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

beat him with all your strength." The caning was done and Parmanand bore it unperturbed.

It has to be noted that he was not taken to the hospital for dressing the wounds but marched straight to his cell and locked up. This was the first occasion for a political prisoner to be punished this way.

Young Parmanand felt nothing; nor did the other political prisoners feel for him. For they knew that Parmanand was the aggressor and had beaten Mr. Barrie. They did not think it a heavy price to pay for Mr. Barrie's disgrace throughout the prison and for the fear it had engendered in the hearts of them all for political prisoners as a class. The spirited action of Parmanand was a lesson to them all. Parmanand had defied prison- regulations and he was caned for that defiance. There we were quits. But Mr. Barrie was not entitled to abuse Parmanand. And he had abused him and, therefore, we had a right to show our resentment for that action. So there was sympathetic strike in the prison. The Superintendent and Mr. Barrie went round pacifying the strikers. The Superintendent pledged his word that Mr. Barrie shall no longer abuse the prisoners. The strikers were requested to resume work, no matter how much they did it or did not do it. After this the strike, of course, came to an end.

The resistance offered by the first batch to the highhandedness of Mr. Barrie made life easier for those who came after it. Even then, Mr. Barrie would, now and then, try to exercise his authority and extract additional work from one or another minor political prisoners. Sometime he would ask them to weave four pounds of coiled rope instead of three, and sometime he would exact more quantity of picked oakum from them. Sometime he would slyly seek to put some one on the Kolu, so on and so forth. But these political prisoners would not tolerate anything from him. And if he threatened caning they would straight tell him, in that case, they would all stop work at once. The spirited and the daring among them beat Mr. Barrie on all scores. These daily scuffles always led some one or another of these political prisoners to resist Mr. Barrie. They never gave Mr. Barrie more work than what the prison-regulations had laid down for them. And, some- time, they gave much less. Every day they had to put up on the prison-gate the roll of those present and absent in their record of daily work. Since the entry of political prisoners in that jail the absentees on the roll were never marked as zero. The resistance in some form or another had continued from day to day and, therefore, neither Mr. Barrie nor the Superintendent dared continue their policy of repression any longer, or carry things in their usual high-handed manner.

The warders carry complaints against me

I have narrated in the last chapter with what suspicion and severity they treated me in this prison. And when these new batches of prisoners had begun to come in, their