India, July 18 -- Of all autobiographical literature, prison memoirs are the most distinctive. They take us into a sharply different world pervaded by themes of perdition, violence, and redemption. Despite their wretchedness or perhaps because of it, prisons have proved to be fecund sites for the production of confessional writing. They are at once a record, therapy, escape, and subversion of the bondage of the institution.

Mahmood Farooqui's The Tihar Players is all of this and more. It stands apart from the many fine accounts of prison that have been published in recent years: Sudha Bharadwaj's Phansi Yard, Anand Teltumbde's The Cell and the Soul, Kobad Gandhy's Fractured Freedom, Arun Ferreira's Colours of the Cage, and earlier, Iftik...