It was meant to be a good week for Anand Teltumbde.

The academician-activist had been invited to speak at a book discussion at the immensely popular Kala Ghoda Arts Festival in Mumbai. And a court gave him permission to leave Mumbai for the first time since October 2022, when he had been granted bail after spending 31 months in jail on the condition that he stayed within the city.

The professor at the Goa Institute of Management had been arrested in April 2020, accused along with 15 others of being part of a dubious conspiracy to spark caste riots in the village of Bhima-Koregaon near Pune in 2018.

Finally, after more than two years of being confined to Mumbai, Teltumbde had been allowed to travel to a family wedding.

Since the wedding trip clashed with the book discussion, Teltumbde asked the organisers of the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival to reschedule the event.

I was party to this information only because I had been invited to moderate the discussion, titled “Incarcerated: Tales from Behind Bars”. Teltumbde was to speak about his book The Cell and the Soul: A Prison Memoir. Also on the panel was Neeta Kolhatkar, author of The Feared: Conversations with Eleven Political Prisoners.

Since his release, Teltumbde has been breathtakingly prolific: since October...

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