Today, October 12, marks two years of G.N. Saibaba’s passing.“They don’t know how to make me die. Because I love so much, the sounds of growing grass,” professor and activist G.N. Saibaba wrote in November 2017. In July 2022, writing from the Anda cell of Nagpur Central Jail, he responded to a question from London-based architect and artist Sofia Karim about the colour he loved seeing. “I cannot see any colours from my prison cell except the rusted iron bars and dilapidated dirty walls,” he wrote. His favourite colour since childhood was “parakeet green”. “Green is the colour I long to see from this prison cell where no colours are around. Green is the colour of planet earth’s life. The colour of my freedom that I see in my past five and a half years is green,” he told Karim. Breaching the boundaries of the prison imposed upon him, he turned it into a place from which he thought about peasants, Adivasi dispossession, Palestine, democracy, fascism, death and life. In a letter to Vasantha, his life companion, dated June 15, 2023, he described the distance between prison and home as something far greater than geography, writing that “It sounds like a trillion kilometres”.And when even this distance failed to sever him from the world, he wrote that “the forces of darkness are trying to put off all the light around us”. He described his confinement in the Anda Cell as being in a “cooking pot”. His co-prisoners had been soaking blankets in water and placing them around the cell. They poured water on the floor, but within minutes the water disappeared and the blankets became dry. Then he made a connection that was characteristic of his political imagination. “If El Nino affects severely, my health will be adversely impacted just like that of the conditions of farmers in the country, who will be unable to withstand the new climate changes”.In “When Is the New Year?”, written to Vasantha on December 30, 2017, the prison clock is the first object to appear. It ticks on the high walls while Saibaba sits alone in his cell, measuring a time that has been taken from him. Behind his closed eyes, the universe expands beyond the walls, and the tiny cell of his head becomes a space where time can no longer be measured by clocks. From there, the poem brings into the cell the violence of the world. Genocides across Asia, Africa and Latin America, Bastar, Iraq, Syria, Kashmir and Palestine. His own physical pain becomes entangled with this wider violence, as the image of the nuclear bomb rises alongside the shooting pain in his left hand. Then time itself breaks apart: “Time explodes. Into pieces of peace.” Saibaba turns to Jerusalem and Bethlehem, invokes Jesus Christ and Prophet Mohammed, and asks to count time again from the beginning, and writes that “The greatest democracies spew out the greatest nukes. End of imagination!”.Then he asks again, “My friend, when is the new year?”. “The monsoon of democracy ended long ago,” he writes, asking why the rains of liberty have not come.Life, imprisonment and the people beyond the wallsIn “Ode to Life”, written to Vasantha on July 25, 2018, he thought of John Donne and the idea of death as a great leveller. “I still feel I am a young student of a learning campus even after turning fifty and growing grey behind the bars”.Sai had been removed from the university, from the classroom, from his students and from the ordinary passage of academic life. He writes of nations that imprison life, of the deathly glory of states, of business becoming death, of an earth that itself will one day die. Finally, after moving through death, stars, nations, history and the universe, he returns to Vasantha: ‘My love, life of my life, these days I think of death, I mean about life. Because ‘I have a pact of love with beauty. I have a pact of blood with my people’’.The final lines are Pablo Neruda’s, from “Do not ask me” in Songs of Protest. But they also illuminate the political ethic of Saibaba’s life. I met Sai soon after his release in March 2024. Sai’s smile had a childlike resemblance, one that greeted you the moment you arrived at home, as he sat at the door waiting to ask questions about what had changed. I asked him if he regretted anything. He said he had not had enough time to learn Urdu. He told me about a letter he had written to Anjum, the fictional character in Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.“I suddenly felt that you are the only person who would really take my letters seriously and do something concretely for my freedom,” he wrote. He explained that he did not know the language she knew well. “One of the biggest blunders I committed in my life was not to learn Urdu.”The prison authorities allowed him to write only in Hindi or English. He could read Hindi but not write it, and was not permitted to write in Telugu, his mother tongue, because no prison staff member could censor it. “Therefore, I am not fortunate enough to write to my love in Telugu,” he wrote.He then drew a parallel between Anjum and himself. “You have been living in a graveyard, I am in an Anda cell far away from the ‘dignified’ society (the Duniya). Both of us are banished from the larger society. Ironically both of us love the larger society.”On September 12, 2013, Saibaba’s home was raided. His laptop, hard drives and pen drives were seized. On May 9, 2014, while returning from examination duty at Daulat Ram College, he was intercepted by the Maharashtra police and eventually lodged in Nagpur Central Jail. The prosecution alleged links with the Communist Party of India (Maoist), and the Revolutionary Democratic Front, which it described as a Maoist front organisation. Speaking about the injury to his left shoulder, which had left him unable to move it, Sai attributed it to the violence with which he had been dragged out of his car. He was already living with cardiomyopathy, but imprisonment brought further health complications to his already impaired body. His heart function had declined to 55% and he would frequently lose consciousness in jail because of sleep apnea. Kidney and gallbladder stones, deterioration of the shoulder muscles, spinal pain and the formation of a cyst in his brain were among the many conditions he endured. One health complication followed another, placing an immense burden on his body over the years of imprisonment.On March 7, 2017, Saibaba was convicted along with Hem Mishra, Pandu Narote, Vijay Tirki, Mahesh Tirki and Prashant Rahi. They were sentenced to life imprisonment. He was over 90% physically disabled and dependent on a wheelchair. He contracted COVID twice in prison. When his mother’s health was failing, they sought permission for him to see her. The request was rejected. His mother died of cancer on August 1, 2020, and Saibaba was not allowed to attend her last rites. A later request to attend her first death anniversary was also rejected.The denial carried a particular poignancy because his mother had carried him to school as a child, enabling his education despite his disability. Decades later, when she was dying, he could not be beside her. The death of Pandu Narote in August 2022 brought another dimension of incarceration into Saibaba’s writing and life. Narote died in prison after contracting swine flu, while Saibaba himself had fallen seriously ill around the same period. Writing to Vasantha, he recalled that he had been unable to write for almost two months and had somehow survived, while his co-accused had not.Sai’s letter to SofiaNarote’s death returned Saibaba to a question that had occupied his political life for decades. Pandu Narote was from the most primitive tribes of central India as such designated by the UN, he wrote to Karim. “He did not know what law, court and a case meant till he was implicated in this”. Narote’s Adivasi identity, his unfamiliarity with the legal system and his death in custody were, for Saibaba, connected to the ways in which people already made vulnerable by social and economic exclusion could be drawn into the criminal justice system.Narote did not live to see the acquittal. On October 14, 2022, the Bombay High Court acquitted Saibaba and the other accused. The following day, the Supreme Court suspended the acquittal and ordered further examination of the case. The second acquittal came on March 5, 2024. Almost ten years had passed since his arrest.Seven months later, on October 12, 2024, Saibaba passed away at Nizam’s Institute of Medical Sciences in Hyderabad.Time spent with Sai remains difficult for me to separate from the letters I later encountered through Vasantha. It was through her that I first came across Karim’s letters to him.Karim had campaigned for Saibaba’s release between 2020 and 2024. She exchanged letters with him while he was imprisoned. Her own engagement with imprisonment had begun through her uncle, the photographer and activist Shahidul Alam, whose incarceration led her to imagine prison spaces and the possibility of entering them, if only to hold his hand.In one of the letters I exchanged with her after Sai’s death, she wrote to me that “I think of Sai often even though I never knew him. I remember his lonely letters from Anda”.In her letter to him dated January 1, 2023, Karim returned to his description of parakeet green. She had reread “When Is the New Year” and realised that she had incorporated its words and spatial ideas into her early architectural drawings. She described drawings in which architectural space became a system containing the whole tiny universe with all its planets and stars of galaxies that Saibaba had seen behind his closed eyelids. The drawings were predominantly black. The void of the prison entered the architecture.But so did green.Karim imagined a library in a derelict brick structure. There was a small green glass window low near the dirt floor. There was a table with a rusted metal section beside a wooden top and a green inkwell. On the wooden section, she imagined a white book containing hundreds of letters calling for Saibaba’s release.She told him that “I have few teachers for this architectural journey on this side. My teachers are you on the other side”.Karim wrote to Sai again on January 1, 2024, as she had on the previous occasion of the New Year. He was still imprisoned. This time, the letter opened towards Gaza and Palestine. She wrote that she had not celebrated the New Year because of what was happening in Gaza. She returned to Saibaba’s prison clock, and asked, what is the New Year in Gaza?She brought his words into her own reflections on Palestine. She wrote about Jerusalem and Bethlehem, about poets killed or censored, about Ghassan Kanafani and Refaat Alareer, and about the relationship between poetry, imprisonment and political memory.She wrote that his poem felt like a prophecy.From the war on people to the prison cellTo understand why Saibaba spent almost a decade in prison, his life has to be read backwards from the cell. At the age of five, in 1972, he developed polio paraplegia. In the late 1980s, he encountered revolutionary literature through the Revolutionary Writers Association, VIRASAM, and the songs of Jana Natya Mandali. In August 1990, he participated in the agitation around the implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations. In 1992, he joined VIRASAM.He later worked as a lecturer at the Institute of Printing Technology in Secunderabad. In 1995, he became the Andhra Pradesh state general secretary of the All India People’s Resistance Forum (AIPRF). In 1996, he was involved in an International Seminar on the Nationality Question at Jawaharlal Nehru University, with delegates from Kashmir, the Northeast and the Philippines. The seminar eventually produced “Symphony of Freedom”.In 1998, his work moved further into anti-imperialist and anti-globalisation politics through the Forum Against Imperialist Globalisation. He understood the struggle of Adivasi peasants against displacement as part of a larger conflict between two models of development. A corporate model organised around corporate interests, imperialism and foreign capital, and a people’s model centred on social needs and productive independence.The distinction was not abstract. The Ranchi Declaration of 2007 extended support to anti-displacement movements against corporate plunder and affirmed the need for a people’s model of development. The Visthapan Virodhi Jan Vikas Andolan was subsequently formed in Ranchi. For Saibaba, displacement could not be separated from the political economy of development. The conflict over land and forests was also a conflict over who controlled resources, whose interests development served and what kind of social order would be built. The conflict became increasingly violent in central India. The Salwa Judum campaign that began in Bastar in 2005 was presented as a campaign against Maoists. Human rights organisations and fact-finding teams documented killings, sexual violence, village destruction and mass displacement of Adivasis. In 2009, as the congress government intensified its security campaign against Maoists, Saibaba helped form the Forum Against War on People. His opposition to Operation Green Hunt was rooted in his argument that the military campaign could not be separated from the struggle over Adivasi land and mineral rich forests. In a 2021 interview with The Hindu, he said he had “gathered evidence suggesting that the ruling class wanted access to Adivasi resources and that Operation Green Hunt was launched to kill, maim and dislodge them”.After his release, the future he imagined was remarkably concrete. He wanted to return to the classroom.This is why Saibaba cannot be reduced to his suffering in prison. He was a political organiser, intellectual, teacher and poet. His death therefore cannot be remembered only through the final legal outcome of his case. The second acquittal marked a decisive moment in its legal history, but it could not return the years he spent in prison, restore the time lost with his mother or reverse the physical consequences of his incarceration. The cumulative violence of these conditions, and the state’s repeated denial of the care he required, amounted to what can only be understood as institutional murder.In his own words, Sai encapsulated his idea of freedom from the Anda cell, writing to his mother that “Fear not for my freedom. Tell the world, my freedom lost is freedom gained for the multitudes. As everyone who comes to stand with me takes the cause of the wretched of the earth, wherein lies my freedom”.“A world of silence is blown into smithereens,” Sai wrote in his poem “The Ocean is His Voice” written to his daughter Manjeera in 2019. He taught us that silence is never empty. There are voices inside it, prisoners, Adivasis, farmers, mothers waiting outside prison gates, letters crossing walls and poems written against the prison clock. And there is grass, still growing.Syed Affan is a Delhi-based journalist and researcher who reports on human rights, the environment and policy