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

the temples without restriction; participated in the recital of the Ramayana, took darshan of the idol, and were admitted to public dinners. With all this progress in the Shuddhi movement we had clashes with the Muslims, from time to time, which sometimes resulted in open riots. Just about 1920, a shameless and insolent goonda among Muslim prisoners had kept a Gujarathi boy as his paramour, and, in due course, this relationship between the two would have led to the boy's conversion to Islam and the corresponding funeral of Hinduism in his soul. My brother came to know about it and managed to detach the boy from his goonda friend. At my instance, the Hindu Munshi transferred him from that ward to a room in another, near the room of a trusted Hindu prisoner. Enraged by this transfer, the Mohomedan goonda came up to my brother when he had just finished his bath and was wiping his face with a towel, and attacked him. He gave a severe blow on his nose which made him faint on the spot. Blood began to stream down from his nose and he fell senseless on the ground. The prisoners around him came running up to him from all sides and at last caught the goonda. What did Mr. Barrie do to him? He openly complimented the goonda on his brave action. And he said to others, "How fine it would be if some one was to handle Savarkar in a similar fashion." But one who was not cowed down under the shadow of death, was not to be put down by the curses of a man like Mr. Barrie. Savarkar's movement suffered no set-back by this threat, but the goonda was soon brought to book for his nasty act. He was caned twice for similar other offences, and was finally put into solitary confinement in a room near my own. He then became meek as a lamb. He then confessed that it was Mr. Barrie who had set him on to attack my brother. Otherwise he would not have done it; he dared not do it. How much of truth there was in that story either he or Mr. Barrie alone could say. I had to undergo personally so many hardships in these matters that I felt, at times, that I should stop all these movements and mind my own lot in this prison, a lot that was already so hapless, helpless and hard to bear. Yet the urge within would not let me rest on my oars; it would not let me do nothing for those around me. To be doing something for the uplift and education of my countrymen had been the breath of my nostrils; to give up the struggle was simply not to exist. Yet I felt, betimes, that to suffer thus personally in jail, was in itself a sort of expiation and service for my motherland, and I should desist from anything outside the sphere of such service and such expiation. Let others take up the burden from me, and let. each one of them share it and carry on. But I saw before me a Hindu prisoner caught in the meshes of this mood of pessimism did not last long, for whenever Mussulman intrigue or any prisoner mercilessly handled by the jail authorities, I could not repress the overpowering impulse in me to plunge into the fray and help these helpless creatures out. I thought the injury and insult to them as personal injury and insult. And further that I could not take it lying down. I used to control my surging emotion by meditation. I am inclined to believe that, when a man feels keenly the insult of his community, nation and religion, and his helplessness to retaliate; when his position is no better than that of a tiger in the cage; some such expression as the Sant Ramdas uttered in similar circumstances, cannot help escaping his lips. Ramdas admonished himself as follows :—