What happens when a Volleyball enters a prison in Assam?

Nandan Kamath, a dear friend and founder of the GoSports Foundation, visited Assam for the Super League of the Brahmaputra Volleyball League in February 2026.

Somewhere in the conversation about sport, community, and the excitement of the League, he suggested that Abantee meet Abhijit Bhattacharya, the former captain of the Indian volleyball team and Founder of the Brahmaputra Volleyball League. It definitely was an unusual match.

One of us had spent years working inside correctional homes in Assam, around access to justice, psychosocial well-being, dignity and reintegration. The other had spent a lifetime with volleyball — first as a player and captain, and later as a grassroots volleyball organiser.

The conversations that followed kept circling back to the same questions: how does a person hold on to dignity inside an institution built around confinement? Where does hope come from? Within weeks, those conversations were travelling towards District Jail, Dhemaji.

This is where Set for Dignity was birthed — a programme bringing together Studio Nilima, Assam Volleyball Mission 100, the District Legal Services Authority and the correctional administration at District Jail, Dhemaji. It is growing around resident teams, structured coaching and peer leadership, with the possibility that some participants may eventually carry this experience outward as coaches, mentors and community mobilisers.

A prison runs on separation. Walls divide the inside and the outside. Gates decide who moves and when. Much of incarceration is also experienced alone: your case, your sentence, your cell, your date of release.

Put a volleyball in the middle of it, and for an hour, the rules bend. Where you stand matters because five others are moving with you.

The serve begins with one player, but the set creates a chance for another; the smash carries the work of every touch before it; the block depends on knowing someone is beside you and someone else is covering behind. When a man is out of position, another moves into the gap.

When a touch goes wrong, the next man keeps the ball alive. Within an institution organised around separation, the rally becomes a small, repeated act of trust — a collective effort to keep the ball in the air.

The first match gave us a glimpse of what this could mean.

A former captain of the Indian volleyball team stood on the same court and played alongside the jail’s residents. There was laughter, competition, missed balls, encouragement, the familiar arguments and celebrations of almost any game. For a while, some of the invisible lines through which people usually encounter one another inside a prison became blurred.

Sport in prisons is usually discussed in the language of rehabilitation — fitness, discipline, teamwork, life skills and reduced recidivism. These matter. But our experience in Dhemaji keeps pointing us towards something harder to count: belonging and trust.

You cannot catch the ball and think it over. You have seconds. Someone moves, someone calls, someone receives, someone trusts that a teammate will be standing exactly where he is supposed to be. A rally holds together through a string of small acts of dependence.

Watch long enough and the score tells only part of the story. A player claps for the man who just missed. Someone starts organising the formation. One man becomes the person others look to when a rally falls apart. A man who rarely called for the ball begins asking for it.

These would be unremarkable moments on any court in the country. Inside a prison, they carry different weight. For the length of the game, another vocabulary becomes available — player, setter, captain, coach — sitting alongside the institutional categories through which a man is otherwise known: undertrial, convict, prisoner. The walls remain where they were.

The case remains. But another story about the same person can begin to exist alongside it. A man becomes a teammate because five others need him to show up. He becomes a captain when the team starts looking to him. He becomes a mentor when someone trusts his knowledge enough to learn from him.

Anyone who has spent time around prisons will know how rare that shift is, inside an institution where so much of a person’s identity is mediated through a file. Anyone who has spent a lifetime around sport will recognise the other half of it — a court is where people continually discover themselves through other people: who turns up, who passes instead of hogging the ball, who takes responsibility after a mistake, who makes room for the weaker player, who holds a team together while it is losing.

Perhaps this is where the two worlds Nandan brought together start to make sense. Years inside prisons had taught one of us to ask what an institution takes from a person, and what might restore some agency.

A lifetime in volleyball had taught the other to notice how leadership emerges almost unannounced on a court. Set for Dignity holds both questions at once.

Residents who begin to show leadership can gradually take on more responsibilities as Peer Ambassadors. A man who learned to serve teaches another. A man who once stood at the edge of the court starts running drills. One discovers he can bring people together; another discovers that people listen when he speaks. None of this shows up neatly in an impact report. Sometimes it only becomes visible in how a team moves.

The harder question begins at the gate. We often speak of reintegration as a single moment — a sentence ends, the gate opens, a man goes home. In practice, home can be a complicated word.

Relationships fracture. Livelihoods vanish. Families move on. Communities remember. A man can walk out of prison in an afternoon; finding a place for himself outside can take considerably longer.

This is the possibility Set for Dignity is built to explore: that a man who first discovers his capacity to lead on a court inside Dhemaji might carry that with him when he leaves. Perhaps he walks into a village one day with a volleyball under his arm — this time as a coach.

His history travels with him, as histories do, but so does a new set of relationships. A child asks him how to fix a serve. A team expects him tomorrow afternoon. Someone notices if he doesn’t come. Slowly, through the sheer ordinariness of these expectations, another place in the world takes shape for him — somewhere to be, something he knows how to do, people who depend on him being there.

We don’t yet know whether the leadership a man builds on the court travels with him outside it. Whether a village will hand a former resident a whistle and trust him with its children.

Whether the men themselves will want these roles once they are free to choose otherwise. Nor can a game carry the full weight of everything that surrounds incarceration and return — poverty, stigma, fractured families, the scarcity of work for a man with a record. A volleyball does not undo any of that.

For now, the court leaves us with smaller, more immediate questions. What happens to a man who has spent months or years being watched, the moment he is also needed? What happens when five other people are counting on him? What happens the day he discovers he can lead — and the day the people around him discover it too?

Perhaps this story began with exactly the kind of relationship we are now trying to understand. One person trusted another enough to make an introduction. A conversation followed, then another.

Two worlds that might otherwise have stayed separate found a shared language, and eventually a volleyball crossed a prison wall. Friendship sometimes has this quiet architecture — people become bridges without knowing where the bridge will lead.

On the court inside the District Jail, Dhemaji, every time the ball clears the net, heads follow it. A man moves towards the ball, and someone calls his name. Somewhere behind him is another player he cannot see. He sends the ball back anyway, trusting that the next man will be exactly where he is supposed to be.

The rally continues.

(Abhijit Bhattacharya is a former captain of the Indian volleyball team and founder of the Brahmaputra Volleyball League. Abantee Dutta is Co-Founder and Director of Studio Nilima: Collaborative Network for Research and Capacity Building.)

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