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

He was cruel even in his geniality As soon as he saw me he began, "Well, when are you going to be mad?" I retorted with anger, "After you, surely." Then he turned to the story of Ullas. I at once reminded him, "You had raid about Indu Bhushan, you remember, that he had hanged himself because he was mad and not because he had suffered from excessive hard labour in this jail? And, then, I had asked you what was the cause of his madness. Why, then, Ullas had gone mad? Can you give me the reason for it? Dare you say, now, that it was anything else than the sufferings in this prison-life? Here they have no hope, no future to look to and no relief in their present state. Day and night they are ground down with labour, day and night they suffer insult and humiliation from you and your creatures. How can they bear it? What wonder that they are off their brains? It is unbearable suffering that brings on insanity and it is insanity that ends in suicide. Ullas and his life are standing testimonials to this fact and you cannot deny it. You manacled him, you kept him hanging for eight days in his cell, he went into fits and loud wailing. That took him to the hospital and that brought him to the stage of madness and he attempted suicide." At once Mr. Barrie changed his front, and said, "But who told you that Ullas is mad? He only pretends madness." A Pretence ! I answered, "Then let us see him and we shall decide for ourselves." He retorted, "Do you want to suggest that I am lying? I say that Ullas is not mad and he pretends madness in order to escape work." I replied, "Then I must say that if Ullas is not mad, then he who says so is mad. Do treat us fairly henceforth, treat us as political prisoners, or at least, as ordinary prisoners. Do end this suffering. Else we shall have no other way out of it but strike. Not that we shall always win against you; entrenched as you are behind power and authority, the fight is bound to go against us. But we shall have done our best to expose injustice and defend our honour. And that is a great satisfaction." For eight months after this Mr. Barrie kept on reiterating that Ullas was not mad but had feigned madness. If there were a large number of prisoners in this jail capable of feigning equal madness, Mr. Barrie's power to distinguish the true from the false would have been blunted long, long ago. The fount of sympathy had already been dried up. But Mr. Barrie was not such a cruel man in his behaviour outside. As soon as he stepped out of the prison he became a human being; inside it he was a beast. We shall have occasion to describe him fully as we go along. It had come to this then. We had tremendous hard work in the prison and we had equally hard labour without. And yet I ever advised my political friends to prefer the latter to the former. Because outside you could do some propaganda work for which there was no scope behind the prison-walls.