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

had not been free from censure! Some suggested that the speaker should be deprived of his knighthood. Others hinted that he should be made to forfeit his pension. Ultimately, the whole incident had proved to be nothing better than the proverbial storm in the tea- cup, though it was not without its repercussions in India. The Indian National Congress was alarmed by the news, and seemed to have lost its balance. Sir William Wedderburn, the president of the Congress session that year, and Surendra Nath Bannerji, one of its most prominent spokesman, while returning from the annual congress Session, attended a public meeting at Calcutta, where, speaking on the incident, they put a gloss on Sir Henry Cotton’s remarks upon me, and declared that the Congress had nothing to do with Savarkar and his tribe and felt no sympathy whatever for him and his doings. I read this news in the cutting of the Kesari noticed above. Strange to say, the Kesari itself in its two leaderettes had sought to exonerate Sir Henry Cotton, and, in reference to me in that matter, had used a form of address that was highly insulting to me. It had said, “ Sir Henry Cotton did not even know who this Savarkar was, whether he was a black man or a white man.” Even a nationalist paper like the Kesari at Poona had to write in that tone then. It was a subterfuge, common in those days, to establish one’s innocence and prestige by running down Savarkar as a traitor, and by referring to him, in name and style, as the veriest criminal. Every political organization, at the time, used that handy weapon to save its own skin. It was a cruel irony of fate, indeed, that an English gentleman should speak of Savarkar in glowing terms, while his countrymen at home should refer to him in newspapers and elsewhere in the language of insult and infamy. But it was not the newspapers that were really to blame in this matter. It only showed the wretched plight to which a foreign rule inevitably reduces a subject nation. It showed that we lost under it even the sense of humanity which, as individuals, we ought to hold, as the minimum that is due from one man to another. What a heavy price this, to pay for bare existence!

Martyr or Rascal

Some one was peeping in through the bars of my door.

“How do you do, barrister?”

“ I am all right, by your grace”, I answered.

“ What is it that you say? Sir, where are you in worth? What am I before you?”, he said. He continued that he had a talk with a friend from England from which he had learnt that the whole of Europe was applauding me as a martyr. The newspapers in France and Germany were comparing me with patriots like Woolfetone and Robert Emmett and Mazzini. Even in far off Portugal, newspapers had published a sketch of my life as it came to their hands. The gentleman from Europe had mentioned that he desired to see me, but the man who was talking to me had informed him that it was impossible to grant