Conditions and Limits of the Autobiographical Self in Joya Mitra’s Prison Memoir Killing Days

Abstract

As a genre, prison writing has often been analyzed as a subcategory of the larger umbrella term we call ‘life narratives’. In my paper, I look at Joya Mitra’s Han mar(1989), translated by Shampa Banerjee as Killing Days and examine the conditions and limits of the autobiographical self emerging in the prison memoir by situating it within the intersections of two paradigms- the role of the prison in the ‘institutionalized killing of the subject’ and theories about different genre of life-writing like autobiographies, testimonies and others.