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

now in the prison of the Andamans along with us, and sentenced like us to serve long terms of imprisonment across the seas. Many were the episodes they told me of their own experience about the matter, I have narrated here only one or two of them. The last of these surprised me most though it was a pleasant surprise. For whenever I turned the Kolu in the solitude of my room and was done up by the exertion, I always used to console myself by the thought that I would bear it all, if the knowledge of it to the world outside were only to pour oil into the flames of discontent that I knew were spreading all over the country. But I was in despair about it. For how was the story of my hardships to reach the ears of those who were so far away from me? I have already referred to this mood and how I controlled it by the power of thought! But when my Sikh friend told me the story, I said to myself, "Yes, I must bear it all, for it is never lost, it produces its effects in due time. That is the only way that one can put fat in the fire and make it burn. An agitation succeeds finally on the strength of tenacity and patience of its sufferers. Here was the proof of it. Every drop of oil that fell into the vat below, as I turned the wheel that ground down and crushed the dried coconut- kernels in the rut and the well, was a spark that had kept blazing the sacred fire of dis- content already aflame all over the country. Here was a clear evidence of that influence. One of the Sikhs in the prison informed me that his copy of my prescribed book on the Indian Mutiny of 1857, had gone into the hands of a friend in Brazil. The book was so popular with Indians everywhere, that the copy in Brazil was sold for a sum of Rs. 150. In addition to this personal news, I got all the information I wanted of what had happened in Siam, Canada, Singapore, America, Europe, Bengal and the Punjab as the result of our secret movements and conspiracies in that part of the world, from the mouths of leaders and followers who had taken an active part in them from the incident of the Komagata Maru down to the violent uprising in the Punjab during the days of this war. Part of it was known to the world, and part of it had yet remained in the dark. I had planned to write a complete history of all these efforts and struggles in one connected narrative beginning with 1909 and bringing it down to the close of the first Great War. But I found it impossible to complete such a story in the prison at Andamans. And I had slender hopes to write it ever for I had never expected then to be free and to enjoy sufficient leisure and peace of mind to complete the task that I had proposed to myself. My fellow-prisoners, the Sikhs, ever encouraged and always insisted that I should undertake the work, when I would twit them that the task of the present generation was to make history and the task of the following generation was to write it, which it may or it may not do. After all writing history was a secondary business; making it was the prime part. As soon as the first batch of convicts in the Lahore Conspiracy Case in the Punjab reached the Andamans, the jail authorities adopted all measures to keep it under strict control. Profiting by past experience, however, the work on Kolu was given only to those in the batch whom they found strong and able-bodied to do it. But we warned the newcomers that it was but the thin end of the wedge, and that they would be wise to