Akin Jeje reviews Ravi Shankar’s introspective autobiographical account of discovery, incarceration, exile, and healing.
Ravi Shankar, Correctional (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022), 232pp.
Ravi Shankar’s Correctional is part memoir, part sociological treatise and full baroque picaresque in an America he loves but also distrusts. Shankar relates his life from his origin as a precocious son of Indian immigrants to an eminent professor and poet, and then convict and prisoner caught up in the web of America’s incarceration complex.
Dr. Shankar’s seemingly trivial misdeeds alter his life for the worse, sending him soul-searching, not only into his own psyche, but towards a society he once thought as essentially just. The first time Dr. Shankar is accosted by police, his subsequent arrest has all the hallmarks of racial profiling. He fights the case successfully, even winning a settlement from the City of New York. Ironically, this incident lulls him into a sense of complacency regarding the fairness of the law, leaving him unprepared for his next arrest, where he is not so innocent or completely undeserving.
Shankar begins his story with his Indian Tamil/American upbringing in suburban Virginia, semi-rural Kerela in South India, and his coming of age in urban New York and small-town Connecticut. Against this backdrop, Shankar explores his various personas, identities and motivations instrumental towards his eventual imprisonment. Through narration of family and personal history, liberally infused with Tamil words and phrases, Hindu proverbs and poetic mysticism, Shankar examines the prime factors that led to his subsequent misfortune. To do this, he invokes a Buddhist notion of “three poisons” – the emotions of delusion, greed and hatred as symbolized by the pig, rooster and snake.
Through this lens, Shankar’s narrative plunges forth into the numerous incidents that hurl him into legal trouble. Consequently, he is dismissed from several of his academic posts at the university, where not long before he had been feted as a top professor and literary notable. Not long after, Shankar’s marriage, already troubled even before these events, breaks apart, but readers cannot help but think the author’s own hubris is the key to his fall from grace. While the various misdemeanors arrayed against Ravi Shankar come across almost as a comedy of errors than a litany of villainy, Shankar learns that there is far less leniency for the transgressions of black and brown people, however unintentional.
Shankar’s previous respectability earns him a relatively light sentence, split to work around his teaching schedule, but he still wrestles with culturally reinforced feelings of disgrace and shame. Jail is a humiliating experience for Shankar, who is processed as brusquely and impersonally as any other inmate. As Shankar interacts with his fellow inmates, he realizes what they need – rehabilitation, counseling and education – are out of their reach, by laws and restrictions that all but make it certain that their rates of recidivism remain high. Shankar’s first stint in jail is an unexpected respite, a time for reflection, temporarily free from playing the roles he assumes in regular society.
Shankar gets to know his cellmates, who become humanized through their personal stories. While Shankar believes it is karmic that he ended up in jail, Shankar still thinks like a temporarily inconvenienced middle-class individual, despite his sympathy for fellow inmates with harsher backgrounds and much longer sentences.
Still, other inmates’ stories touch Shankar’s spirit – among other inmates he befriends an almost stereotypical black jailbird/junkie who grows up in foster care, and their friendship takes an interesting turn. Despite his toughness and volatility, Chaos the black inmate shows vulnerability when talking about his abandonment by his mother and grandmother. Chaos learns how to write from Shankar so he can write to his daughter. Chaos is a strange blend of anger and gentleness; like most of the prisoners, in Shankar’s opinion, he needs love and counseling rather than incarceration.
Reading helps pass the time, helps Shankar reconcile with himself, and helps him to resist the grinding mundanity of jail, which lacks optimism as well as care or opportunity of rehabilitation. However, the oral tradition is alive and well among the inmates, who are expert storytellers of their lives and misdeeds. Leaving jail for the first time is sad, but Chaos exhorts Shankar to tell the stories of the inmates on the outside. Being out of jail allows Shankar to feel more vividly. Shankar travels to Hong Kong to teach graduate students and revels in the sights, sounds and sensations of the city in contrast with having to endure the ponderous monotony of an American jail.
Shankar has to serve out his remaining sentence upon his return to Connecticut. Once again, Shankar is in a strange interstitial position – he is glad to be teaching again, but has to deal with standoffish colleagues, and feels more alienated in his academic environment than in jail. Paraphrasing the Taoist philosopher Zhuangzhi, Shankar wonders if he’s a professor dreaming he’s a prisoner or a prisoner dreaming he’s a professor. Despite this, Dr. Shankar is promoted to full professor. Some of his colleagues ostracize him, while others defend him, leaving Shankar in a strange space between acceptance and denial. Things worsen for Shankar when a Republican state legislator decides to use Shankar’s case for publicity. Despite this, the university allows Dr. Shankar’s promotion to full professor to stand, and Dr. Shankar instantly becomes a jailhouse hero. His newfound celebrity gives Shankar some much-needed jail cred. In the next chapter, “A Mantra to Heal the Unhinged”, Shankar writes an op-ed that criticizes the criminal justice system, the media, and corporations that cynically used his case.
Once released, all is fine until Shankar gets himself in trouble for a petty crime that leads even he to call himself a muttal – the Tamil equivalent for “idiot”. Again, Shankar is in the news, and briefly ends up in a psychiatric hospital. After an inquisition by the department heads and members, the English department narrowly votes to expel him. While Shankar receives the salary he’s owed, he’s become a pariah, so he decides to go to India in self-imposed exile. Back again in the US, he only receives a misdemeanor for his petty crime, so he takes a plea bargain. He even wins another legal case over unpaid benefits against his former university, then becomes an itinerant lecturer overseas in recognition of the lack of future opportunities in the United States.
Correctional veers back and forth between moving, eloquent and compassionate narrative when Shankar describes family, spirituality and the plight of America’s incarcerated, to a frankly exasperating litany of misfortune when he describes his petty misdeeds. Readers understand that Shankar’s flurry of misdemeanors were committed more out of a sense of petulance than malice, but they will find themselves torn between admiration for the gifted poet and lecturer, sympathy for a Tamil-American alienated in both a predominantly white academic setting and an overwhelmingly black/ Latino jail, and frustration with an enfant terrible whose antics land him into trouble far out of proportion to their actual gravity.
Shankar hopes for a more equitable America, a realization of the City on a Hill ideal. He even calls for oneness among all people to recognise an “indelible, ineradicable interconnectedness”. Shankar regrets hurting others, even inadvertently, and dares to be vulnerable, even as he is still ashamed of his transgressions. He also remembers his former fellow inmates, but is unable to visit due to then Covid restrictions. While Shankar questions his own motives for trying to visit, he still feels committed to social justice for them. In the end, Shankar has a deeper appreciation of being alive and free, due to his struggles and the resultant insight and empathy he has for his fellow inmates.
I give Correctional a very good, but not stellar rating. Shankar’s eloquence and candor are remarkable, yet one cannot help but notice that Professor Shankar, for all his accomplishments, had such a blind spot understanding the consequences of his actions. I sympathized with his initial plight, and his incarceration, but poor judgment, impulsivity and hubris play great parts in his fall from grace. Fortunately, Ravi Shankar survived his ordeal, demonstrates resilience, and through his enduring talent and new insight, will continue to thrive.
Akin Jeje‘s works have been published and featured in Canada, the United States, Singapore, Australia, the United Kingdom and Hong Kong. His first full-length poetry collection, Smoked Pearl was published by Proverse Hong Kong in 2010. Jeje also has another full-length poetry collection entitled Write About Here, published in January 2024. He is currently at work on a novel entitled Maroon. Jeje is a previous MC of the Hong Kong English language poetry collective Peel Street Poetry, and one of its three directors. Jeje is also a regular contributor to Voice and Verse Magazine (Hong Kong) and Cha: An Asian Literary Journal.
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