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

With all this, freedom has not come nearer. And it will demand tremendous sacrifice on the part of her people and an amount of suffering to accompany it, till India can hope to be free. That is the price of her victory. Naland Vihar This was the lesson of my preaching to all prisoners in the Andamans. And that made them stand up against any hardship that fell upon them. The newcomers were all drawn from the villages. They were all uneducated, ignorant people but no whit less patriotic on that account. I began to tell them that now that they were to be in prison for a number of years, it was up to them to add knowledge to their patriotism. Let them enforce their love for their country with rational sentiment behind it. Let them read, let them study, let them grasp and understand, so that patriotism would not be with them a vague sentiment or a mere emotion. The prison was a university for such study. It was our 'Naland Vihar'—a Buddhist temple of study and retirement. Train yourself, discipline yourself and acquire learning. And I and my old colleagues began to instruct them accordingly. We started with alphabets for these newcomers—shop-keepers, farmers, and villagers, all of them. Some of them were Gujaratis, and I procured books for them in Gujarati. Others were Punjabis and I made them read through Gurumukhi. The rest took their lessons in Hindusthani. I mixed with them partly in the morning and partly in the evening, and used my time with them in imparting lessons. Every chawl was humming with life. And all our members applied themselves seriously to that task. Most of them had heard my name and that counted much with them. One of these newcomers told me, and I had heard it from others also, that when, during the war and in the early part of it, American warships went along the route of the Andamans, the Indians on board raised their hands in salute in front of Port Blair in honour of the political prisoners imprisoned in this jail. When I heard stories like these, I used to recall the words I uttered almost in the second week of my residence here. I had said then, "Do not be depressed by insults and humiliation. A day will dawn when they will raise their hands in salutes to you in this very place." I have already " mentioned this in the first part of my narrative. That stimulant, that tonic dose which I had administered then to my colleagues against their darkest mood of despondency—those words which had painted the golden morrow on the midnight sky of sorrow—had not proved altogether useless. Some portion of our dear India still remembered us! India had not altogether forgotten us. After the three 'R's, the new comers were given lessons in history and geography. Every evening after dinner, I talked to them for half an hour on Indian history, on the new reforms, on European history, and on elements of political economy. And I continued the topic with a batch of twenty-five men in turn in our Sunday Meetings. In these days the programme of national education was carried out with special vigour and intensity. Songs