Correspondence with India and means of information
A prisoner in the Andamans was permitted to write only one letter home during the year. The letter had, perforce, to be as brief as possible. Again, it was to be an open letter, to be censored first by the jailor, next by the Colonial Officer, and to be despatched if approved by them. Every prisoner was warned that the letter shall not be forwarded if it breathed a single word against the jail authorities. Thus only a slip of a letter could be sent by him home once every year. Even this small facility was taken away from him for the year if he was guilty of the slightest offence like talking to a fellow-prisoner, committing nuisance outside the stated hours, not sitting in a line, so on and so forth. One can imagine how difficult it was to be free from any trivial offence of the kind we have mentioned, during the course of three hundred and sixty-five days. It was impossible, therefore for any prisoner in the Andamans to convey any news about him to the outside world. It need not be said that it was also impossible for the outside world to send any news to him. The prisoner, in these circumstances, could not write even two lines, every year without fail, to inform his people at home that he was alive.
The worst kind of gagging
Moreover, the letters that were officially sent from here through the Government of India could contain no reference to our ill-treatment and persecution in this jail. Nor was there any scope for publication of such description of jail-life anywhere else. For the Jail Inspection Committee never visited our jail. Occasionally a magistrate condescended to pay a visit to us. But, as a rule, he did not report against Mr. Barrie and his doings here. All petitions to the Indian Government from our side had to pass through the Colonial Officer-the Commissioner - who threw them away or rejected outright the petitions which contained complaints against the administration. Who would then care for us? Not the Jail Committee for there was no fear of its regular visit, nor Mr. Barrie and the Superintendents for they were personally concerned in these matters or the Commissioner who always sided with them. The highest official would step in if only there was such a thing here as riots or an open rebellion. But the local men took very good care that the news should not, at least, officially reach the ears ofthe highest authority. So the five functionaries ofthe Silver Jail were the sole masters of the situation and not a word went out from this prison about the real position here. These functionaries disposed of all complaints, petitions and counter-statements without any let or hindrance from the outside world. In case an obvious injustice was found out in that disposal, to make it reach the higher authorities or to ventilate it publicly had become a process more difficult here than in the prisons of India. And the ready means, available to prisoners in India to send news with their brethren on going home after their release, was denied altogether to the outgoing and the in-coming prisoners of this jail. For whoever came here had to stay on for twenty to twenty-five years. And the least period was never less than ten years. And, then, there was the question of his ever going out alive, for the Andamans was such a wretched place for the prisoner to dwell in, whether inside or outside its prison-walls. How, then, were we to take our complaints to the public place and hang them on the gates of India?
Ways and means to do it
The political prisoners were thus faced in my time, with the question of making the public known what they were suffering in this place. The only way to keep body and life together and release themselves from the persecution and tyranny of Officers of this jail was to bring the facts to the ears of the highest authorities in India. For the local Officers told us that the kind of treatment meted out to us by them was according to orders from the Government of India, and that they were not to blame for it. Even to ascertain the truth or otherwise of this allegation, it was imperative that India should know about it, that the matter be brought to her notice. When a prisoner was taken to the Andamans, India knew as much of it as she knew about Honolulu. After all it was transportation out of India! What little was known of these islands by Indians came to us when political prisoners began to be sent there for suffering their term of imprisonment. But the public and the newspaper-world of India had no clear notion of them. And the same was the condition for years together of the Government of India. The annual report to them came in substance to being 4all well’ in that settlement. And the officials never cared to enquire closely into that business. Perhaps, they thought that, once the political prisoners were deported to that place, they need not further bother about them.
With all these circumstances against them, the political prisoners were busy devising means to communicate with the Government of India. For it was with them the question of ’to be or not to be’, if not of release from this dungeon of a prison-house. It was all well to confer and conclude, but who will bell the cat and how, that problem still remained. There was among us a prisoner from the U. P. named Hotilal who had been sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. He, in collusion with a friend, offered to bell the cat. The strike of political prisoners and the strife between them and the local authorities which I have described in a former chapter, and the sequel of these happenings had contributed not a little to have a sobering effect upon a few level-headed men among the ordinary prisoners. And out of them some had begun to cherish the wild hope that these editors, professors and barristers would agitate and finally make the Officers bend before them. These also hoped that if they rendered a timely help to the political prisoners now, they would reap its reward by securing for themselves an earlier release from this jail. Mr. Hotilal managed to procure some paper from these hopefuls and wrote out a long letter full of our grievances.
Hotilal’s letter
This Hotilal had made things very hot for all Officers of the prison from Mr. Barrie downwards during the days of our strike against being put on the “Kolu’. He was a man from Northern India and-spoke Hindi as his mother-tongue. But he had an equal command over Urdu and English. He had travelled all over the world including Russia, China and Japan, and had seen and enjoyed life to the full. He was imprisoned in a solitary cell, apart from all others, as one ofthe “irreclaimables”. A strict watch and ward was kept on his movements. In that cell, notwithstanding the surveillance upon him, he had written that three-columned article upon us. None knew anything of it except his two or three most trusted friends. One fine morning Mr. Hotilal managed to smuggle out the letter with one of them who was being sent for work outside the prison. Hotilal had put his signature to it and had also put upon it the number ofthe cell and the chawl in which he was locked up. He contrived to send out that letter despite the strictest watch upon all his actions. He did it in the rush of prisoners going out for their day’s work. It went out of the Silver Jail no doubt, but it had yet to cross the barrier of the Andaman Islands, which itself was a big prison-settlement. But the letter travelled all the same. It travelled in the envelope of a trusted friend on voyage and reached its post at Calcutta safe and sound. It went into the hands of the famous publicist and leader, no other than Surendranath Bannerji of Calcutta and the editor of The Bengali. In those days of terrorism and Press Act, Mr. Bannerji published it entire in his widely circulated daily, and wrote a leaderette on it. As soon as The Bengali had published the letter, other newspapers had no hesitation in taking shelter behind that paper and writing their own comments upon it. At last, the letter became a subject of questions and replies on the floor of the Imperial Legislative Council.
If it was difficult to send out news from the Andamans, it was equally difficult to get the news from India in that place, and still more difficult for it to reach us in our jail. Hence, those who had done the coup were naturally anxious to know if the surreptitious letter had reached its destination or if the friend who took it across had dropped it in the sea, or had delivered it straight into the hands ofthe Government. While they were so nervous about it, all of a sudden we got the news straight from the horse’s mouth, from Mr. Barrie himself. He played the postman for us in the following manner.
Mr. Barrie inflamed
One morning, without any apparent reason, Mr. Barrie came to our quarters in uproar and all red with anger. He had gone through all the seven divisions of the prison-house dashing his big stick upon the floor and showering abuse upon every one he met on his way. The warder, the petty officer, the Jamadar and the poor prisoner had each his full share of recrimination and abuse. The prisoners were confounded with this sudden outburst of temper. The petty officer could not account for it and all of us were dumb-founded. Mr. Barrie kept on shouting, “You rascals and rogues, I will teach you a lesson for it that you will never forget. What kind of watch is this? I will pound you all into dust.” With all these ejaculations, he would not let us know what had happened. In the Andamans there is a kind of reptile known as centipede. Mr. Barrie’s ‘dance of death’ and fury, his wild gestures and grimaces made the frightened prisoners indulge in the humour that he was so whimming and contorting because he was bitten by that reptile. In the course of his peregrination he came to the cell of Hotilal and shouted out to him to stand up. He rebuked him, “Why don’t you stand up? You are the greatest liar in the world.” And he went on like this, which others could not explain, but which the wily Hotilal understood well. And he also inferred that the shot that had wounded Mr. Barrie and gave him such a pain was none other than the long letter that he had indited and managed to send abroad. Perhaps, the letter had reached its destination and had been published. And the news of it carried to the Andamans was the cause of his sudden outburst. After wasting hot words on Hotilal, Mr. Barrie issued a fiat that no political prisoner was to come within ten feet of one another and the violation of that order meant a sack for the warder, the petty officer and the Jamadar without fear or favour. The prisoners were no longer to come together for dinner. They were to sit apart, one from the other, and none else was to be within the shadow of his body. Issuing these strict orders Mr. Barrie left the place. Those who were in the secret knew the cause of it all, and concluded that the letter had done its work. In a day or two after, we learnt that Mr. Barrie had referred to the letter in his talk to his confidants, - the ‘gentlemen’ political prisoners who had become his allies. He enquired of them how the letter had gone out and who had taken it. The ‘gentlemen’ assured us that nothing could be more foolish than that action. And they informed us further that The Bengali, which had published it, was prosecuted for the offence and its press was confiscated on that account. “Mr. Hotilal’s folly had cost The Bengali the loss of a press worth from two to three lacs of rupees! And we shall all be liable to severe treatment as the consequence of that blunder. Hotilal will suffer the most for having made false allegations. All of us would also suffer in consequence. What a reckless act it was and how contumacious!”
That was what the allies would say to us; it was no better than the echo of what Mr. Barrie was saying to them, sure that it would reach our ears and frighten us.
The Echoes of Mr. Barrie
These renegades and time-servers, however, forgot that the letter in question had exposed the sufferings that they themselves had undergone. And when an opportunity came to them later on, they had not refrained from the ‘folly’ which they had condemned in other political prisoners. They were playing the double game of propitiating Mr. Barrie with the condemnation of Hotilal and of being ready at the same time to welcome any relief that would come to them by the publication of that letter in the press of India. However, all other political prisoners did not hesitate to congratulate Hotilal on his astute move and his brave action. They did it openly unafraid of any consequences that might follow. They answered the objections of the detractors that they had nothing to lose and everything to gain by that step. For already the Officers of the jail were treating them harshly enough. Worse they could not do. And to put an end to that harsh and inhuman treatment the first step was to expose it to the daylight of public criticism. It would mean, for the time being, relentless suffering but the price had to be paid for the object all had in view. And this was no question of any single individual. It concerned and affected the future of political prisoners as a class.
Political Prisoners as a Class
After the first batch of political prisoners had been transported to the Andamans, and in the conditions obtaining then in India, the political prisoners had almost become an institution in the country, and they were sure to arrive in the Andamans no longer in batches of ten and twenty but in a growing volume of a hundred and a thousand prisoners. The fact was obvious and resistance by the early batches was necessary to relieve the yoke on those who would follow them there. Either they bear the yoke themselves or shall have to resist more fiercely and on a tremendous scale to put an end to the evil. Why not then begin now and face the consequences? Why not make the path of our successors easier? Why not strive and fight to raise the status of political prisoners as a class? I would go further and say to them, while I was there, that the task which had fallen to our lot was much nobler and wider; and that was to improve the condition of prison-life in India as common to all its inmates and to see that we did not merely work to ameliorate it for a class known as political prisoners.
Raise the Status of all
It was to improve prison-conditions as a whole that we were striving, and, therefore, we must agitate and rouse public opinion by every means at our disposal, -letters, strikes, petitions and stiff resistance, in scorn of consequence to ourselves. Even if we were to fail and reap greater trouble than relief, doing the work as a duty, we must be ever prepared for it. This reasoning produced a desirable effect on the mind of the political prisoners and they openly supported Hotilal’s action, that he had done the right thing in sending that letter to Calcutta. All felt within their hearts that he was right, but now by far a large number came out in the open to defend him. The stir and excitement over the letter lasted for two weeks. After the first reaction had passed,
Mr. Barrie began to worm out the secret by flattering those who had despatched it. “What can we do? Everything happens here as directed by the Indian Government”, so he began excusing himself to me. Once he said, “Look here, that Hotilal of yours has killed the newspaper Bengali; it was for that letter that Government has confiscated its press.” I answered, “I do not really understand why it should be so. I am afraid the news is entirely false.” “Taking for granted that it is true” I added, “the action of Government should not deter any publicist from printing in his newspaper what he is convinced to be right and fair. Not only one but ten presses, the Government may confiscate, but the price is worth paying if it helps the cause of die political prisoners and relieves them from the kind of harsh and humiliating treatment that is meted out to them in this prison. That was the only way to improve conditions here. The Government should have taken note of that letter and started proper investigations. If the allegations proved true, then steps should be taken to remove the grievances. If they were proved to be false, being made by Hotilal over his own signature, the authorities should take him severely to task for having made them. How can the confiscating of the press help in such matters?” I concluded.
But was the press really confiscated? How was I to know about it? It was very difficult to get any news from India. The political prisoners were always very anxious to get news about their families, of what had happened to their property and their people after they had left India. But they were still more anxious about the news of their country, what was its political condition, and what was the state ofthe agitation in which they had taken such an active part.
How is my Country!
That was what many a political prisoner was anxious to know. The party of revolution was most ascendant in the country when I had left it. In what condition it was now, when political prisoners were all sentenced and sent to jail? Crushed as that party was under the heel of power, it may have gone down. But were other political parties doing something for the emancipation of the country, shielded as they were under the aegis of the ruling power? How were we to know this and other news of the world? What should we do to have it? Whenever one political prisoner met another, the first question that was asked was how the country was faring. If even a single item of news came to them, they felt, for the time being, that there was nothing wrong with them and they kept on discussing the item for the whole day in small groups of two or three. Such was the curiosity of youth which remained unsatisfied here. The political condition of their country made them more restless than their personal grievances. A lover is always keen to get news ofhis beloved. Our political prisoners were equally keen about the news of their mother country, for they had sacrificed their all in her service. No newspaper could reach him in this prison and no letter; all political news was expunged from such newspapers as were given to him. Hence the only anxiety that ever preyed upon his heart was how to get at the news.
The first source was the ‘Chalan’
And yet they devised means after means and succeeded in getting news, however scanty, of the outside world. The first source of such news was, of course, the Chalan. Every month the convicts transported to the Andamans landed on its shores to be taken to the Silver jail. It was a gang of 50 prisoners. The importance of the party during the first month of its prison-life was so great that even the petty officers from the warders to the Jamadars sought to be in their good books. For every one tried to get some news ofhis village or town from the prisoner belonging to his own part of the country. Common language, common native place constituted an affinity between them. He got something to know from the fellow- countryman about his relatives and friends from this common source. To meet a man belonging to our part of the world and speaking the same language begets an attraction for us and affects us like a woman who meets some one coming from her paternal home in a far-off place where she happens to stay with her husband, a man living in a foreign country and on the continent of Europe experiences the same emotion, the welling up of the heart, when he sees there a person who is a native ofhis own village and country and taiks in the same mother-tongue. Here we were banished from India to the Andamans and passing our lives in isolation and prison. No wonder, therefore, that an in-coming party of prisoners should evoke such feeling in the hearts of those who had spent many years there. The slogan indicative of this common bond between us was my countryman, a man of my native place
This was the title of the new-comer in relation to one older than himself in the experience and the habitation ofthe Silver Jail. And the title sounded sweet in the ears of the incoming man and was more precious in his eyes than any other title in the Andamans. The title ‘Mulkhi’ was stretched to signify my countryman when its meaning was a man from one’s native place in India. How the linguistic divisions of India were more natural than its territorial divisions, as they obtain today, was brought home to us in this jail more than anywhere outside it. When a Mahar from Maharashtra began to speak Marathi, the heart of a Marathi Brahmin went out to him spontaneously and he felt that the Mahar was his brother and fellowman.+++(5)+++ The feeling that the latter came from his own province and, perhaps, his native place too, made him give that untouchable of Hindu Society all the help he could in this place. Fellow-feeling and brotherhood got the better, in such a condition, of differences of caste and the taboos that the caste had brought into being. Whenever a new Chalan arrived in this place from India, the old birds here inquired of their kith and kin, but even before that, the political prisoner invariably sought information from the coming party ofthe political condition of their dear Motherland.
A large number of the party were illiterate and ignorant men and they had the least notion of the political upheaval in India. So that they could give but poor information about it to our political friends. Only when a great political trial was going on, and they happened to be in the court as arrested men for certain other crimes, or when they happened, for the time being, to be locked up in the same prison as the political prisoners, and when something in that connection had casually come to their ears, then alone some persons, in that part, used to give our friends piece-meal information on it in their broken and muddled words. In case an educated prisoner happened to be in that company, it was an effort and a trouble to us to glean information from him. For in whatever division he was locked up, there the political prisoners managed to make their way and contact him or sent him oral messages for such news. They gave him no rest till he had told them something. And how much they had to entreat him earnestly for that news! They would even kelp him on the sly in his labour of picking oakum, in order to propitiate him for the news. But even an educated prisoner was not Hp to the task of picking political news. If he were asked about any political party, its agitation and its power at the time that he had left them, he would fumble for he had no answer to give. He would often end that he had no knowledge of it, and everything was quiet there And that answer was a damper on the enthusiasm of our sentimental political prisoners. If there was one piece of information that he could definitely give them it was about the arrest of some great political leader or of the immediate arrival of the KingEmperor to India. “The Emperor is coming”; There was a great show at Delhi”; “A big Lord had been killed”-that was all their definite talk. This news came ready to them, because it had spread like a conflagration throughout India, in all its market-places and thoroughfares. Minus this he could tell nothing about the Indian National Congress, or of the Imperial Legislative Council, of Swadeshi, of the struggle for Swaraj. Of course, I am narrating here experience of my first five years of prison-life in the Andamans. What change came over, will come later on in this book.
It is interesting to note here a few-stratagems we employed to get information from the Chalan. A few of the political prisoners in India used to meet some of the prisoners bound for the Andamans, and they would pass on letters to them to be conveyed to their friends in the Silver Jail. They knew that the letters would be taken charge of by Officers in that jail. So the trick that they used was to put the letters well-concealed within the pages of an ordinary, innocent book bound specially for that purpose. In the body of the binding the letter was inclosed so that none could detect it. The book happened to be duly delivered to the political prisoner concerned and along with the book went the letter to the proper person.
A letter behind the badge
After a time the stratagem became too patent to be used safely by the emissary abroad. Another was quickly resorted to, and thatwas to secret the letter in the badge itself. Every prisoner had to wear a badge with its marked number hanging on his chest as soon is he became the regular convict in a prison. The letter was written on the inner side of the iron-plate which was seldom exposed to view. And thus the news was conveyed safely to its proper quarters. The son of a great Punjabi leader sent me a missive from a prison in the Punjab, where he was serving his seven years’ term of imprisonment, by resorting to this trick. The prisoner through whom he had sent me the letter was in the Punjab jail before he was depofted to the Andamans. He carried the badge on his person, and though he was searched fifty times and stripped naked to discover anything he might hide on his person, the thing remained undetected until it had reached me. No one suspected the iron- plate as the carrier of that message. The prisoner had taken good care all along the transit that the letter written on the back of the plate was not rubbed off. And he handed the strange missive to me as soon as he was inside the jail. I read the letter and handed him back the iron-plate with all the letters erased from it. Thus the news percolated to us through the prison-walls of the Silver Jail. The Chalan was an invaluable agency for such news. And yet the news was so inadequate, fragmentary and intermittent that none of us was satisfied by it, for it did not inform us fully of what we were most anxious to know. To satisfy the craving the only way was to have a newspaper sent to us from the outside world. And this was the hardest nut to crack. The time of which I am writing was one when no prisoner could have even the sight of a newspaper in this jail. It was much easier to let an elephant pass through its portals than to let even a scrap of a newspaper in. A prisoner may be pardoned for the former offence but never for the latter. We were content, in these circumstances, if we got at even small pieces of a newspaper properly smuggled in. Some political prisoners had a greed even to draw carriages, in which the Officers drove from place to place, as part of their prison work, with this objective in view. They even carried out carts full of garbage, took them to the Officers’ bungalows, that they might load their garbage on these carts and discover in the process old newspaper or its cuttings. They discovered them and concealed them in the planks of the lumber on the carts on their way back to the jail. They used to hide them well in the drain pipes of our building for safe custody. And in their movements during the day they would read them all right. Funny was their experience of such reading. One scrap told them of Edinburgh; another of the cricket-world in England; a third delighted them with a column and half of a vulgar and serial fiction. Some came from wrappings round old shoes, and others from wrappings of clothes sent to a washerman, But these contained no news from India. Whenever we came upon a scrap ofthe Times of India’ or of a wire from London, we were on the qui vive, but to be disappointed soon after.
“Foreign Mail”
The newspaper scrappings thus imported into our jail sometimes brought us striking news and without our least expectation of it. One such was Sir Valentine Chirol’s article on India and Indian revolutionaries in an issue of the London Times. Another gave us a full report of the Congress presidential address. A third, of which I have the clearest remembrance, was a full one- columned report of the Tuticorin trial. When they got the scrap they handed it over to me with eagerness and attention. That we could procure this piece of news and pass it on safely to all political prisoners made the prisoners realise to the full the utility of drawing these carts full of garbage to and from the prison and they never felt the hardship of months for the gain they had reaped from it. The dumping ground of this foreign mail was the lavatory of Officers’ bungalows. It contained scraps from the daily Times stored away for daily use. Or they were thrown there on the floor carelessly after the Officers had read and done with them. The political prisoners bribed the scavenger in charge to collect them and put them in the garbage for carts to carry. And after they had been picked out and stowed away, we read them as we have pointed out above.
Sometime ‘The Local Mail’ kept company with ‘The Foreign Mail’ for proper delivery to us. The factory attached to our jail wanted nails and other articles for use. They came in the factory, parcels of them, wrapped up in newspapers. The prisoners picked up these wrappings. Whenever they read the word India in them, their curiosity was sure to be roused by it and the scrap passed forthwith to the political prisoner. Often the piece of paper was so full of dirt that it had to be held with blades of straw and picked up from the garbage. Small chips of coconut shells and cord had to be employed to spread it out for reading. But even then we never failed to read it. We read in such a bit, a portion of Gokhale’s last speech on Free and Compulsory Education Bill-the finest portion of it full of despair over the opposition of Government to its enactment We read also from the same source a report ofhis having introduced the Bill in the Imperial Legislative Council. How it gladdened our hearts to know of it. The spread of free and compulsory education all over India would dot the whole land with schools that will so richly contribute to the literacy of India. A new mill opened; an old tax removed; a trial going on, a bomb thrown revealing the Underground activity of revolutionary societies; a riot breaking out; a new book published; a new poet coming up;— whatever the news conveyed to us in a far-off place like the Andamans, even though it be through such a dirty source, it sent a thrill of joy through our hearts, for we felt that we were linked by it to our dear country and it marked some progress for it. The political prisoner hungered for such news, great and small, pleasant or unpleasant, for it gave us a topic for discussion in that dark, lonely dungeon of the Andamans. Dear India, we, your forsaken children, ever thought of you in the dreariness and rigour of that lonely residence. We were rudely torn from your breast, Mother India, but we never forgot you; and we forgot our personal cares and sorrows in thinking of you and reading about you. In that news we felt your pulse and marked its beats. And we passed our years in this prison forecasting her pains and joys, and experiencing them by the news that filtered down to us through this channel.
Another source of information
In addition to Chalan and ‘The Mail’, we established another agency of communication with the outside world. It was to send some of our prisoners detailed for outside work to certain Indians settled in the colony of the Andamans. These gentlemen were full of sympathy for us, but they were not habitual readers of newspapers. Even if they agreed to read them for us, they could not communicate news from it to men whom we sent to them, and these, again, were not so trained
in mind as to cany the report faithfully to us. There were very few among them to keep correspondence with us. And even if they had dared it, harder still it was for any-one in the prison to convey such letters to us. For those caught in the act were liable to severest punishment. They lost their jobs, and suffered in so many other ways. I had advised them not to do that. Even then a few undertook that risk, imbued with the spirit of patriotism which they had derived from their contact with political prisoners, and through the lectures they had heard. They did it as a part of their duty This did not happen during the first three years of my life in that prison, and in the beginning we had to beg of them so much to do it for us! The political prisoners had nothing to give them in return. But they patted even with a portion of their daily bread so that their appetite for news should be partially attended to. They had semi-starved themselves that they might get some news every evening about their dear motherland from the outside world.
Over and above the improvised agencies for getting news of which we have written in the foregoing pages, suddenly we got the news from the authorities themselves. Mr. Barrie himself would blurt it out to us. Others also brought it to us occasionally out of absent-mindedness or because they werp overcome with fits of sympathy for us. Mr. Barrie’s news was ever bad news- a curse more than a blessing. Whatever to the detriment of India, whatever was damaging to our cause and was bound to fill our hearts with despair or told us about the weakness and disintegration of our past flowed freely from his lips, and he took pains to come over and communicate it gleefully to us. He told it to us and listened to our comments upon it, which he carefully noted in his diary and journal. Even then we were not slow to thank him for whatever he gave us. For a man, worth the name, always likes to hear news unfavourable to one whom he loves, as he loves heartily to hear great, good tidings about him or her. News that is good news brings satisfaction to his soul while bad news makes him ready, body and soul, to run to the rescue of his beloved person. It nerves his arms and fortifies his soul to fight for and save the person from the impending calamity. We shall have occasion as we go on to hear more about this matter. But as a sample of Mr. Barrie’s behaviour with us I give the following incident. When Mr. Gokhale, the great patriot of India, had died. Mr. Barrie rushed up to me and said, “Well, Sir, you always want news, Mr. Savarkar; here is something for you, Gokhale is dead !”
Gokhale dead!
He brought this sad and tragic news to me in the evening when I had set down for my meal. The news was so sudden and so unexpected that I could not believe it for a moment. I burst into tears, whereupon Mr. Barrie said, “But was he not against you?"+++(5)+++ I uttered, “By no means; I have learnt in a College of which he was the head. We had differences but we were not enemies. He was one of the best products of our age, and an undaunted patriot and a sincere servant of India.” On this Mr. Barrie went on, “What then of the evidence in your trial of a conspiracy against him? And what of his observation that until you were caught and punished there will be no peace in India?” I answered promptly, “Do not, please, believe in such hear-say reports. It is no use. We had intimate talks with each other and we cherished deep affection and reverence for each other. And this can be borne out by those who were present on the occasion. My way of doing things may not approve itself to him from his own standpoint of service of the country. But that does not detract from his sterling patriotism, and as for revolutionaiy and secret societies. I may say that when he attacked them in a speech or two in England and when some of the members of the Abhinava Bharat Mandal, at a secret meeting, spoke of finishing him off, I stood up and censured them severely for even a thought of doing harm to his body. I condemned it as a reprehensible act to attack any-one for honest difference of opinion, and much less a man who was our own in blood and race and whose service to the country was unimpeachable. This would be downright heinous act and an unpardonable sin, and saw that the resolution, that they had put down was thrown out by the meeting. My friends themselves will bear me out in what I am telling you today. If every Indian were as patriotic and as dedicated to the service of India as Mr. Gokhale, our country would take immense strides forward towards emancipation and all-round progress.”
Mr. Barrie noted down every word of what I said to him. I saw his notes long after the incident. In those notes he had made one surprising observation which was that ‘however different these Maharashtrians appeared on the surface they were at heart one with the other.”
While I am narrating this episode, I am reminded of a similar utterance of great patriot of India. While I was in England, Hardayal told me much about Tilak. He narrated to me about him the following story. While in India Hardayal once went to Poona to pay a visit to Tilak. And then he paid a similar visit to his rival Gokhale. He had travelled all over India paying visits to the leaders of India in opposite camps. And he had heard from them nothing but abuse and misrepresentation of one another. But Tilak and Gokhale were free from this foible. Each of them tried in his own way to persuade Hardayal to join his own party, but not a word they breathed about each other, to traduce character or misrepresent work.+++(5)+++ Not a word of malice or vilification escaped their mouth. On the other hand, what they spoke of one another was full of appreciation and reverence. Tilak said, ‘Do see Gokhale once." And Gokhale said, “You have done well in seeing Tilak.” And he added, “That you have put up with him is as it should be, for the next generation is going to be his.” After telling me this story, Hardayal remarked, “The conviction that we are Hundred plus five before our common enemy, I find deep-rooted in the heart of the Maharashtrian alone; and it is not so evident anywhere else in India. The Marathas forget their petty jealousies and quarrels in a national cause. Their leaders have learnt the art more than others. And I have experienced the truth of it many times in my life,"+++(4)+++
The political prisoners during the first three years of my stay in this jail had, facing all difficulties and using all possible means, devised a news-service from India to the Andamans, and from the Andamans to India. As time went on and conditions improved, they grew in power and then correspondence with India proved more effective. New means were added on to the old, the details of which we shall narrate as we go on.
It was through this new source that we learnt before long that it was Mr. Barrie’s invention, pure and simple, that The Bengali was prosecuted for publishing Hotilal’s letter and its press was confiscated in consequence. And he had spread the news through his minions to demoralise political prisoners in his charge. A few days after, we procured a cutting from the Paper itself and we learnt that it was the first paper in India to publish the news that I, as a convict in this prison, was put upon the hard work of turning the oil-mill. The news was, thereafter, published in American Papers. And our workers of the Abhinava Bharat in that part of the world improvised a cartoon and circularised it in the press there, and distributed its copies all over the States. I shall narrate its effect on India when I deal with the story of convicts in the Lahore Conspiracy Case since their arrival in this settlement.