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

End of Chapter V

CHAPTER VI On Death-Bed While all these activities were carried on with zest during the later years of the war, I found my health completely shattered, as I wrote in the letter I had sent to my brother; and I was removed to the Hospital for rest and treatment. When my fever was ever hundred degrees on my body, and the dysentery had become very acute, the hospital authorities began to attend to me with greater care and undertook regular treatment of my disease. Every prisoner when taken to the hospital does get some rest in that place, and, therefore, it was no wonder that I got it because when I went in I was worse in health than any other prisoner. It was in the eighth year of my residence in this jail, that they gave me this relief. Otherwise whenever I was ill before, the only treatment for me was solitary confinement. Once removed to the hospital, the Superintendent saw to it that I was well-cared for. They changed my food from time to time to find out what suited me best in the present state of my health. This change in prison management, it must be pointed out, was the result of the criticism passed upon it in the Legislature and in the newspaper world of India; and my letters had helped materially in ventilating that grievance. But this reform had come so late, that, speaking for myself, the care that the hospital bestowed upon me did not lead to any change for the better in my declining health. My fever did not abate although they gave me dose after dose of quinine to drive it out of my body. And the quinine brought on dysentery and blood in the stools in a very acute form. I was unable to digest rice and milk which passed out as it had gone in. In the Andamans and especially at Port Blair, T. B., Malaria, and dysentery marched on together. They stalked the land and took heavy toll of its inhabitants. I was already in the grip of dysentery and malaria, and six or seven months later, the doctor himself suspected that I had a touch of T. B. In the hospital there were many patients around me who were stronger and better- built and yet affected by these three maladies. I had passed eight long years of imprisonment and hard labour, and my constitution had completely gone under. It would have been no surprise, if I suffered from all three of them. Dysentery took off my appetite for food, and I could not digest it. Want of food added to my weakness and shattered my nerves; the fever was continuously on me; only the last enemy was yet to come, though he was very near. In the prison-hospital I had nothing to entertain me except reading. And that was the only solace of my life. But my nervous debility made reading and light conversation a heavy tax on my constitution. The slightest indulgence in these brought on fever which rose to 102 degrees. So I gave up reading altogether did not keep any books near me to avoid the temptation, and lay on my cot with eyes shut. Time, already a tedious factor in the jail, became too long and too heavy to bear and I had to spend the

tedium to the accompaniment of griping pain in the stomach, and of burning fever on the body. Even then I was doing all those things that I have described in the last chapter. Sometimes I thought that, due to my illness in the prison, I had come to regard prison-life as a hell on earth and that to be outside would have been better for me. But how? Do not people suffer from all these maladies outside, and is it wise to lay all the blame for them on the jail? People suffer from dysentery, malaria and consumption even in palaces. Epidemics like bubonic plague and influenza sweep over big cities adorned with theatres, and pleasure-haunts, and blazing with electric light, And groanings and cries of pain are heard in a thousand homes through them. The City of Bombay suffered from such epidemic, and every home in it had four beds of patients stricken with influenza. Why should I then bewail my lot in this prison because I am in its hospital down with malaria and dysentery? Pain and disease are rampant everywhere. There are a thousand villages and a thousand huts of poor families which, stricken down with similar ailments, do not find any medical aid near at hand to relieve them. You have in this hospital a medical officer, medicine and nursing of which these poor folk have not the slightest notion or expectation. Your lot in this dependent state is much better than theirs though they are free; their lot, in these circumstances, is, any day, harder to bear than yours. So be patient and put up with it calmly. Do not grumble because you have to pass through it as a prisoner. Do not add to your pain by this idle pining. It is right for you to think that freedom is better than imprisonment, but for other reasons. But now that you are in prison and are ill, you had better not think of it. For disease and death haunt the prison too often, no doubt; but not that they don't stalk the outside world as well. Life in this prison, intrinsically, is not more 'flat, weary, stale and unprofitable' than the usages of the world outside, for have we not all to pass our days in 'the vast prison that is this world', and is not this prison a part of it? That is as a part of philosophy. But is the reality so different after all? The struggles for national freedom and the individual struggle for existence are both hard and serious things. Is not life in prison equally hard and serious? It is worth while striving to live up to your noble ideal for which yourself with thousand others like you, and some of them your friends, have had to come in this prison. It is for that, that you had to pass through these trials, practise these austerities, and go through this kind of self-abnegation. And these will shine in the world by their reflected splendour, things great and small, like great and dazzling achievements of other men on the theatre of the world. People read with as much eagerness and interest the accounts of the prisoners transported to Seberia for the political crime of shooting Czar Alexander, as they may gloat over pages of a book describing the life of Czar Nicholas, or of the hypocritical priest, full of romance, mystery, lust and dupery, Rasputin. And they certainly cherish greater sympathy and reverence for the former than they pity or hate the latter. A people's eyes are fastened less upon the domes of luxurious palaces than they are rivetted upon the cottages of the exiled and on the Jails of people imprisoned for political crime. And even, were it not so, we, the worshippers of freedom, must count the hour and mark the day in this dark night for the arrival of the dawn for which we had dedicated our all. It is a solemn duty for it is a

solemn vow. Then why should I consider this life as meaner and more futile than the life without? Free life? What is it, and who is free? Is it without the walls where these people toil? Outside these walls are the huge walls of Universe and Nature. Mind alone is free. It is imprisoned only by the skies over-head and by the horizons stretching before its eyes. If you feel pinned down and limited by this prison, ask those who are free, and they will tell you that they are as much pinned down by the giant circumstance. In short, what is here is also without, more or less, but in no way different. And nothing to entertain here, you think? No, friend, you have plenty of it. Look at this book; within its two pages the ants have built their capital city. This much about my ailment. What about the tedium? Nothing more and nothing less. We find life in prison dull, monotonous and useless. But what is life in the world intrinsically? You are a prisoner and your jailor and Superintendent are not. But what is the difference between their life and yours? They rise from their bed every day; they sit in their office and write; they eat and they sleep; again, they wake up, and again they go to bed. How have they made their lives, and what have they made of it? Marriage, children, retirement and pension—that is the sum-total of it. Is that life's fulfilment? Do not children enact the same part in their sport? How is this sort of life better than that of the children at play? Can you really say that it is better from your observation and analysis of that life? Your life and theirs run in the same groove and are cast in the same mould, though they are free and you are a prisoner. We grow on our parents' knees; we burn or bury them in due time; then we dangle and rear up our own children; and we go to our graves finally. And what is all this for? Is not the wheel of life a weary round, after all? The great Shankaracharya asked the question, 'What next?" And it is a question very pertinent to ask of life in this world as also of my life hereafter And even to a mighty cataclysm like the great war just ended. France and Germany have indulged in this game many times before. The Franks attacked the Gauls, and from that day onwards, how many times, across the ages, have they not played the same role? And victory has made sport of them both, sometime swinging to one side and sometime swinging to another. France is victorious once; and Germany is victorious next, and France going in sackcloth and ashes before her. Today the great Napoleon Buonaparte; tomorrow Louis Napoleon III! Today Austerlitz , tomorrow Sedan! One fine morning Bajirao I, another dark evening Bajirao II! In their uniformity, in their commotion and confusion, whose life was being reared and built up? Why all this ambition, this strife, this rivalry, this struggle for mastery, this lust for power? Whither has it all led? Everywhere the same scene, and the same sequel, and the same end. Futility and weariness are not the signposts of prison alone. These words mark not the prison-rate alone. They are writ large on the portals of a palace, on the dome of the Taj, on the summit of a mountain, and on the surface of the sea. "What then? What is all this for?"—This is writ large on the tablet of eternity. Why then pine, that you are in prison and your life is running lo waste? For what is in prison, that is not also in the world?

Then about the news, about the lust for news. The prisoner is sorry that he gets no news in the prison while the outside world is full of it. That makes life tolerable. But you have to look at it from another point of view. Does any news give you ever entire satisfaction? Say, you know that India is free. But consider well, if it satisfies you. For your mind will begin to think how long will that freedom last and on what terms. For India once was free; that freedom brought her glory and greatness; the great and glory made her lethargic; and lethargy made her lose freedom. Look at her history and you know the truth of the matter. One generation fights for freedom, another enjoys the fruits of freedom, and the third generation loses it. Suffer, fight, die, enjoy, lose—that cycle sums up the history of every nation, dynasty, community and society. These three or four words contain the story that we call history. Is not all news the quintessence of these basic truths? Do you not think that there is nothing more to hear than this? Why national history? Even the history of the Universe is summed up in these five significant words. For all the ups and downs of this Universe end, after all, in deluge. Its origin, its creation was the first news that has now grown so time-worn, so stale. The end of the Universe— that news, broadcast,—will surely thrill the world of man as nothing else can, any day or at any time. From creation to dissolution—the phrase sums up neatly the story of the Universe. And you know them both—the beginning and the end. Why then worry that you don't get news here? The philosopher shall find no delight in sports that satisfy the child. All the detailed news must swing like a pendulum between these two extremes,— birth and death; creation and dissolution; flux and reflux. And the news are so transi- tional, transient and passing, that not one of them satisfied any man, and his thirst for it never ends—whether one is in prison or free like the wind to blow where it listeth. The last man's news excites your curiosity in this prison as the last week's news attracts the American. For in America every three hours a newspaper comes to birth and the latest news is welcomed as the best. America wants no stale news. The American mind is anxious to know the latest. The Stock Exchange and the Wall Street are the two barometers of the American temper. If tomorrow we are able to procure news from all sides of the Universe, the human mind will be anxious to know what happened on the Planet Mars, as it is eager to know today what happens in the world of man, or as you are anxious about news from India. So that philosophically speaking your life is not altogether useless or any worse than that of the so-called free man in this world. Behold that city of ants within the pages of that book. How it bustles with life and activity like the great Pataliputra of ancient history. Look at those eggs, look at their queen, look at their princess, and at their army of ants ready to fight and sting; their standing army, and their divisions and classes, and their division of labour. Look at the film of gnats floating before your eyes in the light of the sky. It is a nation of wanderers like the Jews. They fly together in swarms from region to region and settle nowhere. Do not regard them as insignificant beings. You call yourself a man, but you have no wings to fly. But the gnat which is one-tenth the size of the sesame, has wings and it flies. How fine the nerves and feelers? How intrinsically small and yet efficient for work? This is God's great miracle, learn it and be wise. This is real diversion to your distracted mind. Great scientists spend a life to understand the infinitely small in the Universe. They study insects and worms, or the animal world, beasts of the earth and the fowls of the air, their life, their ways and habits, and record

them. They watch an ant-hill or a beehive for years on end to know and write on the evolution of life. And their life, no one can say, is spent uselessly. If it is not a trifle, why do you look upon your life in this prison as futile or as wasted? Behold another thing. The cats after midnight mew and cry. They are out caterwauling. A rival comes on the scene, and the love-song changes into a war-song. Terrible is the fight and screaming. So shrill and piercing the sound, that it jars on your nerves. You feel it contemptible, and ridiculous. But if you think of it, what else is our Ramayana? Like these two cats, the two men fight for the possession of a woman. Smitten with love, Ravana kidnaps Sita. In pursuit of love, Rama fights and carries her back. These cats fight with their claws and make terrible noise. Those men fought with their bows and arrows, sword and trident, and sounded their kettle-drums. The passion and the impulse, the instinct and the behaviour, are the same. The cats must have taken this fight between two tom-cats to be as epic as we regard the battle between Rama and Ravana. To talk in the language of evolution this battle of the tom-cats was the origin of the heroic duel between Rama and Ravana. Speaking of evolution, there are two basic facts of life which it enunciates. One is known as the struggle for existence and the other as the preservation of the race. Hunger and sex are its elements. According to this then, the Ramayana or the battle between Rama and Ravana may well be traced in its genesis to the fight of the two cats. And according to another basic fact, the love of Mary for Christ or of Yashoda for Krishna is the evolution of the primitive instinct of the mother- cat for her kitten. Look at the court-yard of the doctor's bungalow, and see there the hen with her brood of chicken. How she plays with them, crows to them and saves them from the swoop of the eagle or the kite. Yashoda trembled and wept not so much when Putana swooped upon Krishna, as this Madame Partelett must have crowed when the kite swooped down upon her little ones. What a wonderful thing is this world! Elders purchase tickets to witness the sports of children and competitions among schools. Here is the gathering of these chickens, jumping, cackling, picking up corn with their little beaks, their dodging one another, their running and their pursuing one another. Is it not as interesting as the school sports and the school competitions? The same feeling throbs in their hearts, the same joy thrills their being that we find in children and school boys playing. The whole life is a symphony of love, and joy, of instinct and appetite. Nothing is mean and nothing is great. The animal is as much human as the human is animal. Only we must look at both with a sympathetic eye and we must live to see it. After a year in the hospital, I was sent back in chawl number five, and on its third floor. I was kept by myself and all alone, and I whiled away the hours in musings like these. I overcame the weakness of body and, mind by these meditations. Some time I felt every day that the body could not hold out any longer because one ailment after another was attacking it. This garment of the flesh seemed to be completely tattered and torn so that the soul could no longer wear it. At another time I felt a distinct improvement in my health. But how long am I to linger thus? So a year and a half had rolled on. Dysentery, blood in stools, fever and something else followed in succession and I bore it all. So I resolved to put an end to my life. For, I was in no doubt that this prison and myself were never to part company and so long as this continued my health would never improve. We

all struggle for happiness and none could weep for all time and continue suffering to the end of the chapter. I wanted to know how many days I suffered and how many days I was without suffering. So I made a month's chart and marked on it days when wearing a body was a joy and when it was intense pain. I marked this on the wall, the day of suffering from one ailment or another, and the day free from any ailment. This went on for two months and then I made a reckoning. I found out that of sixty days, fifteen days were relatively better, and the rest were all worse. So I concluded that things were not after all so dark, and I must put off the thought of suicide. But who would thus continue to live on 'the far-off interest of tears'? The castles in the air are, after all, shadowy, unsubstantial things. And the mind recoils on reality after building them long enough. So I was pulled back on 'the earth, earthy' and was kept hanging on the borderland of suicide. In the hospital my weight had fallen down to 95 pounds, I could take no solid food, I felt distant symptoms of Thisis; fever did not abate; and there was none whom I could call mine near me. During the three following months I became worse, what with the atmosphere of hostility common to all political prisoners around me; what with disrespect and stark despair, with none to talk to me words of kindness and of love, and with no freedom of movement from one place to another. So much so that I knew not when Death would pounce upon me and snap the chord of my life. I realised that the time had come when, with all my will to live, I must pass away. Am I, then, to die in the hospital? This thought began to haunt me all along. I reviewed in my mind the philosophy of the world and its conclusion on the subject. From Buddha's doctrine of Nirvana and nescience to the Yoga doctrine of Knowledge; from the materialism of Science to the Monism of Haeckel and Spencer, and to the evolution theory of 'Substance' propounded by them, I searched them all for light on death and immortality. From the Mimansa doctrine of the Vedanta to Mill's Utilitarianism, I ransacked in my mind their conclusions about religion, and about the triple faith of God, Immortality and Duty. And as the fruit of them all came forth my poem "On my bed facing death." I wrote it while on bed in the hospital, and I had no hope that I should survive to read it. When I was first arrested, and, when, in England I had expected the sentence of death, I had composed the two poems entitled "My Will", and "First offering". And this I wrote on the threshold of death. In the last I have woven an imaginary conversation between Death and myself. All the three poems find a place in the book, "Echo from the Andamans", published subsequently. First meeting with my family This year my brother and myself got the permission to see our own people in the Andamans. Others were allowed to meet their own people once in five years, and they

stayed together with the members of their families for a couple of days, and, in some cases, for weeks together. I got the permission at the end of eight years. I could obtain it after much worry and effort and with great difficulty. At last my younger brother and my wife started from Bombay for Calcutta when they received a wire that the permission was withdrawn. It was a cruel joke indeed. When one wrote to the Government of Bombay, it directed him to enquire at Port Blair. If the Commissioner of Port Blair was approached on the subject, he referred us to the Government of India. If one wrote to the Government of India, it wrote back to say that the final decision rested with the Government of Bombay. Things went on like this till 1918-19, when at last we met each other. I met them in the prison, and in the presence of the prison-superintendent, and also within the hearing of the Marathi-knowing warder concealed behind, so that they may discover from our conversation if we were hatching up a new plot, conspirators as we were by the nature of our imprisonment. I met them after eight years,—my wife, my brother and his wife. I was glad to see him hale and hearty. We talked to each other for an hour and a half full of joy and with the abandonment of a marriage festival. We suppressed for the time being all the dark memories of the past, thoughts of the rueful present, and fears for the unknown future. We dwelt on the immediate before us, and, as if care-free, gave ourselves up to the delight of the moment. But why did not my elder brother's wife come along with them? She had borne the heaviest burden of work in our political activities and in the never-failing dangers of those activities. With what superb courage and an amount of patience had she faced them all! She was my childhood's companion, she was a loving mother to me in my adolescence, she was my trusted coworker in all political planning and execution, and for seven long years I was pining to see her. Why did she not come? Her eyes had closed on the scene, as I was to learn soon; they had closed after a long vigil with the lighted lamp of her love constantly kept burning. The lamp had flickered, the light had failed, the vigil was over, and she had gone to her Maker; hopes deferred had not only made the heart sick but had broken it. Burning in the sacrificial fire of the country's liberation, and of her own separation from one dearest to her heart, she was at last reduced to ashes, and had expired. The wire, that she was permitted to visit her husband in the Andamans, from the kind Government at Delhi, had come a day too late! The story was told me by my younger brother, and I swallowed it, without a word, like bitter poison. The world is always changing; what is today, tomorrow is not. Those who are united are bound to be separated at some time, sooner or later. God was kind to keep us together so long, and myself am entering on the decline of life. From the drama of life, one character after another must depart. They are bound to make their exit from the stage of this world. Are they mounting up to appear on the stage of the next world? Who knows? Each one to his faith. My elder brother believes in life after death and in rebirth. According to his faith, the soul of his dear and departed wife was hovering over this family reunion in the prison of the Andamans, and it must have heard us all. A man like me may not have that faith and for me the chapter has ended here. A woman fighting bravely for the freedom of her Motherland, dies on the battlefield and is said to go straight to heaven. What does it mean? It means that she is freed from all cares, all struggles, all pining, that she finds peace. She is extinguished — like the flame of fire, disappears, vanishes completely. She goes beyond the pale of sorrow and joy. She attains salvation. On any ground we ought not to weep for her. The sorrow is our own for we can

see her no more. I consoled myself thus and dropped the topic. I turned on other subjects of national, religious and domestic importance. I indulged in humour and laughter within the time at our disposal. I do not know whence I gathered so much strength, in my exhausted condition, to say what I said. We three brothers had met together after twelve years! We were standing together on the pier near the boat that was to take me to England. That was in 1906 and we had met now in Port Blair and in prison in the year 1919, and that only for an hour and a half! Permission was given me to meet my wife alone for half an hour. After the meeting was over, my younger brother and the other members of my family were instantly put on the boat at Port Blair. As if their stay here for a week more to see the Andamans would have been dangerous, and involved some plot to spirit me away from this place by a boat or in an aeroplane! My brother's arrival had made many people anxious to meet him, but no one else was allowed to see him. But my fellow-prisoners saw him in spite of the ban, and did not shrink from presenting him with fruit and flowers. Well, my people had left. It was like a happy dream in deep sleep on a night when the body is burning with fever; and like waking up from that short-lived experience and relief, to toss restlessly on my bed again. I found myself all alone once more, locked up on the third floor of chawl number five of my prison-house in the Andamans. At this time, I was removed from the hospital and put in. this place. It was a solitary place but I saw from it the broad ocean and the open sky, and the island of Ras on the bosom of the ocean. I had never before been put in a room so airy and so open to view. And I was permitted, besides, to move freely in the verandas and the square of that circle of chawl. I used to sit and watch the island stretching out in front of me, and I often passed into a reverie. It put a strain on my mind to be lost in thought thus. Sometimes emotions bubbled over and overthrew thought, and I had to surrender myself to them till the storm had passed over me and I was again cooled down. A conflict and anarchy was the result of these surging waves, and then I had to take the helm, ride the storm and let thought resume its seat as before. That my heart should not be so entirely swayed by them, I directed my attention deliberately to the most ordinary things about me like the cows grazing in the compounder's ground like crows picking up and making away with coconut pieces, in concert and phalanx; or like little boats sailing towards the island of Ras. In the prison the mind becomes so introspective, that it is hard for one to push it out and direct it to objects without. We lose the habit of observing the world around us, and contract the vicious habit of brooding, again and again, over the same old thoughts. Reading was impossible for the brain was too fagged for it. Serious thinking and concentration on Yogic practices was out of question. While contemplating the sea and watching the rise and fall of the rolling waves, suddenly the mind itself like the waves was lost in the depths of reverie, and a mood of concentration would follow. Sometime deep silence came over me as I kept on looking at the island of Ras, shining like an emerald in that sea, and adorned by the Church and its spire pointing heavenward. It

reminded me of the Father in Heaven for whose prayer and adoration it was reared on that solitary island. But that deep concentration, that solemn all-embracing silence, and that exhilaration of solitude became too much for my enfeebled body and my shattered nerves. My desolate heart could not bear them. After I had come to myself, my head would begin to ache, I felt their strain upon my brain and my nerves, and I felt weaker than before. Hence even this exhilaration I could not have. I was reminded in these moments of Lord Buddha. Recovering from the memorable fast, he had fainted, and he had to regain the lost strength of his body, and his power of concentrated thought and meditation. He had to eat whatever nourished his body like butter, sugarcandy, rice, milk and sugar boiled together, and whatever he got on the way. What then of a person like me! In the depressed state of mind and body, reading, thinking, concentration, meditation—all were out of court. Serious work was denied me by my failing health; while the prison-hardships denied to me the calmness of mind as well. Without a friend, without play and without the opportunity of a stroll, the prison had become a nightmare. I could look at the hens of the doctor in the opposite compound. I could watch the birds flying and I could hear the mosquitoes humming. That was my relief, that was my recreation in this prison. Yes, speaking of birds, I am reminded of bulbuls, the Indian nightingales, in the Andamans. Their melody was a real joy to my heart. They are very beautiful birds indeed. Tiny, well-proportioned, and alert. How playful and how sweet is their music, how quick their movements. Swarms of them hovered over the heaps of coconut fruit and swooped down upon them. They picked and ate the pieces to their fill. They continuously chirped round and about our chawls. The bulbuls entertained me when there was nothing else to entertain. I could even know their language and that of the jay or maina. The ten to fifteen notes of the maina I could clearly follow. So soon as the note fell upon my ears, I at once recognised it. The notes were different for different moods. A simple note; a note of hide and seek; a note of deep yearning; a note of alarm and fear; a note of deep happiness and peace; a note of passionate love; of motherly love and affection; of invita- tion to the mate; of ultimatums; and last of fierce fight and finale—I had learnt and mastered them all. They were regular like words of human speech. I could not teach them my language but they taught me theirs, Prisoners, were not allowed to cage a bird as their companion. It was an offence. Or else I could have kept them in my room. I would have taught them songs of patriotism. And then! Why, other prisoners would have directed enquirers to my room as the great Shankaracharya was directed to the house of the learned Mandan Mishra, by pointing it as a house that had in its window a parrot and a maina discussing Vedanta! If a bulbul came in search of my cell, the prisoners would have guided it by saying, "Behold the room at the bar of which the maina and bulbul sing their songs of patriotism and freedom, and know that it is the cell of the revolutionary Savarkar." The crows were my familiar friends. A Mussulman prisoner kept a crow secretly with my connivance. But within a few days I found that it was the food of the Burmese. For the Burmese and the Mussulmans in that prison, being non-vegetarians, often killed crows to make a meal of them. They cooked his flesh on the fire in the factories and ate

it. They sold it to one another at the rate of one anna per roasted piece or four tobacco leaves in exchange for it. The crow was tamed and kept by the Mussulman prisoner with the same end in view. And my suspicion Came true when I found him the next day giving it to the Burmese prisoners for making a dish of it! I was all alone in the prison, confined in a solitary Cell, when I came here first. But then I could pass my time in writing poetry. Eight years after, while my fellow- prisoners could move freely and be warders on tens of their fellows, I alone was put back to rot in a lonely room, and could not beguile the hours in writing poetry. I had stopped writing it when I found that I had better work to occupy my time here. But now nervous prostration had made it impossible to resume my old pastime. And I had to give it up almost. The three or four thousand lines 1 had composed, I now found it hard to commit to my memory. How then could I compose any new poems? Even then every week I recited the old ones and fixed them well in my mind. The whole of my poetry took me one full day and one full night to recite, I used to repeat it line by line and continuously, barring the time for meals. But I realised, as I recited it now from my memory, how much of it I had forgotten during the two years of my continuous illness. This is the story of my serious illness and the enforced rest that followed it. And yet I had not discontinued activity altogether. All old activities like Shuddhi, Sanghatan, education and political awakening were spreading far and wide and were kept on so spreading by me. In this lonely chawl and on its third floor, prisoners came to see me and incurred the displeasure of the officers and were put in handcuffs for eight days for breaking the prison-regulation. They rendered me all the service they could, with all the difficulties that faced them in it. I cannot close this story without putting on record my gratitude to them in these pages. The main object of the doctor and the other officers in this prison in bringing me on the third floor of chawl No. 5 was, I must admit, to give me the advantage of fresh sea-breeze and the open prospect in front of it. This change, along with better food and better treatment that I got during my two years' illness enabled me to tide over it, and to improve my health after it. Gradually I began to digest my food, I gained in weight, shook off fever, and got over the signs which had marked me out as a sure victim of tuberculosis. And in the end I rolled up my bed and was confident that I had beaten off death. My brother suffers from T. B.

But the bed that I had rolled up I had to spread out once more. And this time it was for my elder brother. His health had been failing for a long time, but it collapsed completely by the time I had recovered my own. And it gives me pain to put down here that he was not looked after so well as I had been till almost the last day of his life in prison. I shall recall the scene: my brother going to the hospital in black coat of coarse blanket and bent down with the disease that had attacked him; with pain in the stomach indicating bad liver and spleen; standing before an insolent Madrasi "the sly-boots" of a doctor; the doctor pretending to examine him and to put him odd questions; and at last dismissing him with the remark that nothing was wrong with him! My brother taking it as an insult resolved that, even for the life of him, he would never step into the hospital. He was taken back to his room coughing and groaning, clad in the same coarse garment, and was left to be there unattended, unnursed and uncured. The Madrasi was afterwards sternly warned for his rudeness and indifference. Later on the Superintendent got his sputum examined, and at last, a specialist, who had been sent from India to inspect the hospital and offer his suggestions for improving it, declared that my brother had a patch on his back and was clearly a patient for tuberculosis. Even then, while in prison, he did not get the treatment that he needed for its cure. Sometime he had such a fit of coughing, that the sound was heard in the two blocks of building near his own. And that obstinate cough would exhaust his completely so that he could hardly breathe; and he felt that it was choking the life out of him. And fever rose every day from hundred to hundred and two degrees. And his damaged liver made it impossible for him to walk erect. Add to all this a very bad type of chronic dysentery—and you will be surprised how he could pull on in that prison for the last year and a half of his term of imprisonment. During that year and a half about a hundred and fifty political prisoners on life- sentence, and about five hundred of worst convicts like robbers and dacoits—some of whom had not been there even for one year—were released on the occasion of the Victory Celebration of the last war and for amnesty granted in connection with an event to which we shall presently refer. But my brother who had put ten years of hard labour and declining health in it, and whom bad health and overwork had made prematurely old, got no advantage either of the Victory Celebration or of the amnesty following it. And what was the Government's objection to his release? That he had written a pamphlet pf ten pages for which offence he had been sentenced to transportation for life. And the other and the main objection was that he was my brother. So that though he was suffering from tuberculosis, there could be no amnesty for him. And yet that Karma Yogi, that sufferer, never lost his confidence, never gave way to fear and nervousness, never surrendered his principles, and did not budge an inch when he saw death approaching to claim him as its own. But this is only about the Andamans. When he was transferred from this jail to a jail in India, he had to undergo hardships still more terrible. Fate had in store for him untold suffering in comparison with which what he had got in the Andamans was almost nothing. He was reserved by Providence to face them.

End of chapter VI

CHAPTER VII Riots in Punjab and Gujarat (1919—1920) The war had ended and its reaction on India was just coming to a close, when news came in the Andamans About riots in Punjab and Gujarat. We were taken by surprise to read that news. In the tremendous upheaval of the great war and its repercussion on the world, nothing cataclysmic could happen in India. And now these riots— on a day after the fair, an uprising of sleepers awakened and struggling for commotion, after the tide had turned! Ahmedabad, Viramgaon, and Delhi and towns in the Punjab rioting, for what? Presently were drafted in this prison martial law convicts from the Punjab and Gujarat. No Muslim political convicts had yet been reported to the Andamans. But in this batch from Gujarat and Punjab there were a few Muslim political convicts as well. All of them had sentences passed on them which ranged from two years' rigorous imprisonment to transportation for life. In 1911, when I was transported to the Andamans, on board a steamer, in a chalan from India, I had said to the prisoners that a time would come before long when the whole steamer would be full of political prisoners transported from India. They were then mourning that I was transported for life, and the only political convict among them. I then prophesied that India would win her freedom when prisoners with life-sentences like me would fill the whole Silver Jail of the Andamans, and that increasing number of prisoners like me was the thermometer of India's rising temper and living conscience. I remembered those words now. For two steamers had now anchored in the harbour of Port Blair, and they were all political prisoners who got down from them. The number of poli- tical prisoners in the Silver Jail had gone up to two hundred. And most of them were here on ten years' term of imprisonment or on imprisonment for life. And they were all spirited men not to be cowed down by anything in the world. What a change in the temper of my country during a period of ten years! Prior to that date if a patriot or political leader were sentenced to a year or a year and a half's rigorous imprisonment, he was reckoned as a martyr by the whole of India. And now men go in prison and suffer ten years' imprisonment in the cause of their country as a matter of course, as if there was nothing unusual in it. And it has become such a common occurrence now, that nobody even thinks of it. And what of one year's imprisonment? It is taken as if it was as good as free. "Only two years!" has now become an expression to mean nothing.

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

from the 'Gadar' were freely sung and all came out in their respective chawls and stood listening to them; prisoners, warders, petty officers, jamadars and all. Well, we went even further. In the shade adjoining the' prison factory, they had begun to learn and practise the art of wrestling as a pastime after their day's work. Among the newcomers, there were one or two trained and renowned gymnasts who readily agreed to undertake the task. During the course of instruction, I had, sometime, very strange and unwelcome experience. And not unoften, it amused me. Among the Gujarati prisoners, I found that I had to bribe one of them with a little tobacco that he should offer himself to teach Gujarati to a Mussulman fellow-prisoner. There was a Brahmin prisoner from a village in the Punjab who struck me as a double-distilled rascal. He was one of the convicts in the Punjab riots. Well, he not only demanded the usual fee of tobacco to teach a fellow- prisoner, but occasionally claimed as his special charge for doing the work, a portion of the milk that came to me from the hospital as my ration of food every day. And yet he always shirked the task. When he found me nearby, he did his lessons in a loud voice. Otherwise, he avoided it as much as he could. The Brahmin had passed his fiftieth year but had not overcome his childish pranks. If I failed to give him tobacco, he would straightaway tell me that he had lost the slate and pencil, though I knew but too well that he had concealed them. And when my back was turned upon him, he would sing a skit which ran thus: "The Babuji is duped, duped is the gentleman Babuji." I was amused by it, and if I wanted him to repeat it to me, I had to give him another pinch of tobacco for it. Others threatened to thrash him for this joke at me, when I had to intervene and let him go. I still hum the tune to myself: 'Babuji is taken in; the gentleman is taken in'. Several times I had to run after them with slate, pencil and horn-book, to make them learn. Some systematically avoided me as a pest. I remember giving a lesson in Gujarati alphabet to a forty-year-old peasant, from that province, Jiva by name, forty times before he could learn it. The rest of them burst with laughter, but the best of it was that Jiva had learnt the lesson. They were so dull, so averse and so ignorant. But they had, all of them, hearts of gold. Pure, devoted, simple, humble and obedient they were, except in learning what I wanted them to learn, and what I insisted on teaching them. They had wounds from bulletshots, all of them, which now survived as stains or scars. I always used to pass my hand gently on these scars and say with pride, "Behold our soldiers and the medals they wear. They are more precious in my eyes than medals of gold. They are more honestly won than those, and will last for ever. Exit Mr. Barrie Where was Mr. Barrie when all these changes were going on in this prison, in all the bustle of its political prisoners? Where was now, the demi-god of Port Blair, who

once made the political prisoners look down when he looked up, and look up when he looked down, who roared and fumed every moment of the waking hour, and insulted him every moment of his life? Where was he? Nowhere. He was the jailor, he was in his office, like dead stone, harmful if one dashed his head against it; otherwise immovable and harmless. Ten years of endless wrangling, of strikes of newspaper cries and controversies, his loss of prestige, the grief that it had brought him, had tired him out completely. The superior officers had also adopted towards the political prisoners, considering their growing number, their consolidation and their defiant attitude, the policy of let-alonism, of tolerating them as an inevitable nuisance. Where we could hardly meet together and talk in a company of four, now we hold open meetings of twenty-five and more, and defy any one to stop or disperse us. Mr. Barrie saw this, but wanted the petty officers to refrain from any action. "Let them not gather together and hold their meetings under our very nose, and that is enough. Give them light work, do not do anything and let them not do anything that may raise a commotion and a storm. And that will do. Let those devils do what they like. See that you manage them for yourself." That was the tone of his advice to them.

Moreover, ten years of education had made the petty officers, warders and jamadars of our way of thinking. They had ceased carrying tales about us to their superiors. At least, but a few of them did that dirty work now. Hence Mr. Barrie was ignorant of many things that were happening in the prison. I may give only one instance in point. A Gujarati convict sentenced for murder in some dispute about agricultural holding, had been in this prison long before my arrival. From the time that I came to know him, he had become my confirmed disciple and devout admirer. He had completely absorbed my teaching and had turned a nationalist. In the days of complete strike, he did his work punctually. As a prisoner he used to pass chits from one political prisoner to another hidden in the shreds of coconut shell. As a warder he was put on the work of supervising the gang detailed to take rubbish out of the prison. And he distributed newspapers to different parts of the prison hidden in the baskets for carrying the rubbish. For that service to us he went among us by the name of 'the postman'. In the height of his power Mr. Barrie would not let us have even a scrap of paper or the broken end of a pencil. We then communicated with each other by writing with a pointed piece of brick on our pot of drinking water, and the warder was our carrier of news. He easily passed us one another's pots. Leaves of trees were being systematically thrown on the rubbish and this man signed us to pick them up. And they brought us news scrawled on them by means of thorns, and without exciting the slightest suspicion. The tree is now cut down by order of the authorities. He had thus proved our loyal lieutenant and volunteer, helping us in all public activities. In course of time, by sheer honesty and merit he rose to the position of a jamadar. He had learnt his Gujarati alphabet from me and in his turn he at my instance used to lead others to read and write. As a jamadar he had to do it cautiously, for he was liable to be punished for it. That he was a straightforward man and an honest worker was known to all of us. He was without any vice and observed the prison- discipline with meticulous care. He was suspect of Mr. Barrie because he was so sympathetic to us, but he rose to be a jamadar in spite of that suspicion. That speaks volumes for him.

As men trained by our organisation began to spread all over the Andamans and influenced the working in the prison itself, and, as orders from above had directed that the political convicts were to be kept in peace as much as possible, Mr. Barrie's position in his office was no better than that of an extinct volcano. He had always a long cigar in his mouth which he kept on smoking and puffing all the time that he was in the office. The fire that went up in curls of smoke from his cigar was the only sign of his volcanic temper. All else was as cold as snow. And in these days his health also had considerably gone down. He had lumbago of which he was constantly complaining, and he was fed up with it. At last he had got long leave for which he had applied, and he was making ready to depart from Port Blair.

He was at Port Blair for from twenty to thirty years and, therefore, packing up his things was a long process. He was now on the eve of retirement, and leave prior to it was already granted to him. It will not be out of place, therefore, to refer here to a past story when four years ago he had applied for similar leave to proceed home to Ireland. When he came to India from Ireland, as the report goes, he had come a poor man and was going back to Ireland with a few thousand rupees in his pocket. He then used to say to me, "Mr. Savarkar, I have completed my twenty years of transportation to the Andamans, and am now going back. For was I not bound up to this place as much as you?" He decided to start, but the very harsh treatment that he had given during that career to the political convicts of that Jail, made him afraid of travelling via India. Those were the days when an official or two like him, were despatched to heaven by the political prisoner's knife or bullet, and the news of such happenings in India had reached the ears of Mr. Barrie. One day discussion arose on this subject in his office between Mr. Barrie and his European friends. They came to the conclusion that it was dangerous for Mr. Barrie to travel via Calcutta, for, in that case, he ran the risk of being done to death by an anarchist in India who knew the treatment he had meted out to political prisoners in this jail. It was decided, therefore, that he should proceed to Ireland by a different route. This news was conveyed to me by a clerk in his office. I realised the fact that it was a wise decision for him to take at that time. Mr. Barrie was much flattered by the discussion. That evening he came to my room and said, full of self-importance, "Well, Savarkar I hear that your friends in India are going to throw a bomb at me, as soon as I step on her shores. Is it a fact?" I replied to him in the same ironical tone, "I don't think so. They don't waste their bombs in killing crows and sparrows. I don't think there is such a fool among terrorists there who would waste his powder on these poor birds when he can kill a tiger with it." Mr. Barrie's pride melted away like a clod of earth in a pool of water. I do not know what happened to his fear about us. Of course, he knows it all right.

This is all about his last leave. The story of his recent leave stands on a different footing. He was to leave us this time for good. He was so much reduced in health that he was not sure he would live long after reaching his native Ireland. Suffering from the curses of hundreds of political prisoners in that Silver Jail, Mr. Barrie had to be lifted up by two men into the steamer that was to take off from Port Blair. In this dying condition, he reached India. And there, after great physical suffering, he breathed his last. He is remembered because the political prisoners, whom he had persecuted so cruelly, had

helped to keep his memory alive. And it will live so long as this book lives; otherwise it would have soon passed into oblivion. And verily it should have been so. For Mr. Barrie was but a tool in the hands of Government to inflict horrible cruelty on us. And his role, as the jailor of the Andamans, brought him too much notoriety. In recording all the horrors and kindness as of an institution, the man who is unwittingly or wittingly its instrument must needs find mention, and hence-Mr. Barrie must come in along with the story of our life in the Andamans. Otherwise, in themselves, neither his merits nor his demerits were of a character that would bring him notoriety or fame. This reference to Mr. Barrie must not end without an expression of my sincere gratitude to him, his wife and child for the kind words he spoke at times to me and for the deep sympathy that his wife and daughter ever felt for me during the ten years of the hard life I had to pass in that prison. If I had met him in different circumstances, perhaps, he would have been one of my sincere admirers. And this thought is enforced in my mind by reading his jottings about me in his own diary. After Mr. Barrie, Mirza Khan We have done with Mr. Barrie. Let us now turn to his lieutenant, Mirza Khan. Where the volcano had itself become extinct, what of him who depended for his heat upon the fire in that volcano? The rising strength of the political prisoners, the fact of his isolation, one by one, from his Pathan, Sindhi, and Baluchi confreres, and the substitution in their place of men of discipline and order, of gentle and good behaviour, in all the keyposts of the prison and the Andamans, had shorn Mirza Khan of all his former power. His beard inspired no terror in the heart of the prisoners, and, if he was at all to survive as a jamadar, he must now earn the goodwill of the very prisoners whom he had ruthlessly trampled under foot. His very fanaticism had now become his bugbear. He feared that, as he had so far done by the kaffirs, so now they would do unto him. A funny incident will prove to you the truth of what I say. In these days he had some disease affecting his hand. Whatever he did, the pain would not stop. As Mr. Barrie's whole body had suffered from the atrophy of limbs, so was it with Mirza Khan's hand. The foolish and fanatical Mirza Khan took it into his head that I had done something to it by my miraculous powers. The spectacled Bada Babu of Chawl No. 7 was the cause of it! He had no doubt about it. Mr. Barrie was free from this kind of superstition. But Mirza Khan went about telling that he and his master suffered from the magic I had practised upon them. He, therefore, sent me a message to beg my pardon for all his hundred sins. "Let Savarkar Babu but forgive me, and all will be well with me." That is what he kept on harping. "Do please request him to restore me my hand. Let him do me that kind turn", he repeated to all of them, I tried to convince him that I had nothing whatever to do with his ailment, that I had done no magic, and I did not believe in magic. But he would not listen. And just to please him, I said I would try to cure him. I called him and said, "If you have such faith in my power to cure you, well, then, I say sincerely that I bear no ill-will to you, and may God cure you." In course of time, Mirza Khan got back the strength his hand had lost, and he was cured not by me but by the medicine he had used. However, he thought that I had done the

trick. Six months after he left the prison with three or four hundred others who had got their discharge on account of the victory celebrations. But the serpent sneaked out with his fangs taken out. One who was a terror to Hindu prisoners had become a lamb before them, before he had left the Silver Jail. All his former allies— the Baluchis, the Sindhis, and the Pathans—had paled into insignificance. Tyranny had been beaten, the tyrants had gone, and the rest of them simply dragged on their existence. The warder, the havaldar, the jamadar, the clerks in the office, the doctor, the compounder, in the prison and out in the Andamans—the best part of this phalanx had now been recruited from the Hindus. And they were chosen for their merit, their honesty and straightforwardness, and for their good record as prisoners. The few Pathans that remained, as these new recruits won favour with their officers, said, "It is now Hindu Raj; and what can one say of it!" Now, it is Hindu Raj Some old Pathan prisoners used to complain about the new order of things in the following words : "Sahib, today it is Hindu Raj at Port Blair; we are afraid, very much afraid, that the Hindus may trump up some false charge against us!" As if, when these Pathans were in power, they had not trumped up any charges against the Hindu prisoners in order to persecute them! For these men to fear now a similar treatment from the Hindus was nothing short of a reflection of their own wickedness. The Hindu warders, petty officers and jamadars never persecuted their Mussulman fellow-prisoners, On the other hand, it was a rule with us always to support such Mussulmans as were free from bigotry, and behaved with prudence. I used to teach them, and used my influence to promote their interests. I have written petitions in their behalf, I have helped them in their work, and when, later on, I had some power in this pinchbeck Raj, I treated them with the utmost fairness and justice. Later on, I will quote their own words about it in its due place. After the exit of Mr. Barrie, his post was temporarily filled by successive European officers, on permanent or temporary service. Some of them were local men and others were sent from India. One of them began to treat the prisoners as Mr. Barrie had treated them in his early career of high-handedness and utmost rigour. He had, however, lost sight of the ignoble failure of Mr. Barrie's Last days. He sent some of the mildest of Gujarati prisoners to work the oil-mill. And another equally shallowpated officer supported him. The political prisoners had almost sabotaged the oil-mill. The officer sought this opportunity to revive it. However, he did not choose for that purpose the tough and the strong ones among us. He allotted the task to those who were constitutionally weak, and who were of a mild and meek disposition. He hoped that they would not refuse to do it. Most of them were agriculturists, and yet on the very first day they offered non-violent resistance, for they had known the past history of the notorious Kolu. Two of them had their rooms in my chawl. And I had directed them how to proceed in the matter. Enraged by this resistance he outheroded Herod. He roared and fumed like Mr. Barrie and yoked the two in our chawl, whom he regarded as their ring- leaders, to the handle of the mill as if they were bullocks, and asked others to turn it