A lamb, lionised!
As the demand for conferring Bharat Ratna on VD Savarkar gains momentum, an Indian weekly looks at the life and legacy of one of the most controversial figures in the history of India�s nationalist movement
Niranjan Takle
In the midnight hours of April 29, 1912, an alarm went up on the yard three wing of the Cellular Jail in Port Blair. Warden Gulmir, stationed at the jails central tower, rushed to the wing and shined a hurricane lamp through the iron-barred door of cell 82. He found the bed empty. The prisoner, a young Bengali revolutionary called Indu Bhushan Roy, who had completed two years of his ten years rigorous imprisonment, was dead. His body hung from the window, a strand of torn kurta wound around his neck.
The jail telegraphed Calcutta, the British India capital, of the death. Bengali revolutionaries intercepted the telegram, and the following day the Amrita Bazar Patrika frontpaged the news: Kalapani (the nickname of the Cellular Jail, meaning black water in Hindi) had claimed one more tortured soul. Three suicides a month had become the norm in Andaman.
Roys death drove fellow Bengali prisoner Ullaskar Dutt to madness. For the British, Dutt was a known troublemaker: as a student in Calcutta, he stole chemicals from the university laboratory to make bombs. One of his homemade bombs killed two British citizensan act that landed him in Andaman. Roys suicide had so angered him that he accused the jails medical superintendent Dr F.A. Barker of aiding it.
At Kalapani, it was madness to accuse a jail officer of anything, let alone of killing an inmate. Dutt got the punishment of standing handcuffs: for seven days, he hung by his wrists from a peg hammered into the wall. On the eighth day, Barker ran a test on the prisoner. I could feel the metal clips on my body. The electric current passed through me with a force of lightning, Dutt would write in his memoirs years later. He was transferred to the islands lunatic ward at Haddo, where he was kept for 14 years.
Both Roy and Dutt were incarcerated alongside a Marathi prisoner, a Chitpawan Brahmin from Nashik, described by a British official as a small man with an intelligent face and a nervous manner. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar had set foot on Andaman on July 4, 1911, but his reputation had preceded him. His arrest in London in 1910, his subsequent deportation to India and his attempt to escape to Marseille while being transported on a ship had become a cause clbre in Europe. It was said that Savarkar had slipped through a porthole, leapt into the sea and swam ashore.
He was soon recaptured in Marseille. But France protested, saying the British had not taken appropriate legal steps in apprehending Savarkar on its soil. The dispute came before the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, which ruled that, despite the irregularity in the arrest, the British did not have to hand its prisoner back.
Documents accessed by THE WEEK show that Savarkar was arrested in London on March 13, 1910, for aiding the murder of Nasik district collector A.M.T. Jackson. The Brownie pistol that a young revolutionary had used to kill Jackson was traced to a batch of 20 pistols that Savarkar had sent from London. Back in India, Savarkar was tried for two casesmurder and seditionand was sentenced to two life terms of 25 years each. He was taken to Andaman aboard the S.S. Maharaja, the only steamer that had permission to dock at the island.
Savarkar was 28 when he reached the place that Sir Richard Carnac Temple, the chief commissioner of the Andamans, had described thus: Here was a huge, practical reformatory to forcibly bend every arrivals rebellious nature to the yoke. Their fate would be even more dreadful than the hangmans noose.
The architectural monstrosity was a 698-cell jaila massive, three-storey structure with seven wings, or yards, of unequal lengths, radiating from a central watch tower. The jails design was panopticalall (pan) could be observed (optical) from the central tower, without the prisoners being able to see anyone. The buildings rose out of mangrove swamps on a promontory called Atlanta Point in Port Blair. The cells, measuring 13.5x7.5ft each, had tiny, iron-barred windows and wooden beds measuring 6x3ft. I felt that I had entered the jaws of death, Savarkar wrote later. The high wall was adorned with a festoon of manacles, and several similar instruments of torture were hanging down from it.
In Savarkars case, it seems, Temples vision of the Cellular Jail as a place that would crush the mutinous spirit of Indians had its intended effect. Shamsul Islam, historian and former professor at Delhi University, writes in his book Hindutva: Savarkar Unmasked: Savarkars nine years and ten months in the Cellular Jail did not enhance or deepen his anti-imperialistic inclinations. In fact, it ended it. The conditions in jail were indeed inhuman, but hardly any other freedom fighter in the Cellular Jail surrendered or submitted to the British [like Savarkar did].
The latter-day saffron saint
Savarkar coined the word hindutva, the concept that forms the ideological core of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which leads the coalition government at the Centre. In his 1923 book Essentials of Hindutva, written under the pseudonym of A Maratha, Savarkar says India belongs to only those who have it as their holy land and fatherland. Our Mohammedan or Christian countrymen are not and cannot be recognised as Hindus. For, though Hindustan to them is fatherland as to any other Hindu, yet it is not to them a holy land, too. Their holy land is far off in Arabia or Palestine, he wrote. Somewhere in the 1920s, the title veer (gallant) was bestowed on Savarkar. The person who first called him veer was, perhaps, B.B. Bhopatkar of the Marathi paper Bhala.
The founding father of hindutva politics, however, was for long a marginal figure in mainstream politics. In fact, for several decades after independence, saffron organisations were reluctant to acknowledge Savarkars contribution in laying the basis of their politics. The process of legitimising his legacy gained momentum after the BJP became a force to reckon with in national politics. In 2003, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government installed a portrait of Savarkar in Parliaments central hall, right opposite Mahatma Gandhis portrait. This was the only function of the Indian Parliament that was boycotted by the Congress and all opposition parties, said Mani Shankar Aiyar, Congress member of the Rajya Sabha. Aiyar has long been a critic of Savarkar: As Union minister in 2004, he had removed a plaque of Savarkar from the Cellular Jail.
Today, Port Blair has an airport and a park named after Savarkar. Mumbai has a street and a park that bears his name. In London, a blue plaque identifies India House in Highgate, where Savarkar lived. It is part of the process of legitimising the RSS philosophy of a Hindu nation by projecting the author of hindutva into an icon of freedom struggle, conveniently forgetting his indictment by the Justice Kapur commission in Gandhis assassination, said Islam.
Critics say the nationalist veil that has been drawn over Savarkar in the past two decades owes a lot to a plan by the BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh to invent hindutva icons. Last year, BJP president Amit Shah launched his official website and dedicated his first blog to Savarkar. He was a great patriot, unparalleled freedom fighter and social reformer, great writer, pioneering visionary and strong proponent of Hindu culture, he wrote.
The Shiv Sena, currently a member of the BJP-led coalition that rules Maharashtra, has demanded that Savarkar be awarded the Bharat Ratna, the countrys highest civilian honour. Sanjay Raut, a Shiv Sena MP, recently wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, asking that he undo the acts of the previous governments, which deliberately mocked the legacy of Savarkar. Said Chander Prakash Kaushik, national president of the Hindu Mahasabha, of which Savarkar was president from 1937 to 1943: Now we have a government of our ideology and Veer Savarkar should be honoured with Bharat Ratna.
In the background of Savarkars posthumous transformation as a true, nationalist leader, THE WEEK decided to reexamine his role in the freedom movement. A wealth of information on himfrom documents at the National Archives of India and archives of the Hindu Mahasabha to historical records, diaries, correspondences and confidential files on himwere accessed, read and studied. And the details reveal Savarkar not as a true-blue veer, but as a complex personalityone who was, at best, Indias prodigal son.
The tamed firebrand
History says Savarkars is a tragic success story of the Cellular Jail breaking a prisoners resolve. At Kalapani, every prisoner had a jail history ticket that had details about his confinement, punishments and work allotted to him. Savarkers ticket marked him as convict number 32778, lodged in cell 52, level three, yard seven. His elder brother, Ganesh, aka Babarao, was also in the jail.
On arrival, Savarkar was put in six months solitary confinement, which, apparently, did more than break his resolve. Writes freedom fighter Trailokya Nath Chakraborty in his memoirs Thirty Years in Prison: The political prisoners of the Cellular Jail were divided into two groups: moderates and extremists. The Savarkar brothers, Barin babu [Barindra Ghose, a Bengali revolutionary] and a few others, who had come earlier, had suffered much persecution and had obtained a few redresses for themselves. They were found favourites of the jailer. They were not prepared to forgo those concessions and did not join us in the proposed movement. The Savarkar brothers used to encourage us secretly, but when asked to join us openly, they refrained.
Unbeknown to Trailokya Nath and fellow extremists, Savarkar had filed his first appeal for clemency on August 30, 1911, barely two months after his arrival in Andaman. In fact, the Savarkar brothers and Barindra Ghose were the only political prisoners who begged mercy. Solitary confinement meant that he was to remain inside the cell, said Islam. No hard or light work was allotted to him. It broke him within two months, unlike any other prisoner. Savarkars cell was on the top floor, overlooking the gallows that could hang three prisoners at one go. The prisoners condemned to death were hanged every month, said Islam. The sight of the hangings must have got on his nerves, breaking him down.
ACCORDING TO MANI Shankar Aiyar, Savarkar met with the harsh realities of the freedom struggle at the Cellular Jail. The solitary confinement must have given him time to reflect upon those. He must have reached a conclusion of surrender and submission to the British government, he said. Savarkars mercy petition, the first in a series he would file during his incarceration, was rejected on September 3, 1911.
The Savarkar brothers, Barindra Ghose, Ullaskar Dutt and Indu Bhushan Roy were all class 3C prisonersthose who were convicted of criminal offences. All of them were assigned to work at the jails oil mill. Every day, from 6am, David Barry, the Irish jailor, would sit puffing on a cigar, watching them yoked to a press that they turned until they had produced 30 pounds of mustard oil, wrote Barin Ghose. If the college boys fell sick, there was no sanctuary in the prison hospital, where a new recruit, Dr F.A. Barker, certified patients fit for flogging.
At the Cellular Jail, few could rival Barry the jailer on savagery. He was sent to Andaman to reform Indian freedom fighters and he adopted every cruel technique to do that, said Saroop Lall, 94, of Port Blair. Lalls father was a convict who was allowed to settle down on the island. He remembers Barry from his fathers descriptions. He [Barry] used to wear a khaki uniform the way we see Subhas Chandra Bose in his INA [Indian National Army] uniform, said Lall. But Barry had a big belly and an arrogant face.
Barry forced each prisoner in the mill to produce 30 pounds of oil every day. Punishments for failing to do so ranged from caning to being put in iron fetters. Interestingly, Savarkars jail history ticket has no mention of him actually working on the oil mill. For many months, he worked in the jails rope-making unit, the lightest work a prisoner could hope for at Kalapani.
Like all prisoners, Savarkar got his share of punishments for breaking jail rules. His history ticket shows a one-month confinement for writing letters without sanction, standing handcuffs for seven days for having in possession a letter written to another convict and a four-month relegation to the chain gang (prisoners with neck-ring shackles and cross-bar iron fetters who were forced to do hard labour). The ticket mentions a total of eight punishments between 1912 and 1914.
On November 2, 1916, Savarkar was promoted to a class 2 prisonerpolitical prisoners who had access to books, permission to meet relatives and no restriction on the number of letters to send home. For the last five years, his behaviour has been very good. He is always suave and polite, reads a report.
By November 1913, Savarkars ideological conversion had taken concrete shape: to surrender and submit to the British government. He personally submitted a mercy petition to Sir Reginald Craddock, home member of the Government of British India, who visited the jail that month. The petition, of which THE WEEK has a copy, reads thus: I had to pass [a] full six months in solitary confinement. From that time to this day, I have tried to keep my behaviour as good as possible. I have 50 years staring me in the face! How can I pull up the moral energy to pass them in close confinement?
About the protests by other political prisoners, he wrote: I should be held responsible only for my own faults, and not of others It is but inevitable that every now and then, someone will be found to have contravened a regulation or two. And, if all be held responsible for that, as now it is actually done, very little chance of being left outside remains for me.
Savarkars complete surrender to the British is evident in the concluding parts of the petition. It reads: I am ready to serve the Government in any capacity they like. The mighty alone can afford to be merciful, and therefore where else can the prodigal son return but to the parental doors of the Government?
Craddock, in a note to the governor general dated November 23, 1913, wrote: [Savarkar] affects to have changed his views, urging that the hopeless condition of Indians in 1906-07 was his excuse for entering upon a conspiracy He was willing and anxious to send an open letter to the native press explaining his change of views. He pressed me hard to give him some promise, or to record something that would give him hope.
Despite the plea, Craddock stuck to his pragmatism. The degree to which he was dangerous or not, depended upon circumstances outside no one could say what those circumstances would be 10, 15 or 20 years hence, he wrote. The occasion was fittingly symbolic: to face Savarkar, the leaders had all turned their backs on the father of the nation. The Week
(To be continued)
