The Maddening of Ullaskar Dutt
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.
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