The Cell That Became A Classroom
By A Draft Correspondent
There is a chapter in 10/3: Exile, Empire And War In The Andamans by Gajanan Khergamker that does not read like history, it reads like an indictment. Chapter 8, titled Savarkar and the Politics of Imprisonment, opens with the Cellular Jail already carrying its reputation across the Indian subcontinent as the most severe symbol of imperial punishment before the man who would define its legacy had even stepped off the ship. That detail matters because it establishes something the conventional nationalist narrative frequently collapses, which is, Savarkar did not make the Cellular Jail infamous. The Cellular Jail was infamous before he arrived and what he did was make it impossible to forget.
Today, May 28, 2026, marks the 143rd birth anniversary of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar. It is an appropriate occasion on which to place before readers a book whose chapter on his imprisonment is among the most precisely researched and analytically honest accounts of those ten years that the published literature on the subject has produced. 10/3: Exile, Empire And War In The Andamans is not a hagiography and it is not a political brief. It is a work of documented history that treats the Andaman Islands as the complex, multi-layered, strategically significant territory they have always been, and that situates Savarkar's incarceration within that larger frame rather than lifting it out for the purposes of either veneration or vilification.
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| The prison cell where Veer Savarkar was held is now a shrine revered by millions |
The chapter establishes at the outset that when Savarkar arrived at Port Blair on July 4, 1911, the administration that received him understood exactly what it had. He was educated, politically influential, and capable of articulating ideological critiques of British rule with a precision that made him a threat not only through his past activities but through his capacity to inspire every other prisoner who came within range of his voice or his writing. The policy of solitary confinement was applied to him with particular strictness for this reason. The narrow brick cell, the constantly patrolled corridor, the high ventilator that admitted light without permitting any view of the outside world, the absolute prohibition on communication with neighbouring prisoners - these were not generic applications of prison procedure. They were targeted responses to a specific man's specific capabilities, and their targeting was the British administration's most accurate assessment of Savarkar ever committed to paper.
What the chapter documents with particular care is the manner in which Savarkar responded to those conditions. Writing materials were not always available. The administration had ensured that. What the administration had not accounted for was memory. The chapter records that Savarkar composed poetry and prose within his cell, retained it through repeated recitation, and transmitted it through coded tapping on brick walls and whispered exchanges during the brief supervised encounters that the prison regime permitted. Fellow prisoners memorised these texts and carried them outward when transferred or released. A solitary cell in the Bay of Bengal became, through this process, a point of intellectual distribution. The prison designed to enforce absolute silence had inadvertently assembled, within its walls, individuals whose combined political thought would continue shaping India's independence movement long after the empire that imprisoned them had ceased to exist.
The oil mill receives its due attention in the chapter. The physical labour at the kolhu - the heavy wooden beam attached to a grinding mechanism, work designed for bullocks and assigned to political prisoners as deliberate humiliation - is documented not merely as a record of suffering but as a register of intent. The colonial administration sought to degrade men whose offences were political by reducing them to the labour of animals. The chapter's account of how Savarkar and fellow prisoners understood and named this intent gives the oil mill its proper historical weight: not as a symbol of victimhood but as evidence of an administration that feared the men it was grinding hard enough to grind them very hard.
The presence of Barindra Kumar Ghosh and Ullaskar Dutta within the same institution receives considered treatment. The Cellular Jail's architecture was designed to prevent interaction between politically influential prisoners. The chapter examines how that design failed at its central purpose - medical inspections, work assignments, and brief supervised encounters created fragments of contact through which ideological exchange occurred, debates about armed resistance and political mobilisation were conducted in the most constrained possible conditions, and a network of shared political thought developed that no brick wall could permanently interrupt. The prison designed to suppress a movement had concentrated its most intellectually capable participants in one building.
The petition controversy, which has been used for decades as a political bludgeon by those who argue that Savarkar compromised with colonial authority, is addressed in the chapter with the analytical precision it requires. The documents are placed in their procedural and institutional context. The 1911 petition was submitted in response to a Government of India initiative inviting all political prisoners to apply. The subsequent petitions were legal arguments about the conditions of confinement, filed by a man who had studied law in London and understood exactly what the documents he was signing did and did not concede. The chapter does not argue that the petitions are irrelevant to understanding Savarkar. It argues that they are relevant only when read in full, in context, with the oil press and the solitary cell and the standing handcuffs in the same frame as the documents themselves.
The Andaman Islands are examined across the book's full scope as a territory whose strategic significance the British understood long before independent India rediscovered it, whose indigenous populations bore the cost of both colonial and post-colonial administrative ambition, and whose penal history is the most extensively documented chapter in a larger story that includes military infrastructure, ecological consequence, and the geopolitical calculation that has made the islands central to India's twenty-first century strategic repositioning in the Indo-Pacific.
Chapter 8 sits within that larger architecture as the book's most intimate chapter, in the specific sense that it brings the reader inside a cell that was barely large enough for a sleeping mat and places them there with a man whose intellectual output under those conditions constitutes one of the most remarkable records of human resilience in the documented history of colonial imprisonment. The chapter does not require the reader to share Savarkar's politics to recognise what was done to him and what he did in response to it. The historical record is sufficient to produce that recognition without any political predisposition, and the chapter makes the historical record available with the rigour that its subject deserves.
On the one hundred and forty-third anniversary of the birth of Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, 10/3: Exile, Empire And War In The Andamans is the book that places his decade in the Cellular Jail where it belongs - not in the contested arena of contemporary political argument, where it is deployed selectively by both sides of a debate neither of which has read the primary sources with care, but in the documented history of a prison, an empire, a set of islands, and a man whose response to fifty years of colonial punishment was to keep writing on the walls.
The walls are still there. So is the writing.
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