Last days In the Andamans
Just about this time my younger brother paid me a visit in the Andamans. There was no hope then of my release from that place. My elder brother had continued to be failing in health. And, therefore, the first thought that struck us when we three met together was that perhaps that was the last meeting together of us three. For, the next time that such a permission would be granted to us would be only after the lapse of one year. And one year was such an interminable period for a person like my elder brother who had found himself so thinned in body and so gone down in health that it was hard to imagine he would last long. Every day was such a difficult day for that emaciated body to pull on with. As such I told my younger brother the bitterest truth in plain words. I said, “Bal, truth is always harsh but I am sure you are not so weak-minded and cowardly as not to face it with fortitude. I see, therefore, no reason to conceal it from you. On the other hand, the sorrow that comes with perceptible and slow steps is easier to bear than any calamity that comes down upon us with a sudden blow. Be prepared to hear the worst of us any day in the future. I don’t think we can pull on for a long lime now. Do not forget, however, that even the unexpected sometimes happens. Who know we may survive from this. But the chances are very remote for that. Take it that this is our last meeting together on this side of the world!” Every word that I uttered went like a burning brand to my heart. The face of Bal had completely darkened and his countenance fell. But he realised that words were like heart-beats, and harsh though they were, they were but echoes of truth. I had ultered them as the voice of my conscience, and he heard them intently.
As I had by now completed my period of ten years in that prison, I had petitioned to the Government to grant me the ticket to which I was entitled. The reply that I got was that I had been granted the ticket, but in the prison itself. To have a ticket itself meant freedom to live outside the prison, and to make a home and live in it by earning one’s independent livelihood. Others had got such tickets on the expiry of three years in the silver jail. I got it at the end of ten years. But a ticket to live in the prison itself was indeed a travesty of terms. That really meant that I was to pass all my days in the prison itself, not in the free life of the Andamans, without a home of my own; and yet It was a ticket that they had given me! That was bitter irony indeed. That was lacerting a bruised heart. I was to be made an exception to all the rules operating in these islands; I was to get no benifit of any word or plea I had advanced to Improve the lot of the prisoners in that jail.
Cornered thus on all sides, life for me and for other political prisoners in that jail would sometimes become a burden too hard to bear. In order to save them and myself from suicide, we had hatched up a secret plot among the most trusted and confidential friends of our group Wa had included in that dark conspiracy some of the ordinary prisoners as well. Whenever we found that there was no hope whatever for this, that. or the other of the political convicts in that Jail, when the last thread of hope had perished, then these convicts together were to…………..
So a day passed, a long, lingering day? The bell tolled announcing the coming of evening. A day of pining had gone by! Relief, rest, sleep, forgetfulness, and the approach of release nearer by a day. But release meant death as Well. A day that passed was one day less from the
sentence, sure enough. But it was one day less also from the lease of life. That also kept on haunting the mind.
One of such days. The hour was evening; the bell had rung; and I had made ready to return to my cell. I locked the oil depot and had handed over the keys to the jamadar. Though on ticket, every evening I had to return to my solitary confinement in the appointed room. I gave the keys and was winding my way to the room for the night. A warder came up to me and slipped a chit into my palms. He smiled full of joy and hinted that it was good news. And he went away. I opened the note and I read that an order had come from Indian Government in the head office of the Commissioner that day that Savarkar brothers were to be sent back to India. Tha Government of Bombay had asked for their recall!
‘Such news had been brought to me several times before, and had ended there. And I had remained in the prison all the while. Hence I had never put any faith in these reports. My friends knew it and, therefore, had added that they had seen the order with their own eyes, and there was no humbug about it.
The news may be true, for aught I thought to the contrary . For where prisoners had got their tickets after three years, I had got it after ten. and my ticket brought me no freedom, but permit to rot in the jail for all time to come. I realised that this farce could not continue for long and the shamelessness must end. There were only two alternative to this dirty conduct. Either I must be free in the Andamans; or as the report went, must be sent back to India. The authorities would prefer any day to take me back to India and put me in Jail there. They would not have me on them as a free man in the Andamans. What I did not get for the asking, I was to get now from them without asking for it. For this concession would enable them to detain me in the prison in India after ten years in the Andamans. And that, in the name of mercy again, as an act of kindness towards me! For my transportation to India would be hailed by all who did not know the other side of the matter. They would regard it as an act of grace.
These were my night-thoughts on that date. Next morning the jailor sent for me in the office and ordered me to pack up my things. I then felt sure that this was a prelude to my departure for India.
The Andamans were all agog with the happy news, for they knew not that my send-off from here was to be my imprisonment in India. The people welcomed the news as an order of release and freedom. Wish was father to the thought and they protested, “Babuji, none is going to put you back in the jail again. So soon as you step in India, you are free. That is a certainty.” Taking the wish for the deed, they showered on me messages of congratulations from all sides.
But the more I thought of it, the more indifferent I grew to that news. In the Andamans, I had the consolation of staying together with my brother. In India we were sure to be separated and housed in different jails, I had made intimate friends in the Andamans during the last ten years. I had already secured the ticket, and the chance was that before long, I could live here as a free man in a home and a family of my own. In India I would again be confined in prison and as a solitary man. I would lose my friends, the ties would be sundered. And I felt the same wrench of separation that I had felt when I took leave of my friends in India and was transported to the Andamans..
I felt as miserable and unhappy as I was ten years ago when I left India. And now that I was leaving the Andamans, I felt that I was being sent back on transportation for life once again.
I packed up my books. I gave many of them to the prison library. I distributed others among prisoners aad friends. Ob the last day. there was a crowd of men to pay me their last visit They kept on coming to me from mom till evening. Every moment I feared that the officers might misunderstand the crowd and aught arrest any one of them again. But all went off smoothty aad the officers paid no attention to the crowd. Every one was free that day to go out and come in as he liked. The prisoners ceased to be afraid ofthe officers, and the officers in their turn did not over-do their part as custodians of the place. In spite of my repeated protests aad when many of them could not personally meet me, they brought to the prison gate gifts of all kinds. Fruits, flowers, sweetmeats, soda water bottles, tins of biscuits, there were in any number, heaps of them. And who were they that showered these presents upon me? Free men in the Andamans as well as prisoners. What was their worth? Most of them earned no more than ten rupees a month. But what loyalty and what devotion there were in the act! Unsought and unrestricted they came with their gift of a plantain, a watermelon, and a flower to deposit it near the prison-gate. I went in the afternoon to the door, and I distributed them all among those whom I found near the gate. I only kept such of them as none would take back from me. I administered the pledge of service to a few of my choice friends who lingered behind. The pledge of our association contained the following words
- “One God, one country, one goal”
- “One caste, one life, one language.”
I gave this mantra to him and explained to him its deeper significance. For the fulfilment of this hope, for the attainment of this goal, every Hindu, who is one with the ideal, must be ready, if an occasion arises, even to sacrifice his life fighting for it. I told him in detail what and how to do it. Before every Hindu individually and collectively can summon up strength for this supreme sacrifice and even during the process of it, he must carry out in the present circumstances certain tasks in the Andamans and I told him in detail the tasks devolving on all of them severally in that connection.
Just then a warder came to inform me that the Sahib was coming as also the party of policemen that was to fetch me away from that jail.
I got up, and I had the unalloyed gratification that on the last day of my life here I could convey to the men to whom I had just spoken the vow that I had taken when I was but eleven years old. I had buried my hope alive in that prison for ten years and on the day that its door was to open to let me out, my last act on the last day and at the last moment was no other than the message I gave to the prisoner in that jail. I had to step into this prison because I had given that mantra to young India, and now that I was leaving it after ten years, God had spared me to leave the same message behind to inspire young men in the Andamans.
- “One God, one country, one hope,
- “One caste, one life, one language.”
These words were on my lips all along.
My brother and myself were made to stand before the prison gate. The jailor handed us over to the police party in order to take us on the steamer bound for India. The kind jailor asked them not to put fetters on us. We were marched along and at last the iron door of that horrible prison opened its jaws to let us out into the spacious atmosphere of the world outside.
It had opened in 1909 and closed after swallowing up my elder brother. In 1911, the same horrible jaw opened out again and shut so soon as it had gulped me down. We had no hope then that we could come out of it alive. The iron portal that had shut upon us in 1911, turned on its hinges with a grating sound in 1921, the jaw opened and we came out of it.
The iron theshold of that iron gate, as we crossed it, made us aware that we were leaving the Andamans alive. I said to my brother, “This little threshold is a borderland between life and death. From death we are crossing into life only by stepping athwart the threshold. Yes we have crossed it and stepped into the land of the living. And now? We do not mind very much. Let the future take care of itself.”
A garland of white Champaka flowers
The outside of the prison was strictly guarded against the crowd that had gathered to give me a send-off. A targe number of people had come there only to have a sight of me. The prisoners scattered over the settlement were scrupulously kept at their work that day. And yet many had come under some excuse or another and lay in hiding to have a look at me. We had walked only a few steps on our way to Port Blair and under an escort when a Maratha prisoner by name Kushaba who had been raised to the position of a jamadar and who was shortly to receive his ticket of freedom, suddenly rushed forward and defying the escort that guarded us put a garland of Champaka flowers round my neck on behalf of all the prisoners present. While the police party was about to raise a cry, he had already left after cheering my name and prostrating himself at my feet. He was liable to lose his job and be punished for such a sacrilege. But he seemed not to mind it.
I still visualise the scene, the Maratha prisoner intent on garlanding me, and the baffled police-officers straining to pull me off and handcuff me. The police officer was a symbol of twenty year’s effort on the part of the authorities to blot me out from the memory of the people, to prevent one and all of them from having any photograph or hook in their houses, or any relic to remind them of me and my work. All these years they had branded these actions as punishable offences. And now the police officer taking me to the steamer was making his last effort to prevent the prisoners from honouring me. On the other hand, the garland of Champaka flowers and the jamadar who gave it to me, were a token of the love and veneration in which thousands of my fellow-countrymen still continued to hold mc. My life and life-work had all along been the battle-ground between these two contending forces and of their action and reaction. And the manifestation in my life constituted so many symbolic expressions of the whole story. That was how I felt about the scene before me, and I expressed it in so many words to my brother beside me.
More precious than a jewel necklace
This garland of flowers was an invaluable recognition of our efforts during the last ten years for uplift of the Andamans. We felt our efforts rewarded by this token of love and reverence. It was dearer to us than any necklace of jewels. As he garlanded mc, the crowd expressed its joy by clapping. Ihese plaudits betokened loving gratitude that went home to my heart. It was a conclusive answer to the efforts of the authorities to inspire fear and disaffection about me among the settlers in the Andamans,
I found some time to talk confidentially to my friends and chief co-workers before being taken up into fhe steamer, I hrough them I gave my parting advice to the dwellers in the Andamans, I told them, “Stay in the Andamans, cultivate the soil, inter-marry, multiply, and add to the growth and expansion of the Hindu culture in those islands.” I also chalked out for them the work they were to do. As I climbed the ascent ten years ago from Port Blair to the Silver Jail, I had never imagined that time would come when I was to descend from that place and go back to India. But now I had climbed down and was stepping into the steamer that was to take me back to India.
As the thoughts were passing in my mind, the steamer ‘ Maharaja’ had arrived, She was bound for Calcutta. We went up and I felt a strange sensation coming over me, I was to lose the little freedom I was beginning to enjoy in the Silver jail, and, when in India, I may be put under severe custody as if I was to run my whole sentence once again beginning from it first day. As I stepped into the steamer, I was taken lo the cage for prisoners on the ground floor. It was in the same cage that I was locked on my first voyage to the Andamans. A shiver passed over my entire body as I remembered it. And my elder brother was to be with me now, a thin, emaciated scare-crow of a man hiccoughing without rest or relief. We were both put in together.
Put in the cage of maniacs
The cage in which we were locked up was packed full of lunatics. The insane in the Andamans were all being despatched to India by the same steamer. And in their company we were bound for voyage to India and in the same cage with them! The lunatics were pouring forth foul abuses on one another and were crying aloud in turns. Some were holding their throats in the grip of their hands as if to throttle themselves. The man put in charge of these madmen was one of themselves, who had recovered from that ailment. He used to hammer them all one by one. There was not even moving space for us two in this medley. And my brother was burning with fever and so emaciated in body, and he was herded among this pack.
What the madmen saw and spoke they believed for the time being as gospel truth. Some imagined that the mice were running all over their body and mounting up their chests. Some believed that all the people around were shouting out abuse towards them, and they would wake up at night, sit on the neighbour’t chest, each one of them, and were about to belabour them with fisticuffs. Others were rolling pell-mell in their own vomits and urine. And we were planted ourselves in their midst!
Who are mad, whom can you call mad?
For a moment I could not help asking myself the question, who is really mad and who is not. How do we know that what our senses apprehend is really the truth? Perhaps, what the senses of these madmen perceive may be the reality! On the side of the same as on the side of the insane, the senses alone constitute the witness. And some one sense alone is to determine that the other sense reports correctly. If the senses of us all were like the senses of these lunatics, we should have felt like them the mice running over our bodies. Why then should we take it that we are right? Perhaps, they may be right and we, seated in the midst of their vomitting and discharges, are deluded that we are in that foul and dirty place! For aught we know, we are mad and they are in their senses!
These musings gave me a shock. In the whirring noise of the rolling steamer, in those offals around me, in the obscene chatter ofthe lunatics thereby, and in the fetid and oppressive
atmosphere of the place, I felt my life choking within me. I had often the fear and the feeling that this philosophic reverie may be the first intimation of lunacy creeping over my being and under it things visible may be rapidly melting away into illusion.
I felt the weakness of my shattered nerves at the time as I had never felt them during the ten years of my life in prison. The weak nerves were due to that life, no doubt, but I felt it overwhelmingly in the steamer and at that moment as I had never experienced them before.
I appealed and protested to the officers on board the steamer to remove us from that place. There was a part of the steamer occupied by other Indian passengers bound for India, and they also interceded on our behalf. Their efforts and chiefly the persuasion of one who shall remain unnamed secured for bath of us seats in the other half of the compartment, and somewhat detached from the space allotted to the lunatics.
But there was no breeze on that side. There were other prisoners carried by the same steamer to India and among them were some consumptive, dacoits and robbers. These convicts were accommodated on the deck that they might get fresh air to breathe. My brother, who was more sick than any-one of them, had to rot in the cage on the lower deck - the cellar of the ship as it were - and in the cage I have already described. He was consumptive, his body was burning with fever, and I suffered from hard breathing due to chronic bronchitis, and we two were placed in that stuffy atmosphere.
Again, I appealed for fresh air; again I wrote to them that we needed very badly some fresh air to breathe in.
From the following day a sort of ventilator was improvised to let down fresh air from the deck above two times during the day. A heavy gunny bag was suspended from the top downwards open at both ends from which air passed downwards from the deck above. Later on we were taken on the deck, under guard, for half-an-hour every day to sit there and inhale fresh air.
The passengers on the deck and officers, at times, came in the cellar below to have a talk with us on the sly. The Indians among them were full of sympathy for us; but even some Europeans treated us with respect. One educated Anglo-Indian gave me a living proof of it by presenting me a copy of my favourite book, “Thomas a Kempis’s ‘Imitation of Christ”’ which he asked me to cherish as a keep sake from him. They sent us by private arrangement good food to eat. I sent back out of it soda-water bottles, Ice, and sweetmeat as not wanted by me. Some of them would force us to accept gifts in money which we thankfully refused. I told them that we were sure to be back in prison in India where we had no use for money. I distributed the sweet-meats among our fellow- passenger - the lunatics on board.
At night my brother would narrate to me the story of his prison- life. I left India for England, in 1906. And from that date till fourteen years after, we were not in one room for a single day or night, so that we could talk together and exchange our thoughts. He told me how the movement of Abhinav Bharat had spread in the country after I had left for England, the names of members enrolled in it, how he happened to be arrested, how he was persecuted by the police to force from him the information necessary to round up all of them, how he breathed not a word about them and their whereabouts, how, at last, he had fainted under the torture, so on and so forth. They tried to get out from him information about conspiracies in Maharashtra and Bengal, but hey failed. I heard that thrilling narrative with rapt attention.
While on that steamer, I constantly remembered the friends I had left behind in the Andamans! And the thought brought home to me the void in my life that their separation had made. I often had the yearning that I should go back to the Andamans and meet them! Oh, for the touch of a vanished hand!
On the fifth day as I was seated on the deck forhalf an-hour’s daily draught of fresh air, I saw a fortified wall right in front of me. A fellow-passenger told me that we were almost in India and the fortified wall was its boundary. I startled. The fortress of India. The embankment, sighing for which I had kept my body and soul together during all the hard years I had passed, in the Andamans; was right in front of me and I was soon to be landed on it! This was Mother India whom I was seeing again with my eyes. Her holy feet I was touching with my head. In this very life, I was seeing and touching them. I turned round to my brother and ejaculated, “Dear brother, behold our dear Bharat once again! Behold her feet washed by the blue waters of the sea around”
We both got up from our seats full of adoration and worship We folded our hands with reverence and devotion. We felt a thrill passing through us, and we uttered the following prayer
“Victory to the Goddess of Freedom,
“Bande Mataram!”