Sameer Gudhate Presents the Book Review of Black Warrant by Sunil Gupta

There’s something about prisons that unsettles me — not the concrete, the locks, or the barbed wire, but the silence. That heavy, echoing silence that follows you like a shadow, whispering stories you’re not supposed to hear. When I picked up Black Warrant: Confessions of a Tihar Jailer by Sunil Gupta and Sunetra Choudhury, I thought I was signing up for a cold, procedural memoir — a peek behind the bars of India’s most infamous jail. Instead, I found a mirror — cracked, smoky, and deeply human.

Sunil Gupta isn’t just any insider. He spent over three decades walking the echoing corridors of Tihar, witnessing 14 hangings, each a punctuation mark in a story that most of us would rather not read. Alongside journalist Sunetra Choudhury — whose keen eye for detail keeps the narrative crisp yet compassionate — Gupta opens the gates to a world few have truly seen. You can almost smell the damp stone, feel the claustrophobic air, hear the distant clang of metal. And yet, between these grim details, there are glimpses of strange tenderness — a prisoner asking for one last cup of tea, another humming an old Hindi song moments before his death.

(If you enjoy books that reveal the warmth behind authority and discipline, you might also like my review of I Came Upon a Lighthouse by Shantanu Naidu.)

The book doesn’t dramatize. It doesn’t need to. Real life inside Tihar is drama enough. There’s Charles Sobhraj — intelligent, manipulative, charismatic — and Billa and Ranga, who wore their notoriety like ill-fitting armour. There’s Rajan Pillai, whose tragic death revealed the rot of apathy and negligence, and Manu Sharma, who went from being a privileged convict to the unlikely mind behind TJs, Tihar’s in-house brand. Gupta’s anecdotes humanize these names we’ve long reduced to headlines, reminding us that crime stories don’t end in courtrooms — they echo in cells, in sighs, in silence.

The writing style is deceptively simple — almost conversational, like sitting across from a man who has seen too much but still wants to be understood. Gupta doesn’t moralize. He observes. There’s an unpolished sincerity to his words, an occasional awkwardness that feels earned. Choudhury’s journalistic sharpness ensures the book never slips into indulgent self-praise or needless shock. Together, they strike a tone that’s both confessional and courageous.

What lingered for me wasn’t just the hangings — though the “Anatomy of a Hanging” chapter is chilling in its procedural precision — but the emotional isolation of those who enforce justice. Gupta writes about “The Loneliness of a Jailer,” and it hit me hard. The job demands compassion without attachment, discipline without cruelty. It’s a life spent on the thin wire between law and empathy. You start to wonder who’s really imprisoned — the inmate or the man guarding him.

The book’s pacing is brisk, its structure linear but interspersed with memory flashes — the kind that haunt the storyteller as much as the reader. At times, it reads like a diary. At others, like a documentary unfolding frame by frame. And occasionally, yes, it wobbles — a shade too much about Gupta’s own endurance or the occasional detour into his personal justifications. But those moments are forgivable, even necessary. How else could a man survive 35 years in a place where death has a timetable?

Black Warrant isn’t for everyone. It’s not a comfortable read. But it’s a necessary one. It tells us what happens when justice meets privilege, when crime meets conscience, and when humanity tries — sometimes desperately — to exist within concrete walls. It asks difficult questions: Can a man change after crossing the line? Can a system designed to punish also heal? And what does it do to the soul of the one who holds the keys?

When I closed the book, I didn’t feel judgment. I felt a strange, quiet respect — for the broken, for the repentant, for those who chose to see the human even in the condemned. Maybe that’s what this book does best: it forces you to look beyond guilt and innocence, to the fragile thing that connects us all — the need to be seen as human, even when we fall.

If you’ve ever been curious about what really happens inside Tihar — beyond the headlines, beyond the bars — this is your invitation. Step inside. But don’t expect to come out unchanged.

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