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Following the suicide of Indu Bhushan Roy, the mental breakdown and torture of Ullaskar Dutt, and the worsening treatment inside the Cellular Jail, political prisoners in the Andamans organised another strike.

In the previous part, we already covered the first strike in the prison, after which the punishment of the kolu was restricted to rare instances. This time, however, the prisoners demanded recognition as Political Prisoners, better treatment, lighter labour, and permission to work outside the prison like ordinary convicts.

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> As soon as I had completed my one year in the Silver Jail, I began sending petition after petition to be sent out for work. During one year and a half, I had the misfortune to be caught by Mr. Barrie and appear twice before the Magistrate on charges framed by him against me.

> First, on having written an anonymous letter to a person outside the prison for some news and press-cuttings from him. Unfortunately, the man to whom I had entrusted the letter happened to be Mr. Barrie’s spy upon my movements, and the letter went straight to him…I was punished for it by one month’s solitary confinement.

> The next occasion for coming into Mr. Barrie’s clutches was the first strike. I had discussed in a letter how the strike was to be organised and carried on, and I was about to circulate it among the political prisoners.

> On a sudden my room was searched. The Officers had just stepped in when I threw the letter away. Somebody got hold of it and handed it over to the authorities.

> It was written in Modi script and the Officers could not ascertain who was its writer. Mr. Barrie got it read by one of his confidents. But the political prisoner dared not depose before me, when the case was on, that it was written by me. For he feared his other friends in the prison.

> Whereupon Mr. Barrie got his Bengali clerk to declare that the letter was written in Bengali, and to read it out before the Superintendent. But a friend on our side gave evidence to prove that the letter was not written in Bengali. “Damn me,” said he, “if a single Bengali alphabet appears in that letter.”

> The Superintendent was non-plussed, but Mr. Barrie held his own, and shouted: “Oh, Sir, these political prisoners have conspired not to give true evidence.”

> At last the clerk’s word was accepted as truth and I was sentenced to be manacled for a week.

This incident is also corroborated by Savarkar’s Jail History Ticket, which records that he was punished on 19 September 1912 for possessing a letter instructing other prisoners on the organisation of the strike.

Primary Reference: Jail History Ticket of V.D. Savarkar (1911–1921), Government of India, Home Department (Special), 60(D)-F/1921, Maharashtra State Archives, Mumbai.

Secondary Reference: Vikram Sampath, Savarkar: Echoes from a Forgotten Past, p. 360.

> Excepting these two cases against me, the rest of my period was completed without any flaw. As such, I kept on sending petitions for outdoor work, as it was my due after the lapse of one year and a half in that prison. For other prisoners who had been sent out before me had not only cases against them, but had also gone on strike. My brother had already put in two and a half years.

> Sometimes I got an answer as follows: “You are not a political prisoner; you are classed as an ordinary prisoner.”

> And I used to reply, “Ordinary prisoners include thieves, robbers, and dacoits. They also have among them some who have broken open prisons, escaped from them, are hardened criminals, and have been sentenced several times. But they are also detailed for outdoor work and have become petty officers and jamadars in this prison. If I am an ordinary prisoner, then I must get the same concessions as they. I should have been let out long ago. You should have appointed me as a petty officer or a jamadar. For I have not against me any charges of breach of discipline in this prison.”

> At long last, the Chief Commissioner wrote categorically that I was not to be sent out for any work outside the prison walls. The reason he had given for this final decision was that, though my conduct in that prison was exemplary, I had a very dangerous past behind me.

> If the past conduct was the criterion of decision, where was the point in the remark that my present conduct was unexceptionable?

> The sum and substance of it all was that I may behave well or ill, I was always to be treated as a prisoner. There was no getting out of that position, even for a slight concession.

> While I was being dealt with in this manner inside the prison, the political prisoners who were sent for work outside the prison were being treated more harshly than before.

> All of us had begun to think that it was part of our duty to make an organised move to retaliate on behalf of Indu Bhushan, the account of whose tragic end I have given in the previous pages. They had misrepresented him, and they had sought to prove that he had done himself to death in a fit of insanity. We felt that we must do something to set things right in this affair.

> And we decided, after considerable discussion and deliberation, that strike was the only weapon that could bring the authorities to their senses.

> We further felt that we must be recognised as political prisoners not only for purposes of maltreatment, but also for purposes of due concessions; that whether we were kept inside the prison or sent out on the settlement, we must be given comparatively light work to do, some writing work inside according to our ability, or some light work outside according to our status. Nothing should be forced upon us simply to undermine our health, as was being purposely done then.

> Political prisoners, other than those who had been transported here on life sentence, should be treated like ordinary prisoners, and so on and so forth. We put down these demands in serial order, and we selected two of us as our representatives to submit the petition personally to the authorities.

> In the petition, I had pointed out that prisoners on transportation for life did not get even the ordinary facilities of other prisoners, like sending and receiving letters, or occasional meetings with relatives and friends, or facilities to read and write, or to be taken up as petty officers. We were not recognised as ordinary prisoners entitled to these concessions, and we got no facilities as prisoners belonging to a special class.

> If we claimed any rights as political prisoners, we were put off with the excuse that ordinary prisoners would resent the partiality shown to us, and the prison officers would not be a party to such a decision.

> To sum up, we were subjected, as political prisoners, to all the disabilities of prison life in India and the Andamans, without the compensating facilities afforded to ordinary prisoners in all the jails of India, as well as in the Cellular Jail of the Andamans.

> I ended the petition with a solemn warning that no longer shall we tolerate such treatment of political prisoners in the jail presided over by Mr. Barrie.

> “No relief, no concession, then no work” —that was our final resolution on the matter.

> And, in the carrying out of this solemn covenant, we were prepared for the worst.

> Our petition, like all other petitions before it, went for nothing; and strike was the weapon we decided to employ. One by one, the political prisoners outside began to repair to their cells in the Silver Jail. The prisoners inside stopped all work on the fixed day, and thus the strike began.

It is also worth noting that Ladha Ram Kapur, former editor of Swaraj, was among the first prisoners to initiate the strike. His photograph is attached with the post.

> This was the second strike during my period in the prison of the Andamans.

> My brother had joined the strike on its first day. Prisoners were handled severely for this species of non-cooperation. Batch after batch of civil resisters was hauled up before the Superintendent, and sentences were passed upon them of putting on handcuffs, or chains on the arms, or shackles on the feet, or solitary confinement in the cells.

> Every block of the Silver Jail, and every room in that block, witnessed the scene of prisoners hanging with their manacled hands tied to the top above. Some tried to squat on the ground with the chains on their hands and feet. Others offered stern resistance when shackles were being put on their feet. Others deliberately broke the rule of perfect silence and kept on talking loudly with one another. Others, again, refused to stand up when Barrie would come to see them.

> Most of them had stopped work. When Mr. Barrie came, the petty officers announced him as “Sircar”. Ordinary prisoners, off their guard, would stand up. But the political prisoners, to a man, firmly sat upon the ground; and it took three men to dislodge each one from his seat and put him on his feet.

> Mr. Barrie would not like the exhibition of enforced respect, and he could not continue this exhibition endlessly.

> The political prisoners were given no food as retaliation against their stopping work. Some of these were given very scanty food to eat, and others were put on conjee without salt from week-end to week-end.

> Some skirmishing also began between the guardians of law and these passive resisters. So there were obvious signs of impending disaster all about the prison.

> When the news came to my ears, I sent for Mr. Barrie and warned him to take care. I added:

> They are at present only civil resisters. They disobey the law and you punish them for disobedience. And I don't blame you for that. But if you are going to punish them in a manner to infringe your own regulations, then these infuriated young men will not fail to retaliate. They will return blow for blow.

> They realise that you will crush them. But they are like vipers. Even a worm turns; and they will not fail to sting you to the quick before you are able to scotch them.

> The responsibility of all this will rest on your petty officers who hammer them, and who set on each one of them three of your creatures to pinion them and beat them down. Your petty officers are cruel, they are bullies and cowards. They abuse and they beat. The Pathan and the Punjabi Mussalman—they are your agents in this nefarious business.

> But, be sure about it, abuse will meet with abuse and blow will meet with blow before long. Our political prisoners are up to that game if you would have it. The Pathan and the Mussulman petty officers will stand aghast when they get such abuses from them—the choicest abuses, the like of which they may never have heard before. And abuse invariably leads to blows.

> And I have already warned you of the consequences; so you had better muzzle your men.

> This warning was not without its effect on Mr. Barrie. He misrepresented me, all the same, to his superiors as the arch-instigator of the strike, and of violence that would come in its wake.

> I had not yet gone on strike myself. For I was expecting every day my annual letter from home. I had asked the political prisoners to wait till they had received their letters. Besides, my letter always contained fuller news of events in India, and that had afforded all of us ample matter for discussion later on. It used to be circulated throughout the prison for perusal by political prisoners.

> As the time was near for receiving the letter, I had decided to postpone going on strike till the receipt of that letter. As I have mentioned above, my brother had already stopped work and joined the strike.

> As the strike went on, Mr. Barrie began to meet with insult from every quarter, as he had never done before that time. All the prisoners seemed to view things differently. They behaved with perfect indifference. He tried his utmost to re-establish his influence over them by striking terror into their hearts. How hard put to it he was!

> Many things had happened in this prison to spoil its discipline and lower the prestige of its authorities. And the resistance of political prisoners made that discipline and prestige totter to their fall.

> All the weapons in the armoury of its officers had spent themselves. Only caning remained to be used with such frequency as the other weapons were used. The officers were at their wit’s end what to do with us. They threatened us with the cane, but none of us minded that threat.

> At last the Chief Commissioner asked the Superintendent, as also Mr. Barrie, to make overtures to us. He told us through them to return to work. He promised that he would give light work to us, and assured us that he would see that the political prisoners would be sent out for work like ordinary prisoners.

> And, lastly, he also promised that he would definitely take up our case with the higher authorities to determine our status as a class of political prisoners.

> So some among us resumed work; and, as soon as it was resumed, they were given lighter work to do, and they were also sent abroad. When we got the news, a change of opinion began that we should not now strain too much.

> I had always considered it desirable that my friends, the political prisoners, should have the freedom of going out for work in the settlement, for I was sure that it would help me in my propaganda, and would pave the way for my escape from the prison. So I advised them to call off the strike and go to work.

> If all of them were not treated equally in the matter of outdoor work, we were free to declare strike once again.

> Within a few days the prisoners resumed their normal life, and my brother was one of them. The officers kept their word and sent many political prisoners on light work outside the prison, such as watching the coconuts, sweeping the streets, and so on.

> If they had continued this policy, the strike would have ended at once. But they refused permission to the ring-leaders to work outside. My brother, Mr. Wamanrao Joshi, Hotilal, Nani Gopal, and two or three others were denied that right. Of course, I was out of the question.

> I had never given up my work even during the progress of the strike, though I did not escape the charge that I was their ring-leader.

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Reference: My Transportation For Life

Get the PDF of the whole book from here: https://savarkar.org/en/pdfs/My-Transportation-for-Life-Veer-Savarkar.pdf

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Ullaskar Dutt was a Bengali revolutionary and one of the key accused in the Alipore Bomb Case. Although originally sentenced to death by the British authorities, his sentence was later commuted to transportation for life, and he was deported to the Cellular Jail in the Andamans.

Like many political prisoners, Dutt was subjected to brutal penal labour and severe physical abuse. Years later, he recounted these experiences in his memoir, Twelve Years of Prison Life

What follows is Dutt’s own account of life inside the prison:

> I was yoked to the oil-mill similar to those we see in India for crushing oil from coconut and sesame. It is the bullock that is made to run the grinding mill in India. And even the bullock cannot turn out more than 16 lbs. of mustard seed oil during the day. In the Andaman jail, men were yoked to the handle of the turning wheel instead of bullocks, and it was imposed upon them to yield by their hard day’s work 80 lbs. of coconut oil.

> Three prisoners were yoked to the handle of one mill. And they had to work continuously from morning to evening, with a brief interval for their bath and morning meal. The interval actually given us came to no more than a few minutes.

> We were made to run round the oil-mill unlike the beast which could plod on slowly. We had the fear in our hearts that otherwise we shall not be completing our daily quota of oil.

> If any one of us was found to slacken his pace, the Jamadar was in attendance to belabour him with his big stick. If that bludgeoning did not hasten the pace, there was another way of compelling him to do so.

> He was tied hand and foot to the handle of the turning wheel and others were ordered to run at full speed. Then the poor man was dragged along the ground like a man tied to the chariot wheel. His body was scratched all over and blood came out from it. His head was knocked on the floor and was bruised.

> I have seen with my own eyes the effect of this mode of getting work done. ‘What man can make of man?’ These words of the poet escaped my lips after watching the process and its torture.

> When I came back to my cell in the evening, I found myself completely washed out by the process. I was not sure that I would be alive the following morning to continue that harrowing work. Yet I remained alive and did the work all right during the day. We all used to say about it, ‘that we are fated to do that work and we must pay the price!’

> All the prisoners working with us were, however, released from it in six months and sent to work outside. Other batches came in, worked on it for the fixed period and were sent out like their predecessors. But myself and other political prisoners were tied down to the same sweating toil.

After months of being forced to work at the oil-mill, Ullaskar Dutt was transferred to a brick factory, where he had to carry wet bricks under the burning Andaman sun. A medical officer declared him physically unfit for such labour, but the European jail officials ignored the warning.

His suffering did not end there. Dutt was later assigned what was perhaps the harshest task of all: carrying two heavy buckets of water suspended from a pole and repeatedly climbing a steep hill to supply water to an officer’s bungalow throughout the day.

Even the small milk ration he was supposed to receive for this exhausting work was often taken away by the jail tindal.

Years of humiliation, overwork, and physical torture eventually pushed Ullaskar Dutt to his limit. One day, he finally refused to continue the labour.

> …At last I was fed up with it and refused to do it any longer…We, political prisoners, who do what we will to conform to the rules of the prison and the settlement, were shown no consideration by the jail authorities. Why should we then bend down to their wishes?

> The more we toiled, the more they made us toil. Let them do their worst to our bodies; let us, at least, keep the soul free. They may rule over my body, but I am master of my soul. I shall not, of myself, enslave my body to them.

> I was given three months’ additional sentence of hard labour, and I was sent back to be locked up again in my cell. The same Silver Jail, the same Mr. Barrie standing near the gate! As soon as he saw me, he roared: This is not an open field, beware, this is a prison-house. If you go against its discipline, I will thrash you with my cane. I will give you thirty stripes of it, each of which will go deep into your flesh.

> I answered: You may cut my body to pieces. I am no longer going to work here, for I think that to work according to your orders is a crime against my conscience.

> Instantly, Mr. Barrie ordered that chains should be put upon my hands, and I should be suspended by them in my own cell for a week continuously.

> All of a sudden I saw a strange scene before me. I imagined — now I say that I imagined, though it was at the time as real as the body I touch — that Mr. Barrie, my jailor, said to me that I had insulted him. And in order to wipe out the insult he had challenged me to a duel with him.

> He asked me to choose one who would fight for me. “Mr. Savarkar,” he added, “will take your side.” And he telephoned to Savarkar accordingly.

> A form thinner than Savarkar came up before me. The jailor asked him if he would fight in a duel on my behalf. Mr. Savarkar seemed to agree.

> Instantly, Mr. Barrie gave him a gauntlet to throw down and a sword to handle. I watched the duel between the two.

> The duel was keenly fought on either side. At last our side had won. Mr. Savarkar had beaten Mr. Barrie, and Mr. Barrie’s countenance had fallen. I was in an ecstasy of joy and I wanted to clap.

> Suddenly I came to myself, and the vision had gone.

> I was in my room in manacles and hanging down with my hands tied up to the top of my cell. I felt I would have fever on. I reclined as I could against the wall. The rays of the sun were falling hot upon my body. The temperature had gone up, the fever had flared.

> I passed into unconsciousness and saw in that state a person putting a phial of poison to my lips and forcing it down my throat.

> In came the doctor; I was shivering with cold and the temperature had risen. I was tossing restlessly with the manacles on.

> Twice before this I had fever on and I had requested the authorities to take off the handcuffs, but to no purpose. Today the doctor had them removed at once. I fainted and passed into fits of convulsion.

Ullaskar Dutt was shackled in chains and suspended by his hands inside his cell for an entire week.

Forced to hang in iron restraints under extreme heat and unbearable pain, he soon developed a fever that rose to 107 degrees.

Before long, his mind began to break down. He screamed uncontrollably through the prison corridors, crying out desperately for his mother in Bengali: “Amma, Amma.” Fellow prisoners later recalled hearing his heartbreaking cries echo across the Cellular Jail.

Here is how Savarkar described the scene:

> It was noon then. We had all known that Ullaskar Dutt had been put in chains, but we had no knowledge whatever, at that time, as was later on described in his own account of it, that his mind had gone so weak as to see the hallucination that he has recorded in that narrative, or that he was burning with such high fever as to pass into delirium.

> We came and stood in front of his room when we heard a piercing cry and the confusion that followed. It shocked our heart.

> It was a usual occurrence in this prison, and the consequences were ever the same. That was the reason of the fright. Five or six petty officers were found ever, in such scenes, to sit firmly on the chest of the poor rowdy prisoner locked up in his room, thrash him thoroughly, and then run away. And then the cry of helplessness resounded through the whole block of that building.

> That was our usual experience. Hence we feared that Ullas was, perhaps, meted out the same treatment. The slogan among us about it was “to make one straight.”

> Mr. Barrie and his myrmidons used to say openly that if they were “to make straight” a prisoner or two of these political prisoners, everything would be calm and quiet and normal in the jail they ruled. I asked the warder whose cry it was that I had heard, and what all this noise about was. He said he did not know. Heart-rending cries, one after another, had filled the whole atmosphere.

> I saw this from a distance when the warder came running to me and whispered that: Ullaskar had gone insane!

> Yes! Burning in the hot sun with fever of 107 degrees, manacled and tied up, what else could happen to him than the loss of his brain? The brain and the body, which had been both outraged by excessive pressure upon them, had suddenly gone to pieces.

> Already he was so weakened in mind that he would easily pass into delirium tremens. He saw hallucinations and visions. The brain was out of gear and the body was out of joint. The latter had repeated fits and convulsions, and ten persons could not control it. The doctor somehow managed to take him to the hospital.

> Ullaskar was a young man full of laughter and mirth. He would crack jokes and make fun even while hearing in court the sentence of death passed upon him. The spirit of humour did not forsake him even in his present state of delirium.

> The whole night he sent piercing cries of pain that rent the whole building around him. At the same time, like a ventriloquist, he filled the atmosphere with the sounds and notes of all sorts of birds whose chirping music he had heard before, and would burst into laughter.

But the prison authorities believed that he was only pretending. Suspecting that Ullaskar Dutt was feigning insanity to escape hard labour, they subjected him to electric shock treatment using a battery.

The shocks were so severe that Dutt later described the experience as if lightning were passing through every nerve and muscle in his body:

> Even in this semi-conscious state of mind and under severe pain of the body, I could clearly feel that the medical Superintendent had played his electric battery upon me, the shocks of which it was impossible for me to stand.

> The electric current went through my whole body like the force of lightning. Every nerve, fibre and muscle in it seemed to be torn by it. The demon seemed to possess it.

> And I uttered words such as had never passed my lips before. I roared as I had never done before, and suddenly I relapsed into unconsciousness.

> I was in this state of unconsciousness for three continuous days and nights. And my friends told me about it when I awoke from it.

However the cruel jailor Barrie kept insisting that Dutt was pretending, Savarkar recounts it as:

> Four days after I had heard those heart-rending cries reaching our ears from Ullas’s cell that afternoon, Mr. Barrie came to have a talk with me.

> It was a rule with me never to talk with an Officer myself. They came to talk to me, and I never hesitated to be frank in my opinions when I talked to them. Barrie knew this full well and, when anything extraordinary had happened in the jail, he came to me to know what I thought of it.

> That day he came to me full of smiles. Mr. Barrie was so wicked of heart that his geniality even could not be free from taint.

> He was cruel even in his geniality as soon as he saw me he began: Well, when are you going to be mad?

> I retorted with anger: After you, surely.

> Then he turned to the story of Ullas. I at once reminded him: You had said about Indu Bhushan, you remember, that he had hanged himself because he was mad and not because he had suffered from excessive hard labour in this jail? And then I had asked you what was the cause of his madness.

> Why, then, had Ullas gone mad? Can you give me the reason for it? Dare you say now that it was anything else than the sufferings in this prison-life?

> Here they have no hope, no future to look to, and no relief in their present state. Day and night they are ground down with labour, day and night they suffer insult and humiliation from you and your creatures.

> How can they bear it? What wonder that they are off their brains? It is unbearable suffering that brings on insanity, and it is insanity that ends in suicide.

> Ullas and his life are standing testimonials to this fact and you cannot deny it. You manacled him, you kept him hanging for eight days in his cell, he went into fits and loud wailing. That took him to the hospital and that brought him to the stage of madness, and he attempted suicide.

> At once Mr. Barrie changed his front, and said: But who told you that Ullas is mad? He only pretends madness.

> I answered: Then let us see him and we shall decide for ourselves.

> He retorted: Do you want to suggest that I am lying? I say that Ullas is not mad and he pretends madness in order to escape work.

> I replied: Then I must say that if Ullas is not mad, then he who says so is mad. Do treat us fairly henceforth, treat us as political prisoners, or at least as ordinary prisoners. Do end this suffering. Else we shall have no other way out of it but strike…Not that we shall always win against you; entrenched as you are behind power and authority, the fight is bound to go against us. But we shall have done our best to expose injustice and defend our honour. And that is a great satisfaction.

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Reference: My Transportation For Life

Get the PDF of the whole book from here: https://savarkar.org/en/pdfs/My-Transportation-for-Life-Veer-Savarkar.pdf

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Before reading this excerpt, it is recommended that readers first go through this short passage from the preceding pages of My Transportation For Life, as it more provides context about the treatment endured by political prisoners in the Andamans.

The following account narrates the tragic death of young revolutionary Indu Bhushan Roy, a convict in the Alipore Bomb Case.

It is one of the most haunting descriptions of the psychological and physical torture inflicted upon political prisoners in the Andamans:

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[The incident narrated is from April 1912. Roy had been in the Andaman jails for 34 months, since December 1909.]

> A young man named Indu Bhushan Roy was convicted in the Maniktola Bomb Case and sentenced to ten years' rigorous imprisonment in the Andamans. He also had to suffer hard labour on the ‘Kolu’ and had his full taste of a similar soul-killing experience. He was one of those who were sent out to work. But he found the work outside more fatiguing and humiliating than the labour inside. He had thought he would get some concessions, but instead he found that he had more rigorous work to do in the settlement. If a prisoner outside happened to fall ill, he was sent to a hospital relatively better than the hospital in the jail. But if a political prisoner became sick, he was punished all the more for that sickness. For if he had fever or suffered from loose stools, he was made to walk the distance of four miles, carrying his own bed, to the jail, and was instantly locked up in his own cell.

> Indu Bhushan was fed up with it and returned to the jail of his own accord. Chains were put on his arms and hands, and he was marched on to his old residence; but he refused to go back to his work in the settlement. He was punished for this recalcitrance. No sooner was Indu put in his cell than Mr. Barrie came on the scene. He said, “Well, you have returned! You think, perhaps, that by coming here you will be spared all work. Nothing of the kind.” And turning to the Jamadar he ordered, “Put him on the oil-mill, and at once.”

> Indu Bhushan was immediately marched off to work on the ‘Kolu.’ He was simply disgusted with his own life. I tried my hardest to help him bear up. I told him to think of me, who had the burden of fifty years to live in this jail, whereas he had to live there only for ten years. While he was taking his quota of oil to the Jamadar, I again met him and could address only a few words of solace. He said, “No, I cannot bear it; better death than life in such disgrace.” That was his constant refrain.

> I argued with him, I entreated him, I tried to soften him. I ended, “For the sake of our country, O my brother, we have to sacrifice our self, our life, and even our honour at times. We owe this duty to her at any cost. You are very young; you are not even twenty-five, of the same age as myself. You have better hopes to be free and alive than I have. So cheer up. Suffer and live, so that, when free, you will serve the country as before.”

> These words were exchanged in a hurry and on the sly. Two or four days passed off. Every evening I saw Indu Bhushan returning from the ‘Kolu,’ dead tired, with drops of perspiration on his face, the chaff of the coconut clinging like sawdust to his body from top to toe, chains clanging on his feet, a weight of about 30 lbs. on his head, and a sack of chaff on his shoulders. I saw him coming up bent down under this weight and staggering to the place. All of us were in the same plight.

> One fine morning, as our doors were unlocked for the day and we were all coming out, a warder approached us and, requesting us not to disclose his name, broke the news that Indu had hanged himself last night.

> I was astounded by the news. Only yesterday evening I had seen him, a man in the prime of youth, before he went into his cell for the night. I had exchanged a few words with him. And in the morning he was found dangling from the top window, hanged by a noose made of his torn clothes! His neck broken, his tongue lolling out, his feet dangling, his throat strangulated by a cord whose one end lay tied to the bar of the window, and the corpse suspended from it in mid-air. The young man must have found life too burdensome, for the loss of his self-respect, to bear and to endure.

> A dark, deep shadow had spread over the whole building. Once in two months we had found such an incident happening. But Indu Bhushan was the first political prisoner of his kind to put an end to his life thus. I was saying to myself, “Who knows, one day your fate will be the same as his. He died tired of his ten years' sentence—and you—you will tire of your fifty years and quit the stage like him.”

> But Mr. Barrie gave me no time for these musings, for such melancholy brooding. For he announced within three hours, not that Indu Bhushan had tired of life and committed suicide, but that he had done himself to death in a fit of insanity and personal quarrel. Indu had tied a slip of paper round his neck which Mr. Barrie had cleverly removed and concealed. That was what the prisoners present were saying of him. He tutored the Jamadar, the warder, and the petty officer at the post-mortem upon Indu's body to depose that they saw nothing to conclude that the deceased was tired of his life, or that the work in that prison was too much for him.

> Before the officers brought together for the post-mortem, the political prisoners on the side of Mr. Barrie supported his statement, and the immediate custodians of the dead man swore that he had hanged himself in a fit of insanity. But we, on the other side, sent message after message to assure the officers that the deceased was not an insane person, that he did not commit suicide on a sudden impulse, that he had done it deliberately and as the result of the hardships and insults he had to bear in that prison.

> The officers were requested to call independent evidence to prove the truth of our deposition, and we suggested for that purpose the name of a person whom Mr. Barrie could not browbeat. The officers accepted our offer, and the witness gave his evidence undeterred by the circumstances around him. He was one of the editors of the Allahabad newspaper Swaraj, who were all sentenced for sedition and came here as political prisoners. He proved to the hilt that the deceased was a victim of the tortures he had to suffer in the prison presided over by Mr. Barrie. These had created in him a disgust for life, and he had ended it by suicide.

> I had told all of them the conversation I had with Indu Bhushan. And I wanted myself to give evidence. But Mr. Barrie would not call me.

> In the evening Mr. Barrie came to me and told me whining, “Indu Bhushan has left a note behind in which he says plainly that he had ended his life as the result of some personal quarrel.”

> I turned round upon Mr. Barrie and asked him, “Why did you not produce that note?”

> “Why did you not put in this note as evidence in your favour? It would have supported you much better than mere argument and logic,” I said to Mr. Barrie. I continued, “Please show me the note even now. I know the conversation Indu had with me only two or three days previous to this happening. I know what he had said to other prisoners in the same trying circumstances. He had told me and them that he had no desire to live for ten years in such hard conditions. He had said so several times, and yet you dare say that he committed suicide in a fit of insanity.

> Granting that it was so, the question remains how at all a man strong and young like him could suddenly go mad. He was an arch-conspirator; he had faced treachery, imprisonment, transportation for life, hardships of prison-life, and at last death by hanging with calmness and indifference and with a smile on his face. He had never shown temper in hot discussion with his friends, and had not given even the slightest indication of an unbalanced mind. Political prisoners are accustomed to such discussions and to sharp differences of opinion among themselves, and yet none of them has shown such a sign of weakness. Why then should these affect the mind of Indu Bhushan?

> Indu Bhushan was a man of strong mind. What had made his mind so weak now? What was the cause of it? It could be no other than the harsh treatment that he received in this prison. He was treated here harshly; therefore, he chose to work outside; there also he had to pass through the same kind of torture and humiliation. He returned here sick and woe-begone. You put him in his cell and straightaway ordered him to work on the oil-mill. All this had contributed to his weakness. He openly said that he was tired of his life and would put an end to it. That is why he hanged himself. It was no case of suicide through insanity as you put it. If he has really written what you say, then there must be some reason for his insanity.”

> I talked so to Mr. Barrie. Mr. Barrie bore a deep grudge against me chiefly for this plain-speaking. But even those who flattered Mr. Barrie then and deposed that Indu Bhushan killed himself in a fit of insanity say openly, in the history of their prison-life, now that the circumstances have changed entirely, that the cause of his death was no other than the very hard conditions of jail-life in the Andamans. Thanks to them, for they tell the truth at long last. For many continue to tell lies because they had told them once. Rare are the men who confess the truth that they had deliberately hidden before.

> Among the books found in Indu Bhushan's room was one on theosophy. And it gave Mr. Barrie an easy brush to whitewash the case. He succeeded in impressing upon his superiors, from the Chief Commissioner downwards, that it was theosophy that had softened his brain. Theosophy led its devotee to practise Yoga, and Yoga, with its breathing exercises and other conditions of the body, had a bad effect upon the brain!

> We do not know if he was able to convince the Government of India by this kind of logic. But it is a fact that the Government showed no solicitude for investigating into the case, though Indu's elder brother fought hard for such an enquiry. Indu had hanged himself, and the shock of it made the survivors count their days in this prison. They were afraid that theirs would be the next turn to follow him in the same way.

> Mr. Barrie became more and more impudent. He began to boast publicly that the incident had not at all affected his career and influence. On the other hand, he had begun to send reports that prisoners in the Andamans were never before so well cared for, and that they had nothing to complain about. But just at that moment an incident happened to upset his whole story.

> Poor Indu could not narrate his own story. But the man about whom we are writing now[Ullaskar Dutt] has given a record of his own impressions…

Which will be covered in the next part

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Reference: My Transportation For Life

Get the PDF of the whole book from here: https://savarkar.org/en/pdfs/My-Transportation-for-Life-Veer-Savarkar.pdf

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Throughout Savarkar’s incarceration in the Andaman Cellular Jail, he resisted the British authorities through his role as a strategic leader and organizer of strikes designed to protest the brutal conditions and inhuman labor imposed by the colonial administration.

His participation ranged from personal acts of defiance to coordinating mass non-cooperation movements among political prisoners.

Savarkar’s argument was that, as the freedom movement gathered steam, thousands of prisoners would eventually come to the Andamans. If they accepted the treatment being imposed upon them, all successive prisoners would suffer the same fate. Therefore, they had to resist and change the existing conditions. They had to demand special treatment for political prisoners while also improving the general conditions for all prisoners. They must suffer now for the sake of future prisoners.

The political prisoners began discussing various approaches. Even many criminal prisoners started supporting them, hoping to see improvements in prison conditions. Eventually, major strikes were launched.

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The First Strike: Against the "Kolhu" (c. 1912–1913)

The Kolhu was considered the hardest and most spirit-crushing labor in the prison. It required political prisoners, many of whom were educated and unaccustomed to physical toil, to take the place of bullocks. They were yoked to a handle and forced to run in circles to grind out 30 pounds of coconut oil or 10 pounds of mustard oil daily. Prisoners were often dragged by the handle if they could not sustain the pace, working in the blazing sun with no water.

The first strike against the oil-grinding mill was triggered by the individual resistance of a Punjabi political prisoner named Nand Gopal, editor of the Swaraj newspaper.

A few months after Savarkar’s arrival in July 1911, Nand Gopal was assigned to the Kolhu. He openly defied the authorities through non-cooperation and outright refusal to perform the hard labour.

The authorities initially attempted to compromise with Nand Gopal. When he again refused to comply, he was punished with fetters, and a general order was issued requiring all political prisoners to grind oil for three full days.

Recognizing that compliance would eventually lead to their deaths in the oil mill, the prisoners collectively refused to obey the order. This resistance culminated in the first major strike in the Andaman Cellular Jail.

Although Savarkar was physically excluded from the first batch of strikers because he was undergoing six months of solitary confinement, he nevertheless gave ideological support to the movement and encouraged the prisoners to remain united.

During this period, jailor Barrie also attempted to pit prisoners against one another. In one such instance, he praised Savarkar in front of the other prisoners, portraying him as an educated and well-bred gentleman in an attempt to isolate him from the strike movement. Barrie told him:

> Mr. Savarkar, a man like you ought not to mix with such people. They are a despicable lot. You are well-bred and a gentleman. These wretches will go back to their homes after serving their terms of eight or ten years in this prison, and the world will forget them. That is not so with you. You have to pass the full fifty years of your precious life here, and you are no mere political prisoner. You will lose much if you associate with them, go on strike with them, or sympathise with them. Even talking with them is fraught with danger to your future. Whatever you intend to do, do it on your own. You take care of yourself, never forgetting your ticket. Do you understand me?

Savarkar immediately saw through Barrie’s attempt to divide the prisoners and later told his fellow inmates:

> Do not feel small, do not be dispirited by what Mr. Barrie said of you in my presence. What he says of you today, he will say of me the day after. Thereby he does not insult you and me; he only insults and degrades himself. We are helpless today, the world holds us in disgrace today, but a day is sure to come when it will honour you, perhaps raise statues to you in this very place where they revile you, and thousands will visit this place to offer their tributes to you as martyrs to the cause.

Following the strike, the first batch of political prisoners was sent out to perform lighter tasks in the settlement, such as sweeping streets, guarding coconut groves, or carrying loads of coconuts.

Savarkar viewed this victory as the “thin end of the wedge,” proof that collective passive resistance could force the administration to grant concessions. The strike raised the moral status of the political prisoners and paved the way for future demands.

Although Savarkar’s direct participation in this first strike was limited by his solitary confinement, he nevertheless worked to keep the prisoners united and committed to collective resistance. In the strikes that followed, he would emerge as one of the principal strategists and representatives of the political prisoners…

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Reference: My Transportation For Life

Get the PDF of the whole book from here: https://savarkar.org/en/pdfs/My-Transportation-for-Life-Veer-Savarkar.pdf

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In the last post, we saw how Savarkar undertook social reform efforts within the Andaman Cellular Jail, eradicating deeply rooted taboos of caste pollution, and the ostracization of Hindus for dining with people of another faith or consuming prohibited food.

But what were the practical results of this Shuddhi movement? Surprisingly, they were tremendous.

The most immediate success was ending the systematic efforts by Muslim warders and jamadars to forcibly convert Hindu prisoners. Following Savarkar's agitation, the Jail Superintendent issued a formal order stating that the prison was not a place for conversion and that changing one's name or dining with Muslims would no longer be officially recognized as a change of faith.

> Inspired by this conviction, I taught the Hindu prisoners of our jail, and chiefly its political prisoners, to rescue the worst of Hindu prisoners from the grip of Islam, to save them from the coercion and blandishments of their Pathan jamadars.

> In 1913, that is a year and a half or two years after my coming to the Andamans, the first complaint was lodged by me against a forcible conversion in our jail. This was the first resistance I offered. I carried on the campaign of resistance and Shuddhi which began in that year to the end of 1921-22, that is till the day I was transferred to a prison in Hindusthan.

> I did not give up even when I was a prisoner in India. For that, attempts were made on my life by Pathan Goondas from time to time. There were riots on that account in that jail itself. My brother was actually injured in such a strife. But we never gave up the movement.

> The movement went on and one appreciable result of it was that forcible conversion in the Andamans had become a thing of the past, and the reconversion of the forcibly converted by Shuddhi became an established fact.

Many who had been converted through coercion or bribery were brought back to the Hindu fold. The movement also reached beyond former Hindus, including the conversion of a Ceylonese Christian to Hinduism.

The movement fundamentally challenged orthodox Hindu notions of "pollution" and untouchability.

Savarkar convinced Hindu prisoners that a Hindu's touch should be seen as purifying others rather than being polluted by them. This led to the acceptance of reconverts—such as a man named Tulshi, who had been a Muslim for 15 years—into Hindu dining rows, a practice previously considered impossible.

Savarkar was even mocked by orthodox Hindus as “Bhangi-Babu” for dining with low-caste reconverts. Yet as the movement gained momentum, many of its most vocal Hindu opponents underwent a change of heart and eventually joined it.

During the census in cellular jail, Savarkar and his colleagues, especially the Hindu jail guards influenced by Savarkar, utilized their positions in the jail office to ensure an accurate record of the Hindu population. They reclaimed hundreds of individuals who had been fraudulently or coercively marked as Muslims on their prison "tickets," a result Savarkar described as the triumph of the Shuddhi movement.

The movement even spread beyond the Cellular Jail to the independent Hindu settlers in the Andamans, leading to the opening of temples to outcastes and reconverts for prayers and public dinners.

Savarkar also observed that the Shuddhi movement transformed even hardened Hindu criminals into dedicated social workers who worked to protect Hindu interests. It fostered a sense of fraternity and solidarity among Hindu inmates.

By the end of his stay in the Andamans in 1921, the “Pathan Raj” (the Muslim dominance in the prison administration) had largely been replaced by what prisoners called a “Miniature Hindu Raj,” where Hindu warders and clerks in the Cellular Jail held significant influence.

> One who was a terror to Hindu prisoners had become a lamb before them…Tyranny had been beaten, the tyrants had gone, and the rest of them simply dragged on their existence. The warder, the havaldar, the jamadar, the clerks in the office, the doctor, the compounder, in the prison and out in the Andamans—the best part of this phalanx had now been recruited from the Hindus.

> And they were chosen for their merit, their honesty and straightforwardness, and for their good record as prisoners. The few Pathans that remained, as these new recruits won favour with their officers, said, "It is now Hindu Raj; and what can one say of it!"

> Some old Pathan prisoners used to complain about the new order of things in the following words: "Sahib, today it is Hindu Raj at Port Blair; we are afraid, very much afraid, that the Hindus may trump up some false charge against us!" As if, when these Pathans were in power, they had not trumped up any charges against the Hindu prisoners in order to persecute them!

Savarkar also clarified that this Shuddhi movement wasn't about aggression towards the Muslim inmates but rather about justice.

> It is our sad fortune to refer endlessly to the misdeeds of our Muslim brethren in this record of prison-life, and of the Shuddhi and the Sangathan movements as part of that life. It is because they formed the most fanatical and the most mischievous element in the entire colony of prisoners in the Andamans.

> With the rest of the good and honest Mussulmans whom I met with in the islands I was always on the best of terms. They respected me and I respected them, as I enjoyed the respect of all other prisoners in that colony.

> Minus the particular question of coercive conversion I always tried to see that justice was done to all of them and I took the side of justice against tyranny and oppression in every case and about every person, irrespective of his caste, creed and religion.

> If I succeeded in changing the hell of the Silver Jail into a habitable place on earth for all its inmates, and that by incurring the wrath of its authorities, the advantages of the change went as much to the Muslims as to the Hindus, and both of them showed equal gratitude to me for it.

Savarkar also made it clear that it was orthodox Hindu practices themselves which had enabled many of these conversions in the first place.

> That I was throughout just and fair to all is borne out by the fact that if I blamed the Muslims for the conversion of the Hindus I did not conceal the fact that most of it was due to the foolish notions about religion entertained by orthodox Hindus themselves. Conversion followed as a natural consequence from the obscurantism of Hindu society about purity and impurity, touchability and untouchability, conversion and reconversion.

> I always used to assert, while engaged on these activities, that both the Shuddhi and the Sangathan movements in Hindu society were not the means of antagonism between the two communities of India; but of their abiding unity on the basis of right knowledge and right understanding.

> This was the motive inspiring my agitation in the Andamans. I began my work of Shuddhi in the year 1913 and fought my first battle in its favour in the same year. From that date to 1920-21, I did that work in the Andamans; from 1921-24 I continued it in my prison-days in India; and from my release in 1924, I have been pursuing it to this day. And I have invariably carried it on in the interests of freedom, justice and fair-play for all.

> I have no hatred in my heart for the Christian, the Mussulman, and the heathen, or for those whom they style as primitive barbarians. I do not look down upon any one of them with scorn and contempt. I only oppose that section of it vehemently, which is oppressive and violent towards another. For I believe firmly that the Shuddhi movement itself will build a bridge of permanent union between the Hindus and the Muslims, and will bring good to both and lasting advantage to India as a whole.

Savarkar, who came to the Andamans in chains and as a prisoner himself, was able to safeguard Hindu interests even in a hellhole like the Cellular Jail!

Now question yourself: we now live in an independent India where we Hindus control everything from the media to the army. If we were to sincerely put effort into the Shuddhi movement, or what is now called Ghar Wapsi, would it not be a grand success?

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Reference: My Transportation For Life

Get the PDF of the whole book from here: https://savarkar.org/en/pdfs/My-Transportation-for-Life-Veer-Savarkar.pdf

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In the last post, we saw how Savarkar rebutted the argument that the Shuddhi movement was pointless or that it made no difference whether such convicts remained within Hindu society or not.

But there was another obstacle to the movement: the widespread belief that one’s caste could be “polluted” merely by dining with people of another faith. Because of this belief, all that was needed to convert a Hindu into a Muslim was to make him dine with Muslims once. After that, Hindus themselves would ostracise and excommunicate him, treating him as polluted and untouchable, leaving him with little choice but to abandon his old identity and accept Islam.

Savarkar strongly criticised this practice and regarded it as socially destructive:

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> If a Muslim or a Christian does not lose his caste by taking his food with a Hindu, why should a Hindu alone lose his caste and religion by dining in the company of Christians and Muslims or eating the food that they set? Was it because the Hindu had lost his power of digestion? How did it happen, I wonder. A Hindu must now eat and drink with the Mussulman and the Christian, and digesting his food, survive as a Hindu. The whole world has been feasting on you and you are the only people starving! We must now learn, O my brothers, to feed on the food of the whole world and yet remain staunch Hindus. That is the only way of our salvation! That constitutes the salvaging of Hindu culture, Hindu religion and Hindu civilisation.

> I have been preaching this all along and in different contexts. I have sought to impress this one truth on the minds of my co-religionists. I may quote only one instance to illustrate my argument.

> There come to the Andamans, as it is a coaling station, steamers laden with coal. Coal is stored up in the harbour to provide passing ships and steamers the coal that they need occasionally for their voyage to and fro. Once, when a ship with a cargo of coal in her happened to be at anchor in that port, thousands of prisoners were put to labour from daybreak to empty the coal and to stock it in the appointed warehouses. The prisoners could get no food during the day, as they were so busy with the work. So usually they were given four handfuls of gram each, as a substitute for their morning meal. They worked like this from early morn till three in the afternoon, when alone they were sent back to the settlement to have a meal.

> Sacks full of gram were ordered for the purpose on the day of such work. Hindus and Muslims did not take from the same sack, but separately. On that particular day, the Hindu prisoners, dead tired with their work, their bodies full of perspiration, and their faces and hands besmeared with coal dust, returned to the spot where these things were being served to them. It was noon, and they were very hungry.

> And what did they find?

> They found that the Muslim prisoners who had preceded them had already opened the sacks reserved for Hindus and had been making a full meal out of them. These Hindu prisoners belonged to the Thakur caste in Hindusthan, who would not eat food touched by the Mussalmans. Here were sacks full of gram and parched rice. But they would not touch a particle because the Mohammedans had touched them.

> The officer in charge of them all was a Mohammedan. And when he saw the Hindu prisoners so starving themselves, he burst into a fit of laughter. He did not attend to them, he made no arrangement for their food, and the Mohammedan goondas had their full feast and fun out of it. For they ate their own ration all right, and finished that which the Hindus would not touch. So these had to toil and starve for the whole day without a particle out of the sacks meant for them.

> The same thing happened to them on the following day. The Muslims had touched two sacks of gram reserved for the Hindus, and the Hindus had to go without food in consequence. The European officers did not bother to know what was happening near them. They would not care, and pitied the starving Hindus for such ludicrous nonsense and folly.

> I knew of the incident in the evening of the first day. I rebuked them severely, such of them as were the inmates of my prison, for this foolish and suicidal custom.

> “Look here,” I told them, “how this way of yours is going to harm you. Suppose you Thakurs prepare jilabi one day, and the whole of it is touched by the Muslims; they eat it all and you go without it. Another day, you bring pedhas and a Christian touches them. You throw them away and the Christians feast upon them. Where is this going to take you in the end?

> “This foolish notion of purity and impurity, of pollution by touch, has landed the Hindus into misery and starvation. They remain poor because they would not cross the seas; they would eat from nobody and eat with nobody, and they starve in the midst of plenty. They don't do business, and others steal a march over them and exploit them.

> “It is no sin to let others carry your riches away from your own country; to let others devour your food. It is no sin or pollution to let others fatten on you. But if you eat your own food touched by others, it is a great sin. Do not eat another man's food, I grant it. But do not allow anyone else to eat your food; that is merit and not sin. Simple touch does not desecrate it. And the eating of food so desecrated is no sin before man and God.

> “Do not be so foolish, so asinine. If the gram and the parched rice handled by the Muslims became Muslim-tainted food, then why should not your touch make their food Hindu food and purified food for you?

> “Go, you fools, tomorrow when your work is done, rush, some of you, to the sacks reserved for Muslims, and devour the gram in them. If they cry and complain, say to them that your touch had polluted them because it had turned the grains into kafirs! Our grains do not get polluted by the touch of the Muslims, remember it well, and their ration is certainly polluted by our touch, don't forget it. So eat both and don't starve. Your sin, if it is any sin, be upon my head, I assure you. Why on earth do you let yourselves starve?”

> As I thus brought them round by harsh and plain-speaking words, some hundred and fifty of them agreed to do as I had bidden them. On the third day, these men, without waiting for their fellows, ran straight to the bags of grain reserved for the Muslim prisoners and began to feed fully upon them.

> The Muslims, of course, were angered by this act. The Hindus reminded them of what they had themselves done on the two previous days.

> “You felt then that you had polluted the thing and we would not touch it. Now we touch the bags and they are ours, and we eat the contents as food of the Hindus.”

> This talk the European officer overheard and could not help laughing over it. He did not punish the Hindu prisoners. On the other hand, he congratulated them for doing away with the foolish notion which had kept them from that food for two days before.

> When others saw how well they had fed themselves, they also began to have their share in that feast. From the following day, the Muslims never dared open the bags reserved for the Hindus, for they knew that it would no longer serve them to play that dirty trick.

> I thus succeeded largely in driving away from their minds the silly notions about food, drink, sleeping and sitting, which, in the name of pollution and non-pollution, had done so much harm to Hindu society. As a result, the Hindu way of life became as convenient for us in prison as was the Christian and Muslim way to its followers. Life became easier and we, as Hindus, were enabled to face our hardships with better courage and greater fearlessness.

> This had one other effect as well. Many a Hindu in this prison, who had gone over to Islam disgusted with these taboos, was converted back to Hinduism by this change of outlook on life and religion. And many a Hindu who was inclined to that faith naturally remained in his own religion.

Through such arguments and practical examples, Savarkar tried to break the self-destructive social taboos within Hindu society. He argued that notions of ritual pollution through touch or dining had weakened Hindus socially, economically, and politically, and had even aided religious conversions. In his view, overcoming these customs was necessary not only for social reform, but also for the survival and consolidation of Hindu society itself.

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Reference: My Transportation For Life

Get the PDF of the whole book from here: https://savarkar.org/en/pdfs/My-Transportation-for-Life-Veer-Savarkar.pdf

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In the last post, we read how Savarkar analysed a conversion racket in the Cellular Jail of the Andamans, where young and naive Hindu prisoners were converted to Islam through coercion and force by fanatical jail wardens and guards.

After identifying the problem and what was causing it, Savarkar decided to make other Hindus aware of it as well:

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> I tried hard to infuriate the Hindu prisoners against this act of sacrilege. But one and all of them I found so callous. Each one of them used to say, “What is it to me?”, and “What do I care?”

> Leave alone the ordinary Hindu prisoners, it was the same with the political prisoners as well. They dared not put a fight against conversion, and for obvious reasons. For they were already suffering enough, and they were not willing to put an additional strain on their patience. Having done the most ceaseless daring work in the country, they were paying for it heartily in this jail. And in the prison again they had to struggle and fight for their very existence. How then can their mind and body bear the additional burden I was putting on them?

“Political prisoners” here refers to people imprisoned for participating in the Indian freedom struggle and revolutionary activities, such as Savarkar himself, who was convicted for his involvement in the Nashik conspiracy case and the assassination of A. M. T. Jackson.

> This work had to be done by others and not by them. Hence they often used to say, “Leave alone this trouble, for the time being, it is already hard for us to be constantly fighting with the jamadar for our right to live. We are not willing to expose ourselves to his malice all the more by opposing him on the ground of conversion.”

> I did not blame them, but I certainly blamed three or four of them who dismissed the effort as a sheer waste of time, as a foolish action. For they were thus shielding their own cowardice, and their conduct deserved censure from me.

> Others went even further in order to insinuate themselves into the favour of the jamadar and save their skin. They used to show to them that they were themselves going to adopt the Muslim faith. How could they, then, openly join a movement to resist conversion?

Imagine, in a cellular jail where people were ready to accept the faith of guards and wardens out of fear, Savarkar had resolved not only to save himself and others from conversion but also to reconvert those who were converted unfairly.

However, this was met with opposition not only from the jail authorities but also from many Hindus themselves, and arguments were made that these efforts were foolish and a "childish play" because those who left Hinduism were convicts, i.e., criminals, dacoits, and lower-class prisoners, whom they saw as unimportant to Hindu society. They argued, what difference does it make if they remain Hindu or not?

> Those who are against the Shuddhi movement are often found to object to reconversion and purification on similar grounds. Not only those who are hypocrites but those also who are honest and sincere in their opinions. It is, therefore, imperative that I should clear all misconceptions on this burning question.

> If it is a foolish waste of time and a childish pursuit to retain in Hinduism those born in it, may be sinners, criminals and the miscreants of society, how can one explain the Muslim campaign, now going on for a thousand years, to win this riff-raff, condemned class of Hindu society for Islam?

> The Mussulmans have waged wars for it, they have put men and women to the sword, they have burnt and looted houses—in short they have declared Jehad—for effecting this mass conversion. Is this a childish game?

> Evidently, the Christian missionary and the Mohomedian Moulvi undertake the task as a religious duty. They convert heathens, the fallen, the criminals, and the derelicts—for the salvation of their souls.

> Why then do you blame us if we seek to keep them in their own religion and work for their uplift and redemption as Hindus? We believe fervently in the Gita doctrine that the salvation of man lies in dying in his own religion. And we seek to save their souls and redeem them for Hindu society on that principle. Hindu religion and Hindu culture have in them the power to work such redemption. That is our faith and we act up to it.

Savarkar then argued that a converted person would go on to have children who would grow up in the new faith, and that even if the parents were criminals or uneducated, their children could later become educated and respectable citizens.

> The individual whom you try to convert may be a wicked man, a sinner or a drunkard. But after deep thought you have learnt the social law that if you make him a Christian or a Mohomedan by means fair or foul, and if you change his name, you are really adding to your strength.

> In course of time children come into his family and it grows. The children become Muslims and Christians by name, birth and association. And they turn out better than their parents and add in number to the well-to-do, educated, well-behaved number of Muslim citizens. And, in that proportion, the Hindu society loses its good members.

> The history of Canada and Australia is an instance in point. England started deporting to those colonies her criminals and her unemployed families. Today the grandchildren and the great-grandchildren of these first inhabitants have built up prosperous dominions and commonwealths and powerful self-governing nations out of these colonies.

> Where are those criminals and outcastes of society sent to Botany Bay in those days and where is the Commonwealth of Australia today?

> You are dragging to-day by your shovels dregs of Hindu society into your soil, and you know how to use these dregs to manure and enrich it. And, in course of a few generations, the soil so enriched will yield you an abundant harvest. The fields will smile and wave with their dancing ears of golden corn.

Savarkar then explained how, often, after changing their faith, a person or their future generations begin to oppose or even hate Hindus, which would ultimately harm Hindu society.

> A Hindu thief is less harmful to Hindu culture than a Mohomedan thief. The former will only rob, the latter will break the temple he has robbed, he will break the idol in it and give a shattering blow on the head of a kaffir, while running away from the place of robbery. He will spill his blood to save his soul in heaven.

> This difference between the two has ever to be borne in mind by everyone as a probability. Hence persuading as we must a thief to give his thieving, a drunkard to give up his drink, and a greedy wicked man to give up his greed and wickedness, we must not give him up, as a Hindu, to any other faith or religion than his own.

> It is the duty of every Hindu to persuade a Hindu to remain a Hindu. It is a principle to be followed as vital to his community and culture for the preservation and progress of both.

> It is well if a Hindu thief gives up thieving, but even if he does not give it up, he must be made to remain a Hindu. The theft is a sin no doubt, but to cease to be a Hindu is a greater sin, and a social and national sin. Persuade a Hindu thief not to commit that sin.

> Every one who calls himself a Hindu must impress it upon the most abandoned Hindu that it is not well for him to change his religion. He must strive his hardest to do it. For our ancestors committed the greatest blunder when they allowed such persons to go out of their fold, in pride of self-sufficiency and moral superiority. "Let them go where they choose", said they, "we are sufficient unto ourselves." "He is, after all, a wretched being, let him be a Mohammedan, a Christian or whatever he will. It is nothing to us." And what was the result? For one person whom they so neglected there arose, hundred years ago, hundred Muslims and Christians to be born enemies of Hinduism, Hindu society and Hindu culture…

> The Moplahs of Malabar are by blood and bone half-Hindus. They have forgotten the mothers who gave them birth, and today, they swear by their fathers and behave as bitter enemies of the Hindus. Whence this difference in one generation or two? The difference has arisen by their conversion to Islam, by "the childish play" of the Moulvi who cut their tuft of hair and made them grow a beard.

> Thus even for its name the meanest man or the most useless man must be kept a Hindu if he happens to be born a Hindu. We as Hindus have lost terribly for not playing the game which others have played. It has affected us detrimentally, as we should come to realise after the Malabar riots.

> We must not now, for our very existence and preservation, refrain from playing the “childish game” of pulling out a convert’s beard, and making him wear a tuft of hair instead. We must change his Christian or Muslim name into a Hindu name; we must give him a Tulsi leaf to eat and we must declare that he is purified and accepted back into his own faith.

> Our leaders must play the game as the Christian and the Muslim leaders have played it in the past and are playing it today. We must admit these sinful men in our society not for themselves but for their progeny which, otherwise, will be lost to it. It is first, our social duty, and it is a religious duty as well.

> Who knows that a Valmiki may not be born to any one of these Hindu robbers, dacoits and highwaymen? You denounce and disown them today as being more holy, more pious Hindus than they are. This is a pride and self-righteousness highly injurious to the future of Hinduism and Hindu culture.

> A pirate robber and highwayman wrote the Ramayan which is the admiration of the world. Let, therefore, a Hindu however depressed, criminal and abandoned in character he may be, repeat the name of Ram, however wrongly he may utter it to start with. Make it worth his while to do it. Do not shun him, do not revile him, do not turn him out. Treat him as your own brother, make him love his religion. Then he will recite that holy name properly, and it is sure to be good for him.

And thus, Savarkar rationally countered the hypocritical arguments against the Shuddhi movement and held the movement to be a necessary effort, not only for justice in bringing back those who were forced out of the Hindu fold through coercion or unfair means, but also for the survival of Hindu society.

---

Reference: My Transportation For Life

Get the PDF of the whole book from here: https://savarkar.org/en/pdfs/My-Transportation-for-Life-Veer-Savarkar.pdf

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Vande Mataram

Sources are present within the slides themselves. Vande Mataram!

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In July 1910, while being transported by the British aboard the S.S. Morea, Savarkar made one of the most dramatic escape attempts in the history of the Indian revolutionary movement. As the ship was docked at Marseilles in France, he slipped out through the porthole of the ship’s lavatory, jumped into the sea, and swam to the French shore in an attempt to escape British custody.

Although he was quickly recaptured, news of the incident spread widely across India and among Indian revolutionaries abroad. The daring nature of the escape transformed Savarkar into a legendary figure in popular imagination. Stories and exaggerations began circulating about him, with many people attributing almost superhuman qualities to the man who had leapt into the sea at Marseilles.

Years later, in My Transportation for Life, Savarkar himself reflected on how ordinary people reacted when they finally met him in prison:

> [while Savarkar was being held at the Alipore Jail in Calcutta following his transfer from the Andamans in 1921, he was taking to a guard] 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 had similar notions 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 gun-shot 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.” 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.

Reference: My Transportation for Life, page 363.

What stands out in this passage is Savarkar’s insistence on telling the truth exactly as it happened. He could easily have encouraged the myths and exaggerations surrounding the Marseilles escape, but instead he deliberately corrected them, even when it reduced the awe people felt toward him.

Rather than presenting himself as an invincible hero, Savarkar chose honesty over self-glorification. In doing so, he offered a rare reflection on how political legends are created, and how truth is often less satisfying to people than myth.

---

Reference: My Transportation For Life

Read the whole book from here: https://savarkar.org/en/pdfs/My-Transportation-for-Life-Veer-Savarkar.pdf

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Reference: https://www.livemint.com/news/india/asaduddin-owaisi-objects-to-centre-equating-vande-mataram-with-jana-gana-mana-nation-is-not-a-goddess-11778203789994.html

A hundred years ago, they objected to Vande Mataram, and we complied and decided to make concessions in the hope that we could live together in harmony. A few decades later, they asked for a separate nation. Now again, we're at the same crossroads.

Let's leave the Islamists out of the question. The left-wing extremists who hurl slurs at Hindus and call us regressive for something as simple as celebrating our festivals, who want to "reform" our religion and its rules, as evident in the Sabrimala case, are supporting the "rights" of Islamists to deny singing Vande Mataram on the grounds of their religious theology? Sheer hypocrisy!

The only solution, as told by Dr. Ambedkar, is establishing boundaries, not concessions.

> There are the Congress Hindu nationalists whose policy is to tolerate and appease the Muslims by political and other concessions, because they believe that they cannot reach their cherished goal of independence unless the Muslims back their demand…Is the Congress way, the right way? It seems to me that the Congress has failed to realize two things: The first thing which the Congress has failed to realize is that there is a difference between appeasement and settlement, and that the difference is an essential one. Appeasement means buying off the aggressor by conniving at his acts of murder, rape, arson and loot against innocent persons who happen for the moment to be the victims of his displeasure. On the other hand, settlement means laying down the bounds which neither party to it can transgress. Appeasement sets no limits to the demands and aspirations of the aggressor. Settlement does. The second thing the Congress has failed to realize is that the policy of concession has increased Muslim aggressiveness, and what is worse, Muslims interpret these concessions as a sign of defeatism on the part of the Hindus and the absence of the will to resist. This policy of appeasement will involve the Hindus in the same fearful situation in which the Allies found themselves as a result of the policy of appeasement which they adopted towards Hitler

—Dr. B. R. Ambedkar in his book Pakistan or partition of India, p. 261.

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The “O! Martyrs!” pamphlet was a powerful four-page leaflet written and distributed by Swatantrya Veer Savarkar in May 1908. It honored the heroes of the 1857 uprising and also called for a new revolutionary movement against British rule.

Savarkar wrote the pamphlet to mark the anniversary of the Meerut uprising on May 10, 1857. He argued that the event was not just a “mutiny,” as the British described it, but India’s “First War of Independence.”

The pamphlet was also a response to the British Golden Jubilee celebrations of 1857 held in 1907 and 1908. British newspapers had described the Indian rebels as criminals and murderers, but Savarkar praised them as martyrs who sacrificed themselves for their country, religion, and freedom.

A central idea of the text was that the fight for independence was still continuing. It famously stated: “The war begun on the 10th of May 1857 is not over on the 10th of May 1908, nor can it ever cease till a 10th of May to come sees the destiny accomplished.”

Thousands of copies of the pamphlet were circulated in both England and India. Indian students in London wore badges saying “Honours to the martyrs of 1857” along with the pamphlet’s message, which led to clashes with British authorities and professors.

The pamphlet also emphasized Hindu-Muslim unity during the 1857 revolt. Savarkar described the uprising as a movement in which both communities united under the idea of the Motherland.

Because the pamphlet used the memory of the 1857 revolt to encourage resistance against British rule, the British government considered it seditious. In 1910, it was later used as evidence against Savarkar in the case accusing him of conspiring to wage war against the British Crown.

Here is the full text of the pamphlet:

---

> The battle of freedom once begun And handed down from sire to son Though often lost, is ever won!!

Today is the 10th of May! It was on this day that, in the ever-memorable year of 1857, the first campaign of the War of Independence was opened by you, O Martyrs, on the battlefields of India. The Motherland, awakened to the sense of her degrading slavery, unsheathed her sword, burst forth the shackles, and struck the first blow for her liberty and for her honour.

It was on this day that the war cry Maro Firungee Ko was raised by the throats of thousands. It was on this day that the sepoys of Meerut, having risen in a terrible uprising, marched down to Delhi, saw the waters of the Jumna glittering in the sunshine, caught one of those historical moments which close a past epoch to introduce a new one, and found, in a moment, a leader, a flag, and a cause, and converted the mutiny into a national and a religious war.

All honour be to you, O Martyrs; for it was for the preservation of the honour of the race that you performed the fiery ordeal of a revolution, when the religions of the land were threatened with a forcible and sinister conversion; when the hypocrite threw off his friendly garb and stood up in the naked heinousness of a perfidious foe—breaking treaties, smashing crowns, forging chains, and mocking all the while our Merciful Mother for the very honesty with which she believed the pretensions of the white liar.

Then you, O Martyrs of 1857, awoke the Mother, inspired the Mother, and for the honour of the Mother rushed to the battlefield, terrible and tremendous, with the war cry Maro Firungee Ko on your lips, and with the sacred mantra “God and Hindustan” on your banner!

Well did you in rising! For otherwise, although your blood might have been spared, yet the stigma of servility would have been the deeper; one more link would have been added to the cursed chain of demoralizing patience, and the world would have again contemptuously pointed to our nation, saying: “She deserves slavery; she is happy in slavery! For even in 1857, she did not raise even a finger to protect her interests and her honour!”

This day, therefore, we dedicate, O Martyrs, to your inspiring memory!

It was on this day that you raised a new flag to be upheld; you uttered a mission to be fulfilled; you saw a vision to be realized; you proclaimed a nation to be born!

We take up your cry, we revere your flag, we are determined to continue that fiery mission of “Away with the foreigner!”, which you uttered amidst the prophetic thunderings of the Revolutionary War—revolutionary, yes, it was a revolutionary war. For the War of 1857 shall not cease till the revolution arrives, striking slavery into dust, elevating liberty to the throne.

Whenever a people rises for its freedom, whenever that seed of liberty gets germinated in the blood of its martyrs, and whenever there remains at least one true son to avenge that blood of his fathers, there never can be an end to such a war as this. No, a Revolutionary War knows no truce save liberty or death!

We, inspired by your memory, determine to continue the struggle you began in 1857. We refuse to acknowledge the armistice as a truce; we look upon the battles you fought as the battles of the first campaign—the defeat of which cannot be the defeat of the war.

What? Shall the world say that India has accepted the defeat as a final one? That the blood of 1857 was shed in vain? That the sons of Ind betray their fathers’ vows? No, by Hindustan, no!

The historical continuity of the Indian nation is not cut off. The war that began on the 10th of May of 1857 is not over on the 10th of May of 1908, nor shall it ever cease till a 10th of May to come sees the destiny accomplished, sees the beautiful Ind crowned either with the lustre of victory or with the halo of martyrdom.

But, O glorious Martyrs, in this pious struggle of your sons, help! O help us by your inspiring presence!

Torn in innumerable petty selves, we cannot realize the grand unity of the Mother. Whisper, then, unto us by what magic you caught the secret of Union. How the Firungee Rule was shattered to pieces and the Swadeshi thrones were set up by the common consent of Hindus and Mahomedans. How, in the higher love of the Mother, united the differences of castes and creeds; how the venerated and venerable Bahadur Shah prohibited the killing of cows throughout India; how Shrimant Nana Saheb, after the first salute of thundering cannon to the Emperor of Delhi, reserved for himself the second one!

How you staggered the whole world by uniting under the banner of the Mother and forced your enemies to say:

> “Among the many lessons the Indian Mutiny conveys to the historian and administrator, none is of greater importance than the warning that it is possible to have a revolution in which Brahmins and Shudras, Mahomedan and Hindu, were united against us, and that it is not safe to suppose that the peace and stability of our dominion in any great measure depends on the continent being inhabited by different races with different religious systems, for they mutually understand each other and respect and take a part in each other’s modes and ways and doings.”

Whisper unto us the nobility of such an alliance of Religion with Patriotism—the true religion which ever is on the side of patriotism, the true patriotism which secures the freedom of religion!

And give us the marvelous energy, daring, and secrecy with which you organized the mighty volcano; show us the volcanic magma that underlay the green thin crust on which the foe was to be kept lulled into a false security; tell us how the chapatti—that fiery cross of India—flew from village to village and from valley to valley, setting the whole intellect of the nation on fire by the very vagueness of its message; and then let us hear the roaring thunder with which the volcano at last burst forth with an all-shattering force, rushing, smashing, burning, and consuming into one continuous fiery flow of red-hot lava flood!

Within a month, regiment after regiment, prince after prince, city after city, sepoys, police, zemindars, pundits, moulvis—the multiple-headed Revolution sounded its tocsin, and temples and mosques resounded with the cry “Maro Firungee Ko!” Away with the foreigners!

Meerut rose, Delhi rose, rose Benares, Agra, Patna, Lucknow, Allahabad, Jadagerpoor, Jhansi, Banda, Indore—from Peshawar to Calcutta and from the Narbada to the Himalayas, the volcano burst forth into a sudden, simultaneous, and all-consuming conflagration!!

And then, O Martyrs, tell us the little as well as the great defects which you found out in our people in that great experiment of yours. But above all, point out that most ruinous—nay, the only material drawback in the body of the nation—which rendered all your efforts futile: the mean selfish blindness which refuses to see its way to join the Nation’s cause.

Say that the only cause of the defeat of Hindustan was Hindustan herself; that, shaking away the slumber of centuries, the Mother rose to hit the foe, but while her right hand was striking the Firungee dead, her left hand struck—alas!—not the enemy but her own forehead! So she staggered and fell back into an inevitable swoon of 50 years!

50 years are past, but O restless spirits of 1857, we promise you with our heart’s blood that your Diamond Jubilee shall not pass without seeing your wishes fulfilled!!

We have heard your voice and we gather courage from it. With limited means you sustained a war, not against tyranny alone but against tyranny and treachery together. The Duab and Ayodhya, making a united stand, staged a war not only against the whole of the British power but against the rest of India too; and yet you fought for three years, and yet you had well-nigh snatched away the crown of Hindustan and smashed the hollow existence of the alien rule.

What an encouragement this! What the Duab and Ayodhya could do in a month, the simultaneous, sudden, and determined rising of the whole of Hindustan can do in a day! This hope illumines our heart and assures us of success. And so we avow that your Diamond Jubilee, the year 1917, shall not pass without seeing the resurging Ind making a triumphant entry into the world!

For the bones of Bahadur Shah are crying vengeance from their grave! For the blood of dauntless Laxmi is boiling with indignation! For the shahid Peer Ali of Patna, when he was going to the gallows for having refused to divulge the secrets of the conspiracy, whispered defiance to the Firungee and said in prophetic words:

> “You may hang me today, you may hang such as me every day, but thousands will still rise in my place—your object will never be gained.”

Indians, these words must be fulfilled! Your blood, O Martyrs, shall be avenged!!!

Bande Mataram!

---

Reference:

Savarkar: Echoes from a Forgotten Past by Vikram Sampath, page 514.

Link: https://savarkar.org/en/encyc/2017/5/22/Oh-Martyrs.html

---

---

The “O! Martyrs!” pamphlet was a powerful four-page leaflet written and distributed by Swatantrya Veer Savarkar in May 1908. It honored the heroes of the 1857 uprising and also called for a new revolutionary movement against British rule.

Savarkar wrote the pamphlet to mark the anniversary of the Meerut uprising on May 10, 1857. He argued that the event was not just a “mutiny,” as the British described it, but India’s “First War of Independence.”

The pamphlet was also a response to the British Golden Jubilee celebrations of 1857 held in 1907 and 1908. British newspapers had described the Indian rebels as criminals and murderers, but Savarkar praised them as martyrs who sacrificed themselves for their country, religion, and freedom.

A central idea of the text was that the fight for independence was still continuing. It famously stated: “The war begun on the 10th of May 1857 is not over on the 10th of May 1908, nor can it ever cease till a 10th of May to come sees the destiny accomplished.”

Thousands of copies of the pamphlet were circulated in both England and India. Indian students in London wore badges saying “Honours to the martyrs of 1857” along with the pamphlet’s message, which led to clashes with British authorities and professors.

The pamphlet also emphasized Hindu-Muslim unity during the 1857 revolt. Savarkar described the uprising as a movement in which both communities united under the idea of the Motherland.

Because the pamphlet used the memory of the 1857 revolt to encourage resistance against British rule, the British government considered it seditious. In 1910, it was later used as evidence against Savarkar in the case accusing him of conspiring to wage war against the British Crown.

Here is the full text of the pamphlet, made available thanks to historian Vikram Sampath, who shared it on page 514 of his book, Savarkar: Echoes from a Forgotten Past.

You can download the PDF of the book for free here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Uuq65oIXW_AIqiX4S_Xs8lqL1c0cw9f-

---

> The battle of freedom once begun And handed down from sire to son Though often lost, is ever won!!

Today is the 10th of May! It was on this day that, in the ever-memorable year of 1857, the first campaign of the War of Independence was opened by you, O Martyrs, on the battlefields of India. The Motherland, awakened to the sense of her degrading slavery, unsheathed her sword, burst forth the shackles, and struck the first blow for her liberty and for her honour.

It was on this day that the war cry Maro Firungee Ko was raised by the throats of thousands. It was on this day that the sepoys of Meerut, having risen in a terrible uprising, marched down to Delhi, saw the waters of the Jumna glittering in the sunshine, caught one of those historical moments which close a past epoch to introduce a new one, and found, in a moment, a leader, a flag, and a cause, and converted the mutiny into a national and a religious war.

All honour be to you, O Martyrs; for it was for the preservation of the honour of the race that you performed the fiery ordeal of a revolution, when the religions of the land were threatened with a forcible and sinister conversion; when the hypocrite threw off his friendly garb and stood up in the naked heinousness of a perfidious foe—breaking treaties, smashing crowns, forging chains, and mocking all the while our Merciful Mother for the very honesty with which she believed the pretensions of the white liar.

Then you, O Martyrs of 1857, awoke the Mother, inspired the Mother, and for the honour of the Mother rushed to the battlefield, terrible and tremendous, with the war cry Maro Firungee Ko on your lips, and with the sacred mantra “God and Hindustan” on your banner!

Well did you in rising! For otherwise, although your blood might have been spared, yet the stigma of servility would have been the deeper; one more link would have been added to the cursed chain of demoralizing patience, and the world would have again contemptuously pointed to our nation, saying: “She deserves slavery; she is happy in slavery! For even in 1857, she did not raise even a finger to protect her interests and her honour!”

This day, therefore, we dedicate, O Martyrs, to your inspiring memory!

It was on this day that you raised a new flag to be upheld; you uttered a mission to be fulfilled; you saw a vision to be realized; you proclaimed a nation to be born!

We take up your cry, we revere your flag, we are determined to continue that fiery mission of “Away with the foreigner!”, which you uttered amidst the prophetic thunderings of the Revolutionary War—revolutionary, yes, it was a revolutionary war. For the War of 1857 shall not cease till the revolution arrives, striking slavery into dust, elevating liberty to the throne.

Whenever a people rises for its freedom, whenever that seed of liberty gets germinated in the blood of its martyrs, and whenever there remains at least one true son to avenge that blood of his fathers, there never can be an end to such a war as this. No, a Revolutionary War knows no truce save liberty or death!

We, inspired by your memory, determine to continue the struggle you began in 1857. We refuse to acknowledge the armistice as a truce; we look upon the battles you fought as the battles of the first campaign—the defeat of which cannot be the defeat of the war.

What? Shall the world say that India has accepted the defeat as a final one? That the blood of 1857 was shed in vain? That the sons of Ind betray their fathers’ vows? No, by Hindustan, no!

The historical continuity of the Indian nation is not cut off. The war that began on the 10th of May of 1857 is not over on the 10th of May of 1908, nor shall it ever cease till a 10th of May to come sees the destiny accomplished, sees the beautiful Ind crowned either with the lustre of victory or with the halo of martyrdom.

But, O glorious Martyrs, in this pious struggle of your sons, help! O help us by your inspiring presence!

Torn in innumerable petty selves, we cannot realize the grand unity of the Mother. Whisper, then, unto us by what magic you caught the secret of Union. How the Firungee Rule was shattered to pieces and the Swadeshi thrones were set up by the common consent of Hindus and Mahomedans. How, in the higher love of the Mother, united the differences of castes and creeds; how the venerated and venerable Bahadur Shah prohibited the killing of cows throughout India; how Shrimant Nana Saheb, after the first salute of thundering cannon to the Emperor of Delhi, reserved for himself the second one!

How you staggered the whole world by uniting under the banner of the Mother and forced your enemies to say:

> “Among the many lessons the Indian Mutiny conveys to the historian and administrator, none is of greater importance than the warning that it is possible to have a revolution in which Brahmins and Shudras, Mahomedan and Hindu, were united against us, and that it is not safe to suppose that the peace and stability of our dominion in any great measure depends on the continent being inhabited by different races with different religious systems, for they mutually understand each other and respect and take a part in each other’s modes and ways and doings.”

Whisper unto us the nobility of such an alliance of Religion with Patriotism—the true religion which ever is on the side of patriotism, the true patriotism which secures the freedom of religion!

And give us the marvelous energy, daring, and secrecy with which you organized the mighty volcano; show us the volcanic magma that underlay the green thin crust on which the foe was to be kept lulled into a false security; tell us how the chapatti—that fiery cross of India—flew from village to village and from valley to valley, setting the whole intellect of the nation on fire by the very vagueness of its message; and then let us hear the roaring thunder with which the volcano at last burst forth with an all-shattering force, rushing, smashing, burning, and consuming into one continuous fiery flow of red-hot lava flood!

Within a month, regiment after regiment, prince after prince, city after city, sepoys, police, zemindars, pundits, moulvis—the multiple-headed Revolution sounded its tocsin, and temples and mosques resounded with the cry “Maro Firungee Ko!” Away with the foreigners!

Meerut rose, Delhi rose, rose Benares, Agra, Patna, Lucknow, Allahabad, Jadagerpoor, Jhansi, Banda, Indore—from Peshawar to Calcutta and from the Narbada to the Himalayas, the volcano burst forth into a sudden, simultaneous, and all-consuming conflagration!!

And then, O Martyrs, tell us the little as well as the great defects which you found out in our people in that great experiment of yours. But above all, point out that most ruinous—nay, the only material drawback in the body of the nation—which rendered all your efforts futile: the mean selfish blindness which refuses to see its way to join the Nation’s cause.

Say that the only cause of the defeat of Hindustan was Hindustan herself; that, shaking away the slumber of centuries, the Mother rose to hit the foe, but while her right hand was striking the Firungee dead, her left hand struck—alas!—not the enemy but her own forehead! So she staggered and fell back into an inevitable swoon of 50 years!

50 years are past, but O restless spirits of 1857, we promise you with our heart’s blood that your Diamond Jubilee shall not pass without seeing your wishes fulfilled!!

We have heard your voice and we gather courage from it. With limited means you sustained a war, not against tyranny alone but against tyranny and treachery together. The Duab and Ayodhya, making a united stand, staged a war not only against the whole of the British power but against the rest of India too; and yet you fought for three years, and yet you had well-nigh snatched away the crown of Hindustan and smashed the hollow existence of the alien rule.

What an encouragement this! What the Duab and Ayodhya could do in a month, the simultaneous, sudden, and determined rising of the whole of Hindustan can do in a day! This hope illumines our heart and assures us of success. And so we avow that your Diamond Jubilee, the year 1917, shall not pass without seeing the resurging Ind making a triumphant entry into the world!

For the bones of Bahadur Shah are crying vengeance from their grave! For the blood of dauntless Laxmi is boiling with indignation! For the shahid Peer Ali of Patna, when he was going to the gallows for having refused to divulge the secrets of the conspiracy, whispered defiance to the Firungee and said in prophetic words:

> “You may hang me today, you may hang such as me every day, but thousands will still rise in my place—your object will never be gained.”

Indians, these words must be fulfilled! Your blood, O Martyrs, shall be avenged!!!

Bande Mataram!

---

---

The “O! Martyrs!” pamphlet was a powerful four-page leaflet written and distributed by Swatantrya Veer Savarkar in May 1908. It honored the heroes of the 1857 uprising and also called for a new revolutionary movement against British rule.

Savarkar wrote the pamphlet to mark the anniversary of the Meerut uprising on May 10, 1857. He argued that the event was not just a “mutiny,” as the British described it, but India’s “First War of Independence.”

The pamphlet was also a response to the British Golden Jubilee celebrations of 1857 held in 1907 and 1908. British newspapers had described the Indian rebels as criminals and murderers, but Savarkar praised them as martyrs who sacrificed themselves for their country, religion, and freedom.

A central idea of the text was that the fight for independence was still continuing. It famously stated: “The war begun on the 10th of May 1857 is not over on the 10th of May 1908, nor can it ever cease till a 10th of May to come sees the destiny accomplished.”

Thousands of copies of the pamphlet were circulated in both England and India. Indian students in London wore badges saying “Honours to the martyrs of 1857” along with the pamphlet’s message, which led to clashes with British authorities and professors.

The pamphlet also emphasized Hindu-Muslim unity during the 1857 revolt. Savarkar described the uprising as a movement in which both communities united under the idea of the Motherland.

Because the pamphlet used the memory of the 1857 revolt to encourage resistance against British rule, the British government considered it seditious. In 1910, it was later used as evidence against Savarkar in the case accusing him of conspiring to wage war against the British Crown.

Here is the full text of the pamphlet, made available thanks to historian Vikram Sampath, who shared it on page 514 of his book, Savarkar: Echoes from a Forgotten Past.

You can download the PDF of the book for free here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Uuq65oIXW_AIqiX4S_Xs8lqL1c0cw9f-

---

> The battle of freedom once begun And handed down from sire to son Though often lost, is ever won!!

Today is the 10th of May! It was on this day that, in the ever-memorable year of 1857, the first campaign of the War of Independence was opened by you, O Martyrs, on the battlefields of India. The Motherland, awakened to the sense of her degrading slavery, unsheathed her sword, burst forth the shackles, and struck the first blow for her liberty and for her honour.

It was on this day that the war cry Maro Firungee Ko was raised by the throats of thousands. It was on this day that the sepoys of Meerut, having risen in a terrible uprising, marched down to Delhi, saw the waters of the Jumna glittering in the sunshine, caught one of those historical moments which close a past epoch to introduce a new one, and found, in a moment, a leader, a flag, and a cause, and converted the mutiny into a national and a religious war.

All honour be to you, O Martyrs; for it was for the preservation of the honour of the race that you performed the fiery ordeal of a revolution, when the religions of the land were threatened with a forcible and sinister conversion; when the hypocrite threw off his friendly garb and stood up in the naked heinousness of a perfidious foe—breaking treaties, smashing crowns, forging chains, and mocking all the while our Merciful Mother for the very honesty with which she believed the pretensions of the white liar.

Then you, O Martyrs of 1857, awoke the Mother, inspired the Mother, and for the honour of the Mother rushed to the battlefield, terrible and tremendous, with the war cry Maro Firungee Ko on your lips, and with the sacred mantra “God and Hindustan” on your banner!

Well did you in rising! For otherwise, although your blood might have been spared, yet the stigma of servility would have been the deeper; one more link would have been added to the cursed chain of demoralizing patience, and the world would have again contemptuously pointed to our nation, saying: “She deserves slavery; she is happy in slavery! For even in 1857, she did not raise even a finger to protect her interests and her honour!”

This day, therefore, we dedicate, O Martyrs, to your inspiring memory!

It was on this day that you raised a new flag to be upheld; you uttered a mission to be fulfilled; you saw a vision to be realized; you proclaimed a nation to be born!

We take up your cry, we revere your flag, we are determined to continue that fiery mission of “Away with the foreigner!”, which you uttered amidst the prophetic thunderings of the Revolutionary War—revolutionary, yes, it was a revolutionary war. For the War of 1857 shall not cease till the revolution arrives, striking slavery into dust, elevating liberty to the throne.

Whenever a people rises for its freedom, whenever that seed of liberty gets germinated in the blood of its martyrs, and whenever there remains at least one true son to avenge that blood of his fathers, there never can be an end to such a war as this. No, a Revolutionary War knows no truce save liberty or death!

We, inspired by your memory, determine to continue the struggle you began in 1857. We refuse to acknowledge the armistice as a truce; we look upon the battles you fought as the battles of the first campaign—the defeat of which cannot be the defeat of the war.

What? Shall the world say that India has accepted the defeat as a final one? That the blood of 1857 was shed in vain? That the sons of Ind betray their fathers’ vows? No, by Hindustan, no!

The historical continuity of the Indian nation is not cut off. The war that began on the 10th of May of 1857 is not over on the 10th of May of 1908, nor shall it ever cease till a 10th of May to come sees the destiny accomplished, sees the beautiful Ind crowned either with the lustre of victory or with the halo of martyrdom.

But, O glorious Martyrs, in this pious struggle of your sons, help! O help us by your inspiring presence!

Torn in innumerable petty selves, we cannot realize the grand unity of the Mother. Whisper, then, unto us by what magic you caught the secret of Union. How the Firungee Rule was shattered to pieces and the Swadeshi thrones were set up by the common consent of Hindus and Mahomedans. How, in the higher love of the Mother, united the differences of castes and creeds; how the venerated and venerable Bahadur Shah prohibited the killing of cows throughout India; how Shrimant Nana Saheb, after the first salute of thundering cannon to the Emperor of Delhi, reserved for himself the second one!

How you staggered the whole world by uniting under the banner of the Mother and forced your enemies to say:

> “Among the many lessons the Indian Mutiny conveys to the historian and administrator, none is of greater importance than the warning that it is possible to have a revolution in which Brahmins and Shudras, Mahomedan and Hindu, were united against us, and that it is not safe to suppose that the peace and stability of our dominion in any great measure depends on the continent being inhabited by different races with different religious systems, for they mutually understand each other and respect and take a part in each other’s modes and ways and doings.”

Whisper unto us the nobility of such an alliance of Religion with Patriotism—the true religion which ever is on the side of patriotism, the true patriotism which secures the freedom of religion!

And give us the marvelous energy, daring, and secrecy with which you organized the mighty volcano; show us the volcanic magma that underlay the green thin crust on which the foe was to be kept lulled into a false security; tell us how the chapatti—that fiery cross of India—flew from village to village and from valley to valley, setting the whole intellect of the nation on fire by the very vagueness of its message; and then let us hear the roaring thunder with which the volcano at last burst forth with an all-shattering force, rushing, smashing, burning, and consuming into one continuous fiery flow of red-hot lava flood!

Within a month, regiment after regiment, prince after prince, city after city, sepoys, police, zemindars, pundits, moulvis—the multiple-headed Revolution sounded its tocsin, and temples and mosques resounded with the cry “Maro Firungee Ko!” Away with the foreigners!

Meerut rose, Delhi rose, rose Benares, Agra, Patna, Lucknow, Allahabad, Jadagerpoor, Jhansi, Banda, Indore—from Peshawar to Calcutta and from the Narbada to the Himalayas, the volcano burst forth into a sudden, simultaneous, and all-consuming conflagration!!

And then, O Martyrs, tell us the little as well as the great defects which you found out in our people in that great experiment of yours. But above all, point out that most ruinous—nay, the only material drawback in the body of the nation—which rendered all your efforts futile: the mean selfish blindness which refuses to see its way to join the Nation’s cause.

Say that the only cause of the defeat of Hindustan was Hindustan herself; that, shaking away the slumber of centuries, the Mother rose to hit the foe, but while her right hand was striking the Firungee dead, her left hand struck—alas!—not the enemy but her own forehead! So she staggered and fell back into an inevitable swoon of 50 years!

50 years are past, but O restless spirits of 1857, we promise you with our heart’s blood that your Diamond Jubilee shall not pass without seeing your wishes fulfilled!!

We have heard your voice and we gather courage from it. With limited means you sustained a war, not against tyranny alone but against tyranny and treachery together. The Duab and Ayodhya, making a united stand, staged a war not only against the whole of the British power but against the rest of India too; and yet you fought for three years, and yet you had well-nigh snatched away the crown of Hindustan and smashed the hollow existence of the alien rule.

What an encouragement this! What the Duab and Ayodhya could do in a month, the simultaneous, sudden, and determined rising of the whole of Hindustan can do in a day! This hope illumines our heart and assures us of success. And so we avow that your Diamond Jubilee, the year 1917, shall not pass without seeing the resurging Ind making a triumphant entry into the world!

For the bones of Bahadur Shah are crying vengeance from their grave! For the blood of dauntless Laxmi is boiling with indignation! For the shahid Peer Ali of Patna, when he was going to the gallows for having refused to divulge the secrets of the conspiracy, whispered defiance to the Firungee and said in prophetic words:

> “You may hang me today, you may hang such as me every day, but thousands will still rise in my place—your object will never be gained.”

Indians, these words must be fulfilled! Your blood, O Martyrs, shall be avenged!!!

Bande Mataram!

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The “O! Martyrs!” pamphlet was a powerful four-page leaflet written and distributed by Swatantrya Veer Savarkar in May 1908. It honored the heroes of the 1857 uprising and also called for a new revolutionary movement against British rule.

Savarkar wrote the pamphlet to mark the anniversary of the Meerut uprising on May 10, 1857. He argued that the event was not just a “mutiny,” as the British described it, but India’s “First War of Independence.”

The pamphlet was also a response to the British Golden Jubilee celebrations of 1857 held in 1907 and 1908. British newspapers had described the Indian rebels as criminals and murderers, but Savarkar praised them as martyrs who sacrificed themselves for their country, religion, and freedom.

A central idea of the text was that the fight for independence was still continuing. It famously stated: “The war begun on the 10th of May 1857 is not over on the 10th of May 1908, nor can it ever cease till a 10th of May to come sees the destiny accomplished.”

Thousands of copies of the pamphlet were circulated in both England and India. Indian students in London wore badges saying “Honours to the martyrs of 1857” along with the pamphlet’s message, which led to clashes with British authorities and professors.

The pamphlet also emphasized Hindu-Muslim unity during the 1857 revolt. Savarkar described the uprising as a movement in which both communities united under the idea of the Motherland.

Because the pamphlet used the memory of the 1857 revolt to encourage resistance against British rule, the British government considered it seditious. In 1910, it was later used as evidence against Savarkar in the case accusing him of conspiring to wage war against the British Crown.

Here is the full text of the pamphlet, made available thanks to historian Vikram Sampath, who shared it on page 514 of his book, Savarkar: Echoes from a Forgotten Past.

You can download the PDF of the book for free here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Uuq65oIXW_AIqiX4S_Xs8lqL1c0cw9f-

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> The battle of freedom once begun And handed down from sire to son Though often lost, is ever won!!

Today is the 10th of May! It was on this day that, in the ever-memorable year of 1857, the first campaign of the War of Independence was opened by you, O Martyrs, on the battlefields of India. The Motherland, awakened to the sense of her degrading slavery, unsheathed her sword, burst forth the shackles, and struck the first blow for her liberty and for her honour.

It was on this day that the war cry Maro Firungee Ko was raised by the throats of thousands. It was on this day that the sepoys of Meerut, having risen in a terrible uprising, marched down to Delhi, saw the waters of the Jumna glittering in the sunshine, caught one of those historical moments which close a past epoch to introduce a new one, and found, in a moment, a leader, a flag, and a cause, and converted the mutiny into a national and a religious war.

All honour be to you, O Martyrs; for it was for the preservation of the honour of the race that you performed the fiery ordeal of a revolution, when the religions of the land were threatened with a forcible and sinister conversion; when the hypocrite threw off his friendly garb and stood up in the naked heinousness of a perfidious foe—breaking treaties, smashing crowns, forging chains, and mocking all the while our Merciful Mother for the very honesty with which she believed the pretensions of the white liar.

Then you, O Martyrs of 1857, awoke the Mother, inspired the Mother, and for the honour of the Mother rushed to the battlefield, terrible and tremendous, with the war cry Maro Firungee Ko on your lips, and with the sacred mantra “God and Hindustan” on your banner!

Well did you in rising! For otherwise, although your blood might have been spared, yet the stigma of servility would have been the deeper; one more link would have been added to the cursed chain of demoralizing patience, and the world would have again contemptuously pointed to our nation, saying: “She deserves slavery; she is happy in slavery! For even in 1857, she did not raise even a finger to protect her interests and her honour!”

This day, therefore, we dedicate, O Martyrs, to your inspiring memory!

It was on this day that you raised a new flag to be upheld; you uttered a mission to be fulfilled; you saw a vision to be realized; you proclaimed a nation to be born!

We take up your cry, we revere your flag, we are determined to continue that fiery mission of “Away with the foreigner!”, which you uttered amidst the prophetic thunderings of the Revolutionary War—revolutionary, yes, it was a revolutionary war. For the War of 1857 shall not cease till the revolution arrives, striking slavery into dust, elevating liberty to the throne.

Whenever a people rises for its freedom, whenever that seed of liberty gets germinated in the blood of its martyrs, and whenever there remains at least one true son to avenge that blood of his fathers, there never can be an end to such a war as this. No, a Revolutionary War knows no truce save liberty or death!

We, inspired by your memory, determine to continue the struggle you began in 1857. We refuse to acknowledge the armistice as a truce; we look upon the battles you fought as the battles of the first campaign—the defeat of which cannot be the defeat of the war.

What? Shall the world say that India has accepted the defeat as a final one? That the blood of 1857 was shed in vain? That the sons of Ind betray their fathers’ vows? No, by Hindustan, no!

The historical continuity of the Indian nation is not cut off. The war that began on the 10th of May of 1857 is not over on the 10th of May of 1908, nor shall it ever cease till a 10th of May to come sees the destiny accomplished, sees the beautiful Ind crowned either with the lustre of victory or with the halo of martyrdom.

But, O glorious Martyrs, in this pious struggle of your sons, help! O help us by your inspiring presence!

Torn in innumerable petty selves, we cannot realize the grand unity of the Mother. Whisper, then, unto us by what magic you caught the secret of Union. How the Firungee Rule was shattered to pieces and the Swadeshi thrones were set up by the common consent of Hindus and Mahomedans. How, in the higher love of the Mother, united the differences of castes and creeds; how the venerated and venerable Bahadur Shah prohibited the killing of cows throughout India; how Shrimant Nana Saheb, after the first salute of thundering cannon to the Emperor of Delhi, reserved for himself the second one!

How you staggered the whole world by uniting under the banner of the Mother and forced your enemies to say:

> “Among the many lessons the Indian Mutiny conveys to the historian and administrator, none is of greater importance than the warning that it is possible to have a revolution in which Brahmins and Shudras, Mahomedan and Hindu, were united against us, and that it is not safe to suppose that the peace and stability of our dominion in any great measure depends on the continent being inhabited by different races with different religious systems, for they mutually understand each other and respect and take a part in each other’s modes and ways and doings.”

Whisper unto us the nobility of such an alliance of Religion with Patriotism—the true religion which ever is on the side of patriotism, the true patriotism which secures the freedom of religion!

And give us the marvelous energy, daring, and secrecy with which you organized the mighty volcano; show us the volcanic magma that underlay the green thin crust on which the foe was to be kept lulled into a false security; tell us how the chapatti—that fiery cross of India—flew from village to village and from valley to valley, setting the whole intellect of the nation on fire by the very vagueness of its message; and then let us hear the roaring thunder with which the volcano at last burst forth with an all-shattering force, rushing, smashing, burning, and consuming into one continuous fiery flow of red-hot lava flood!

Within a month, regiment after regiment, prince after prince, city after city, sepoys, police, zemindars, pundits, moulvis—the multiple-headed Revolution sounded its tocsin, and temples and mosques resounded with the cry “Maro Firungee Ko!” Away with the foreigners!

Meerut rose, Delhi rose, rose Benares, Agra, Patna, Lucknow, Allahabad, Jadagerpoor, Jhansi, Banda, Indore—from Peshawar to Calcutta and from the Narbada to the Himalayas, the volcano burst forth into a sudden, simultaneous, and all-consuming conflagration!!

And then, O Martyrs, tell us the little as well as the great defects which you found out in our people in that great experiment of yours. But above all, point out that most ruinous—nay, the only material drawback in the body of the nation—which rendered all your efforts futile: the mean selfish blindness which refuses to see its way to join the Nation’s cause.

Say that the only cause of the defeat of Hindustan was Hindustan herself; that, shaking away the slumber of centuries, the Mother rose to hit the foe, but while her right hand was striking the Firungee dead, her left hand struck—alas!—not the enemy but her own forehead! So she staggered and fell back into an inevitable swoon of 50 years!

50 years are past, but O restless spirits of 1857, we promise you with our heart’s blood that your Diamond Jubilee shall not pass without seeing your wishes fulfilled!!

We have heard your voice and we gather courage from it. With limited means you sustained a war, not against tyranny alone but against tyranny and treachery together. The Duab and Ayodhya, making a united stand, staged a war not only against the whole of the British power but against the rest of India too; and yet you fought for three years, and yet you had well-nigh snatched away the crown of Hindustan and smashed the hollow existence of the alien rule.

What an encouragement this! What the Duab and Ayodhya could do in a month, the simultaneous, sudden, and determined rising of the whole of Hindustan can do in a day! This hope illumines our heart and assures us of success. And so we avow that your Diamond Jubilee, the year 1917, shall not pass without seeing the resurging Ind making a triumphant entry into the world!

For the bones of Bahadur Shah are crying vengeance from their grave! For the blood of dauntless Laxmi is boiling with indignation! For the shahid Peer Ali of Patna, when he was going to the gallows for having refused to divulge the secrets of the conspiracy, whispered defiance to the Firungee and said in prophetic words:

> “You may hang me today, you may hang such as me every day, but thousands will still rise in my place—your object will never be gained.”

Indians, these words must be fulfilled! Your blood, O Martyrs, shall be avenged!!!

Bande Mataram!

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Credits to @kraantiie on Instagram for making this post

https://www.instagram.com/p/DP1bBQMAcv4/

This is a British news covering of the Direct Action Day killings in Kolkata, 1946

Since this is a video of a news outlet in itself, I assume a link as a source is not required.