Excerpted with permission from The New Icon: Savarkar and the Facts by Arun Shourie.
Without a shred of doubt, incarceration in the Cellular Jail in Andamans was an ordeal of the worst kind. The dungeon-like cells. The solitary confinement. The anaemic food. The cruel warders and jailor, and the extreme maltreatment by them. The beatings. The all-too-frequent caning. The daily abuse and humiliation. The punishments: the already scanty ration cut to starvation level; being placed in chains and handcuffs for six months at a time; being made to stand for two weeks at a time with iron fetters on one’s legs and around one’s feet; being locked in a cage. Like others, Savarkar was subjected to them—solitary confinement, to stand for a week with handcuffs; chain-fetters; crossbar fetters . . . ‘work’, diabolically designed to break the prisoner—pounding coir, extracting oil as the bullock does by pushing the shaft round and round the ‘oil mill’ to the point one fainted yoked to the ‘mill’ . . . Many died of exhaustion, from hunger and malnutrition, from overwork, from chronic dysentery, tuberculosis, asthma, phthisis, malaria and unbearable pain. Some went mad. Chakraborty was to recall that on the average three inmates committed suicide every month. About 400 of the prisoners were hanged or shot. Worse than even these, was the daily abuse, the sheer helplessness to which one was driven. And there was no appeal—the perpetrators were the judges. Savarkar’s health broke down. He spent almost a year and a half in the jail’s hospital. Even as he was dissuading others from committing suicide, at one point, he says, he himself thought of killing himself. That someone should do everything that he could to get out of the place is perfectly understandable.
Arun Shourie
The New Icon: Savarkar and the Facts
Penguin Random House India, 2025
Why then have the petitions attracted so much censure and derision?
The first, of course, is the contrast with what Bhagat Singh and others said as they faced execution. Recall Ram Prasad Bismil mounting the gallows with Bismil Azimabadi’s Sarfaroshi ki tammana ab hamaare dil mein hai on his lips.
The second is the halo that has been stuck around Savarkar. When people read the petitions, they naturally wonder whether a ‘Veer’ would plead in this way.
Also read: Is Savarkar a Gujarati Writer?
Third, Savarkar himself did not seem to have been comfortable with the fact that he had submitted the petitions. He certainly did not own up to them. In the letters that he wrote to his family, and in his copious My Transportation for Life, he does mention the sort of grounds on which he has asked the Government to reduce his sentence, to transfer him back to a jail on the mainland, to give him a chance to work in constitutional ways. But in those accounts, it is as if an equal is talking to equals, almost as if a Barrister is arguing in court. There is none of the beseeching that we have encountered above. No hint that he has offered to be of service to the Government in whatever capacity they deem fit. No hint of the conditions he has told the Government he is ready to accept.
Next, there is the reaction of his own associates and admirers when they heard that he had accepted conditions for being released.
…
Then there is the image of an uncompromising, fiery, ready-for-death image that Savarkar himself had built of himself. His autobiography, his newsletters from England, his My Transportation for Life, his Samagra, the pseudonymous Life of Barrister Savarkar are all full of passages that lead one to think of him as one prepared to run any risk, to face any hardship, to stare death in its face, to die. A little volume can be filled with those passages.
Also read: Sanatan Dharma: An Ideology or the Entire Hindu Community?
Savarkar and his friends have set up the Mitra Mandal, a fledgling group that it will be said gave birth to revolutionaries and revolutionary organizations. Savarkar and his friends think much of their secret meetings. They feel that they are sowing the seeds of mass upheaval. And, therefore, are under the constant watch of the Government and its agents. Queen Victoria has died. Some of Savarkar’s friends, he says, urge that they hold a memorial meeting and pass a condolence resolution so as to allay suspicion about them and their activities. Savarkar as good as scolds them:
“Our country alone is our Emperor. We do not know any other Emperor. This is a golden opportunity to show that there is at least one institution that will proclaim this radiant truth. We should not become afraid ourselves and lose this opportunity. If this organisation is closed down for this reason, we will have to take its life to have been successful. Whenever it wants, the British Government jails even those who write with great circumspection. Then, why should we not speak the truth? Let us unfurl that resplendent emblem of independence openly. Even if we are able to do so for a moment and in the next moment we are killed by a bullet, no reason to worry. Because the cremation pyre of persons who die thus sends out sparks, and the palaces of foreign rulers are reduced to ashes in the fire that these sparks light. Those who say that those who make such attempts are hanged, well let them say what they will. We also know that much. The hanging of Chapekar gave birth to us, our hanging will give birth to others, and this lineage shall remain intact. …”
In another typical piece, we have him proclaim once again that there is no way to attain independence other than armed revolution. We have to break the weapons and power of the enemy by better weapons and greater power, he says. In no case in history, has independence been won except by triumphing in a violent, armed fight. If people are not up to this, he says, then they cannot have freedom. This is as unalterable a law as laws of nature.
…
It is from such passages—and even the ones of which the preceding are a summary, much longer and more colourful—that his image of a revolutionary was embossed on people’s minds. Naturally, when the contents of the petitions burst into view, many were nonplussed.
