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

considered free from sedition and from any other objectionable reading matter in them. That a man of the intellectual calibre of Mr. Barrie should sit in judgment upon us was to declare that censorship purblind. This argument weighed with the Commissioner and we got these magazines all right for our perusal in the library. However, with the change of that Superintendent, Mr. Barrie found his chance once more to interfere with our work. Sometime he would tear off pages from a magazine; at another time he would blacken the objectionable portion in it with an ink-roller from his printing-press; so on and so forth. And, yet, we got what we wanted and fought for more. Once or twice Mr. Barrie intercepted parcels of books which had been sent to us after the lapse of a year, and informed us that they were not received. We had information that they had been delivered in the jail. We, therefore, wrote to the Superintendent who discovered that they had been received a month before. Mr. Barrie had to look very small in that episode. He found it very hard to make up with the Superintendent. To obtain books and magazines, we had sometimes to strike our work. We had opened the library against his wish, and he gave us considerable trouble over it.

Passing through all these difficulties, the library became a model institution in our jail. It contained from one to two thousand books in different languages and on different subjects. It contained choicest books on these subjects. Those who had kept aloof from it at the start, now began to take full advantage of it by sending their own books to that collection. Even the Superintendent became proud of that institution. He sanctioned new cupboards for it, gave it an independent hall to house in, and got all old and tattered books bound for it. He appointed three political prisoners to supervise that work and to take proper care of the books. They knew the art of book-binding, did their job thoroughly well, so much so that Government began sending its orders for book-binding to the jail from that time onwards. Some of them were excellent photographers, and they got orders for photo-enlargements from European officers in our jail, with the permission of the authorities themselves. Thus, these were released from hard manual labour, and got an opportunity for doing work that was entirely to their taste. Of course, these relatively easy jobs fell to the lot of those who were the favourites of Mr. Barrie. They did not go to those who had done their best work in that line. Mr. Barrie and they put spokes in our wheel and he did his best to pay his debt back to those who had obliged him.

The Origin of Vainayak Vritta

The library contained biographies of Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, and other great men of Bengal in the original Bengali language. It included works of Navin Sen Roy and Ravindranath Tagore; and books by Jogeshchandra and others in original Bengali. It had complete Sanskrit editions of the Mahabharat, the Ramayan and the Yoga Vashistha. Lives and works of Vivekananda and Ramkrishna Paramahansa, and magazines bearing on the subject of religion and philosophy consti- tuted a special feature of the library. We had these in duplicate and triplicate copies, so that the political prisoners read them repeatedly and with avidity. It was through the study