a shoot-out that had occurred a day after his arrival in Allahabad. Nehru told him that the judge had originally intended these sentences to run concurrently but had changed his decision to consecutive during a delay in finalising the paperwork. The change could have been significant because a fourteen-year sentence was de facto equivalent to one of life imprisonment: government review and permission for release was required once the sentence was complete. As events turned out, and after facing further charges in May 1932, resulting from the deliberations of the Delhi Conspiracy Commission and later abandoned, Yashpal served six years before being among those released under an amnesty agreement for political prisoners that was brokered by the newly formed Congress government in the United Provinces. As far as Congress were concerned, there was no difference in status between people who had been imprisoned for non-cooperation (the satyagrahis) and those serving sentences for revolutionary activities. His release came on 2 March 1938, without any requirement for him to renounce his past activities. Despite his own misgivings concerning his future prospects, given his criminal history and increasingly poor health while in jail, Prakashvati had determined to marry him and did so at her insistence. The ceremony took place at Bareilly Central Jail on 7 August 1936 and was the first marriage to be conducted in an Indian jail. It caused a furore, being considered an unwarranted humanisation of the strictures of imprisonment. Prison manuals were amended to prevent a recurrence. Writing It was after Yashpal's release from prison that he began to write, seeing literature as a vehicle for righting the wrongs that he perceived to exist in Indian society. Marxism became his preferred ideology; he saw the Communist Party of India as the successor to the HSRA, although he joined neither that nor any other political party. Yashpal had been banned from entering Punjab following his release from prison and so settled with his wife in Lucknow. His first work, Pinjre ki Uran (Flight from the Cage) (1939), was a notable success. He worked briefly for Karmayogi, a Hindi-language magazine, before establishing his own magazine, Viplav (Cataclysm), which was published in Hindi and Urdu until its closure in 1941. The closure became necessary because the government, which considered Viplav to be seditious, demanded a 13,000 rupee security; the magazine was restarted after India gained independence in 1947. In 1941, he established