Why Cellular Jail
In Andaman Disturbs Our Conscience
Every
year, on 15th August the Tricolor is hoisted by our Prime Minister
from the ramparts of the Red Fort. It is an annual ritual telecast live every
year in our living rooms and has been for so long that it seems to have little
connection to the freedom our ancestors fought for. It has become more of a
political statement by the Prime Minister of whichever party is in power.
For
generations, Indians were given the message that they got their independence from
the British on this particular day through the efforts of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawahar
Lal Nehru with a few more men and women added in the background who also helped.
The image of Red Fort with the flag fluttering in the air became synonymous
with our idea of freedom relegating all other images to the background. It has
become so imprinted on our psyche that the sequence where the Prime Minister
climbs on to the rampart and addresses the nation about preserving our freedom has
become banal. The audience in Red Fort ground consisting of school children, bureaucrats
and dignitaries some of whom are more out of compulsion, has little if any
connection to India’s tragic road to freedom. One doesn’t see any freedom
fighters or hear them there. Red Fort doesn’t have any association with freedom
struggle like many others have, where the blood and cries of freedom fighters
mixed together. It doesn’t have a history written in blood. There were never any
hangings or mass torture of freedom fighters like in Andaman. Shahnawaz Khan, Dhillon
and Prem Sehgal from the INA were tried there for treason and that is the only
association many can think of. However, nowhere inside the place one feels the air
charged with the cries of those who lost their lives for our freedom.
Far
away from this hot spot, some of the freedom fighters of India and their descendants
have been assembling quietly in a ceremony little known to the world outside. It
is not only more heartfelt and has a simplicity that is unmatched but I believe
has a message that no other place has. While we have come to associate our
independence with flag hoisting at Red Fort, another event far away stands as a
silent and mute symbol to the spirit of nobility and courage that our freedom fighters
showed in countering the terror of the British. If the freedom fighters had
failed, the British would have been on Indian soil for many more years. The
fact they lost taught them a lesson they were never to forget.
Red
Fort, more of a glamorous tourist spot today, doesn’t have the same emotional air
that reminds us of the sacrifices of our freedom fighters like it does at Cellular
Jail. A time may come when even that will be gone leaving us to believe it
never existed. Nehru tried to demolish it for this reason.
That
is why thousands of miles away from Red Fort in Cellular Jail, a group of men and
women have been quietly holding a silent vigil every year on this day in the
memories of their fathers and for all revolutionaries. They don’t want them to
be forgotten even if rest of the country has forgotten them. As their group
leader told me, it was the courage of their fathers that led the British to concede
that their policy of terror and mass torture was a failure and wouldn’t be able
to subjugate Indians. A little known event known as ‘the hunger strike of the
prisoners’ twice in the thirties taught the British that the spirit of the
revolutionaries couldn’t be crushed. It was the beginning of a realization that
they were against an enemy who could counter their terror with a counter
terror, as in the words of Mr. Anup Dasgupta. The British carefully hid it and admitted
it many years later when the Ex British Prime Minister Atlee admitted so in
Calcutta.
“Why
do you come to Cellular Jail in the Andaman every year on 15th August?”
I had asked Mr. Anup Dasgupta, the octogenarian team leader of a delegation of
men and women whose parents were incarcerated in the Cellular Jail.
“To
keep alive the memories of the revolutionaries of the jail so that they are not
forgotten. They faced the British terror with counter terror with nothing but
their arms raised to the British guns. This spirit, this story of theirs spread
and led and an average Indian to believe that he could face the British with
bare hands. No other group faced the terror like they did, least of all Gandhi
or any Congressman. They could see the average man borrowing this spirit from
the revolutionaries.”
“Why
didn’t anybody admit it?” I wonder. “Why did the British commit so much torture
and terror when it was not necessary?”
“The
British were scared of them. Not of anyone else. They knew if their spirit begins
to spread to the hearts of Indians they will lose the country. About Congress and
their leaders, they were not scared. The Cellular Jail referred to as ‘Kalapani’
or India’s Bastille where political prisoners and revolutionaries were lodged
after they revolted against the British. The British responded by creating a
prison that would strike a permanent terror in the hearts of Indians to contain
it. In that respect Andaman was different from other prisons. Not only it would
be the cruelest but would terrorize and traumatize everyone.”
“The
revolutionaries knew it then.”
“Yes,”
he answered. “I remember my father saying to me that once there, they realized
they had to behave in a way so that the British never feel they have been able
to crush their soul. If they felt so, they would have advertised it as a
success. They could never do that to our fathers and only then the Indian
people knew that the revolutionaries didn’t give in to torture.”
“So,
perhaps they fought a bigger battle from inside as from the outside.”
“Yes,
you may say that,” he said.
“In
the entire literature on Andaman, I have not found any prisoner’s spirit broken
by torture. How did they manage to stay calm inside despite the torture? Who
gave them the strength? My father was incarcerated in the jail for five years and
he lived for a short time after his release. The torture had damaged his inner
organs that he couldn’t sustain himself for long. Like many others who went along
with him.”
“Why
was he released?”
“They
forced a release from the prison after they began a hunger strike for their
rights and chose to die instead of being force fed. The British tried to force feed
them through pipes to keep them alive till they realized they were killing them
in the ensuing process. That they were not able to keep them alive at a sub-human
level which was their mission, they realized the prisoners had shown them they
had a choice to live their life their way. That they couldn’t take away their choice,
their ultimate freedom.”
“And
this realization that they can’t subdue their spirit was a fatal blow to the British
idea of domination of Indians.”
The
prisoners couldn’t talk to each other but they learnt to communicate through
their eyes and body language and the message was ‘they won’t be able to crush our
spirit’. They passed it to each other.”
“And
the British got to know of it.”
“Yes,
my father told me,” he added with an ironic smile. “But it is not to be found in
history textbooks and it gets erased with every passing year.”
Mr.
Anup Dasgupta spoke in a halting voice and took some time to answer as I talked
to him. A man, otherwise shy and quiet, had a fire in him that is seen in the children
of revolutionaries. When he burst out, it was with a passion and rage that came
straight from his heart.
“They,
the British, gave us a cause to be angry and one which we have never erased. It
comes out in our voice even now. We will never let it die till our last breath
and then pass it on.”
“What
is the source of this anger?”
“The
anger comes out at the very thought of what they did to my father,” he replied.
“Is
the anger only with the British?”
“There
is another anger at Congress, at Gandhi and Nehru and all congress leaders who
tried to denigrate their memory. The anger is at the injustice where the
stories of our fathers doesn’t find its mention in the annals of history.”
“Your
anger, I have never seen in a Gandhian or their descendants,” I answered.
“You
won’t see it either,” one of the group members listening to our conversation said.
“Gandhians were not sent to Andaman. It was an unwritten policy of the British.
It was an oral understanding of two brothers in arms. The British considered
Gandhi and Nehru as their pawns, on their side. How could they send them or anyone
from their group to this inhuman place? If sent here and tortured, they would
have seen the futility of the non-violent struggle and its hypocrisy. It is
only those who understood that the British can only be thrown out by taking up arms.”
“The
voice of those died here, we won’t let it die. That is why we come here every
year to speak.”
“Ever
since our independence in 1947, an attempt has been made to undermine the
history of our fathers and all revolutionaries who breathed their last here. Our
attempt is to see that the history of our fathers is not erased by the Government
for future generations. Do you know after Independence, Nehru wanted to destroy
the Cellular Jail and build a hospital? Would he have thought of doing so on
his own? He, his mentors and his sycophants saw Andaman as a threat to his
hegemony, the legacy of the Congress. He knew that if Andaman remains as a
prison, the story of Congress having got India freedom will crumble one day. Nehru
managed to destroy four out of seven buildings. He had to stop when we threatened
with mass action.”
I
could only nod in silence. There will remain an eternal conflict between what Cellular
Jail represents as a symbol to our national conscience and how different it is from
what the court historians of our country have tried to project. Will a day
come, sooner than later, when the version of history planted upon us will not
last and let the truth emerge.
The
past few days, a visit to Andaman had been a poignant one. I had noticed a subtle,
insidious attempt at every step to undermine this part of India’s freedom
struggle and project it as an add-on to the movement by the Congress.
“Do
you know several years ago, an attempt was made to put up a picture of Gandhi
and Nehru in Cellular Jail by the administration. On hearing this, we decided
to sit on a fast until death in the jail till the decision is reversed. Fearing
an outrage across the nation, it was reversed,” Mr. Dasgupta burst out, his
voice burning with anger and desperation.
“Why
did you not agree to that? Some would say it was only a photograph,” I asked.
“No.
Did they play any role here? Did they ever come here? They, their congress colleagues
were they sent here to be tortured? None of them were threatened or killed. Gandhi
never said a word against the inhuman practices here on the inmates. He did
only after Tagore spoke up. Gandhi’s thinking was so much in line with the
British. They thought that these revolutionaries were the real danger, sub
humans who should be wiped out through torture. Gandhi, Nehru kept a stoic silence
about that, especially Gandhi who believed that these inmates are his rivals and
deserved to be killed. Could any ruler have asked for more from Gandhi?”
“The
sound and light show there is another injustice. It doesn’t bring in fully the
torture and violence enacted daily on the prisoners. The daily schedule in Cellular
jail was worse than that of a concentration camp and the torture unparalleled,”
he continued. “It could beat any other torture chamber of those times in the torture
inflicted on the prisoners, my research tells me,” he added. “The torture was most
grotesque, brutal and could put the concentration camps of the next decades to
shame. Yet the overall impression given today is that the torture was just like
any other prison, shown in a minimalistic way, almost in passing. When I asked someone
why the degree of torture shown doesn’t match the actual description that one
finds in memoirs of the people, he said people get affected so it’s kept a minimal.”
“The
core program of the Cellular Jail was only torture. The jail was built with that
purpose in mind. That every prisoner should go through it and every Indian should
hear about it. The very ideology was to torture the Indian revolutionaries so brutally
that they remain traumatized and their stories affect every youth on the
mainland. It was a psychological warfare designed carefully for Indians. It was
felt that this jail will prevent every young Indian of revolting against the British
Empire for another hundred years. Ironically, as the stories reached the
shores, it had the opposite effect from what the British had anticipated. The
prisoners not only bore it on their bodies and learnt to not give in to the suffering.
It was a collective effort on their part to show that they could not be cowed
down even without any meeting ever. My father used to say that even though we
were not allowed to meet, we connected with each other in the jail in a spiritual
way and never felt alone.”
“Do
you know it was Rabindra Nath Tagore who first called a meeting to protest
against the torture in the Cellular Jail? When it almost seemed to take the
shape of a movement larger than his own, Gandhi, to keep his movement relevant,
issued an appeal that he would take up their cause. He asked them to give up their
hunger strike that greatly helped the British. Did Gandhi ever stop any hunger
strike elsewhere? How would it be if he were force fed?”
On
this eve of Independence Day, as I sat not aware of the time, dusk began to
fall throwing a strange light on the walls of different cells where the
prisoners once spent their days dreaming of a free India.
Many
of them stayed just above the hanging room. As I looked at it one final time
before leaving, a thought came to me that the inmates of Cellular Jail
represented the very inviolate spirit of those Indians who spread that spirit
in India in a time most needed and one that the British could not crush. A
hundred years ago, those men and women made it sure living in lonely cells that
they won’t give up even facing death and their stories of courage reach every
individual on the mainland who would be keenly watching. It was a spirit that the
British came to fear and later movements used as they multiplied. But do we know
about this today? Will it not get erased at the cruel hands of history if we
don’t stand up for them? Will it be able to stay alive after these children of
freedom fighters leave this world? Will the later generations be able to keep it
alive? I pray from my heart that we do.
Note
– The above article was written after a discussion with some of the children
and grandchildren of those whose parents were incarcerated in Cellular Jail in
Andaman and who come every year on 15th August to honor their memories.
This article couldn’t have been possible without their support.
