मेरा आजीवन कारावास / माझी जन्मठेप (स्वातंत्र्यवीर सावरकर - काले पानी का ऐतिहासिक संस्मरण)

INTRODUCTORY Thousands of my countrymen in Maharashtra and the rest of India have sympathetically expressed their desire to hear the story of my life in the Andamans and of the hardships that I had to pass through during my imprisonment in that island. Since my release I have also felt that the yearning to narrate the story, and share in the tears that my dear ones will shed while reading these pages. Sorrows remembered are sweet and that sweetness I hope will be mine, while I unfold page by page that heart-rending tale. All the same, the events of that story, even when they had been upon my lips, had not found expression in words up to this time. Like some thorny creeper growing in darkness, they seemed to wither away at the touch of light. They were dazzled and blinded by the anticipated glare of publicity. Occasionally the thought came to me that I did not suffer what I had suffered to tell it to others! Then it would be all a stage-play. Sometime there was the irrepressible longing to recount the tale of my bitter experience because those who had died in the midst of them had not communicated them to the surviving members of their families. They had not that consolation and I should do it for them. Those sufferers are not with me today-my fellow-workers and prisoners. Why should I, then, in their absence from this world, reveal their sufferings and enjoy the relief and consolation denied to them by Providence? The sweetness of sorrow remembered was not theirs. Why then should I claim it for myself? Will it not be an act of betrayal towards them as also of self- deception? And have not several persons suffered like me before this? Have they not gone through similar dangers and catastrophies, and are not many more yet to face mountains of trouble like me? Why should I then make so much noise? What is my tom-toming before the sound of their kettle-drums? In the bivonac of life and in the noise of the battle-drum, let me not sound my tom-tom. Let me be silent. But grief is always eager to express itself in words. The cry of grief is irrepressible. Nature has bound that drum round its neck and it must beat it. A falcon pounces upon its prey and carries it in its claw. The little prey sure not to escape from that claw, still sends forth its yell, knowing full well that no help will come to it in that dire plight. It is Nature’s impulse that makes it utter that piercing sound. From the wail of that bird to the funeral march accompanying the corpse of Napoleon brought back from St. Helena to find its grave in Paris, with flags at half-mast, with drums beating and trumpets sounding before the coffin is let down in its last resting place, is not all this wail of sorrow but an expression and outlet for suppressed grief? Every being in this world finds an outlet for the soul pent up with grief, “in words that half reveal and conceal the