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

marry and make a home for themselves, then the difficulty on that score was bound to disappear. Many of them would, in that case, bring their families from India or marry women of the Andamans. So long the prisoners were forbidden from having any contact with free men and their families in these islands. But that ban would not be there under the new order of things. Would it not be better, in these circumstances, to stay here and improve their social and economic position than to go back either to rot in the jail, or to carry on litigation for a small piece of land and thus quarrel with their kith and kin? Here was free land open for their occupation. They had better settle on it, cultivate it, reap a new harvest from it, live and be happy. The so-called free men here were the progeny of prisoners who had come to the Andamans a generation back. They were their blood and bone. To establish marriage alliance with them would be addition to that progeny. To live here in contentment was better than anything they were going to do in India. It would be hard for them to win any status there, to settle, to marry, to make a home for themselves, have children in the family, and make a little money on their own. Why! In India their caste would shun them as pariahs. Those who had returned from Fiji to India in similar circumstances preferred to go back, for in India conditions were hard for them to endure. They were labourers, while the prisoners will go back branded as convicts or ex-convicts. Was it not better, therefore, for them to obtain their freedom after ten years in the Andamans, which in former days came to them after twenty years of penal servitude? Was it not better to use that freedom to improve their lot by settling here, for which they would get a ticket on mere application? Now the ticket was being given only after three years of imprisonment in the jail here. Turn farmers, cultivate the soil,. be independent, earn your living and be happy. Take it that you have come to this foreign country to make your fortune. You will thus not only serve yourselves, avoiding all the hardships of imprisonment, but you will be helping to add to India, if you make full use of your opportunities and work as an organised unit, a colony as prosperous and enlightened, in the course of a few generations, as Canada or Cape Colony. That will mean Greater India, not unlike Greater Britain, though on a smaller scale. For your stay in the Andamans ultimately means to keep the flag of India flying on these shores. It will be the expansion of India from the cultural and religious point of view." "Look at Nicobar. It originally was an off-shoot of India. Now it belongs to the Burmese and the Malayans because the Hindus refused to settle and colonise it. It is lost for good to Hindu culture. And the same thing will happen in the Andamans as soon as the Hindu prisoners are removed from it, and their settlement here is broken up for good. The Burmese and the Malayans are sure to put themselves in possession of it. And the three generation of Hindus which had sown the seed and spilt their blood in its development will disappear in no time. It will be lost to their children and the toil and sweat of their ancestors shall have been in vain. Lost to Hinduism and Hindi culture by such expropriation the Andamans may remain a possession of India, yet its soul will belong to the Chinese, Malayans and other races of Mongolian stock and culture.