Diary of an Unseen Witness, by Ampasayya Naveen.
Translated from the Telugu by Kalpana Kannabiran. New Delhi:
Speaking Tiger, 2026. 230 pp. Price: ?499.

Introduction

Diary of an Unseen Witness appears in English at a charged historical moment. The fiftieth year after the declaration of Internal Emergency has drawn renewed attention to states of exception, to routine suspensions of law in the name of order, and to the persistence of ordinary people who remember. In this setting, Ampasayya Naveen’s novel, first published in Telugu as Cheekati Rojulu in 1978, feels uncannily present. It does not present the Emergency as a distant aberration. It shows instead a continuum of state power, caste and class arrogance, and middle class hesitation that bears on our own time.

The book stages this history through a single consciousness. Srinivasa Rao, a Telugu lecturer in a small ‘aided’ college, is arrested during the Emergency and held for nineteen days in an illegal police camp. Cut off from his family, unsure of the charges, he begins to write a diary on stolen scraps of paper. This diary is the novel. It records not only what he witnesses but what happens inside his mind while he waits, fears, questions and slowly understands what has changed forever.

Any English rendering of such a work must carry the strain of memory, the cadences of colloquial Telugu, and the political intelligence of a writer who reshaped modern Telugu fiction. Kalpana Kannabiran’s translation does not treat this as a mere technical task. It reads as an extended ethical argument about witness, about how one might move a language of hurt and resistance from one context to another without domesticating it into smooth metropolitan English.

Author and translator

Ampasayya Naveen was born in 1941 at Vavilala village in Warangal district. He came of age in the decades after Independence, studied economics at Osmania University, and taught for many years in government colleges in Telangana. His fiction—thirty eight novels, several collections of short stories, essays on literature and cinema—turned repeatedly to the lives of students, teachers, clerks, workers, small peasants, and activists in Telangana. His most appreciated formal innovation is the use of stream of consciousness in the Ravi trilogy, beginning with Ampasayya, and he later wrote a Telangana trilogy mapping the region’s social history from the 1940s to the 1990s. He received a Sahitya Akademi award for Kalarekhalu and many other honours, yet his work has remained anchored in provincial towns and small institutions rather than metropolitan literary circuits.

One should be cautious about attaching a fixed label to such a writer. He is not usually introduced as a chronicler of deprivation and helpless lives in any narrow, programmatic sense. Yet the world he writes about—lower middle class teachers, landless workers, small villagers up against landlords, the victims of Naxalite and police violence—is saturated with casteed experience. It becomes impossible to understand this Emergency novel without seeing that the people who most easily disappear into lockups and forest graves are those at the bottom of hierarchies of caste, class, and region. In that sense, he stands beside writers who we readily sympathise with the Dalits, as a crucial chronicler of Telangana who takes humiliation and structural violence as his basic material.

Kalpana Kannabiran comes to this project with a distinct but related history. She is a sociologist and expert in legal studies based in Hyderabad, whose work ranges across sociology of law, feminist theory, disability studies, Adivasi rights, and constitutional jurisprudence. She has worked at NALSAR University of Law and the Council for Social Development, and written extensively on non-discrimination and the Indian Constitution. She has had a long association with women’s movements and legal activism.

This pairing is striking. A novelist steeped in the minutiae of police stations, colleges and villages meets a translator whose writing has grappled with Emergency powers, custodial violence, and constitutional rights. The result is not simply a translation by a sympathetic reader. The English Diary of an Unseen Witness grows into a dialogue between legal memory and literary memory. The translator suggests, in her note, that the Emergency in Andhra Pradesh did not mainly mean sterilisation drives, as in North India. It licensed a far more brutal campaign against Naxalites and supposed sympathisers—preventive detention, torture, extra judicial killings, illegal camps in disused fortalices. Her description of a Memory Project that cuts across fiction, poetry, fact finding reports, legal writings and diaries inflects how she reads and renders this novel.

Narrative and style

Diary of an Unseen Witness is epistolary fiction of a special kind. The diary is not an old fashioned gentlemanly account of ideas and readings. It is written at night in a hidden corner of a police club or lockup, under dangling bulbs, with paper pilfered from police bags. The diarist is not a seasoned political organiser. He is a hesitant, self-doubting lecturer, introspective and full of guilt, whose one risky story has been seized by the state as proof that he is a leftist propagandist.

The diary records nineteen days. The text, however, stretches further back and further forward. Undated pages at the beginning recall Srinivasa Rao’s earlier attempts at diary writing, his youthful urge to write fiction, his embarrassment about sharing his work, and the circumstances under which he wrote “Nyayam,” the story now used against him. Those pages also sketch his relationships with Venu, the revolutionary poet who becomes a Virasam organiser, and with his students who start a literary journal that drifts, under Venu, into the orbit of revolutionary writing. Only after this extended self-portrait do we enter the dated diary—20 June 1976 to 9 July 1976.

The temporal rhythm is also double. On the surface, the record of days is linear. Each entry begins with the date and a brief marker of time—early morning, late night, afternoon. Yet within each entry the mind loops. A knock on the door at midnight pushes the diarist back to a year of harassment by Special Branch men; a ride in a van brings back imagined scenes of his children weeping, his wife collapsing, his job lost forever; a moment of apparent kindness from a constable leads to wider ruminations about cogs in a machine, about state power that grinds both constables and detainees.

In terms of style, attention should be drawn to the stream of consciousness. Naveen’s earlier work is known for the use of this technique. The power of this novel too lies not in a bare record of atrocities but in interiority. The diary moves again and again from external observation to interior monologue, often mid paragraph. The voice records a police beating, then swerves into meditations on human cruelty, the stubbornness of life, metaphysical questions about creation, or the absurdity of a universe in which one lecturer in a small town can be declared a threat to a leader in Delhi.

The stylistic texture is dense with shifts in register. Scenes in police stations are full of reported speech, clipped commands, abuse, mockery. These passages alternate with long reflective stretches in which the lecturer draws on his reading, on memories of college debates, on conversations with radical friends. The diary entries rarely use ornate metaphor. The image system leans towards blunt objects—lathis, boots, pestles, shackles, ice blocks. In this world, violence is not abstract. It leaves marks on skin, rattles teeth, dislodges nails, fills air with the smell of urine and sweat and beedi smoke.

At the level of structure, the novel invites attention to the epistolary form more broadly. One can place this Telugu diary beside earlier letter novels in English and contemporary experiments in fragmented, multi medium texts. Yet what matters here is the tight discipline of a single voice. There are no interpolated police files, no pasted news cuttings, no retrospective commentators. The only supplemental voices are in the closing notes, which gloss references and clarify names for readers who do not speak Telugu. The body of the text retains the integrity of a man writing in a camp, with no knowledge of a future audience, no promise of publication, and no certainty that he himself will leave the camp alive.

Thematic concerns

The Emergency appears here less as a constitutional event and more as an atmosphere thick with dread. The term surfaces in political speeches, in headlines about the Anushasana Parvam, in police wireless messages that bark coded orders. People in the town know that something suspended rights, that preventive detention orders can land on anyone viewed as inconvenient, that the police can claim a drunken brawl or an encounter and bury bodies in fortalices. Yet there is also a strange everydayness. The lecturer continues to teach classes, grumble about delayed salaries, worry about his children’s school fees. The violence does not strike a public figure. It falls on a college teacher who is already precarious in his job and marginal in the college hierarchy.

Marginalisation in the novel is not only a matter of caste location, though caste saturates the background. The story “Nyayam” that haunts Srinivasa Rao retells the dispossession of a farmhand Mysayya by a landlord. The sons who go to the forest to ‘seek justice’ do so after the court rules in favour of the landlord. The Emergency gives police forces a licence to hound not only overt Naxalites but also anyone whose writing has inspired youth to challenge landlords. Yet the lecturer himself never becomes a militant. He is part of a large lower middle class, some of whom speak the language of revolution, others who write memoranda to governments about unpaid salaries, others who simply do whatever will keep jobs and children safe. The state erases these distinctions.

Silence and speech move in tense counterpoint. In the police van, the detainees fear that any loud objection will lead to beatings. On the other hand, the police mock their silence as guilt. The diary becomes a fragile space where a man can speak without immediate reprisal. He writes what he cannot say in interrogation. He writes what he cannot convey to his wife or children. He writes about fear of death and about moments of shame—his refusal to join Virasam, his delight in the small celebrity of one successful story, his cowardice when students praise him as a revolutionary author.

One can read this writing as a strategy of sanity. The diarist cannot send messages, cannot see family, cannot know how long he will be held. Unless the mind finds some outlet, terror will unhinge him. Each night, after the constables fall asleep and the mosquitoes begin their assault, he pulls out stolen slips, and writes through tears. The diary checks the drift towards madness. At the same time, the act of writing creates another stake. When he is released, he finds that he can no longer write fiction at all. The man did not die. The writer did. The diary is both a last work and an account of that death.

The politics of testimony in this novel runs through many figures. There is the boy Suryam, whose father, a poet, has been taken away, and who tells the lecturer that revolution will one day release them all and deal with these policemen. There is Narasimhulu, the murderer who cooks for the camp and speaks, with startling candour, about his life of petty crime, violent robbery, and betrayal of comrades. There is Taruna, the asthmatic woman activist, who refuses treatment until the police allow her out of a suffocating cell and who calls them animals to their face. There is Kiran, the militant mislabelled as Anil, whom the police torture brutally and later claim to have killed in an encounter. Each of these figures bears witness in a different register, yet Srinivasa Rao is the only one who writes.

The diary also stages the ambivalence of middle class witness. The lecturer is drawn to Venu and Ramaraju, admires their courage, feels shame at his own vacillation. He accepts the honorary editorship of Vijaya, then wants to withdraw when it turns revolutionary. He refuses to join Virasam, citing family responsibilities, lack of ideological clarity, fear of police. He grumbles about his corrupt college chairman, yet steps back when the chairman threatens to brand him a Naxalite. When he hears constables boast about molesting village women during raids, he feels revulsion but also a kind of helplessness at the machine that grinds both victims and low ranked police. The diary does not present a heroic self. It lays bare compromises that many middle class readers will recognise with unease.

Translation as interpretation

The English text reveals three striking traits. First, it adheres closely to the original scene order and content. Second, it retains the narrative voice and interiority. Third, it preserves local colour through selective use of Telugu words and register shifts. A close reading bears out this assessment.

Kannabiran retains the full diary scaffold, including undated prefatory pages, day by day entries, and an ending that turns away from the camp towards the fate of the protagonist’s writer self. She avoids smoothing the temporal jumps. The English too moves from present fear to past memory and forward staring anxiety. The sentences do not mimic English stream of consciousness as found in Woolf or Joyce. They follow an Indian English rhythm closer to thinking aloud. This choice keeps the lecturer’s voice anchored in the linguistic world he inhabits.

The translation refuses to iron out shifts in social register. Educated characters speak in standard English with occasional Indian turns. Senior police officers use a sardonic, clipped diction. Lower ranking policemen and petty criminals speak in mixed Hindi Telugu English phrases. Instead of converting everyone into one neutral idiom, the translation marks speech differences, as the Telugu does, yet without heavy dialect spelling that would exoticise or caricature. This is not an easy balancing act. Many translations from Indian languages flatten such distinctions. Here the constable Suryam does not sound like the DSP. The boy Suryam from the village does not sound like the young urban revolutionary poet.

Kannabiran keeps specific Telugu terms that carry social meaning—honorifics such as garu, kinship terms such as annayya, words for feudal figures, for types of labour. She does not bury the main text under footnotes. A small number of notes and a short glossary at the end offer help, but often the context suffices. In an age of smartphones a reader can search for unfamiliar words, and that extended glossing would break the reading flow. The translation trusts the reader to inhabit a slightly foreign verbal environment, to infer meanings through use and tone.

At the same time, the translator deftly draws on her own engagement with law and rights. Her translator’s note is not neutral. It recounts her work on Emergency literature, her reading of court judgments in Andhra Pradesh, her understanding of how emergency provisions were used to attack political opponents, students, Dalit and left organisations in the region. She names this effort a Memory Project and locates the novel among poems, legal essays, diaries, fact finding reports, and plays. This framing influences her English choices. When she renders lines about criminalisation of dissent, she does not blunt their edge. When she describes illegal camps in disused fortalices, she preserves the specificity rather than turning them into generic prisons.

Critical positioning within protest and testimonial writing

Diary of an Unseen Witness belongs to several intersecting traditions. It continues a long history of prison writing in South Asia, from colonial jails to postcolonial lockups. It keeps close company with African and Latin American texts that record diaries of incarceration under military regimes. It also speaks into an Indian literature of protest that foregrounds lived experience of power, caste humiliation, and police violence.

Although Naveen did not begin from a self-declared project of writing from a depressed caste location in the strict sense, his work intersects strongly with that current. He wrote about landless peasants losing their land to landlords, about the misery of private school teachers treated as bonded labourers, about women trampled by patriarchal families and institutions, about left-wing militancy as a response to long histories of exploitation in Telangana. Critics and research students have taken his novels as material for work on Telugu social history and marginal subjectivities. In this novel, the lecturer himself is not described in explicit caste terms, yet his students, the lumpenised drunk Vadderas, the cook Narasimhulu, the dispossessed farmhand Mysayya, and the terrorised villagers all occupy positions that caste and class create.

When one places this book beside Dalit and anti-caste classics, interesting affinities emerge. There is the insistence on detailing police procedure and camp conditions, which one finds in Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s accounts of caste humiliations or in many Marathi Dalit autobiographies. There is a frankness about fear and shame that recalls Bama’s Karukku, where the protagonist moves between convent and village, head full of guilt and anger. There is the focus on how a single sentence in a story can be seized to declare someone an enemy of order, in the same way that a small act of speech or refusal can bring a Dalit labourer under attack.

Testimonial writing is never just a transcript of events. It is shaped by genre, by expectations of readers, by the teller position. Here the diary becomes a citizen’s testimony about a period in which state law turned explicitly arbitrary. The diarist sees at close hand the torture of schoolboys and radical students alike. The police use the same third degree methods, the same threats, the same sexual innuendo, regardless of the groups they label subversive. Emergency as experienced in Karimnagar reduces ideological distinctions to a single figure—the political accused. The diary does not flatten ideological differences, but it shows that state violence cares little for such nuance.

Within Indian writing on the Emergency, this novel stands apart. Other language texts often used allegory, moved the setting into distant times possibly to evade censorship, or spoke in coded terms. Naveen wrote, immediately after 1977, about illegal camps, about specific police abuses, about the routine threat that someone might be taken to a forest and shot and later declared killed in encounter. In English, readers might think first of Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, with its harrowing accounts of forced sterilisation and slum demolition. That book centres Parsi and Dalit characters in Bombay. Naveen’s novel, in contrast, stays in Telangana and focuses on preventive detention and custodial torture. Together these works fill out a more complete picture of the Emergency as lived across classes, castes and regions.

Conclusion

Diary of an Unseen Witness in Kalpana Kannabiran’s translation is not an easy book to read. Its pages contain recounted beatings, cigarette burns, near suffocation in filthy lockups, and the casual obscenity of policemen who treat raids as opportunities for sexual predation. The prose does not flinch. Yet the novel is not pornography of pain. It stands as a considered act of memory by a writer who had already honed a method of entering consciousness and by a translator deeply aware of how law and language mark bodies.

The book’s achievement lies in its refusal to simplify. The lecturer is not turned into a heroic martyr. The police are not single toned villains. Some are cogs who know they are complicit and feel wretched. Others, like Prabhakar and Venkaiah, take pleasure in cruelty and in petty extortion. The students are not pure revolutionaries. They also crave recognition and some romanticise jail as a fast track to poetic fame. The diary lays bare a complex social field in which courage, cowardice, calculation, and conviction cut across caste and class lines, though structural power flows unmistakably from landlords and leaders towards the machinery of law and order.

For readers who engage with Dalit writing and with South Asian prison literature, this book opens a Telangana archive that has long remained linguistically fenced. It stands alongside texts by Ambedkar, by Mahasweta Devi, by Bama and others, but with a distinctive form and tonal register. For those thinking about translation as political work, it models an approach that honours linguistic density and local inflection rather than sanding them down into global English.

Half a century after the Emergency, preventive detention remains a familiar instrument. Special laws framed around terrorism and sedition carry an echo of the old language of Internal Security. Diary of an Unseen Witness speaks into this present. It invites readers to attend to documents that survive only because someone stole paper from a sub-inspector’s bag and wrote through the night. It reminds us that what history keeps often depends on such fragile acts.

For a professor of literature, concerned with memory and justice, this English version is not merely a work to teach in classrooms. It is a book that asks one to read with unease and with gratitude—unease at the worlds it reveals, gratitude that those worlds have not been entirely swallowed by darkness.