I am put on the Oil-Mill
For nearly a month after my entry into the Silver Jail, I did the work of picking oakum. Everyone was wondering how I was not put on the oil-mill. The optimist said, “Now, how can they put ‘a barrister-babu’ like me on the oil-mill?” I said to him, “They will put me on it with the same mouth that they pronounced the sentence of transportation for life on me!” At last, one day, the Superintendent came to me and said, “From tomorrow you shall have to work on the oil-mill. Oakum must have hardened your hands by now, and you can very well take up that work forthwith.” At this Mr. Barrie laughed and said in a banter, “Now you are promoted to a higher form.” That evening Mr. Barrie sent for me in his office. In his conversations with me, he had already learnt that I was in full sympathy with the strike that political prisoners in this gaol had organised; and that I had denounced those who reviled the strikers and their fearless stand as work of a fraternity of insolent, indecent and foolish folk. Their mouths had by now been shut by my attitude towards the strike and the strikers. The secret reports that were being conveyed to Mr. Barrie, from day to day, had almost convinced him that, before long, I was going to join their ranks and to be one of these indecent fools-nay, the very ‘prince of fools.’ Mr. Barrie had called me to know if I was going to passively resist the new task that had been assigned to me by him and his like. He was anxious to dissuade me from that course. After talking on other sundry matters, he, at last came to the point, and said, “You will please realise that I am helpless here, and I must follow the orders of my superiors. They have written to say that you shall be put on the oil-mill, and I had no hand in that business. However, I have persuaded the Superintendent, realising your worth, to relax the order in your favour. You shall have to do the work only for a fortnight. I will not put you on it repeatedly as I have to do in other cases. I know you well, I know your worth, I would have you go on with it and not resist it. Go, do it, I will help you as far as I can. Only do not compel me to punish you.” To which I answered, “I will do the best I can. I will work as far as I can help it. My life is already a heap of ashes, and I have no desire to bring more trouble cm my head.” Mr. Barrie pretended to be overcome, and said, “Look here, I am telling you all this in your best interest. You have fifty years to pass in this jail. It gives a shock to me to realise it. So I pray that you will keep aloof from all further entanglements. Let others do what they like. You should have nothing to do with them.” His constant allusion to my sentence had ceased to shock me or to unnerve me. The more he repeated it, the more callous I became towards it. It was like the artillery man whom the constant sound ofthe whizzing cannon-ball had ceased to frighten and unnerve. The next morning
I was yoked to the oil-mill
I had my solitary cell in Barrack No. 7. The oil-mill work had to be done in a cell of Barrack No. 6, close by. So they removed me there early in the morning. In a sense, I was delighted with the change of quarters. For there I saw some of the political prisoners and they could occasionally exchange a few words with me. I entered the cell and found a Burmese prisoner put to work with me on the same oil-mill. He was there, I was told, to lighten my work. Were not two to a yoke better, any way, than one? But I must not, they insisted, in any way, slacken; I must push the handle and go round the mill continuously, unfailing and unresting. I had been better treated than any other political prisoner but it was ‘Kolu’ after all. The labour on it, however lightened, was more than enough to exhaust one who was not habituated to the task. I put on the barest piece of loin-cloth round my waist. My work began precisely on the hour of six and it continued unbroken till ten. The continuous round gave me a sensation of dizziness. My body ached all through, and, as I lay upon the plank of a bed for rest and sleep, I felt feverish so that I could not sleep soundly as I did before. Wake up I must the next morning and resume the work. So it went on for a week, and I had not finished my quota. One day Mr. Barrie came to my room and said loftily, “A prisoner in the next room gives me his daily quota of thirty pounds of coconut oil, at 2 p. m. sharp, every afternoon. You have worked till evening and still you fall short of two pounds. You must be ashamed of it.” I replied, “Yes, you are right; I must be ashamed of it. But when? If I had been inured to hard physical labour like him from my early childhood. Each one to his work, that I know too well. Let him compose a sonnet in an hour. I will do it for you in half an hour. You will not, on that account, be justified in crying shame upon that prisoner; you cannot say that he had shirked the work. He can well retort, ‘No body taught me the art of poetry in my childhood. Hence you cannot expect me to do it now.‘You employ in your office unlettered peasants, robbers and dacoits for writing work. If they do not speak fine English like you, surely enough, you do not blame them. And they are not ashamed of that drawback. Equally I need not be ashamed if I cannot turn out as much work from the oil-mill as my next-door prisoner does. Those really are to be ashamed of it who yoke intellectuals like us to the oil-mill, and employ hodmen to do the work of a desk. They fail both ways, for they do not get the best out of either.”
Generous friends come to my help
While I was turning the oil-mill, one or two of the political prisoners, my neighbours, who could slip in unnoticed, always came to help me from time to time. Some of them washed my clothes, even with my protests to the contrary, though they had more than enough of their own hardships to bear. And they cleaned and washed my drinking pot and my dining plate as well. The petty officer and the Jamadar often reproved them for it, and even beat them occasionally; but like true friends they helped me on in my daily work. I tried many times to stop them. I washed their clothes without their knowledge, which, when they learnt, gave them exceeding pain. They literally went down on their knees and besought me to refrain from it. When I realised that my not allowing them to do my work, and my doing their work on the sly, both harassed their mind, I thought it the better part to let them do what they liked. On the whole, I found all of them affectionately disposed towards me. Their selfless devotion for me touched my heart. Sometimes, there was a regular rivalry among them to serve me, and it went the length of making them jealous of one another. Then I had to let them wash my clothes by turn. My heart still goes out in gratitude to these political prisoners when I recall their unstinted generosity Kid their deep friendship for me. I also feel it my duty to put on record in these pages all that I owe, in help and kindness, to my ordinary brethren in that jail, and for the respect they ever paid to roe. I can tell many a story of their “unremembered acts of kindness and love”. But I must not do so, and I record here my deep gratitude to them all.
The mind revolts
To speak to none, to discuss with none, and to keep on looking at my naked body so shabby, so dust-covered, so sweated by the work on the oil-mill, a work that I had to do for the best part ofthe day. The body used to be full of perspiration, the dust thrown up by the turning wheel of the mill as it crushed and ground down the pieces of dry coconut fruit for oil, with other dust mixed up in it had clung to it all over, - this was the experience from which the mind revolted with disgust. It went on like this from hour to hour, from day to day, and, who knows, it might continue from month to month, and lengthen out into years. I began to hate myself. “Why should I bear it?” my mind asked me, “this your body and this your power, of what use are they to you now’? What will you, and what can you, do with them to liberate your country to revive its spirit, and to cover it with glory? Nothing, nothing at all, now and forever. Your body, your mind, your will and your power-they are all dust now in this darkness of your prison-house. And no more will you see light, no more the way out. The world knows not of your sufferings, and will not care to know. What effect, then, can it have upon the world? Thus you are of no use to yourself, no use to the world, nothing for the cause, nothing for mankind. A burden you are on earth, why then live? Why not end it all? A cord, a noose, a pull, and finis!” So did my mind torture me and argue with me.
End it all
Your power to will and to persist was given to you to agitate the minds of your people, not unlike Mount Meru of Indian legend given to the Gods and the Demons to churn the ocean. Now they will be used by you to churn what? No better than to use the rod of Mount Meru to churn the curds for butter-milk! Why disgrace your gifts thus? Again and again the mind would revert to the same topic. “To live is futile; to die is honour”, it would persist in admonition. Novalis and other foreign writers have said much in defence of suicide. It sometimes becomes an act of duty, as they preached it. And I recalled all their sayings in this perturbed state of my mind.
One day, in the hottest part of the noon-and it was particularly warm that day- I was turning the ‘Kolu’, almost panting for my breath. All of a sudden I felt I was fainting and sat on the ground. My stomach had become hard like stone; the bowels within had stiffened; I supported myself against the wall; I shut my eyes and fell into a stupor. I do not know how long I was in that senseless condition. Suddenly I woke up from that deep state of unconsciousness. For a few minutes I knew not where I was, and what I was doing. I had lost all sense of time and space. Deep peace of nescience, state of perfect bliss, complete self-forgetful-ness, body, mind and soul merged into one, and the sense of personality gone from them-this was what I seemed to experience in that happy mood which lasted but for a few minutes. Life in death and death in life, as it seemed to me then! And then I came to myself, objects around me became clearer, one after another. And I resumed my work. My mind was ever goading me:- “Why don’t you finish that work? Death is no torture. You have experienced it now, -complete self- forgetfulness and the peace of nescience. Thousands of prisoners have used the means to attain that nirvana. Why do you hold back? Don’t, take a piece of string and strangle yourself. End all this trouble thus. Why not?”
The lure at Suicide
The whole day passed in this obsession of mind. Suicide -that one word was luring me on. Death was nothing but that indifferent state I had lately experienced. And it was, indeed, better than my present state. Twice did this mood come over me. Once when I was re-arrested at Marseilles and was proceeding through Aden to India. The sea was a blazing furnace of fire, so hot we felt round about Aden; I was then in the lock up on a cabin, distressed in mind and heated in body. And now in the Andamans, working on ‘Kolu’, when the brain became dull and the body failed me. A wrestle within me between reason and desire, when reason had almost gone under! The same was to happen to me twice in the future. That night as I lay on my bed, my eyes were rivetted on the barred window, where I had known that prisoners before me in the room had hanged themselves and taken leave of their I ives. I listened to that controversy between reason and desire as a third person, and I wove it into a poem later on. Again and again the voice of reason would admonish the voice of desire in some such words: “Fool, how proud, how vain you are! Let us believe that you were meant to do great deeds of heroism and national uplift. But what of it now? The human machine is now useless for you; now you say. May be, granted that it is true. Have not thousand such machines been completely shattered prior to this? Why not use the machine that God gave you for humbler ends? Why break it with your own hands? Silent, unknown tortures-to bear and endure them-is also a part of its work. In national work, on a stupendous scale, one has to fight and conquer from point to point, from stage to stage. This may be a stage in your onward march to success. This is, perhaps, the hardest stage, the tightest comer that you have to turn. Will you turn away from this part of duty? Rather stay on and fight, fight at bay if you must. That is also a compliment to the human machine which you will so recklessly destroy. And if you must die then
Die fighting
Kill one enemy of the country and then expire. Why die like a coward? Your tribulations must influence the country, however small that influence may be. And if you don’t believe it, and if you conclude that they shall have no repercussions outside, even then why need you hang yourself? It is dying like a dog. They did not send you to the gallows. Consider why? Were they smitten with compassion? No; they did not hang you because they thought it impolitic to do so. Now, if you hang yourself, you will be only playing into their hands. You will add to the failures and ruin of your party. Why, then, quit the world thus? It will be a distinct disservice to the cause, which, you yearn, should prosper. You are a soldier in this war of freedom. Then die like a hero. Do not commit suicide, but kill and die in the fight.” Reason, when it argued with desire in this fashion, convinced and won me over to her side. I had become desperate. That mood of desperation was conquered, and I recovered my poise once again.
If I resolve to die, I die only thus
Not only did I make up my mind to die bravely, but I persuaded all my friends and disciples in that jail that it was their duty, in virtue of the pledge they had taken, to die like heroes. I thus saved many a lonely and wretched human being in that place from the verge of suicide.
While working at the oil-mill and with all the fatigue that the work involved for body and mind, I had one compensation in it and that was the chance I got there to talk to my political friends. These came to me either by connivance of their Jamadars and wardens, or by eluding their watch. They kept on talking to me as long as they could safely do so. Most of that conversation took place after five in the evening while others were busy arranging for our dinner, and during the hurry and bustle of that business. We gathered together then on the resting place of the reservoir in front of us. One of us kept the watch and the rest engaged themselves in talk. We had free and candid exchange of opinion on the question which had all along occupied our minds and for which we had sacrificed our lives. The talk went on like a fresh breeze through our souls and thoroughly revived us. The fire that had smouldered blazed once more. Insults and humiliations were welcomed as acts of grace. What we had suffered paled into insignificance, and what was to come we resolved to face as “the stern daughter of the voice of God”, would dictate it to us. These moments of freedom from the harrowing teeth of the Kolu were, indeed, blessings from that Goddess. Most of the political prisoners of my time were not more than twenty-five years old. I found their education defective and incomplete. They had read nothing of history, politics and economics. It was not a strange experience, and that did not diminish aught from their patriotism and self-sacrifice. On the other hand, I felt a sort of respect for them because they had suffered so much for the cause inspired by noble motive and thorough disinterestedness. If only they had added adequate knowledge to their sterling enthusiasm, they would have better fitted themselves to advance the cause so near to their heart. I, therefore, resolved to make up the defect in them by proper study and wise guidance. First, it was necessary to awaken in them this desire for study and guidance. And my conversation with them had this principal object behind it. I began my work as soon as I was set to my new labour on the oil-mill. Some of them had begun to despair that their life had gone in vain. I had to draw them out of this ‘slough of despond’. I quoted to them examples from history. Those who had doubts, I gave reasons to overcome that doubt. Those who were merely caught in the whirl-wind of agitation, I convinced why it was right to do what they had done. I thus succeeded in reinforcing their will and confirming their zeal. After the tiresome and soul-killing toil of the day, the evening meeting was a happy, though brief, respite to them all. They talked freely, they imagined boldly; they revelled in happy dreams of the future; and they recovered the balance of their minds and the poise of their souls. Their courage to face and to endure was deepened; its blinted edge had recovered its sharpness; and, when they dispersed, they went away, each to his cell, taking leave of one another, like happy and loving brothers. It was there that I enrolled them and other prisoners of the settlement as members of my “Abhinava Bharat”. It was here that they took their solemn oath to be true to the cause and serve it ever with their lives.