A dense tuft of smoke filled the early summer sky of Kolkata’s Dum Dum neighborhood. In a matter of months, breathing would become perilous for tens of thousands in the city and for millions more in the rest of India. But on March 21, 2020, reported positive cases of COVID-19 in Kolkata still numbered less than a handful, and the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, had not yet announced a lockdown. While some Indians, at the behest of their leader, partook in a celebratory cacophony for healthcare workers, banging pots and pans from their balconies, the prisoners at the Dum Dum Central Correctional Home had another response to the government’s handling of the early pandemic. Pelting bricks, alighting prison property with gas cylinders, and even trying their hands—and feet—at freedom as they clambered the prison’s six-meter-high walls, the undertrial prisoners at Dum Dum demonstrated their discontent against their conditions of crowded confinement, the denial of basic personal protective equipment, and the state’s decision to stop family visits at the early onset of the pandemic.

In Siddhartha Deb’s latest, Twilight Prisoners, he asks readers to consider incarceration as both a metaphor and a fact of life in India today. Through his lively and poetic reporting, readers encounter many prisoners of what Deb describes as a “bitter twilight of oligarchy, authoritarianism, and climate collapse.” We learn of Burmese dissidents in the northeastern state of Manipur, an eerie interspecies incarceration at the hands of the 40-year-old Union Carbide gas leak in the central Indian city of Bhopal, and the terrifying repression of journalists, academics, and writers occurring across the country. Not even the Hindu right—neither foot soldiers nor commanders—is spared from incarceration; in Deb’s telling, there is an unexpected and undeniably refreshing suggestion that they, too, are suffering a sort of imprisonment by desperation as they attempt to reap the elusive fruits of a saffronized postcolonial modernity. An entire third of Twilight is devoted to resistance, but here Deb makes some curious choices. We learn not of the likes of the prison riots of the incarcerated masses at Dum Dum, which were prescient in their ability to acutely reflect the cruelty of the Modi government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, not to mention the wider lens into the longstanding practice of state violence through incarceration. Instead, Deb focuses on the resistance of a dozen and a half individuals who have bravely opposed the Modi government in different ways. The individual stories that Deb recounts are undeniably important, but to glean the larger refractions of these acts of resistance is difficult, because Deb focuses mostly on the repressive reaction of the state and not on resistance of India’s multitudinous subaltern masses. What does it mean to think about India as a twilight prison, without adequately considering the struggles of those who riot now—and have always rioted before—against the conditions of life in this so-called prison?

An ennead of already published essays and reporting featured in mostly American and British outlets, Twilight Prisoners follows on the heels of Deb’s fictional writing (The Light at the End of the World [2023], An Outline of the Republic [2005]) with a stranger-than-fiction, nonfiction account of the state of India. By “state,” I mean both senses of the word. Twilight Prisoners is both a chronicle of the condition of life in India as well as an analysis—albeit mostly implicit—of the flawed and fatal projects of those who rule India with the force and impunity of a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Intertextual links between Deb’s earlier work are tightly woven: readers of Twilight will confront some of the same strange and startling oddities as Bibi, the protagonist of The Light at the End of the World, as they explore the haunted afterlives of industrial disaster in Bhopal or airborne military marvels of the Vedic Age.

Deb tells his story of India’s fall and the Hindu right’s rise as an act in three parts. The first act begins, as most conversations about India in the past decade, with Narendra Modi, the strongman of the Global South. Deb’s depiction of Modi, though, departs from the usual accounts of untrammelled popularity and an unchallenged populist juggernaut. Instead, drawing on insights from the psychoanalyst Ashis Nandy, Deb diagnoses the man and the mind, exposing Modi’s troubled inner core and the feelings of insecurity and humiliation that drive his desperate ambitions. In the second act, Deb moves his readers through different Indian states, doing well to decenter the usual political geographies of the Hindu right. Untethered from India’s western states like Maharashtra and Gujarat, or its northern “Cow Belt”—the typical terrain of Hindu right-wing dominance—readers travel to two states in the contentious northeast of India, Manipur and Assam, to witness some of the borderland battles waged by the Hindu right against Muslims.

At the same time, readers do not miss out on the more central and spectacular sites of Hindu-nationalist assertions. There is a timely chapter on Ayodhya, the northern Indian city that became an epicenter of a rising fascist force when Hindu mobs demolished the 16th-century Babri Mosque in the 1990s, claiming it to be the birthplace of the Hindu lord Ram. In January 2024, saffron throngs flocked to Ayodhya once again, this time the violence of their Hindu supremacy thinly disguised in the pomp and ceremony of an official state visit to consecrate the Ram temple built on the site of the erstwhile mosque. Deb portrays the power and politics behind the temple construction and Hindu nationalism more broadly, but the true gift of Twilight might be the granular, textured account of the emotional stakes and affective implications of this terrific and terrifying political project. We see this in the psychoanalysis of Modi that appears early in the book. Still, in subsequent chapters, Deb introduces us to individuals arguably more interesting and potentially more informative than Modi of what life is like in the twilight prison of India. “I didn’t quite know what to make of Dr. Anil,” Deb admits as he recalls the time he spent with the local leader of the Muslim wing of a Hindu right outfit.  

Slight, balding, with a gentle paunch and lively eyes… [Dr. Anil] didn’t project the violence I associated with the RSS. He was a Kshatriya—the warrior caste—but it was hard to take him seriously as a combatant. He laughed a lot, although never at himself, and a boyish self-satisfaction radiated from him, remarkable for a man in his early forties

Dr. Anil embodies many of the deepest contradictions of the Hindu-nationalist project. We learn that despite his distinguished title, Dr. Anil, who has a PhD in library studies, suffers from social dislocations, stunted upward mobility, and debt-ridden economic precarity. Such is the stuff of life in the semi-periphery of the capitalist world-system, another sort of twilight prison, in which the likes of Dr. Anil have been trapped between an ever-shifting 20th-century sunrise of industrial modernity and the 21st-century darkness of rising inequality and exacerbated social vulnerability. Deb’s description of twilight prisoners like Dr. Anil reveals the complex moral constellation of forces shaping the politics of far right in India, and elsewhere: on the one hand, the humanity that is revealed in individuals, including their understandable desire to taste those elusive fruits of postcolonial development; and on the other, the physical and structural violence that undergirds the Indian state’s pursuit of these projects. 

In fact, as Deb suggests, this is a twilight that not only hangs over India but angles widely, spreading to all the variations of toxic nationalism, environmental disaster, and far-reaching precarity that have accompanied the modernist projects of capitalist development and the nation-state more broadly. Deb gestures to, but does not fully delineate, the nature of these two structural supports that hold up the walls of twilight imprisonment in India and elsewhere. 

With its violently enforced borders, plunderous conditions of work, and reductive, repressive social norms, the prison does appear to be a most illuminating analogy for life in India, ensconced by the structures of the nation-state and subsumed by capitalist social relations. But if the prison symbolizes larger power structures from above, then as the undertrial prisoners at Dum Dum demonstrated, the prison riot does the same from below. Indeed, the prison riot becomes a useful concept, because it reveals both the conditions of brutality and deprivation, and also the continued possibility (and promise) of resistance in these dangerous conditions. In theory, Twilight Prisoners seems well set up to investigate this dialectic of resistance and repression. “As long as there is resistance and remembrance, there is still hope,” Deb promises in the introduction. Yet by the time we reach the end of the book, Deb’s reading of the tea leaves of resistance in the three final chapters is only foreboding. Perhaps an accurate assessment of the political climate in India today, but even so, Deb falls short of his own offer to document and honor the ongoing and persistent forms of resistance that continue to take place in India, even in the darkest hours of its twilight. 

To draw extensively on the metaphor of the prison, without adequately investigating the potential of the prison riot leaves us with a one-dimensional understanding of power. Moreover, this flat conception of power tends to move through linear time in Deb’s telling of Indian history, not a dialectical movement as we might expect given his engagement with the Marxist theorist Walter Benjamin. For instance, when we travel to the Indian northeast in the early parts of the book, Deb takes us squarely into a region that has long been fertile ground for resistance. The people of the northeast have long felt imprisoned—first by British imperialism and then, after Indian independence, through the iron-clad defenses deployed by the so-called democratic state against populations whose demands for secession and independence pose an existential threat to the very idea of India. This is a territory that has always reflected—and, importantly, fought against—the tenuous, limited hegemony of the postcolonial nation-state. Yet while the longstanding repression of these marginalized groups may reflect the trap of twilight between the “fall of India” on the one hand and the “rise of the Hindu right” on the other, the longstanding resistance of these groups complicates the notion of stillness and incarceration in the metaphor of imprisonment at twilight. 

In the chapter on the Bhima Koregaon 16 (BK-16), we learn of the various tactics of repression pursued by the Indian state; including manufacturing evidence, manipulating India’s legal institutions, and cruel and inhumane treatment of the 16 human rights activists charged with plans to foment a Maoist uprising. Thousands are detained in India’s prisons, Deb notes, but the 2018 arrests of the BK-16 stand apart in demonstrating the ruthlessness and absurdity of the Modi government crackdown on critics of its Hindu-nationalist project. Yet within a span of a couple of years, it became clear that the repression meted out against the activists was hardly a standout occurrence. Indeed, while Deb seems to depict the fallout of the Bhima Koregaon case as a horrific singularity, he also draws a throughline from the BK-16 to the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which began in 2019 and continued into the early months of 2020. In this case, too, the government relied on similar tactics, including portraying protestors and critics of the Modi government as threats to national security and pushing them into the jurisdiction of anti-terror laws like the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, or UAPA. 

Aside from the ambiguities in Deb’s analysis of the BK-16, there is a larger concern about what to make of Deb’s depiction of resistance in the “twilight prison.” Strangely, we walk away from all three of the chapters of Twilight with a vivid illustration of state repression—specifically under the authoritarian rule of Narendra Modi—but less so of the acts of riot and rebellion that motivate the government’s “massive project of surveillance, entrapment and incarceration” in the first place. For instance, we learn of the important cases of the BK-16, the bravery of the journalist Gauri Lankesh, slain at the hands of Hindu right vigilantes, and of the political commitments of the author and activist Arundhati Roy, but surely the protests of these individuals are but a few bright, blinkering spots lighting up India’s twilight. Perhaps here, Deb could have turned his deft, perspicacious eye toward the women of Shaheen Bagh, a Muslim-majority neighborhood in the southern outskirts of New Delhi, who for 101 days organized, led, and sustained resistance against the CAA. The protests at Shaheen Bagh reflected not just opposition but, as Yash Sharma and Shatakshi Singh have argued, a sort of “prefigurative politics” that allow us to peer past prison walls and catch a glimpse of that promising, periodic glint of subaltern social transformation that sparkles even in the darkest moments of India’s long 21st-century twilight.

How do we orient ourselves to better view such configurations of resistance? Perhaps the question, put differently, is how Twilight Prisoners might also be told as a story of twilight “prison riots”? Alongside Benjamin’s Angel of History, whom Deb invokes “to slow things down, to put things on record,” we might also take up another Benjaminan notion: the “tradition of the oppressed.” Seen from the perspective of those living inside prison walls—both literal and figurative—the so-called state of emergency in which we live is not the exception, but the rule. “We must attain a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight,” Benjamin implores his readers. Only then, he insists, do we realize that the historical task at hand is to bring forth the real state of emergency.

What then are the conditions to realize this real state of emergency? Who will bring it about? While difficult to delineate precisely, for some indications, we might look toward certain moments of mass resistance and riot that light up India’s twilight prison but did not make Deb’s cut: the millions of working-class people who took to the streets in the historic general strike of 2019 or the tens of thousands of farmers who mounted their tractors and rode into the Indian capital to oppose the market reforms of the agrarian sector in 2021 and 2022, and those who came again in early 2024, pushing past the tear gas and police blockades, to express their discontent at the state’s promises, both broken and unfulfilled. Indeed, it is in the riotous resistance of these sorts of multitudinous mutinous masses of exploited, expropriated, oppressed, and excluded that we can begin to see the dreams of sunrise that burn through the prison walls of India’s bitter twilight.