In this presentation, I consider a set of developing materials I choose to label ‘prison texts’. Drawing from research on revolutionary terrorism, translation theory and literary criticism in South Asian studies, I focus on prison texts to think through crucial trajectories of political prisoner-hood in late colonial India. I dwell on the relationships between literary production, imprisonment, and ‘vernacular’ public spheres in pre-independence India to move towards disambiguating the motivations of colonial governance and its reliance on imprisonment as disciplining technology. I read across Urdu, Hindi, and English and across the genres of novels, autobiographies, archived police reports, official translations of ‘confessions’, poetry and jail letters to explore frames of racialized knowledge production (which led, for instance, to the colonially coined term ‘terrorists’ to describe anti-colonial thinkers and writers). Philologically constructed systems of meaning worked in concert with the institutional apparatus of imprisonment to contain and reinforce calcified frames for reading anti-colonial resistance, and this stage of my research anchors these frames of interpretation in multilingual ‘prison texts’.