiled by Dr Bhalchandra Mungekar, former Mumbai University Vice-Chancellor and Congress Rajya Sabha MP, in the presence of senior advocates Mihir Desai and Dr Gayatri Singh. Also present were two men acquitted in the 2006 Mumbai train blasts case - Ehtesham Siddiqui, a chemical engineer, and Dr Abdul Wahid Shaikh, co-organiser of the Innocence Network. "I never imagined I would write a prison memoir," said Teltumbde. "I never thought I'd be 'qualified' for arrest," he said. Teltumbde is accused of inciting caste-based violence through speeches on December 31, 2017, which resulted in violent clashes the next day in Bhima-Koregaon and elsewhere in Maharashtra. "If Ambedkar's Republic has now become a Republic of Inversion, I thank the present dispensation for this imprisonment, which I consider an award." Teltumbde's co-panellists, Ehtesham Siddiqui and Dr Abdul Wahid Shaikh, recalled their own experiences of prison life - hunger, humiliation and endless bureaucratic cruelty. "There are no doctors, no medicines, not even mosquito nets without permission," one of them said. "We tried to tell the truth about what we saw, and they said it was anti-prison propaganda." Siddiqui, who spent 19 years in jail before being acquitted, said of his time behind bars, "In Nagpur Central Jail, there was a noose hanging near my cell. Every time I saw it, I felt a shock. That's when I decided to write." He said the lack of education was the greatest failure of the prison system: "I did 22 courses in jail through IGNOU, but getting enrolled was harder than studying." Written during his 31-month imprisonment in Taloja Jail, Teltumbde's The Cell and the Soul is dedicated to his brother Milind Teltumbde, a CPI (Maoist) operative killed in a 2021 encounter. The memoir also pays homage to Father Stan Swamy, the Jesuit priest and co-accused in the Elgar Parishad case, who died in custody in 2021 after being denied a sipper despite suffering from Parkinson's disease. In one of his poems written from the Anda Cell, a year after Swamy's death, Teltumbde wrote: "A sipper, deemed a dangerous weapon, by the paranoid deep state, denied to you for days until it turned into national black humour." While releasing the book, Dr Mungekar said, "The book suffocates you, it destroys your illusions about democracy." Calling Teltumbde "a true intellectual", he added, "An intellectual is defined not by knowledge but by commitment, by how much one sacrifices for society." Quoting from a chapter titled A Nation of Anti-Nationals, Dr Mungekar said: "India today has become the only country where nationalism is used to silence its citizens. The coercive apparatus of the state dehumanises individuals." Senior lawyer, Mihir Desai, noted that while judges increasingly refer to jails as "correctional institutions", the ground reality is brutal. "There are hundreds of judgments on prison reform, from Hussainara Khatoon to Charles Sobhraj, but none are implemented," he said. "Two of the men on this panel were acquitted because there was no case, yet no police officer was held responsible. Without accountability, injustice repeats." Senior advocate Dr Gayatri Singh called Teltumbde's prison memoir "a mirror to the perversity of the system", recounting how police officers illegally entered Teltumbde's house using a watchman's keys, took videos, and later held a press conference maligning his name. "Even the police, who were trespassers, never faced accountability," she said. "We live in a system where terminally ill prisoners like Stan Swamy must file pleas for a sipper." The Cell and the Soul has been endorsed by Ramachandra Guha, Arundhati Roy, and Shanta Gokhale, and reviewed as "a mirror image of society, except for the delusion of freedom". As the audience filed out of the auditorium, the final lines of Faiz's Hum Dekhenge echoed in the background, a reminder that the struggle for justice, dignity and reform continues both inside and outside prison walls....