We reach Andamans
Our steamer had entered the port of the Andamans and her anchor was cast with ringing chain into its waters. She had stopped, and boats and officers’ launches were seen gathering around her to remove the prisoners. We had to wait for a long time before we were let down into the boats. I cast a glance around me to survey the place where I was to pass the rest of my life. My fellow- prisoners, who had been there before me, and, occasionally, some sepoys explained to me the topography of the island. There was the Ras Island, the head-quarters of the Chief Commissioner of the Andamans. The island ornamented the sea like a palace built in the land of the fairies. It was, indeed, small in size compared with other islands. But it was so picturesque and compact that it could not fail to ravish the mind of even a prisoner in chains like me. On the other side of the island, the foreshore of the sea was fringed by a long line of coconut trees waving their crests in the gentle breeze overhead. Beyond, one observed clusters of mango trees, betel-nut trees, and pipal trees. On the wharf were crowds of people filling the whole atmosphere with their humming voices. Higher up and just on one end of the climb, we saw a stately building in perfect seclusion and enclosed within circular walls and shaded by a thick grove of coconut trees. All round it were gardens of coconut, betel- nut and plantain trees. They stood there like royal menials waving their fans and holding their umbrella over the head of this “grand monarque.” The building, with its perfect calm, struck us as the mansion of a happy, solitude-loving rich man or the manse of a retired clergyman. We inquired of our neighbours, and a sepoy told us that it was the very “Silver Jail” of Barrie Baba. The guards on board the steamer had referred to that name more than once to rebuke the unruly prisoners in their charge. And the sepoys were not mistaken in their belief that its mere mention was enough to strike terror into their hearts. The man, who told us the name, kindly added that, as we were presently going to that place, he need say no more about Barrie Baba and his residence. We were let down the boat one after another in a line, and each one carried his bedding on his head and the pot and pan in his hand. Landing on the pier, other prisoners were at once marched in a line up the steep climb, under the strict escort of regulars and warders from the prison beyond. I, alone, was kept waiting on the wharf, and in charge of European Officers. Thus segregated from the rest, I sat there, and it suddenly struck me that the islands were so located in the Bay of Bengal that they constituted the bastion in the naval fortification of India from the East. As such they had an abiding importance in the future defence of our country.
The eastern islands of Andaman and Nicobar are gateways into the Bay of Bengal. If they were not to come under the control of India and if they were not properly guarded and fortified, any foe from the East can easily launch a naval attack and knock straightaway at the door of Calcutta. But under her control they can be turned into a formidable naval base for the defence of India from the East. It can then be equipped with a fleet of aeroplanes and a strong detachment of fighting ships that will guard its waters day and night and hold in bay any attack on the shores of India. The population of the Andamans and the present state of its c u lture being Indian, the islands themselves must form a political province of India. The Lakhadives and the Maldives, lost to India in her early history, exposed us to European incursions from the next- door islands of Bombay and Goa. The native rulers of those days could devise no efficient means, at the time, to stave off these inroads. We should all leam from these mistakes of the past, and profiting by that experience, raise an effective line of fortifications ’ covering in their range Lakhdiv and Maldiv islands in the West, Ceylon in the South, and the Andamans and the Nicobars in the East of India. We must turn this base of defence into a naval fortress, not unlike the formidable Sindhu Durga in the glorious days of Shivaji. Today Singapur constitutes our first line of fortified defence. The Andamans are its natural front line. For, like Ceylon, they form a natural link with India and also her cultural heritage.
Get up, on with your bed
While the future navy of India with its base in the court-yard of the Andmans was floating on the sea of my imagination and guarding its fortifications of the historical Sindhu Durga. the sepoy rudely awakened me from my dreamland with the words, “Get up, on with your bedding.” He used high words because he knew that his Officer was hearing him. It was his faith that the more insolent his language, the quicker will be his promotion. These insulting words were a prelude to my humiliating position in the prison- house of the Andamans. I got up, I took the bedding on my head, my pots and pans in one hand, and, girding up the chains round my waist, I stood ready for further orders. The mind suffers pain like the body hurled suddenly from a great steep height into the deep valley below. Disillusioned, and consigning to the future the glorious picture I had drawn, I stood up to face the grim reality of the present. I was led from the wharf to go up a steep ascent. With heavy weights on my legs and with bare feet, I could not walk up as rapidly as I wished. The warder, beside me, was goading me on to quicken my pace. The European Officer once rebuked him not to trouble me. In my climb upwards one thought was persisting in my mind. It harassed me with the question, “You are going up this climb to your prison, will you ever go down by the same road to freedom?” In a short time we reached the top, and saw the main gate of the “Silver Jail” in front of me. The gate began to grate on its hinges. It opened, I went in, and it was shut behind me. I felt that I had entered the jaws of death.
Mr. Barrie
As I stepped in, two sergeants held me on either side and made me stand up. At the same time. I heard a whisper going round among the warders that Mr. Barrie was coming. They seemed to have seen none more cruel and hard-hearted than he, and they watched my face to see what impression that name had made upon me. But I was absorbed in looking at the decorations in the space between the two iron doors that had folded upon me with their tremendous size. The high wall of that mighty prison was adorned at the top with a festoon of manacles of every size and shape, and worked into the form of hideous-looking flowers. Heavy shackles for the feet, iron bands for the arms, and several similar instruments of torture were hanging down from the wall, right in front of me. They had a grimness and beauty all their own, for they were befitting omamentsofthehorribledungeon I had entered. The bayonets-the rifles-the shackles -the handcuflfs-these were the proper lay-out of that hall of torture, of that big ghastly prison, as appropriate to it as the neat and fine garments that become an executioner, when he escorts his victim to the block. I had read many a work dealing with the history of revolutionary movements all over the world, and also autobiographies of martyrs in those struggles for independence. The descriptions in those works of the prisons in which they were confined were harrowing enough. And they had exactly reproduced, I felt, what I was seeing before me now. The two surly sergeants had made me stand up, that I might behold the scene and be thoroughly downcast in soul by it. The hideous scene was staring me in the face and I was staring at it with an eye as stern as the scene itself. I did not turn my gaze from him, as he did not lower his eyes before mine. We seemed to understand each other, and rightly had we measured each other’s strength. I had a mysterious satisfaction that I was here experiencing what I had read in the books, and that I was standing up in the jaws of this horrible monster, as it were, without being ground down by its teeth. I stood calm and composed, fearless in mind and body, and without a tremor in my limbs. I had written a poem, “The Two Images” in the Briston prison in London. Lines in that poem came up in my mind now. I began to revolve those lines; and my heart thrilled with their utterance:- “Victory to the Goddess of Freedom”.
Mr. Barrie’s Counsel of Perfection
I had almost recovered from this maelstrom of emotion when I beheld a stout, corpulent European Officer, carrying in his hand a big stick as formidable as himself, standing right in front of me and watching me from head to foot. This was Mr. Barrie and he had announced his name that it might fall upon my ears before he was himself on the scene. He had expected me to look out for him with fear in my eyes, to cow down before him, but I had not noticed him as my mind was absorbed in the feeling of defiance which it had conjured up as a reaction against the fearful present that was facing me. In those few minutes he kept on watching me. My eyes caught him in that process when he gruffly turned to the sergeant and said, “Leave him; he is not a tiger.” Then, pointing his big stick at me, he went on, “Well, are you the man who tried to escape at Marseilles?” I answered his bold query in a similar independent but self controlled tone. “Yes, why do you ask me that question?” The tone lowered slightly the temper of the man before me. And he added, as if in a mood of curiosity, “Why did you do that?” “You ask me the reason why? Well, one of the reasons was to spare myself all future trouble.” “But did you not invite the trouble upon yourself?” “Yes, but that was because I felt that it was my duty to do so. And I may add, Mr. Barrie, that I also felt that it was my duty to be rid of it.” “Look here”, said he, “I am not an Englishman. I am an Irishman.” He pretended to be as frank with me as I was frank with him. I intervened, “But I would not have hated you for being an Englishman. I have spent the best years of my life in England, and I am an admirer of the virtues that characterise an Englishman.” “I tell you that I am an Irishman”, he replied, “to let you know that I also have taken my part in activities like yours for the liberation of Ireland. I was young then as you are now. But since that time I am a changed man. Look here, I tell it to you as a friend”, he continued, “you are young and I am pretty old in years. I have seen many more winters than you have.” I smiled and interrupted him, “And don’t you think that, perhaps, that may be the reason of the change that has come over you? Not increasing wisdom but dwindling energy?"+++(5)+++ The man was non plussed and he retorted, “You are a lawyer and I am a layman, and I have but little education. But you are a prisoner, and I am the gaoler of this prison. So don’t reject my advice as useless, murders are murders, and they will never bring independence.” “Of course, I know it, but may I ask you, why don’t you convey this to the Sinfeiners in Ireland? Besides, who told you that I had favoured murders?” He, then, changed the subject and said, “The Superintendent will be here presently. It is against the rules that a man in my position should discuss politics with you. But my heart feels it poignantly that a man like you, educated, scholarly, and famous, should find himself in the company of the most hardened criminals in the world It was thus that I was impelled to talk to you. Let by-gones be by-gones. I have nothing to do with them. I ask you to observe strictly the regulations of this place. You are a prisoner here and it is my duty to warn you about them. Don’t break them and I will not interfere. Otherwise I shall have to punish.” What unconscious humour it was that be should be talking to a political prisoner like me, and yet be warning that I was not-to break my rules of prison discipline in this place!
“I would give you one more tip”, and it is this:- “You will be involving yourself in a terrible mess if ever you try to run away from this place. The prison is surrounded on all sides by vast, dense, impenetrable jungles; the cruellest of aborigines make their abode in them; they are cannibals. If they catch you, they kill you, and make a meal of tender, young bodies like yours, as easily as we may eat cucumbers! Do not, please, treat it as a joke; don’t chaff; the Jamadar here will tell you if it is not true.” The Jamadar saluted him, of course, and said, “Every word of it is true, Sahib.”
“I know it but too well”, I added. “The first book I ordered and read, when I knew that I was to be sent to the Andamans, was the Government Report of these islands. I fully realise that Port Blair is not Marseilles.”
“So far so good, act as I like, and I shall prove myself useful to you. Jamadar, take him in, and show him up to his room on the top floor of barrack number seven. Lock him up.”