> 'Give me medicine for fever and diarrhoea!’ When any prisoner asked this favour of another in a suppressed voice and with a dejected mind, it did not imply that he demanded a mixture to drive out these maladies, but to induce them into him. A man, it was reported, gets high fever if he swallows the paste of Kanheri roots; another told me that the easiest way to get loose continuous motions, with blood in them, was to drink the paste of red berries called Gunja. If a thread soaked in some liquid—I forgot which—were sewn into a wound, another said, the wound remained raw and open for six months on end.

> This was the talk of the prison. And if I questioned the authenticity of these reports, they told me that the medicines were tried and found effective for these purposes. Prisoners, put on the oil-mill or sent out to cut down the jungles or detailed to pick oakum and weave the threads into a coil of rope, were so much done up with the work and felt such a terror for it, that they preferred anything else to going on with it. Hence, they would resort to these dangerous shrubs, roots, and berries or would make a wound to their feet with the scythe they carried, to fall ill and come back into the hospital.

> They would sew a thread into that wound to keep it from healing. They would prick their throats with a needle to convince the physician in charge that the blood had come out with their spit and from their chest. Any of these tricks they employed for purposes of escape from the toil under which they were being ground down in their prison life. Others feigned madness, and, to prove that they were really mad, would besmear their faces with urine and excreta, and occasionally ate them also.

Reference: V.D. Savarkar. My Transportation for Life, p. 149

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On 6 January 1924, after spending almost fourteen years in prison, Savarkar was conditionally released by the British Government.

Several factors led to this decision.

First, years of harsh imprisonment had severely damaged Savarkar's health. The British Government feared that if such a prominent political prisoner died in custody, it would spark widespread public outrage, damage the government's reputation, and possibly encourage more people to join the revolutionary movement.

Second, public pressure for his release continued to grow. His supporters became increasingly vocal, and campaigns demanding the release of the Savarkar brothers gained momentum across the country.

The Bombay National Union organized a massive petition calling for their release, collecting more than 75,000 signatures.

Reference: Vikram Sampath, Savarkar: Echoes from a Forgotten Past, p. 419.

In the Legislative Assembly, legislator Vithalbhai Patel moved a resolution on 24 February 1920 recommending amnesty for the Savarkar brothers and other political prisoners.

A year later, on 26 March 1921, legislator Rangaswamy Ayyangar moved another resolution in the Council concerning a petition signed by more than 50,000 people seeking amnesty for the Savarkar brothers. The resolution urged the House to recommend their release to the Governor-General in Legislative Council.

Reference: Vikram Sampath, Savarkar: Echoes from a Forgotten Past, p. 424.

Despite sustained pressure from family members, political leaders, the public, and even international supporters, the Government remained unwilling to release Savarkar. Officials feared that his return would once again revive revolutionary activity in the Deccan, which had largely subsided after the arrest of the Savarkar brothers.

By 1922, however, the government faced increasing and justified criticism for continuing to imprison the Savarkar brothers, especially after other political prisoners involved in similar conspiracy cases had already been released.

Following his interview with the Governor of Bombay, the authorities concluded that releasing Savarkar under strict restrictions in the remote district of Ratnagiri was safer than keeping him in prison.

Accordingly, on 6 January 1924, Savarkar was released from prison under two strict conditions. He had to remain confined to Ratnagiri district and was prohibited from taking part in political activities. These restrictions were initially imposed for five years, however, the British Government repeatedly extended them and even considered sending him back to the Cellular Jail, claiming that he had violated the conditions of his release by making seditious speeches. This tells us that Britishers still did not trusted him to have quit his revolutionary ways, He was finally granted complete freedom in 1937.

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Excerpt from 'My Transportation for Life'

> Just then I received a call from the Superintendent to meet him in the office. At the same time a trusted man sent me a message that I was free.

> The political convicts who had stayed with me, worked with me, and suffered with me, in whose company I had passed so many years of my hard life in the Andamans, were full of joy at the news. Their eyes shone full of tears. But I trembled that I was leaving them behind in that prison. They heartily congratulated me. The Sikhs among them, some of whom were sixty years old, said, “Babuji, come closer to us, do not forget us.” And they locked me up in their embrace full of affection and reverence. They added, “You have been on transportation for life long before us. You had passed seven or eight years in the Andamans when we came there. Why then should you be sorry that you go out, while we remain behind? Is it not right that you should precede us? If you are free, we are as good as free. In fact, your freedom will pave the way for us. At least it will pave the road to freedom for our motherland.”

> I answered, “It all depends upon the strength that God will give me to complete the task. But, my brothers, you will surely bear me out when I say that, ground down under the sufferings as I was during the fourteen long years that I spent in the Andamans and even to the last day here, I have not flinched or retracted from what I was preaching all my life. I have given you the stories of all our martyrs and I have advised all along to hold firm by our creed of violent resistance if circumstances were to force it upon us. I have kept the flag flying. When I heard the sentence passed upon me fourteen years ago, the words dancing upon my lips were the same that are dancing upon them today. I uttered them then, I have uttered them during my long stay in prison, and they come forth from my mouth today, to be carved on your heart and mind, and to ring in your ears for good. Let us say all of us, Glory to the Goddess of Freedom; Victory to our Mother.”

> We greeted one another with these words, we hailed our mother, and then I parted from them.

> As soon as I stepped into the office, the Superintendent read out to me the order of my release. It was that for five years after my release I was to take no part in politics and stay at Ratnagiri as a prisoner on parole.

> All the inmates of the prison, my fellow-countrymen, prisoners and officers, the youngest as well as the oldest, formed a circle round me. They said with one voice, “Savarkar, you have been an exile from your country like Rama who went to the forest for fourteen years, abandoning his beloved Ayodhya. You have passed through similar trials, sorrows and bereavements. Hail to you, Savarkar, may God bless you. The whole country rejoices today and its joy knows no bounds.”

> I could not contain myself for the kind words spoken by them and for the affectionate heart they betokened. And I replied, “There is one great omission in this comparison. Rama went into exile, but Rama finished Ravana and won the battle. I have gone into exile and suffered, but Ravana is still alive. I shall feel myself free only when that is accomplished. With God's grace even that task will accomplish itself like many other minor things to which I have put my hand. Some day, sometime, that also will happen, and you must realise the difference, and it must give you acute pain.”

> My relative had come to fetch me away. The prison gate was opened and I came out. What varied means I had used to secure my release! And how I felt then that I was escaping, not through the open gate, but through its keyhole.

> At last I was a free man. I looked about me and said to myself I had scored over my life sentence of fifty years. But who dares say that I may not be sent back to serve it to the full? It was not yet time, methought, to bid final goodbye to this prison. I must not forget it yet. Was I not free at Marseilles? Had I not made my escape? This may be but the repetition of that experience, for India's battle for freedom has yet to be won, and the struggle must go on.

> Indulging in such kind of talk with my friends, and smiling at the same time, I entered the car and it moved on its wheels. It brought me into the land of the living and had left behind my sentence to perish. The boundary line was crossed, and I was both alive and free.

> The greetings that I received from the whole country, as I came back alive to them, made me for a time oblivious of myself. On the very first day of my freedom, I was floating, as it were, in the upper air of my country. When it hailed me as a hero and patted me on the back, all the wounds inflicted on me during my fourteen years of prison life seemed to heal. And the only thing that remained with me were these reminiscences.

> Therefore, as I had invoked the Goddess with the words "That another image," in order to fortify myself against the intending shadow of the death sentence and to be prepared to swallow the cup of poison it was holding out to my lips, I now recall the same Goddess to my mind with deep gratitude for my survival and, bowing my head, take final leave of her. I pray that the heavenly Goddess may go back, for the time being, to her abode.

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Dear Reader

The story is told. The curtain is rung down on it. Two life sentences have been run. And I have brought together my recollections of them within the cover of this book. They are narrated in brief outline to you; they are put together within the narrowest compass.

When I came into this world, God sent me in it on a sort of life sentence. It was the span of life allotted to me by Time to stay in this "prison-house of life." This story is but a chapter of that book of life—a longer story not yet ended. As I completed this chapter as a dedication to my great worship of the ideal, so the book of life may end as a dedication to it without break or faltering.

Yes, I am free. The iron fetters on my feet are broken. But the chain of longing that binds my heart still remains. I have come out of the stone walls which had buried me. But my soul is still imprisoned, for my vision is not yet reached. The horizon that limits it is not yet crossed. It engirdles my soul and stifles it.

Dear Reader, surely you must have been wearied to hear my story, and put out by the endless repetitions it contains. But I am as much tired in writing as you may begin reading it, this weary tale of my life. It has been a long and weary way for me also. How I have suffered and how much fatigue of the mind I have passed through in putting it on paper! But I shall be more than paid for it if you feel the same disgust for it that I have felt. For you can finish reading it in a day, while I had to live it for fourteen long years of transportation. And if the story is so tiresome, unendurable and disgusting to you, how much must the living of it have been to me! Every moment of those fourteen years in that jail has been an agony of the soul and the body to me, and to my fellow-convicts in that jail. It was not only fatiguing, unbearable and futile to us all. It was equally, or more, excruciating as well, to them and to me. And it is only that you may know it, and feel the fatigue, the disgust and the pain of it, as we have felt it, that I have chosen to write it for you. I hope you will have through it some idea of what we have passed through, what we have endured.

Dear Reader, I lay down my pen and take leave of you. My broken pen I cannot put aside, however, without telling you never to forget those who stuck to their task, disheartening and trying though it was; who embraced it to the last; who were nearly burnt up in that fiery ordeal; and who came out of it because nothing could burn them up completely in it. Lest you forget! Dear Reader, I say it to you as my last word, do not forget them. For sooner or later the memory of them will serve you and be your salvation; nothing else will avail!

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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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