I remember growing up with my grandmother and other members of the extended family talking about relatives and family friends who were in jail during the independence movement. As I grew up and realised the social taboo that is the jail and imprisonment, the enormity of the task accomplished by our freedom fighters struck home. The leaders of our independence struggle had, in my opinion, performed something of a coup d’etat of perception by taking the symbol of punishment and defame, and converting it into the epitome of pride and sacrifice.
And it was gleefully that I gloated at this masterstroke that went a long way in you and I breathing this free air. The times of the people in jail, over countless tellings of the story had become tales of bravado, honour, courage, resilience and to be honest, it had started seeming like it was a party in there. I had never visited a colonial jail, you see. Then I went to one, confident and with my chest puffed up, I entered on a fine spring day and it wasn’t long before everything I had imagined, constructed and enacted several times in my head fell to pieces almost instantly as the very air was simultaneously sucked out of me. The jail was the Cellular Jail of the Andaman Islands. Notorious in the freedom struggle as the dreaded Sazaa – e – Kala Pani.
Why ‘Kaala Pani’, you ask? The romantic notion is that monsoons would make the seas appear black and hence the ‘black water’ sobriquet. Yet, the more befitting derivation for the name is the word kaal in Sanskrit that means time or death and since only the luckiest ever returned, the name was a fitting description.
The context of the creation of an incarceration facility in the Andaman Islands stemmed from the First War of Independence in 1857. The charge for the profitable province that was India was taken up directly by the British Government and the holdings of the East India Company became an imperial colony. The first act that was deemed necessary was to display a firmness of resolve against any who rose against the Empire. The East India Company had tried making a colony in Andaman in 1789 but had abandoned it in 1796 due to outbreak of disease. However, after India’s First War of Independence, the British thought it imperative to have a penal colony away from the mainland for the ‘hardcore’ elements.
Transporting the freedom fighters of ‘The Great Outbreak’ would serve as a terrible punishment to them. As per Hindu customs, crossing the sea would make one an outcast. This saagarolanghan or samudraolanghan wipes away the varna status and crossing the sea would make the sepoys, who were mostly Brahmins and Kshatriyas, to lose their caste, so precious to every Indian and the very thought of it would serve as a crippling psychological fear.
Introduction of the ‘chain gang’
At first, Ross Island, just off the coast from Port Blair became the administrative headquarters of the British. The prisoners brought from various parts of the mainland, while bound in iron chains cleared the forests and built the colony at Ross Island. The prisoners were put on the hardest labour in the settlement. They had to work about nine hours a day in the tropical climate and dense forest. They were engaged not only for clearing thick tropical jungles but also employed in digging wells, cutting earth, filling swamps, cooking and constructing huts. Convicts were handcuffed together in pairs and these handcuffs were never opened. During working hours the worst characters were taken to sea beach, and an iron bar being passed through the fetters of a number of them, they were thus fastened to the earth, and made to do what they could in a sitting posture. After the buildings of Ross Island were completed, the prisoners were moved to nearby Viper Island. With the occupation of the Viper Island on 8 October 1858, a new form of punishment called the ‘chain gang’ was introduced. The prisoners who were sentenced to undergo this punishment by the Superintendent’s Court, were chained together and locked up at night by a chain running through their legs through the coupling of irons. Solitary cells, lock-ups, stocks and whipping stands characterised the Viper Jail which was built between 1864-1867. In effect, this was the first jail on the Andaman Islands. It also housed a gallows atop a hillock.
The early days of building Ross Island headquarters and the Viper Jail were very torturous. There was a lack of building material. There was no accommodation and place to stay. It got very bad, especially in the monsoon months. The temporary thatched roof tents leaked and several freedom fighters and heroes of the first war of independence died due to disease and lack of food and other basic amenities. As per many accounts, at least in the early days, there were no last rites performed for the convicts who died. They were either buried in shallow graves on the sandy beaches or taken for a burial at sea.
Towards the end of the 19th century, the jails at Viper Island were complete and functional. They were also overcrowded as the freedom struggle had intensified on the mainland and more prisoners were being sent to the Andamans. Ironically, after the worst of the initial conditions were bettered, the quality of life as a prisoner was considered good here and prisoners preferred to come to Andamans than other Indian jails. For these reasons, the British decided it was necessary to build a more severe penal facility for the offenders sentenced to Kala Pani which could hold them in solitary confinement.
The Cellular Jail of Andaman
The Cellular Jail started being constructed at Port Blair in 1896 and was completed in 1906. It is a three storied structure shaped like a large starfish. Seven wings radiate from a central watch tower and 698 people could be kept in solitary confinement. Each cell was just 13.5×7.5 feet wide and at a height of 3m was the sole ventilator in the cell. The central tower had a large bell to raise an alarm in case of any eventuality. The cells were designed such that the face of a cell in a wing saw the back of cells in another wing making communication impossible. Due to these cells of solitary confinement the incarceration facility got its name – Cellular Jail.
All measures were taken by the British to ensure that political prisoners and revolutionaries were isolated from each other, made to work like beasts to break their resolve and humiliated at the slightest pretext. The prisoners daily work included peeling coconuts and extracting oil from them. A daily minimum quantity of oil (30 pounds of coconut oil and 10 pounds of mustard oil) was fixed for each prisoner, extracting anything less was punished by flogging. Prisoners were put in yoke and made to go round and round like bullocks to extract oil. Outside they were forced to clear the jungles and trees on hillside levelling marshy land. Refusal to do any of the tasks would result in flogging. Rebellion would incur beatings, often till death and complete stoppage of food.
Rain water, infested with worms was the normal drinking water. Often, wild grass would be boiled and served as food. Prisoners are said to have been routinely tortured and experimented upon by British army doctors. The army doctors would give certificates stating that the prisoners were fit enough to be flogged. There were secret pharmaceutical trials. One being the drug Cinchona alkaloid made from the bark of the Cinchona tree imported from Peru. The quinine made from the distilled bark would one day make for a natural antimalaria drug. However during the trial phase, with the rough preparation and dosage, the British noted a higher suicide rate amongst inmates.
The list of people incarcerated here knows no boundary of religion, language or state. It reads as a list of the greater heroes of the freedom struggle. Batukeshwar Dutt, who along with Bhagat Singh bombed the Assembly in Delhi, the Moplah Rebels, the revolutionaries of the Chittagong Uprising, Gadar Party revolutionaries, those named in the Alipore Conspiracy Case. And the most famous one of them all, Veer Savarkar who was sentenced for 50 years in 1910 but released after 11 years, in 1921.
Tales of horror
Accounts and tales of people incarcerated in this dreadful cauldron of human suffering would break the strongest heart. Bankim Chakraborty called Indian jails a Begum’s paradise compared to Andamans. He says – “I was trussed up out in the yard. Flogged until our skin split. Or we were half-drowned, bound like chickens and dunked in salt water until we were gasping. In 1935, I was hung for weeks at a time from a peg, high above my head, my face pressed against the bricks.”
Another freedom fighter Chattar Singh was suspended in an iron suit for three years. Baba Bhan Singh had been beaten to death. Ram Raksha had starved himself to death as a protest at the removal of the sacred Brahminical threads from around his chest. Of the several jailers and other officials and attendants at the Cellular jail, one that stands out particularly is David Barry whose tales in all accounts are one of a person completely devoid of any moral fibre or stand of humanity and ready to subdue all with vile abuse and crude violence.
The conditions at this inhuman facility continued till the 1930’s when a massive hunger strike began call to attention to their suffering. The British on their part tried their best to conceal the news of this uprising in the Andamans itself. They also tried force feeding the inmates on hunger strike. A mixture of milk, sugar and eggs was forced down a catheter inserted from the nose. Mahavir Singh, an associate of Bhagat Singh from the Lahore Conspiracy case, where Assistant Police Superintendent Saunders had been murdered, was force fed this way and died as the ‘food’ entered his lungs. He was tied to a stone and thrown into the sea. The first hunger strike was quelled this way.
In 1937, another hunger strike was called, though people knew full well the fate of Mahavir Singh. Soon 230 people joined in this hunger strike. The news spread like fire through Bengal and the country got behind the prisoners. A telegram arrived from Gandhiji – “Nation-wide request to abandon the strike… trying best to secure relief for you. MK Gandhi”. In September 1937, following the protests, the first group of prisoners was repatriated. The Cellular Jails were forced to empty in 1939 and two years later, the Japanese seized the islands transforming them into a prisoner of war camp where, in a perhaps deserving twist of fate, the warders became the prisoners.
An eternal flame – the second in India – is lit at the jail. The first one is at Jalianwala Baugh. Ironic isn’t it? That the place of such torture and strife is amongst the most sought after leisure destination within the country? And about my day-dreams of how glorious it would have been to be ailed? They died a brutal death in mere seconds and will never compare even in the wildest of imaginations with the brutal lives lived by those to whose sacrifices we owe, and will owe till the day we die, every free breath we take…
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Akul Tripathi
The writer is a media professional and freelance writer.[/column]