Standing in the hot sun and working inhumanely for six hours straight, Sushil Dasgupta's hands are stained with his own blood. In the same rhythm, his whole body is sweating as he constantly breaks the coconut and removes the fiber from its husk. The throat is dry and has become wood. He stopped work for a moment and asked the guard to give him a glass of water. The water didn't match, but a new brutal game started with the guards' face-to-face remarks. Sushil, who was wearing handcuffs, was told to walk and fetch water for everyone from the nearby river. As he walked some distance through the thorny forest, a stream of blood flowed from his weary body. Sushil lost consciousness and remained there. Not even a sip of water was added to his forehead like last time.
Numerous political prisoners like Sushil have lost their lives while working in such an inhuman environment. Under the British colonial rule, potentially young people who could stand up against colonialism were sent to the Andaman Cellular Jail in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands near the Bay of Bengal as punishment. To the common people, the jail is better known as 'Kalapani'. ‘Kala’ here means death, and ‘Pani’ is associated with the name as it is located on the coast of the Bay of Bengal.
Kalapani or Cellular Jail is a former prison located in the Andaman Islands of India. The construction of this prison was completed in 1906. Many prominent activists of the Indian independence movement such as Batukeshwar Dutt, Ullaskar Dutt and Binayak Damodar Savarkar were imprisoned in this jail. Now this building is being used as a national memorial. The only cellular gel in the Andaman Islands is made of terracotta brick.
Kalapani was one of the infamous prisons set up in India during the British rule, especially to hold the anti-British revolutionaries in Bengal. Prominent protesters and activists like Batukeshwar Dutt, Ullaskar Dutt, Binayak Damodar Savarkar, who took part in India's freedom struggle, were imprisoned in Kalapani. The cellular prison is located in the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal, 1,255 and 1,151 km from Kolkata and Madras respectively.
The Andaman Islands have been used as a prison camp by the British since the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857. However, no separate prison was built at that time. On 12 June 1889, it was decided to establish this colony in the Andaman Islands of India. Finally, in 1893, as part of that colony, cellular prisons were built. In just three years, in 1896, the construction work of Kalapani was completed through the tireless work of about six hundred prisoners day and night. It is like digging one's own grave with one's own hands and arranging for the rest to sleep in that grave. In the first anti-British movement, the rebels did not get along well with the British. Most of the rebels were suppressed by killing, while the rest were sent into exile in the Andamans with life imprisonment.
Hundreds of rebels who took part in the Sepoy Mutiny were sent to the Andamans under the supervision of prison guard David Barry and military physician Major James Pattinson Walker. The number of prisoners gradually increased, and the anger of the prisoners increased much more than this number. Clearing the forest, cutting wood, fetching water - while doing these things, they see innumerable corpses here and there. Meanwhile, some British visitors came and declared the place unsuitable for human habitation. But the British authorities did not listen to those words. Where else could there be a safer place to hide political prisoners? Prison authorities released the prisoner as soon as he told them that he had escaped and died.
Meanwhile, on April 1868, 236 prisoners escaped from the jail and were caught. 87 of them were hanged. The situation of the rest has nothing to say separately. Those who did not have the good fortune to die at once, the barbaric British without their world. Unable to bear the inhuman torture, some would go insane, some would die prematurely. In this way, they made a mockery in the name of justice by arresting the protesting people who raised their voices against the colonial rule day by day. Most of the prisoners were arrested from Bengal and Burma.
Prisoners were terrified of the strong currents and black water of the Andamans, and it was almost impossible to cross this path by swimming. There is no way out of this desolate island. Therefore, Kalapani became a favorite place of the British to punish the freedom fighters. They were chained and forced to build new homes on the island, including prisons, where British exploitative authorities could spend their days in comfort. Prisoners were also forced to build jetties in the Andamans to further strengthen colonialism. In the late nineteenth century, when India's independence was taking the form of a coup d'etat, the need for high-security prisons for arrested political prisoners became vital.
Sir Charles James, Home Secretary of the British Raj, and Surgeon General of the British Administration. S. Lathbridge suggested that inmates in the Andaman Cellular Jail should be subjected to harsher punishments for a minimum period of time. If everyone dies like this in the field, it will be more noticeable to the people of India. From that thought, Kalapani was made in the Andamans by combining innumerable small cells. It is called cellular gel because of this cell-like structure.
Unable to bear so much torture, the prisoners often attacked the English sepoys. It is also known that there were casualties of English soldiers. Most of the famous revolutionary prisoners who were imprisoned in the Andaman Cellular Jail at different times and different periods were involved in the Indian freedom struggle. Diwan Singh Kalepani, Fazle Haque Khairabadi, Jogendra Shukla, Hemchandra Das, Savarkar brothers, Ganesh Ghosh, Ananta Singh, Loknath Bal, Ullaskar Dutta, Maharaja Trilokyanath Chakraborty, Batukeshwar Dutta, Ullaskar Dutta among them.
Some of those arrested in the 1908 Alipore case, such as Barindra Kumar Ghosh, were sent to the Andamans. Upendranath Bandyopadhyay, Birendra Chandra Singh, Bagish Jatin's living companion Jatish Chandra Pal and others were later transferred to Bahrampur Jail in Bengal. Jatish Chandra Pal died mysteriously there in 1924. The Savarkar brothers, Babarao and Binayak, have not known for two years that they are in separate cells in the same jail.
The prison first attracted the attention of the general public in the early thirties. The prisoners all went on a hunger strike. Mahabir Singh first went on a hunger strike to protest the inhumane treatment of the British. To resist him, the British authorities tried to break the fast by forcing him to drink milk, but unfortunately the milk went straight into his respiratory tract. He died instantly. His body was dumped in the Bay of Bengal. In 1937-38, the British government, under the mediation of Mahatma Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore, took the initiative to transfer the freedom-loving prisoners.
In 1942, the Japanese government expelled the British from the Andaman Islands. At that time, Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose with his 'Azad Hind Fauj' occupied the island on November 7, 1943 and hoisted the flag of independent India. He named the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Shahid and Swaraj Islands. However, two years later, in 1945, the British government recaptured the archipelago. But by then the sun of British rule in India had set. So they released all the prisoners in the Andaman Cellular Jail and forced the colony to close forever. But until then, the black chapter that has taken its place in the pages of history will forever be etched in people's memory.
The cellular prison building had seven wings, all like the wheels of a bicycle that came together at one point. The total number of cells in the three-storey wings was 693. There was only one prisoner in each cell, and there was no arrangement for anyone to see anyone's face. There were innumerable guards on guard all the time. There were giant alarms for emergencies.
Even then the British could not stop the freedom-loving people. No evil force could stop them. That is why the Indian subcontinent has become independent today. In 1969, the building was recognized as a national monument. At present, it is well-known as a place of interest to people in India and other parts of the world.
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Nice article.