The Cellular Jail at Port Blair is one national monument that every right-thinking Indian must visit at least once in their lifetime. I undertook that personal pilgrimage along with my wife last week.A silent, intense and reflective visit it must be, undiluted or distracted by the limitations of time or the pressures of a tour and touristic mindset. It will gradually reveal the immensity, the magnitude and the intensity of the sacrifice, the excruciating suffering and the rock-like determination of those who had decided to take upon themselves the mission of liberating India from the clutches of subjection.
The saga of V D Savarkar, Ganesh Savarkar, Barindra Kumar Ghose, Ullaskar Dutta, Upendranath Banerjee, Sudhir Kumar Sarkar, Indu Bhushan, Nani Gopal, Hotilal Verma and scores of others who were consigned and condemned to the Cellular Jail and yet never lost sight of the ultimate goal of India’s liberation is a story that is yet to be told in its entirety. One cannot forget either the fate of those who participated in the Revolt of 1857 and who were sent to penal settlement at Andamans in the aftermath of the revolt, when the Cellular Jail was not yet built, and were confined to the dreaded Viper Island, chained in batches so that they can never contemplate escape.
Fettered, whipped, lashed, abused, and condemned to labour as slaves, berated and treated as sub-humans these later revolutionary-nationalists bore the burden of imprisonment, continued to resist silently but never allowed the vision of a free India to blur. In one of his last works, Penal Settlements in Andamans, historian R C Majumdar brings out the saga, poignancy, suffering in the Cellular Jail and observes that its history is “punctuated throughout by barbarous cruelties on the educated youths of India who fought for the emancipation of their country, on the one hand, and their brave defiance and passive resistance in the face of unspeakable sufferings, on the other. It is a heroic story of almost epic grandeur.”
My own great-great-grandfather, Upendranath Banerjee, was incarcerated in the Cellular Jail between 1910 and 1920, convicted in the Alipore Bomb Case and went through that fiery hell along with Savarkar and others, and lived to narrate its tale too. It was for me a home-coming of sorts.
For those who have allowed the gradual erosion of the sense of how our freedom was won, for those for whom freedom seemed easily won and therefore fit for barter, for those who have worshipped one political dynasty and are never tired of singing paeans to its “sacrifice”, for those who exalt in demanding India’s dismemberment and receive political support for it, a visit to the Kalapani will, at least to those amongst these, in whom some modicum of the element of conscience and intellectual honesty is left, perhaps inspire introspection. Very easily do some continue to collude to desecrate our freedom and thus betray these sentinels of our past.
As I walked out of the gates, Savarkar’s entreaty echoed within, “Dear Reader... my broken pen I cannot put aside, however, without telling you never to forget those who stuck to their task, disheartening and trying though it was; who embraced it to the last; who were nearly burnt up in that fiery ordeal; and who came out of it because nothing could burn them up completely in it, lest you forget! Dear Reader, I say it to you as my last word, do not forget them. For sooner or later the memory of them will serve you and be your salvation; nothing else will avail.”
That collective memory can never be allowed to slacken; it upholds and sustains our freedom... for it inspires us, as Prime Minister Modi reminds us, to live for a free India.
Anirban Ganguly
Director, Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation
Follow him on Twitter @anirbanganguly