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

news. But even an educated prisoner was not up to the task of picking political news. If he were asked about any political party, its agitation and its power at the time that he had left them, he would fumble for he had no answer to give. He would often end that he had no knowledge of it, and everything was quiet there. And that answer was a damper on the enthusiasm of our sentimental political prisoners. If there was one piece of information that he could definitely give them it was about the arrest of some great political leader or of the immediate arrival of the King-Emperor to India. "The Emperor is coming"; "There was a great show at Delhi"; "A big Lord had been killed"—that was all their definite talk. This news came ready to them, because it had spread like a conflagration throughout India, in all its market-places and thoroughfares. Minus this he could tell nothing about the Indian National Congress, or of the Imperial Legislative Council, of Swadeshi, of the struggle for Swaraj. Of course, I am narrating here experience of my first five years of prison-life in the Andamans. What change came over, will come later on in this book

It is interesting to note here a few stratagems we employed to get information from the Chalan. A few of the political prisoners in India used to meet some of the prisoners bound for the Andamans, and they would pass on letters to them to be conveyed to their friends in the Silver Jail. They knew that the letters would be taken charge of by Officers in that jail. So the trick that they used was to put the letters well-concealed within the pages of an ordinary, innocent book bound specially for that purpose. In the body of the binding the letter was inclosed so that none could detect it. The book happened to be duly delivered to the political prisoner concerned and along with the book went the letter to the proper person.

A letter behind the badge

After a time the stratagem became too patent to be used safely by the emissary abroad. Another was quickly resorted to, and that was to secrete the letter in the badge itself. Every prisoner had to wear a badge with its marked number hanging on his chest as soon as he became the regular convict in a prison. The letter was written on the inner side of the iron-plate which was seldom exposed to view. And thus the news was conveyed safely to its proper quarters. The son of a great Punjabi leader sent me a missive from a prison in the Punjab, where he was serving his seven years' term of imprisonment, by resorting to this trick. The prisoner through whom he had sent me the letter was in the Punjab jail before he was deported to the Andamans. He carried the badge on his person, and though he was searched fifty times and stripped naked to discover anything he might hide on his person, the thing remained undetected until it had reached me. No one suspected the iron-plate as the carrier of that message. The prisoner had taken good care all along the transit that the letter written on the back of the plate was not rubbed off. And he handed the strange missive to me as soon as he was inside the jail. I read the letter and handed him back the iron-plate with all the letters erased from it. Thus the news percolated to us through the prison-walls of the Silver Jail. The Chalan was an invaluable agency for such news. And yet the news was so inadequate, fragmentary and intermittent that none of us was satisfied by it, for it did not inform us fully of what we were most