The Jesuit unjustly jailed for his commitment to tribal rights passed away two years ago. One of his fellow prisoners remembers that his famous verse - "even caged a bird can sing" - was not only an image but also an act of shared life with other prisoners.

Mumbai (AsiaNews) – Today marks the second anniversary of the death of Fr Stan Swamy, the Indian Jesuit who passed away at the age of 84 after more than nine months in prison, falsely accused of terrorism over his support for tribal rights in Jharkhand.

Vernon Gonsalves is one of the people who remember Fr Stan. The activist was among those detained in Taloja Jail (Mumbai) in connection with the Bhima Khoregaon affair.

Inspired by a verse written in prison by Fr Swamy, "Even a caged bird can sing", which AsiaNews reported in early 2021, Gonsalves penned a piece published today in Scroll, an Indian news website, in remembrance of the late Jesuit clergyman.

He notes that the elderly priest really sang in prison, summing up a life dedicated to the last.

“Soon after coming into prison, Stan started singing – in a literal sense, “ Gonsalves writes. “He was lodged in the prison hospital, which is a warren of small cells and barracks.

“At that time, another person accused in the Bhima Koregaon case , the poet VV Rao, was in a nearby cell. His condition was critical due to two years of prison neglect and Covid.

“Arun Ferreira and I had been assigned as his carers and were in the same cell. VV could not do things on his own and had to be moved around on a wheelchair.

“Stan, who then seemed relatively better off, could walk, though he was a bit unsteady on his feet. So he would regularly visit VV during the times permitted by jail rules. The period post-tea at 3 pm was song time. Stan would come, sit beside VV, and sing at least one or more songs.

“His repertoire was wide – Jharkhand struggle songs such as Gaanv Chodob Nahin to songs in Tamil, his mother tongue, Paul Robeson tunes and some in Kannada from struggles in and around Bengaluru, where he had been stationed in the 1970s and ’80s.  

“His voice was mellifluous and strong. Each song would be introduced by its background or his association with it or why he wanted to sing it just then.

“We would join in the chorus. We would imagine our voices wafting past the bars and high prison walls, reaching distant peoples and lands.

“The singing was therapeutic for VV,” Gonsalves writes. It helped “his own efforts to rise from the ravages of disease and faulty medical treatment. He’d respond with poetry.

“Arun and I, enervated and weighed down by the dull and drear of prolonged prison years, would be energised. We would, with renewed vigour, sally into the drudge of ferreting out judicial precedents and jurisprudential logic to tackle the fabrications and falsehoods in our case.”

For the activist, Fr Stan’s singing was against prison rules, but it put him in harm’s way. “Rule 19 (i) is normally kept dormant. It is imposed very selectively only on certain groups and activities that the administration targets.

For example, “a Nigerian prisoner’s quarrel with an officer, on some personal issue, in one corner of the jail, invited a total ban, throughout the prison, on Sunday morning hymns and prayers – intended as mass punitive action for all African inmates, who are mostly Christian.”

Singing instead unites inmates in Indian prisons. “Despite such official bias in prohibiting some, while promoting others, the songs of the prisoners themselves co-exist in harmony.

“The story of the immense variety of jail-singing is a tale in itself. Suffice [it] to say that the crowded night-time locked barrack is the site for many a mehfil,[i] where the suppressed and suffering prison soul finds release and expression.”

As activist Sudhir Dhawale’s poetic words proclaim: “Yes Stan, a caged bird can still sing, caged birds still continue to sing, and you, I, all of us, whether in prison or out, will, in chorus sing.”

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[i] Formal venues for indoor recreational activities.

• india
• fr stan swamy
• anniversary
• death
• prison
• poetry