On The Way
The portion of the prison-house reserved for the chalan’s confinement in the gaol at Thana, was to me like crossing the threshold and entering the precincts ofthe Andamans. The room in which I was locked up in that outlying part of the gaol, though a solitary cell, was within hearing of the rooms occupied by the prisoners in die Chalan. I could hear from my room the noise they created, the sighs they heaved, their wails, their talks and their good cheer, clearly enough to divert me from the long loneliness of my own cell. My mind, oppressed as it was with dejection and grief, felt: relieved by this company of prisoners near me. They were really hilarious, for, as I know, man laughs even in the dungeon-hole of utter calamity, overbearing grief, and unbearable tortures of body and mind. Such is his resilience. Perhaps, that horrid laughter is the acme of all laughters as it unburdens the soul of aft the horrors of under-ground imprisonment. Man laughs when he is reduced’ to extremes, and his grief laughs with him when he grows callous to it, as if he has thrown rt offhimself to pass it on to the shoufders of callousness itself. Excessive joy or the ecstasy of joy, if you will, makes a man burst into tears. Similarly an excess of grief tests out into broad laughter. It is said, that in the days of the French Revolution, when inhuman bloodshed, slaughter, girilfofinm’g and murder had been the order of the day; when no man’s head Was safe ori his shoulders; when the premier and leader of today found himself to be the arch-traitor of tomorrow, with the guillotine waiting to chop off his head; when things had passed into the reign of terror, theatres in Paris were full to over-crowding, as they were never before, and wine flowed freely in the taverns of the city. Hilarity, mirth, merriment and brutal murder kept each other company, and danced and laughed and roared in sheer recklessness. “Let us eat, drink ahd be merry for tomorrow we dje " That seemed to be the obsession of them all.
Reckless Laughter
The same was the experience during the great world war of 1914-1918. The officers and the crew on the German submarines had to do the hardest and the most dangerous duty during that period. With their head on their hands, they had to dive deep underneath the sea and expect death in that bottomless pit every moment of their breathing life; they had to torpedo boats and steamers plying above, at the risk of their lives. In that precarious state they had to come up on the surface for rest and refreshment. And they ate and drank to their heart’s content in the restaurants that were specially provided for them. Their slogan was:- “Enjoy till thou goest mad! enjoy, for tomorrow we die! Laugh till you go mad, and tomorrow be a morsel to fill the jaws of death !” In these pleasure-houses, the frenzy of laughter sometimes overstepped the bounds of decency, and let itself go in reckless dancing and mirth. For the reveller knew to certainty that his name, that was today on the dancing card, was to be enrolled tomorrow in the casualities of death. Verily the laughter of sorrow is the most hideous of all laughters.
These prisoners, deprived of all the good things of life and reduced to a condition of existence which beasts even may tremble to live in, their hands and feet bound in chains, their hearts seared and deadened by a career of crime, some of them, being new to sin, feeling the stings of conscience within them, fretting and fuming with anger, sighing and sobbing for grief, were still roaring with laughter-a hundred of them and more were weeping and laughing at the same time. The poignancy of their grief found no relief in light fun and humour. They reeled with the intoxication of the obscene of which they drank deep in this hell on earth. Some came from the province of Sindh, others from Dharwar, some belonged to Kathiawad and Gujarat, and others again were drawn from the Konkan. They talked in different tongues; their thoughts and feelings were so diverse, one from the other; they scarcely understood each other. But the obscene formed the common bond between them all. That had become their national language in which they could thoroughly participate and fully enjoy This social union had come to them as an opportunity of a life-time, and they used it to the full and abandoned themselves completely to its pleasures and pastimes. The evening was the hour when this rebellious mood of frank and free indulgence in the obscene and the broadly humorous found its fullest outburst. The whole wing on that side of the prison was one pandemonium of shouts and cries, of abuses and peais of laughter, and of irrepressible utterance of coarse and foul language. But in this orgy of self-indulgence even, there ran an undercurrent of honour and duty. Human nature is, indeed, a strange amalgam of conflicting elements. These convicts indulged in this uproarious pastime as if it was a duty which they owed to themselves. If the lowest of the low had not laid this flattering unction to their souls, they could not have shamelessly gone in for the kind of life they were leading. The meanest and the most case- hardened among them egged on others, less perverse and less inured to these ways, by the slogans “0, my brethren, sing, O, you fools, go on, for the name and notoriety of our outward-bound phalanx”. And they stressed their homily by adding that when they had been last in this place they had all caught hold of the prison-bars and shaken them with all their might. They had hurled their pots and pans against the walls and the wardens were hard put to it to control them and restore silence. They cajoled, they wept, they went down on their knees and they doled out to each one of us a little tobacco as a solatium. “Shout, shout, O, you nincompoops, do not disgrace the name of this gang.”
Its Fair Name
For it had made a name-this chalan to the Andamans -in the prison-world of those days. It was no mean institution or a body of men. To aspire to the membership of that notorious gang was no mean achievement. We had to pass through several examinations for admission to that status. It began with the ordinary lock up; the magistrate’s court; the criminal session of the High Court; the jury; and the final verdict. Through these many sieves we had to pass before we became eligible for the corps that was ordered for the Andamans, sent to transportation for life. The troop here was made up of the picked ones of this corps. They constituted the representative leaders of their several provinces. And it was the crown and culmination of the Underworld of crime. It had, indeed, a reputation to maintain, for whenever it came to Thana all the wardens of the place—the warden, the jamadar, the havildar, the gaoler and the Superintendent-had a fright. The bars must be broken, the walls must collapse, heads must be shattered, a warden or two must have their thrashing, and twenty or more of the gang must receive their whipping and lashing, and their skins must cut open and bleed till this hell on earth would have its quietus. This was our chalan, with this tradition to maintain. The wardens must wheedle them, if they at all cared for their lives. The chalan would incur disgrace if it did not bear up to this age-long reputation. The old ones, of the gang admonished its recent members in the following words, “Why did you at all go in for crime, if you did not feel like coming up to the standard? Today we are the inheritors of its fame, and we must keep it. We should not tarnish it, Therefore, shout, cry, raise an uproar, dance and abuse. Oh, brothers, we are jealous guardians and cannot afford to lower its name.”
Indeed, they felt that that was their code of honour. When they indulged in the obscene and the slang common to their tribe, when they danced and jibed, an applause greeted them from all sides of the house. When some one appealed to maintain the honour of the chalan, whistling, clapping, the clanging of chains followed their pranks. And the whole atmosphere resounded to that noise. Thus the wheel ran on and completed its full circle-victims as they were of their brute instincts and sensual appetites. This continued far into the night till the midnight hour had sounded its arrival. The pride of the chalan as an institution made the warden bend before it. The Superintendent lost his self-importance, and all had to eat the humble pie before this outrageous multitude. The only way to soften it was to offer them tobacco and beg of them to maintain silence, to talk if they liked, without being a nuisance to the rest of the colony. The officers were anxious, above everything else, to hand over the party intact when it left the place and was taken in charge by those who were to give it safe conduct, under proper escort, to its last destination: It was, indeed, a heavy strain on their minds and the tension was relieved when the chalan had quitted the place in the same condition and numbers that it had entered it.
We always follow the tradition of the community where we belong. There was no finer example of this esprit de corps than this chalan and its behaviour in our midst. If indulgence in the vulgar and the obscene is the rule, abstention becomes a sin and a crime. In the days of our Holi, that man is a disgrace who abhors the time- honoured practice of mud-slinging. The rest laugh and jeer at him for not falling into line with them. Such is communalism and its practice all over the world. That is, verily, the way of all flesh.
The Prestige Of A Barrister
I may have suffered the same fate but I escaped because I happened to be a bar-at-law, a member of the legal profession, and, hence, a man of prestige. The criminal class, and the worst of that class, fears a barrister as they do not fear or revere a poet, a man of learning, a saint or an astute statesman, even if the last be the Premier of England. Utter the name of a barrister and you will see the most hardened criminal raise his brows and ejaculate-“Is it?” The reason for it was plain enough. Men whose life is spent in thieving and dacoity, in courts and prisons, fear and respect him who can unearth their sins, unravel their threads, and expose them to the world by his legal acumen or can shield them by equal chicanery from the arm of the law. He can prove them guilty or not guilty according to the position he takes up towards them. How can they not quail before him? Or how can they fail to regard him as their saviour? They look upon him as an extraordinary being, and, as such, fear him. The criminal class fears the lawyer and seeks to curry his favour. Stories go round about him in the prison-world, not unlike those one hears about the great Birbal and his monarch. The prisoner in the dock trembles before the lawyer as people in Birbal’s time quaked before him. In brief, I must say that my professional degree, if it had served me for nothing else, did serve me in this, that it ipyed me the insolence and insult of neighbours around me. The most confirmed criminal at once felt huiflbled before me.
I was standing that night near the door of my room. And I quietly watched them in their revelry, dance and riotous behaviour. For many days now I had never heard such noise, never witnessed such a scene. The mind fretting in solitude should have recoiled from the obscenity and riotry ofthe scene. But it happened to me otherwise. It was like an ignited match thrown into a tin of kerosene. All my repressed feeling flared up and in that blaze I stood there and lost myself in the show. And as I watched its progress; the mind analysed the emotion and tTaced its genesis to the wretched condition of my own heart. The heart in its woe-be-gone condition could not help turning outside for any relief it might have there; I watched the show because I could do nothing else and in order to forget myself in the ecstasy and revolt of grief I witnessed without me. I did not participate in it, and I found rest and sleep when the whole show had stopped on the admonition of its leader not to disturb me. He seemed to forgive me for not joining in the revelry. As the clock struck eleven the noise had reached its peak, when the wardens reminded the party that my sleep was spoiled by their uproar. They had the goodness to listen and to end their shouting. It was about twelve midnight that my eyes drooped and I fell asleep.
As I woke up in the morning, the idea came into my head that my elder brother, who was now a prisoner in the Andamans, may have proceeded with a chalan like this and must have stayed in this prison before being carried over. I asked the warder about him but, as he was new to his post, he could give me no information on the subject. An older man, after further enquiry, told me that my brother did occupy the very cell in which I was locked up now. The old man had left, when my brother’s image came up before my eyes. He had to undergo considerable persecution here, as I had learnt from a co-accused in my trial. And I saw him vividly as he must have stood up under these tortures. He must have faced them unbending like the elephant at bay, as it stands rooted to. the spot, while the rider rains upon its head blow after blow of his trident that it may move forward. Behind the bars o. f the prison-dop. r, he, like an eagle, may have beaten his wings against, them- He, nuist have sat here thinking of me. He must have said of himself that it did not very much matter to him, if he was transported to the Andamans, so long as I was free to carry on the work behind him. If these were his musings, what will he say when he knows that I was going the same way as he. What a shock will it be to him? Would that I do not meet him in the Andamans, and that we live in different parts of the island.
I think that if only I had suffered by myself, the agonies of my mind would not be one-fiftieth of what they are now. But now that I see my brother before me as he must have suffered, when I hear what he had endured, the thought of it is simply beyond my patience to put up with. My heart was cleft in twain and I felt that I was collapsing under the blow like the bunyan tree suddenly breaking down.
I asked an Officer who I could trust, if my brother had to pass through any tortures in this place. He replied, “Not here. He suffered terribly at Yeravada, as some of the co-accused with you informed me at the time.” This assurance from him gave me a sort of relief. At least in this cell, he must have slept in peace. I asked the same Officer about Wamanrao Joshi, Soman and other fellow-workers who had passed a period of their sentence at Thana.
Brethren, Start We For The Sea
Only two or three days after, our army of prisoners was taken out to proceed to the Andamans. I had shackles on my feet; I wore a chaddar, a banian and a short scarf over it. That was our uniform on the way to the steamer and across. For my bed I had a rough blanket and a hempen carpet which two could not be rolled into a bedding and was, therefore, hard to carry. Somehow I took it under my arm-pit, and carrying my tin-pot and tin-plate in the other hand, I stood ready near my door to fall into the line. The gang came on in a file, clanging their chains in measured steps. They saluted everyone on the way. “Come on brethren, we are proceeding to the Andamans”, they repeated as they marched on. The party came near the main gate and, one by one, they passed across. The soldiers were ready, fully armed to give it an escort along the road. The party walked on to the station under the full guard of the soldiers.
I was left behind, I wondered why. A motor car came up to the door. Two big sergeants got down from it. I was put into it and they stepped in after me. The door was shut and the car started. I was not taken along the road like the rest because they feared that the crowd, who knew of my departure, had stationed itself on the road in scattered groups to have a sight of me. Besides I was a culprit who had run away at Marseilles. Perhaps, I may be spirited away in the same fashion by some member of the secret societies, of which there were many in those days. A mine may spring up beneath my feet, and, who knows, I may disappear on a sudden. These and other reasons of safety had decided the authorities to take me to the station all by myself, in a car, and along a different route. They did not want to repeat the mistake that they had committed at Marseilles.
Whenever I was thus taken from one place to another in a special car and under a special guard, my fellow-prisoners thought highly of me. They used to say, “Why, he is a king; they take him out in a car; why should he tramp with us along the road?” Others said, “Evidently Government is afraid of him. Otherwise they would not have given him a car to go in.” My effort to run away from the steamer-boat at Marseilles did do me some good after all! It procured me a car to enjoy a long drive. It created in the mind of these prisoners a sort of reverence for me. And, further, right or wrong, the more the authorities tried to belittle me, the greater the respect they showed to me.
We came to the station and I was shoved in a separate compartment. The other end of my hand-cuffs was tied to the hand of the Officer who was charged to cany me. Poor man, he had to be a prisoner like myself for the time-being. There were shackles on my feet as well. Not only did I wear hand-cuffs, but my two hands were tied together by a chain between them. I could not tuck up my dhoti, the Officer had to do it for me. If I had to go to the lavatory, he had, perforce, to accompany me, as he and I were holding together by a common chain. So also about sleep. Such wretched experience and dirty life I had to pass through during my journeys, to and fro, from one place to another.
Although they had quietly put me in a separate compartment, people had noted my transit all night. They approached my compartment with eager expectation and, as ruthlessly, they were turned out from that place. They were not only Indians but counted some Europeans among the number. These could come close to me. open the shutters of my compartment and addressed me in polite or rude words as they liked, and leave. There was no restriction or forbidding in their case. The train started, but at every station, where it stopped in the journey, I found the shutters of my window put down. Since the time I had left England, I was never allowed to travel in any compartment with windows up. But the Officer with me in this compartment had, as if by prearrangement, kept the window shutters up so that the European visitors should have a full look of me. A large crowd of them had come near my compartment. Some of these men had lifted up their women-folk on their shoulders that they might see me clearly. One beckoned on to me to stand up. “There is he; that is Savarkar”, went up the cry from all sides as I stood up. The European ladies and gentlemen on the station platform, of course, did not come so near me as I could talk to them, Four or five of them did come close enough. But I did not exchange a word with them. I did not enquire who they were. They were all polite to me; only rarely, I met with insolence from them. And if any-one of them was rude to me, I paid him back in the same coin. I simply cold-shouldered him, and so he melted away.
Those Hot Plaint
The windows of my compartment were always kept shut. Across the bars in another compartment was huddled up the party bound for the Andaman islands. They were all in an uproar on that side. Those were hot summer days. The heat of the Sun overhead was like that of a burning furnace. A marriage party going in that train would have found the journey unbearable. I was only a prisoner sent to transportation for life. How then must have I felt it?
The plains ail about us were exuding hot vapour, and correspondingly it was steaming hot in the train. And both vied, as it were, with the dreariness and burning heatoftheheartwithin. Mysoulandbodywere oppressed by both. In this state of mind and body I found the train running at full speed through the Mogul territory on its way to Madras. In desperateness, I recalled to mind the treck of prisoners in Russia marched in exile to the bleak regions of Siberia. Their miseries made me cry, You have not yet experienced a fraction of them. This is not a mere matter of words. As thou sowest so shalt thou reap. And he alone will reap who had dared to sow.
The train was leaping acoss village after village, town after town, through gardens and forests, across the rivers and over the valleys, along the mountains, up hill and down dale like a maddened tigress carrying in its mouth the prey which was no other than myself. The train was delivering me to the Andamans with the rapidity of a lightening. Will it bring me back to my own country with the same speed? Will it bring me back at all? How can it bring me back and when? Vain imaginings these and obstinate questionings! But the mind that hopes against hope cannot escape them. In far off Siberia, many a prisoner dies with the name of dear Russia on his burning lips. So may I die far away from dear India, and in the Andamans breathing the last word—my motherland!
The train arrived at Madras. I was taken down from my compartment and was kept under guard apart from my fellow prisoners in the train. An Officer had accompanied the train right through the journey. Between every two stations he would come to my compartment, talk to the Officer in it, have a look at me and go back. I thought he was to leave us now as we had reached Madras. He approached me now and wished me good-bye. He seemed to be overcome with feeling as he said, “I do hope, my friend, you will be let off in the coming coronation ceremony at Delhi” That was to be in December. I answered, “Thanks for your good wishes. My wounds are so raw that nothing can heal them. It would be folly for me to bank upon this hope.” The officer assured me to the contrary as if he was in the know of things. “Believe me; you will be free before long; goodbye. Nothing will efface from my mind the impression of this your dignified courage.” Other Officers also took leave of me in the same manner. Having heard all sorts of report about my behaviour at Marseilles, they had conjectured that, in the journey, I would prove a horrible nuisance to them, I would hate the Englishman as a devil, I would burn with rage against him. They took me naturally enough for a ruffian, a braggart and an indecent fellow -a veritable miscreant in short- But I gave them no trouble whatsoever. And they could pass me on safely to the Officers in Madras. At long last they said to themselves, and heaved a sigh of relief. They found me a fine fellow, and taking off their hats and wishing me, they departed.
I was flow in Madras where its Collector, Mr. Ashe, was done to death by a man of the Abhinav Bharat Society - And the Officers suspected that it had some connection with the Central Association of that name in Europe of which I happened to be the leading figure. I had, therefore, expected that they would directly or indirectly sound me upon the incident. When I was arrested in England and was being brought back to India, I had not the slightest notion that the vice-president of the Ahhinav Bharat, Mr. Aiyer, whose premattue death since, we were all mourning as a great loss to the country, had proceeded to India. He had reached Pondicherry from Europe bearing all the rigours of the journey, when warrants were hanging over his head and the police were on his track all along the coast- He had eluded them all by assuming various disguises and offering excuses and making pretences as time and occasion had suggested themselves to him At Pondicherry he took charge of a branch of the Abhinava Bharata, and had compassed the end of Collector Ashe through the instrument of the Shakta Brahmin. Such was the suspicion of the secret police against Mr. Aiyer. And I learnt this seven or eight years after my incarceration, in the Andamans, having then read the secret report about him. But while I was proceeding to Andamans I had no knowledge whatever of the return of Mr Aiyer to India. I had, no doubt, information about this murder and I had also suspicion in my mind that some one from the Abhinava Bharat Mandal had done the deed. Presuming that I may know nothing about it and yet seeking to worm out some information from me, if he could about the Mandal, especially of its branch in Madras, an Indian Officer dressed in an up-to-date European style saw me while I was in that city. A steamer calledMaharaja was anchored in the port to take us to the Andamans. All the prisoners were conveyed on board the ship, in a boat full-packed with them- I alone was left behind on the port. The Officers, including this Indian, presently arrived in a special boat to convey me on the steamer. I got into the boat. It was a rule with me to talk to none in these circumstances. For I was a prisoner and if I began talking, any-one could put a stop to it. The Indian Officer opened conversation with me on several ordinary topics and, on a sudden, showed anxiety to know from me the history of my Society in England and its present state. I told him that it was for him to enlighten me upon it. How can I know anything about it from any person in India? “That is true enough” he interposed in order to encourage me. “And what poor plots they are after all? They could not count even four members to support them.” Smilingly I retorted “|t was then for you to swell the number.” “Nonsense, we in Madras are level-headed fellows. We are not wild and senseless like young men on your side. If any-one were to preach sedition or revolution here, he will not get a single person to follow him.” He kept on talking in this strain just to make me blurt out, by way of protest, the names of well-known revolutionaries in Madras. He was looking at me from time to time if i was about to fall into his trap. After a time he himself said “What is your experience in this matter?” I retorted “You ought to know it better than myself.” “I feel”, he continued, “that everything in Madras is quiet.” I smiled and replied, “Yes, are you quite sure about it?” He caught the meaning of my remark. The other Officers smiled significantly, and interposed. “He knows all about the Ashe business. Only he is trying to pump you out, as you are trying to pump him.”
The boat touched the steamer Maharaja which had come from the Andamans. I was lifted up, with handcuffs on, the ladder of the steamer and taken on the deck. While I was climbing up, a whole crowd had gathered around to watch the scene. All the passengers on board the ship, all Officers, all men in the boats around her, and other spectators, had come out to see me. They saw me entering the steamer. They rivetted their eyes on me, as we witness a corpse being tied on the bier. With eager eyes and bare-faced shame theykept on gazing.
Yes, climbing into that steamer to be transported for life was like putting a live man in his own coffin. Hundreds and thousands must have gone to the Andaman Islands during these years, and not ten in a thousand had returned alive to India ! Young men of I8, as soon as they put their step on that steamer, became old and the shadow of death was visible on their faces. When a man is put upon the bier, his relatives conclude that he had left the world for ever, and, overcome with bereavement, watch the corpse with vacant eyes. Even so, the spectators watched us as we climbed into that steamer, and felt that we were dead to the motherland we were leaving behind. The people, watching the scene, fixed their eyes upon me with the same feeling in their hearts. I was dead to the outside world- -that feeling was writ large on their faces. Really, I wis being put on my funeral pier. The only difference was that I felt what was happening to me while my corpse would have felt nothing. Thousands looking at me in this plight were simply indifferent and altogether cold. They were looking at me as they would have seen any corpse passing along the road. “Poor man, he is dead and gone!” says the passer-by and forgets him the next moment. It was a pain to me to see them gaping at me-my fellow-
countrymen that they were-more than that the consciousness that my transportation was to mean a death-in-life for me, could give me. If but a single one out of these my compatriots was to tell me, “Go, my brother, go, I and others like me swear that we shall make India free and fulfil your yow”, I would have felt my funeral pier as soft as a bed strewn with flowers.