As we alighted from the steamer and touched the port at Calcutta we were put in the lock up at the Alipore jail. The fear that I had felt on leaving Andamans in the morning had but proved too true. Myself and my brother were put in different cells. Wearing our prison-garments and holding our bedding under the arm-pit and our pots and pans in one hand, we were both marching together like thieves directed by our escort of sepoys, when my elder brother was directed along a side passage by the sepoy in charge, and I was taken in different direction by another. Then I felt that I and my brother were parted for good one from the other.
I heard him coughing hard as he was being moved away from me, and for a good long time after. Wearing his long coat of coarse wool and carrying his bed under the pain “Whatever will happen to him? Who will care for him?”- that was what kept me thinking. When he turned into the side passage, I felt that he had not merely left me, but that he was taking the road to death while leaving me back on the road of life, and that I was having the last sign of him.
I cast my glance to have the last look of him. and walked silently on, though, within me, I was crying for the loss. I was taken to a lonely room in the prisons wing which was entirely vacated for me, and I was locked up thirein. How sad and woe- begone I felt then!
Along with the sepoys appointed to keep guard over me, there used to come a warder, who was convicted for fourteen years’ transportation for life, but was promoted to the place of the warder after serving only three years of that sentence and had thus become relatively a free man. How I envied him for that freedom! I had served my term of nearly twelve years and all while in solitary confinement, and had not been free from restrictions of prison life yet. Nor was I relieved of hardships bound up with that life. On the other hand, they threatened to be all the more oppressive now. I was standing near the door holding its bars. The evening was psssing into darkness and night A sepoy was speaking something in an undertone. I gathered from one remark in that talk a partial proof of the foolishness that had run rampant in the politics of the day. Expressing his own notion of political agitation in Calcutta and other part of the country, he had remarked, “We are going to have Swaraj in two months. For a powerful Yogi of the name of Gandhi has begun his fight with the Government. The British are helpless against him. For a bullet-shot does not hurt him. If put in prison, he knows how to came out of it. Such superhuman powers he possesses. He vanishes from his cell and is seen standing beyond the outer wall. Such is the magic he wields. This has happened several times. Mahatma Gandhi had gone into prison several times, and, time after time, after short sentences, he had been let off. This fact had reflected itself in the mind of this man and in the minds of several persons like him in this queer fashion. I said to the sepoy smilingly, “What you say is correct. Far when the Mahatma is seen standing outside the prison wall and near its gate, it is precisely the time when he is released after running his sentence. He thinks of coming out and showing himself on the day when the Government lets him out of the prison.
A young Chinaman was later put in a cell near my own on the charge of selling cocaine. He danced, sang and frolicked for he imagined that within two days he was to be free. I had not the good fortune like him of cherishing that hope.
Does a shot wound you?
The Chinaman knew the name of Sun-Yat-Sen. As I talked to him I knew that he was not unfamiliar with my name. He could not believe his eyes when I told him that I was that Savarkar of whom he had heard. How could a big man be contained in the ordinary cell of a prison! His idea of a big man was that he must be a man of abnormal size. Ordinary people have always similar notion of greatness and when they see that the great man before them does not come up to their notion of him, they are often shocked and disillusioned. So the Chinaman put me the question, “Does a gunshot pierce your body?” I answered, “No doubt, it will.” And a deep disappointment was visible on his face.
Another sepoy asked me, “How many days and nights were you swimming in the sea?” Of course he meant at Marseilles. I answered, “What of days and nights? I swam, only for ten minutes before I reached the shore across.” +++(5)+++ This reply gave a rude shock to his admiration for me, and to the miraculous powers he attributed to me. If I had bragged and lied to him, he would not have received any shock, but the barest truth that I told him seemed to put him out. My habit of reporting correctly what happened at Marseilles had lost me many friendships in life and their reverence for me.
Within a week I was despatched from Calcutta elsewhere. I did not know to what prison I was being taken. In the train I had the same experience that I had on my way from the Silver Jail to Port Blair. People used to put in my compartment fruit and newspapers from station to station and quietly went away. Sometime they would gather in large crowds to have a look at me. From the scenes I witnessed as I passed through, I could not help thinking that the news of my departure from Calcutta must have been communicated abroad by wire. As our train reached Nagpur and beyond, I saw newspapers with big headlines announcing my release from the Andamans and expressing their joy for the event. I also saw leaders and articles written upon it. A person sitting on a bench behind me in the same compartment had held a newspaper open and was reading it. He held it deliberately in a manner that I may also be able to see it. The writing was in Marathi and the Anglo- Indian officer in charge could not make any head or tail of the writing. The impression I gathered from what I read in the newspaper was that the report indicated that I would be released within a week. But I knew how the matter stood at the time. The gentleman in question was traveling by the same compartment out of deep sympathy for me, and helped me the best he could, without being noticed by the officer-in-charge. He read the news items aloud that I could follow him.
The Anglo-Indian officers in charge gave me no trouble on the way and at last I reached Bombay. Our train reached Nasik at night, as I learnt from the words ‘Nasik’, ‘Nasik’ falling upon my ears. The shutters of my compartment had already been let down and I was seated in the centre between officers on either side. In the next compartment some passengers from Nasik got in. Twelve years had passed since. I had left Nasik and now I was passing it in a train! A new generation had grown up during the interval, and who was there that could know and recognise me after such a long interval? And yet the word ‘Nasik’ itself raised such a flood-tide of thoughts in my mind. So many send-offs and entertainments on that veiy station; journeys to college and back, and packets of fried grains mixed together; water-melons, faces of friends lit up with joy, friends who had come on the station to see me off to England, and their tears of leave-taking; their cries of “Victory to the Goddess of Freedom”; and now their trains formation into prisoners in fetters; and some of them sent to the gallows, - these pictures passed rapidly before my mind not unlike the moving pictures of today in a cinematograph. In Bombay I was put straightaway on a steamer. At the end of the voyage, I was again locked up in jail at about ten o’clock at night. This was no other than
The jail at Ratnagiri
I can no more describe in detail and one after another my experiences in the jail at Ratnagiri. Circumstances prevent me from doing it. The main reason for my reticence is that they are very recent matters and concern a Jail in our own province. I shall finish the whole by stating what I have to say about the matter in the briefest outline.
The first two or three weeks in the jail at Ratnagiri passed away very badly for me. In the Andamans during my last days I was given well-cooked food and milk along with it which had helped to improve considerably my digestion and my general constitution. I was just looking up and had recovered from serious illness, when, sent to Ratnagiri jail, milk was denied to me, even in the small quantity that was allowed to me in the Andamans. And I had to fall back once again upon the usual ration of prison life which was hard and ill-baked bread. This bad food had brought on continual illness to me for two years in the Andamans, and I was almost dying. The most experienced doctors had therefore prescribed for me milk and well-cooked food, as I have already told my reader in a previous chapter. But now my representation proved of no avail.
To add to my misery, I was kept here all alone, segregated from other prisoners and locked up in the solitary cell assigned to me. All the concessions granted to me after twelve years of imprisonment at Port Blair were now withdrawn. They had given me in the Silver Jail at the end of that period full clothing, freedom from hard labour, mere writing work to do, paper and pencil to write with, and liberty to mix with others. Here I was made to wear the prison uniform which was given me on the first day of my sentence, I had on my chest the iron plate marking the year of the completion of my sentence - 1960,+++(5)+++ and I was put in solitary confinement. This change from the Andamans to Ratnagiri was so unbearable to me, as I felt that I was made to start running my sentence from its very first day.
Again, I could get no news here of my elder brother. Methought that he must have been passing through the same ordeal as I. My condition here made me remember my friends in the Andamans with greater poignancy. The work given me was that of cotton- spinning. Not being habituated to it, I could not finish it in time. I was not allowed to read and I found time dull and heavy.
The last impulse of suicide
You may wonder, O Reader, but every moment in this prison was an agony of mind. For twelve long years - nay, since the time I went to England - life had been for me a series of unexpected, unendurable mishaps and dangers, a continuous torture to my body and soul, with the result that my mind had been stretched on a rack all the time, and my nerves were completely shattered. And this new and additional strain on them was like the proverbial straw. I feared that it would end in utter collapse. One day I felt so dejected that my second thoughts could not come to my rescue. How long should I bear such life? What was the use of such a life? It was no use rotting thus now. Suddenly in this mood of mind I got up. High up in that cell was a barred window as in the jail ofthe Andamans. I thought out in my mind how to reach my hand to that window and how to put an end to my life by hanging myself by a rope to its bars. The thread of my life was to be snapped by straining it from the bars of the window above my head. The cord tied to the one was to break the thread tied to the other. My mind was overcast with complete darkness. And every moment that passed deepened the gloom and added to the darkness.
I am writing these pages in imprisonment at Ratnagiri. Only within call from that place is the jail where I experienced the most tragic moment of my life, very similar to one or two experiences during my fourteen years’ stay in the Andamans. This was the last and the darkest of these moments.
But it was day when this last fit came upon me. And I had to wait for the night to act accordingly. And during the interval, I gradually recovered the usual balance of my mind. I argued with myself as follows, “In the Andamans, from Indu Bhushan to Professor Parmanand, you had dissuaded several of the Bengali, the Punjab and the Sikh political convicts, who had suffered as many agonies as you do now, from committing suicide. For the same reason you must desist today from putting an end to your own life.+++(5)+++ According to your own precept, you must exact cent per cent compensation for such an act. You must at least kill one enemy ofthe country as an exchange for parting with your own life. But is it possible now for you to act up to that precept?”
The night came and I spent the whole of it in reviewing my whole life and its outcome. I was completely absorbed in that task. I scanned minutely with as much detachment and concentration of mind as was possible for me, the steps I had taken one by one towards reaching the supreme ideal of my life, and other minor goals subservient to it, and dictated by particular circumstances through which I had to pass. I definitely visualised my duty in relation to them, and I outlined the course I was to follow in the light of that duty.
I must bear it all
Therefore, I decided to suffer all, to endure all as a supreme national duty in the situation of the moment. I was also to continue doing what little I could, while bearing all that I could not possibly avoid. What cannot be cured must be endured.
That was my final resolve. From the following day, I took up the thread of the poem that I had begun in similar conditions of loneliness years ago, and I planned the writing of the story of my life from the day of my arrest in England down to my removal to Ratnagiri. I brought together all its threads in my mind and working out its outline in my mind, I divided it into parts and chapters and headings and committed the facts, recalling them one by one, to memory as if I was immediately putting them down on paper. I repeated the process page by page, concentrating my mind fully on the events as I recalled them. I, then, recorded them, with a piece of pointed brick, on the walls and stones of my prison-house using all my leisure from my usual work for that purpose, and according to the opportunity I got for executing the task. These jottings of the principal topics in my story occupied me for successive months, and I accomplished the work full of zest and earnestness.
This work is the outcome of that task
Those writings on the wall and those jottings from memory have given birth to these printed pages. During the three months that I was busy with the task a great change came about in my circumstances. I got better food to eat. The Calcutta weekly ‘The Capital’ had written an article connecting my name with the German plot of the submarine Emden. My brother having threatened the Paper with prosecution, it apologised and withdrew its statement. This affair laster for a few days since my arrival at Ratnagiri, and I also received parcels sent to me by members of my family.
The trouble of the Khilafat
Some convicts from Sindh and other parts of the country, involved in the Non-cooperation movement and the Khilafat agitation, both Hindus and Mussulmans, came to the Ratnagiri jail soon after my arrival there. Their notions of the Khilafat movement, of Hindu-Muslim Unity and of politics in general struck me as vitiated and eccentric. And I had to carry on endless discussion with them on these topics and vigorously attack their misconceptions. A few days after, I arranged in that jail for talks and for weekly lectures and meetings on the line I had followed in the Andamans. We were together at Ratnagiri for a year and a half. When I happened to meet them for the first time, I happened to hear one of them shouting that “the Mussulmans had not done the atrocities in Malabar that were being fathered upon them.” Another friend echoed loudly that “it did not matter in the least if they had done them; whatever had happened should be treated as dead past; Hindus may convert themselves to Islam; what mattered most was Swaraj and it must be won.” There was no end to the perversion of the definitions of truth and non-violence among them. I may narrate here an episode of a political convict in this prison as a specimen of the mentality of almost all the non-cooperating and the Khilafatist patriots I came across in this jail during that time.
The confusion of Gandhism
We used the devices that we had employed in the Andamans to get at news in the jail at Ratnagiri. We could thus procure scraps or newspaper from outside carried to us through dust bins or by prisoners sent on work outside the prison. My friends among the non-cooperators often used to read these scraps as I read them also. Twice or thrice some of them were found reading them while moving about in the open court-yard. One of us warned them against this practice, as we were forbidden to read newspapers in prison, and if noticed by officers, our secret would be out, and all means of getting them would be instantly stopped. To this a non-cooperator replied, “Do you mean to say that I should read this in secret? I am a non-cooperator. Whatever is done secretly is against the doctrine of truth and I will not do it.” We did not argue the matter with him. We only stopped giving him any scrap of paper to read. He was in rage with us. And he told us that they were report the matter the next day to the officer, telling him that they were smuggling newspapers in the jail in the same manner that some prisoners were smuggling tobacco. To hide a fact was sin, which no non-cooperator as a follower of truth, would commit.
We told him that he knew when he was reading those scraps that he got them from a secret source. Why did he read them then if he felt that it went against his conception of truth? Why did he not say he should have nothing to do with such a course? And was it not a betrayal of confidence on his part to tell the officer the name of the prisoner who had rendered that service to him? If this were truth, then Narendra Goshen must be worshipped by him as a sincere non-cooperator.
No doubt the man was taken aback by this counterargument He did not act as he had threatened. But he kept on maintaining that getting news in a secret manner was a sin, that founders of secret societies like Mazzini were all sinners. He asserted that whatever a non-cooperator did, he did openly, and there was no secrecy or cow ardice behind his single action. He went about spinning long yarns on the subject.
One day, in order to make a fun of him, we adopted a plan just when we were dining together. The gentleman in question always managed to eat a ‘Chapati’ by flattering the cook in charge, while all of us were being served at dinner with rice. On the day in question, while the gentleman was eating his ‘Chapati’ as usual, one of us raised an alarm that the Superintendent was coming. The man instantly concealed the ‘Chapati’ under a dinner plate near him and began quietly eating his rice. There was a roar of laughter raised around him, and all began cross-questioning him. “O, fellow, is it not a sin to conceal the ‘ChapatiI as you have done it? Is it following truth, according to your article of the creed, to eat the ‘Chapati’ stealthily?” Another answered on his behalf, of course, ironically, “A non-cooperator lover of truth does not regard it as a violation to eat a small ‘Chapati’ even stealthily, to feed his stomach. For that is an act of necessity, while your getting news surreptitiously and reading it is Violation of truth as harmful to the national cause “Surely it is no cowardice to eat forbidden food in order to live; that is not a lie or an evil act. To lie for the sake of a nation is, surely enough, an unpardonable sin, and an act of down right cowardice.”+++(5)+++
I would not have referred to the story if it were an isolated and exceptional incident But I found this attitude but too common among the non-cooperators and Khiiafatists I met in this jail. Hence I found it worthwhile to mention it in this narrative.
That they may take in correctly the situation in Malabar I spoke to them in several lectures on that momentous topic, dealing at large with the whole history of the question. Our friends in that prison were dead against my Sanghatan movement I convinced them of their inconsistent attitude in the light of the unity they were working after. For the larger unity was impossible so long as we were weak and divided among ourselves as Hindus. As to discussion on politics there was no end to it here.
The Shuddhi Movement at Ratnagiri
Before long I discovered in the jail at Ratnagiri that the Pathan and the Muslim convicts sent there from Bombay were practising the same methods of converting the Hindu juvenile offenders to Islam that were current in the Andamans. The officers of the prison had no inkling about the matter. As I knew their ways and means of doing this business I at once forestalled it. I started the Shuddhi movement to reclaim such converts for Hinduism. Two old prisoners from U. P. and some juveniles I reconverted into Hindus.+++(5)+++ I gave all the monetary help they needed. In course of time a high dispute arose over the matter. The controversy was carried up to the Superintendent of the jail. There were at the time too many Muslim prisoners in the jail including Pathans and Sindhis. They made things hot for the Maratha warders and their superior officers. I had to join battle with them. Some of them were my immediate neighbours in that jail and they threatened to give me a sound thrashing. I give here one instance in point, to show how they harassed me.
Some of them started proclaiming “Bang” at dawn just to annoy their Hindu brethren. All of them were worse characters and notorious thieves and robbers, and they never did their Namaz and never uttered the name of Allah. Yet they shouted out earty m the morning inviting Muslims for prayer and disturbed de sleep of the rest of us. It became a great nuisance and when the Soper- mtendent remousuaied with them they pleaded dot it was a saner of religion and he dare not object to The superior officers could do nothing to stop them. Then I tried my own remedy the nuisance. I took in hand two of the worst Hindu convicts, the ringleaders of dacoits and thieves in that Jail. One of them had passed his whole life there. Four or five times he had bees heavily sentenced on charges of theft and had at last come to regard this prison as bis home. He bad lost his one tooth and was advanced in age. I tutored him to utter the name of Ram with a load voice so soon as the Muslims began to cry ‘“Bang”. He sang couplets from Tulsidas and in uttering Ramanama. raised his voice loader than the Muslims. The warders would rebuke him stemly when I would intervene and say. “why should you object to his prayer? Either stop all of them or let every one be free to pray as he likes.” If a Mussulman prisoner was found doing his Namaz at night the Hindu followed suit with his Bhajan. The Mussulmans were full of fury but they were helpless to prevent us, As they disturbed the sleep of the Hindus, the Hindus paid them back in their own coin.+++(5)+++ So the whole dispute ended by itself. One nuisance cancelled the other. What punishment could not Stop, counter-goondasim had silenced. I silenced a Khilafatist editor-prisoner by a similar counter-move. He used to touch water for the Hindus on the plea that Muslims were as much human beings as they I entirely agreed with him on the point and I called upon an untouchable and scavenger to dip his pot and take water from a vessel of water for the Muslims.+++(5)+++ And the Khilafatist who was preaching broad humanitarian principle at once went at the untouchable and would not touch the water as being unholy for the Namaz. When I had exposed them two or three times they quietly took their water from a Hindu water-carrier and stopped touching the water reserved for the Hindus.
Riot in the Ratnagiri Jail
During this period a great quarrel arose between the insolent Pathans and the cunning Sindhi Mussulmans on the one side, and the Jail Superintendent on the other. The point in dispute was about the strict enforcement of prison-discipline. And the matter came to such a pass that these goondas decided to break into a riot to checkmate the Superintendent. In the riot they had conspired to beat all the Hindu prisoners in the jail, including the sepoys, the warders and the political convicts like us who were leaders of Sanghatan in that jail. One day after our usual meal was over, the Mussulmans suddenly kicked up a row and began attacking the Hindus, Having already warned the Hindus beforehand against this onslaught, they were ready to meet it though it had come on sudden. Some Hindu warders got a beating to the point of bleeding, but the Mussulman goondas did not go unscathed. They also got then share of sound hammering.+++(5)+++ They began to leave out and to flourish their sticks and fisticuffs, and in order to attack us sought to force their way inside the chawls. I stood ready near my room to meet them and all along incited the Hindus prisoners to take the offensive against them. In the meanwhile, somebody sound the alarm-bell. A regular fight ensured between the two sides along with the usual cries to accompany it. The Superintendent came on the same followed by a posse of soldiers. He threatened to give order for shooting. The Mussulman goondas were in a fright. They were all rounded up. Most of the had received sound thrashing from the Hindus and were bathed in blood. Prosecutions were launched, trials followed, and the rioters were duly punished. The Hindu warders who had saved their fellow-prisoners and themselves from the attack and had fought on the side of law and order, received due meed of praise.
This incident and its sequel made those who were considering me an outcast because I was the leader of the Shuddhi movement converts to that movement. And soon we succeeded in converting a Mussulman to Hindu faith. Of course, for this sacrilege, the Mussulmans dragged me into a suit.+++(5)+++ After the usual argument and counter-argument, the court decided against forcible conversions on either side. Thus ended the Mussulman’s game of converting Hindu lads to their faith. I was always on my guard against those who had designed against my life. The prisoners who had before this worked for the Khilafat movement as its partisans and had subscribed freely to its funds, now became champions of the Shuddhi and the Sanghatan movements. Their eyes were opened to the truth of the matter by what they had witnessed with their own eyes in this prison. And as they began at last to examine everything through the insight given them by the Sanghatan movement, their politics changed from non-cooperation into responsive co-operation. Out of this jail and free, they became in their respective provinces staunch supporters of Hindu Sanghatan.
As in the Andamans so at Ratnagiri, I went on with my work of instruction for the ordinary prisoners in that jail. Some of these I taught myself. I gave from my own purse prizes and scholarships to encourage them to read good books. The prison library had so books worth the name. I petitioned to the Bombay Government for the sanction of books and at length succeeded in getting from them a grant of five hundred rupees for the purchase of books for the library. I made a list of books, and I sent the list through the Superintendent for approval by the educational department of the Government And after the list was approved of by that body, the books were at once purchased and kept in the library. The prisoners developed great fondness for reading them so that during the course of a year and a half the Superintendent had to make a special mention of it in his report as the main cause of the remarkable decline in that jail of the propensity of the prisoners to quarrel, fight and come to blows.
A public holiday for the Muslims on the day of Id, was marked in the jail by the permission to them for general prayer. The prayer was led on such an occasion by a Moulvi from outside. The Christian prisoners had a similar privilege on their great holidays. Only the Hindus were without this right. The political convicts therefore petitioned to the authorities that the Hindu prisoners be granted, similar concession to celebrate their public holidays. The Government granted the permission asked for, and we decided to celebrate the Gokulashtami day as a great Hindu holiday. We fixed upon holding a Kirtan that day, and the Government did not object to it. They gave us things to eat suitable to the fast that we observed and the Kirtan was done in the jail as a public function.
The practice overthrown
As has been already pointed in another place the manner of sending prisoners to answer the call of nature in prison administration was extremely barbarous and highly objectionable. There was no partition and no door to the latrines arranged in a line, and the prisoners were made to sit down rubbing shoulders with one another. There was no roof overhead either in the rains or in the hot seasons. No water was allowed to be taken into the latrine. All were to get up after the function and to go to a water-tap at a distance to wash and clean their parts. The political prisoners agitated for reform in these matters with the result that this hideousness and dirt disappeared for good and the prisoners began to lead a clean and disciplined life. There was improvement in food and the general mode of living, and order was strictly maintained as laid down by the prison regulations.
One more thing was being carried out in the jail at Ratnagiri. It had remained unfinished in the Andamans. When I knew that I could no longer do any national work I had resolved upon, as the reader may remember, to finish a poem and had begun composing it in my own mind. But as other work grew upon my hands, this project lay in abeyance. At Ratnagiri I resumed the task and completed the poems that I had proposed to write. I gathered together the smaller poems previously composed by me. I wrote longer poems and gave a complete notion of what I meant by ‘Hinduism’. Some of the writings I had already despatched home from the Andamans. My brother brought out from these writings complete editions of three poems which were.
Kamala, Saptarshi and Gomantak.
These three poems were published anonymously. The fourth was a miscellany of my minor poems which had also gone to the press but it contained so many misprints as I was not on the spot to see it through, and I stopped its publication altogether. The miscellany was entitled ‘Virahoswasa’, the sighs of separation. I had to withdraw the complete edition of that book from the market. ‘Kamala’ , ‘Saptarshi’ and ‘Mahasagara’ were portions of the epic which I had contemplated to write, These survive as independent poems themselves, but the main tree of which they were to be branches is not yet even in the process of creation. It was been so with me- work that is undertaken under duress is often part finished and part destroyed.
After the completion of these poems I wrote my work on Hinduism in English which my friend Mr. Kelkar of Nagpur was kind enough to publish.
In the early days of my stay in the Ratnagiri jail I was not given a single book to read. After a time I got the works of Ramdas to read. Of these ‘Dasabodha’, and miscellaneous poems, I had already perused in my younger days. But as my edition of Ramdas contained only these, I read them over and over again in the jail, Later on they gave me other books and also writing material so that I could do both reading and writing to my satisfaction, I read many great books from beginning to end during this period, like the life of Prithviraj, Puranas like ‘Bhavishya Purana’ and Vedic India by Das.
One day I casually enquired after the health of my elder brother when I learnt that his condition was serious. My brother after being separated from me at Calcutta was put in the jail at Bijapur. My younger brother had gone to see him. when he was told that he could enter the prison and see his elder brother only if he would change his Khadi garments,
My brother, of course, refused to accept the condition at highly insulting to himself. He carried the matter up to the govenor and got it cancelled. My elder brother suffered terribly in the jail at Bijapur. He was confined in a dark, damp and deserted room all by himself. I heard later on that a political convict had been seized with madness in that very jail. The room had a very bad reaction on my brother’s mind and he was removed thence to Ahmedabad. Here he suffered less from solitariness, but he received no treatment and nursing for his growing disease. And at last his hardy constitution and his equally strong patience broke down under its terrible inroads. He was then removed from the jail to the prison hospital. We got information about it through the daring of a political convict in that prison. So my younger brother visited the place and found my brother almost on his death-bed. But his fortitude was remarkable. Nothing could shake it.
When I learnt the news I felt definitely that my elder brother was passing away without being helped, that he was slipping from our hands. Well, all of us were sojourners here and all had to leave the place sometime. Life was no better than a halt in a caravansori for a day or two. But my brother was dying inch by inch, having suffered and toiled and wasted himself for others, and there was none beside him at the last hour to put an affectionate dropflil of water in his mouth. It was the jail that had admitted him, and it was the jail that was swallowing him up.
Alas! methought, it was the enemy that, at long last had done him to death! He did not kill him with one stroke, but by a process of slow torture. These had finished him. I could not contain myself. I could hardly breathe, so overwhelming was the feeling of it all.
At that bitter moment, as was the habit with me, I sat up and composed myself. I maintained a quiet frame of mind, and recollected myself. And then I put to myself the question, “Where was the use of all this fretting and storm? My brother dies of hardships imposed upon him by our enemies. He is a victim to the enemies of our country! What help was there now but lamentation over individual loss? Can I avenge myself for it? Nothing but wailing and enquiry!”
I had made up my mind as soon as I was free to avenge myself on those who had victimised my brother, and then I would celebrate his death anniversary. That would be an example to others to do likewise. I felt calm in my mind after I had taken this solemn vow. The perturbation was gone and I was my former self again.
But Baba was released
A few days after this incident, news came that my brother hail been let off from the prison. I was full of joy at the news. He got his discharge but had to be brought home in a senseless condition But that was of no account, Mcthought; the Government had at last saved the expenses over his funeral, by setting him free And the members shall have at least the consolation of paying for it when he dies in the midst of them. Because that was also a matter of doubt. Hence his release was better than his death in that jail, any way. It was not release only. It was a rebirth for him from death-in-life in the prison. By the grace of God and as good fortune for the county that lover of his country began gradually to improve in health, and a wave of joy passed over the whole country.
That very year, I believe- though I do not remember correctly at the moment- the Congress session at Coconada adopted a resolution demanding my release. The resolution was moved from the chair and was passed nem con It was a moral gain for all the efforts of my younger brother and for similar agitation of patriots in full sympathy with all the political convicts in the country , I was transferred from the Andamans to Ratnagiri in 1921 and in 1923, I was removed from that place to the Yeravada Jail. That is at least my impression. I cannot be too sure about the dates I had no opportunity and no time to check the dates. I must say about the whole narrative, that there may be discrepancies, here and there about the dates, though in general they may be pretty accurate.