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

counterfeit. These criminals were hauled up before the Magistrate and were caned for their dishonest practices, after they had been cured and released from the hospital. The offence was obvious, the practice objectionable; but it cannot be gainsaid that the prisoners were forced into these tricks of having 104 to 105 degrees of high fever or getting continuous blood-stained stools, and suffering pain in the stomach, by the horrors of the prison-life to which they were doomed for all their crimes. Some of them were seasoned convicts and not new-comers, and still they did it, which only shows how hard the work must have been. If dacoits, robbers and other confirmed and dangerous criminals found it beyond their endurance to go through the hard labour, it is easy to imagine how the political prisoners must have felt about it. I need not describe their wretched condition and the horror of their lot in the Silver Jail of the Andamans.

Disease was better than this labour

I quote here specific instances of such prisoners and describe the tortures of their lives in their own words. One such political prisoner was Babu Upendra Nath Banerji. He says about himself: "Most of the prisoners that had come before me in this jail from the Indian Mutiny of 1857 onwards, on transportation for life, did not return alive to India. I learnt this fact and realised the horror of it while I was myself passing through the sentence of hard labour. I often felt that I should take a rope and put an end to my life forthwith to end all my troubles. But I could not summon up courage to do it. I kept on crushing the coconut pieces for oil by going round the grinding mill patiently and without any complaint. One day, working from morn till eve, I felt my body stark and stiff like a plank of wood; I found my palms blistered over; I saw blood trickling from the cracks in my hand; and yet, at the end of it, the yield had not come to the regular quantity of 30 lbs. a day. I felt I was swooning; I heard abuses hurled at me by the petty officer in charge; I felt them like whips against my heart, and, at last, I was dragged before the jailor. He abused me downright with the choicest slang and threatened me with caning. I was brought back from the office and seated in my place for the evening meal. Grief, pain and insult choked my throat and I could not swallow a morsel of the food put before me. A Hindu petty officer took pity upon me, and whispered to the cook to serve me more rice. He said, "The Babu is stricken with grief. He cannot eat his bread, give him some more rice." This made me cry aloud and burst into a loud wail. I tried to control myself and stop this exhibition. A blow with a stick would have been borne at that time better than these words of pity and compassion from the mouth of my fellow-prisoner—the Hindu petty officer."

Better die than suffer insult

A young man named Indu Bhushan Roy was convicted of guilt in the Maniktola Bomb Case and sentenced to ten years' rigorous imprisonment in the Andamans. He had also to suffer from hard labour on the 'Kolu' and had his full taste of similar soul-killing experience. He was one of those who were sent out to work. But he found the work