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

And when he saw the Hindu prisoners so starving themselves he burst into a fit of laughter. He did not attend to them, he made no arrangement for their food, and the Mohomedan goondas had their full feast and fun out of it. For they ate their own ration all right, and finished that which the Hindus would not touch. So these had to toil and starve for the whole day without a particle out of the sacks meant for them. The same thing happened to them on the following day. The Muslims had touched two sacks of gram reserved for the Hindus, and the Hindus had to go without food in consequence. The European officers did not bother to know what was happening near them. They would not care and pitied the starving Hindus for such ludicrous nonsense and folly. I knew the incident in the evening of the first day. I rebuked them severely, such of them as were the inmates of my prison, for this foolish and suicidal custom. "Look here," I told them, "how this way of yours is going to harm you. Suppose, you Thakurs prepare 'Jilabi' one day; and the whole of it is touched by the Muslims; they eat it all and you go without it. Another day, you bring Pedhas and a Christian touches them. You throw them and the Christians feast upon them. Where is this going to take you in the end. This foolish notion of purity and impurity, of pollution by touch, has landed the Hindus into misery and starvation. They remain poor because they would not cross the seas; they would eat from nobody and eat with nobody, and they starve in the midst of plenty. They don't do business and others steal a march over them and exploit them. It is no sin to let others carry your riches away from your own country; to let others devour your food. It is no sin or pollution to let others fatten on you. But if you eat your own food touched by others it is a great sin. Do not eat another man's food, I grant it. But do not allow any one else to eat your food; that is merit and not sin. Simple touch does not desecrate it. And the eating of food so desecrated is no sin before man and God. Do not be so foolish, so asinine. If the gram and the parched rice handled by the Muslims became muslim-tainted food, then why should not your touch make their food Hindu food and purified food for you? Go, you fools, tomorrow when your work is done, rush, some of you, to the sacks reserved for Muslims, and devour the gram in them. If they cry and complain, say to them that your touch had polluted them because it had turned the grains into Kafirs! Our grains do not get polluted by the touch of the Muslims, remember it well, and their ration is certainly polluted by our touch, don't forget it. So eat both and don't starve. Your sin, if it is any sin, be upon my head, I assure you. Why, on earth, do you let yourselves starve?" As I thus brought them round by harsh and plain-speaking words, some hundred and fifty of them agreed to do as I had bidden them to do. On the third day, these men, without waiting for their fellows, ran straight to the bags of grain reserved for the Muslim prisoners, and began to feed full upon them. The Muslim, of course, were angered by this act. The Hindus reminded them of what they had themselves done on two previous days. "You felt then, that you had polluted the thing and we would not touch it. Now we touch the bags and they are ours, and we eat the contents as food of the Hindus." T his talk the European officer overheard, and could not help laughing over it. He did not punish the Hindu prisoners. On the other hand, he congratulated them for doing away with the foolish notion which had kept them from that food for two days before. When others saw