Vinayak had no idea what to write as a reply to a letter like this. Trying to gather himself and also motivate his shattered elder brother, he wrote:
Baba, success and failure are but coincidences. It is not our fault if we failed in our first battle. In fact, we are fortunate to have stood our ground in the face of failure. It is a matter of pride for us that we are bravely enduring those sufferings, which we exhorted others to undergo. It is now our life mission to languish in this prison and if need be, accept the abuses of those for whom we suffer. Remaining free and achieving fame whilst fighting is no doubt considered glorious. But it is equally glorious to die unknown and suffer abuse. Not just fighting and becoming famous but dying unknown and unsung is also essential for final victory. As far as the loss to our cause is concerned, I can only say that our absence shall not bring our War of Independence to a halt. This army of countless warriors, Whose charioteers are the proud Sri Krishna and Sri Ram, shall not halt in our absence! 39
From the eleventh day of his arrival in prison, i.e., 15 July 1911, Vinayak was condemned to complete solitary confinement for a period of six months. If picking oakum and the oil mill were exacting for the body, not speaking to anyone or having any kind of human contact or interaction for this long took a toll on his mind. He notes poignantly:
To speak to none, to discuss with none, and to keep on looking at my naked body so shabby, so dust-covered, so sweated by the work on the oil-mill, a work that I had to do for the best part of the day. The body used to be full of perspiration, the dust thrown up by the turning wheel of the mill as it crushed and ground down the pieces of dry coconut fruit for oil, with other dust mixed up in it, had clung to it all over—this was the experience from which the mind revolted with disgust. It went on like this from hour to hour, from day to day, and, who knows, it might continue from month to month, and lengthen out into years. I began to hate myself. 40
To make matters worse, on 14 August 1911, a day before Vinayak was harnessed to the oil mill he received a letter from Bombay University. It was from the secretary of the education department stating that under Section 18 of the Indian Universities Act, the BA degree conferred on him was set to be cancelled. The senate of Bombay University in their meeting on 1 July 1911 had come to this conclusion in the wake of his conviction and sentence in the Nasik Conspiracy Case. Interestingly, Justice Chandavarkar, who was among the three-judge bench that sentenced Vinayak, was also the vice chancellor of Bombay University at that time and he ratified this decision. An education that Vinayak had obtained after such hardships and had managed to pass with exemplary performance was ruthlessly stripped off him. 41 This added immensely to his mental agony.
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By the end of 1911, the British government was busy organizing the Delhi Durbar. The festivities were to be held between 7 and 16 December 1911 and the actual coronation on 12 December. Earlier that year, on 22 June, George V had taken over as the emperor. The Delhi Durbar was being held to proclaim him and his wife, Queen Mary, as the new emperor and empress of India. All the princes of the native states, thousands of landed gentry and persons of eminence were to gather to pay their obeisance to their new masters. The impending coronation durbar had given rise to rumours that many political prisoners would be pardoned. Vinayak, however, was extremely sceptical about the possibility of any concession from the government as it had barely been a couple of months since his arrival.
The official protocol demanded that all political prisoners submit clemency petitions to the government seeking their release and pardon as part of the Delhi Durbar goodwill gesture. Accordingly, everyone, including Vinayak, submitted their petitions to the jail authorities. Vinayak’s petition was received on 30 August 1911. Although no copy of this petition is extant, there remains only a reference to this in his ‘Jail History Ticket’. 42 While most of the other prisoners did not receive any response, Vinayak’s petition was answered in less than a week. On 3 September 1911, he received a terse reply from the government which said: ‘Petition Rejected’. 43 It came as no surprise to him.
The other prisoners hung on to their hopes till the official announcement was made. The Bengali revolutionaries believed in the anecdotes floating around about how their contemporary, Barin Ghose’s brother, Aurobindo Ghose, saw Lord Krishna in the jail where he was lodged after being tried in the Alipore Bomb Case. He was released later, after which he renounced politics and revolution and took to spiritual pursuits in the French colony of Pondicherry. Based on his vision of Lord Krishna and the message he received thereby, Aurobindo had prophesied that the Lord, speaking through him, was saying: ‘Go, you young men, go! You are sentenced today, but I assure you that you will come back free within three years from now.’ 44 Clutching on to this vague proverbial straw, the sinking men at Cellular Jail fervently believed that Aurobindo’s prophecy would come true and at the worst, they had just three more years to pass in this misery. The Delhi Durbar seemed to them like this dream was indeed coming true. They had begun building castles in the air about when they would leave, which train they would take back to their homes, inviting fellow prisoners to their homes too.
The evening before the announcement was to be made, Mirza Khan came running to announce that ‘Bada Babu has been released’. Vinayak was shocked because he had already received the official reply. His fellow prisoners exulted for him, shook his hands and congratulated him on his release. Vinayak was circumspect and refused to believe this till it was officially announced. The next morning, all the political prisoners had gathered in large numbers near the prison’s main gate where the announcement was to be made. It seemed to them a mere formality before the gates would open and they would be set free. Barrie walked in with a list in his hand and said that those whose names he read out would have a remission of one month in a year of their sentence.
No one was granted complete pardon or release. Though the excitement abated, a month’s remission still seemed good enough when compared to their hell. Many names were read out; Babarao’s among them too. This meant that he would have twenty-five months reduced from his total sentence. However, Vinayak’s name did not feature in the list. It was obvious that the government considered him dangerous enough to not let him out of the clutches of Cellular Jail even for a brief while. Barrie walked up to Vinayak sympathetically; the one with the longest sentence had not received even a day’s pardon. Vinayak recounts that this was the darkest day of despair, fear and melancholy for the inmates. But he was keen to know if the country had received some concessions on this momentous day, even if he had failed to procure any. He was delighted to know that the government had withdrawn the proposal to partition Bengal, something he had agitated against as a student in Poona. It had also been announced at the Durbar that the capital of British India was being shifted from Calcutta to Delhi.
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Many prisoners were let out of the jail for outside work after they had completed six months of stay. In Vinayak’s case, while his solitary confinement of six months ended on 15 January 1912, he was not let out of prison even after he had adhered to all prison norms. He candidly admits in his memoir that he wanted to shorten the time of his sentence and so maintained good conduct. 45 He believed it was not prudent to rub the jail officials the wrong way and get on the wrong side of law while in prison, where the balance of power was skewed against him. Other prisoners were free to mix among themselves a little more than before; they could even talk to each other. But this concession too was kept away from Vinayak. He was allowed to leave his cell, but only to sit in the gallery or opposite his cell door, all by himself. When the others were let out of the prison, Vinayak was to present himself at the courtyard for his kolhu work.
On one such hot afternoon while pulling the grinding mill, Vinayak began panting for breath and felt faint. His stomach was cramped and excruciating pain wracked his body. He fell to the ground and his eyes closed. For a couple of minutes, a sense of nothingness engulfed him. This near-death experience opened
his mind to the idea that leaving the body was a far better proposition than making it endure so much pain and suffering. He had contemplated suicide once before, when he had been recaptured in Marseilles and put into a cramped furnace of a cabin at Aden. That night the drive to finish his life and its sufferings once and for all was intense. He kept looking at the barred window from which several frustrated prisoners had hung themselves to their deaths. In the intense tussle in his mind, between his desire for death and the voice of reason, the latter prevailed. He decided that if he were to die, he should do so after killing an enemy of the country and not in this cowardly fashion.
Working at the oil mill occasionally led him to interactions with other political prisoners. They would communicate stealthily without catching the attention of the inspecting officers. Vinayak realized that many of these young revolutionaries, although brave at heart and undaunted in spirit, lacked the awareness of politics, history, economics or international affairs. While this did not take away from their courage or their patriotic spirit, Vinayak felt that as someone who had spent considerable time studying these subjects, it was his duty to educate and enlighten them so that they became more focused and strategic in their approach and struggle for freedom once they were released. Many had begun to lose hope and so Vinayak played a good counsellor and motivated them with stories from history and mythology. They began to communicate a few words among themselves through commonly agreed sign language. As he recounts:
They talked freely, they imagined boldly; they revelled in happy dreams of the future; and they recovered the balance of their minds and the poise of their souls. Their courage to fire and to endure was deepened; its blunted edge had recovered its sharpness; and, when they dispersed, they went away, each to his cell, taking leave of one another, like happy and loving brothers. It was there that I enrolled them and other prisoners of the settlement as members of my ‘Abhinava Bharat’. It was here that they took their solemn oath to be true to the cause and serve it ever with their lives. 46
The lack of books proved to be a major obstacle. Prisoners were given a book to read only on Sundays. The warder carried them in a net bag like vegetables and threw them into each room. These were collected back from them the same evening. No exchange of books between prisoners was allowed. As per rules, prisoners got an opportunity to read from their collection between four and six in the evening. But the daily chore would leave them too exhausted to contemplate reading. Being of poor educational background himself, Barrie detested anyone who was found reading or writing, and they would be thrown for the kolhu work.
Slowly, with the connivance of some warders, Vinayak managed to hold small classes for fellow political prisoners on history, the lives of revolutionaries, global politics and so on. Following a few more strikes in the prison, after that of Nand Gopal, some concession was granted and gatherings among them were allowed. Vinayak’s classes became more open and regular. The political prisoners were always keen on knowing about latest developments in India, but they were not given newspapers to read. However, they occasionally figured out a way to smuggle in copies of newspapers such as the Local Mail or London Times . Some of the revolutionaries who went out of the jail to work would get opportunities to meet Indians settled in the colony. They were sympathetic to the cause of the revolutionaries and surreptitiously slipped in either information or newspapers. The new batch of ‘chalans’ who came in every few months also brought with them the latest information about the mainland.
Since slate or paper was never given, Vinayak used thorns to write on the white walls of the cell. He advised his ‘students’ too to do the same and summarize their discussions and learning of the day’s lesson on their walls. This gave the prisoners some intellectual break from the monotony of physical toil and their wretched lives. In fact, Vinayak would inscribe several of his poems on the walls, and just to spite and frustrate him, Barrie would order the walls to be whitewashed. But little did he know that Vinayak had an elephantine memory and would memorize the verses. In Vinayak’s own words:
As soon as I was locked up inside the room and the door was shut, I would begin to write on the wall with that pencil [made of the thorns] in columns, which I drew upon it. All the walls of the 7th chawl were thus scrawled over and each constituted for me a book by itself. For example, the cell in which I was confined to weave the stranded cord was written with a full outline of Spencer’s ‘First Principles’. My poem ‘Kamala’ was composed and copied in full on the walls of this seventh division. In another cell I wrote all the definitions of political economy as I had learnt from Mill’s Work on the subject. My object was that when I was changed from that room to another, a political prisoner, brought in there, may learn those definitions as he was learning that subject from me. With a little management such a student could succeed being put up in this lock-up. He could then learn them off in a month before his turn came for transference elsewhere. As I was being changed from division to division I saw to it that every division and every cell in that division had its writings on the walls from my improvised pen. And the political prisoners who had turned students took the fullest advantage of these written tablets—their books of study. 47
In addition to the lack of literature or paper to write, the prisoners were allowed to write only one yearly letter to their families. It was supposed to be an open letter that was first read and censored by the jailor, next by a British officer and dispatched only after their approvals. They were warned that these letters could not contain a single word against jail authorities. Occasionally, a magistrate would call on the prisoners to find out how they were doing. But even here any word or discussion, any petition regarding the ill-treatment meted out to them was impossible to articulate. The people or political leaders in India had absolutely no idea what was going on within the dreaded walls of the Cellular Jail.
The first letter that Vinayak was allowed to write to his younger brother Narayanrao was eighteen months after his arrival. In this letter, dated 15 December 1912, he laments that given the time it has taken for him to put pen to paper, he might as well unlearn the art of writing itself altogether. The family had received a letter from Babarao in July 1912. Vinayak was delighted to know that Narayanrao had been released from prison after the Nasik Conspiracy Case trial and had joined a medical course in dentistry in Calcutta. He lived at 98, Premchand Boral Street, Bow Bazar. 48 Jokingly, Vinayak mentioned that he hoped his brother would not lose his heart to a Bengali girl, adding that he favoured inter-provincial marriages. It was much better to have a Bengali wife as compared to ‘marrying the European girls at this stage of our national life’. 49 Since no adverse report could be given about jail life, Vinayak painted a pleasant picture, saying that he never had any serious illness since the time of coming there and was in sound physical and mental health. The regimen he narrated also sounds idyllic when one compares it to his memoir, as well as those of his fellow prisoners. But even in this condition, his eagerness to know more about what was happening in India and the world comes through:
In your answer please inform me how our dear Motherland is getting on. Is the Congress united? Does it pass the resolution for the release of the political prisoners from year to year as it did at Allahabad in 1910? Any remarkable Swadeshi enterprise like the iron works of Tata or Steam Navigation Company or New Mills? How is the Republic of China? Does it not sound like Utopia realized? A Romance of History . Don’t suppose that China’s work is a day’s. No, from 1850 they have been strenuously at it though the world knows not where the Sun is making its way—till it is risen: and Persia, Portugal, and Egypt? And are the Indians in South Africa successful in getting their demands? Please do mention if any important law has been passed by the new councils, e.g., the Education Bill of the Hon. Mr Gokhale. When the great Tilak is due to be released? 50
He adds further, about his compatriot revolutionaries possibly:
I cannot name, for obvious reasons, others with whose memory my heart is now overw
helmingly full. Tell them all that I remember each and all of them. How can I forget them? No, a man in a prison cannot forget. The mind, shut up from the new impressions can only feed on the old ones, and so in a prison so far from forgetting old acquaintances that one vividly remembers and begins to love even those who were before forgotten: My sweet friends, in a prison one weeps and weeps and vainly waits for someone to come to wipe the tears—to speak a word of affection, and love . . . To all those please give my affection and love who you know were my sweet friends and comrades and dearer than life to me, and to those who even when some were not ashamed to disown the ties of blood, are still standing by you, and remember me my deepest obligations are due. 51
While Vinayak managed to overcome his suicidal tendencies by finding a mission for himself, not everyone was as strong-willed. Indu Bhushan Roy was one such prisoner. He was a young man convicted in the Maniktala Bomb Case and sentenced by the sessions judge of Alipore on 6 May 1909 to ten years’ rigorous imprisonment in the Andamans. He arrived at the Cellular Jail in December 1909. Indu had found the kolhu work excruciating and was looking forward to being let off from the prison to work outside. Unfortunately, it turned out to be more fatiguing and humiliating than what he faced inside. On many occasions when he suffered from high fever and dysentery while working outside, he was not taken to a doctor and instead made to walk back to his cell in the evening. When he refused to go outside to work, Barrie was furious. He was ordered to immediately get to the kolhu.
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