LEGENDS BEHIND MONUMENTS

KALA PANI Cellular jail or popularly known as Kala pani was one of the most dreadful jails of its time. Its main purpose was to imprison nationalists and fighters of independence. It acquired the name, ‘cellular’ because it is made up of individual cells for the solitary confinement. 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 solitary confinement was such that the Savarkar brothers Babarao and Vinayak Damodar didn’t know about each other for two years though they were in the same jail. There is a long list of distinguished political prisoners in the cellular jail. The Savarkar brothers, Pandit Parmanand, Ladha Ram, Indu Bhushan Roy, Pulin Das, Trailokyanath Chakravarthy, Gurumukh Singh and Babu Ram Hari are

some of them. It was after

India’s first war for independence in 1857 that the British used Andaman islands as a colonial prison to house the rebels. The first batch of 200 were transported for life under the custody of jailor David Barry and Major James Pattison Walker. The surviving inmates were subject to the daily flogging, torture, the hangings, suicides, cases of insanity, failed

jailbreaks and hunger strike. Mahavir Singh, an associate of Bhagat Singh (Lahore conspiracy case) who protested the inhuman treatment meted to the prisoners and sat in hunger strike. He was force fed milk which went into his lungs and he died. He was tied to a stone and thrown in the sea. No one got to know of his murder. Such was the extent of British cruelty. The British made sure that a sense of fear be instilled in the inmates if they tried even a slight rebellion, such incidences turned into horrific stories and anecdotes that creep a sense of fear in each one of us till date.

ACTIVITY TIME

I. NAME ANY THREE FREEDOM FIGHTERS YOU FIND TO BE INSPIRING.

II. NAME ANY TWO POPULAR FREEDOM MOVEMENTS .

III. WRITE A POEM AS A TRIBUTE FOR THE FREEDOM FIGHTERS WHO LOST THEIR LIVES FOR OUR FREEDOM. (NOT MORE THAN 15 LINES)

REFERENCES : 1) http://www.epicchannel.com/show/ekaant

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinayak_Damodar_Savarkar#Prisoner_in_Cellular_Jail_in_Andaman

3) http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/bengaluru/Kala-Panis-horror-stories-revisited/articleshow/21317463.cms