This
film was released in 1996 and when I saw it on First day of its release in
Kakinada, the theatre was not exactly crowded.
It was a film set in British India in the year 1915. The story is about
a young doctor, GovardhanMenon (Mohanlal), wrongly accused of bombing a train
carrying 55 people including British officials.
He is sentenced to serve punishment in
cellular jail at Port Blair, Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The film moved
me – recently seeing it on television choked me with emotions.
‘Kaalapani’
shows the sufferings of hundreds of Indian prisoners in the cellular jail –
the extremely inhumane conditions faced
by the prisoners in the jail are accurately depicted.Alex Draper plays the
sadistic jailor David Berry, who is of Irish descent, while John Kolvenbach
plays the kind-hearted English doctor, Len Hutton. Annu Kapoor plays the role
of Veer Savarkar who is incarcerated and tries his best to keep the spirit of
the prisoners going despite unbelievable torture. Tabu plays Mohanlal's lover
who keeps waiting for him to come back.
Though the British
Doctor Len Hutton takes great efforts, the film ends in an anti-climax – the
Govt decides to investigate the torture meted – 14 persons are ordered to be
released and that includes Mukundan [Prabhu] and Govardhan. The wily warden
Mirza Khan (AmrishPuri), hatches a plan and shoots down 13 prisoners while they
are escaping. Mukundanwho refuses to
escapeis forcibly taken on the pretext of meeting the Chief Commissioner and is
shot and killed. Seeing the dead body of his friend, Govardhan is angered to
the greatest extent and throws down jailor Berry from one of the towers, kills
Mirza Khan by strangling him and even as the British Doctor comes with the
release order, Govardhan is hanged to death.
Kaalapani portrayed the lives of Indian freedom
fighters kept in prison during the British Raj. The film was co-wriiten and
directed by Priyadarshan - originally a Malayalam film, it was dubbed into
Hindi (Saza-E-Kala Pani),Tamil (Siraichalai) and Telugu (KaalaPani). Cinematography was by Santosh Sivan, the music
of Illayaraja was stirring. The film won
three National Film Awards including the awards for Best Art Direction (Sabu
Cyril), Best Special Effects (S. T. Venky) and Best Cinematography (Santosh
Sivan). Along with that it won six Kerala State Film Awards.
The
Cellular Jail, also known as Ka-la- Pa-ani (Black Water), was a colonial prison
in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The
prison was used by the British especially to exile political prisoners to the
remote archipelago. Many notable dissidents such as BatukeshwarDutt and Veer
Savarkar, among others, were imprisoned here during the struggle for India's
independence. Today, the complex serves as a national memorial monument. By some accounts, although, the prison
complex itself was constructed between 1896 and 1906, the British had been
using the Andaman islands as a prison since the days in the immediate aftermath
of the 1857 War of Independence. Those
prisoners underwent torture, cruel treatments many a times, leading to
death.
Guardian had once
reported of some survivors and the tortures that they underwent during British
rule. Living in an apartment with no
bell, in a house with no number, down a lane in Calcutta that had no name,
95-year-old Dhirendra Chowdhury was one of them, concealed among tens of
thousands of logs and reports, all long forgotten, in a New Delhi vault. It was
the start of a paper trail assiduously covered over by the British authorities.Chowdhury
is one of the last survivors of a British penal experiment inflicted upon more
than 80,000 political prisoners. He joined the Indian freedom struggle against
the Raj at 19, like many others recruited into AnushilanSamiti, a covert
Bengali organisation. On October 2, 1931, he had taken part in a robbery to
raise funds for bombs and guns, and the CID had intercepted his getaway car. At
the age of 24, he received an unusual sentence.Prisoner 147 was shipped to the
British version of Devil's Island. Like tens of thousands of political
prisoners before him, Dhirendra was manacled in the hold of a liner and carried
to a remote archipelago in the middle of the Bay of Bengal.Over the past
three-quarters of a century, hundreds had tried to escape from the Andaman
Islands. Those who remained were routinely tortured and experimented upon by
British army doctors who administered the colony, in which thousands died.
"We are
forgotten victims," says Dhirendra. "Back then, all we wanted was
food, and you gave us gruel that was riddled with white threads of worms. We
demanded an end to work gangs, and we ended up chained like bullocks to oil
mills, grinding mustard seed, around and around. We wanted medical aid for our
fevers, and your doctors signed papers stating we were fit enough to flog.
That's why 28 of us went on hunger strike."Among the records of the
Government of India's Home Department, we found the Empire's response in its
Orders to Provincial Governors and Chief Commissioners. "Very Secret:
Regarding security prisoners who hunger strike, every effort should be made to
prevent the incidents from being reported, no concessions to be given to the
prisoners who must be kept alive. Manual methods of restraint are best, then
mechanical when the patient resists."
Escape from
kalapani was surely on all the inmates' mind, but was close to impossible. It was not just the prisoners who suffered.
From the inception of the project, the indigenous inhabitants of the islands,
who had migrated on the trade winds from Africa at least 30,000 years before,
acted out "a pantomime of defiance", emerging from the impenetrable
jungle only to rain down arrows on British settlers.VinayakSavarkar was aboard
the SS Maharaja which docked on July 4, 1911, bringing prisoners to the brand
new Cellular Jail. The wooden ticket around his neck declared that he was there
to serve a 50-year double life sentence. Five years previously, in 1906,
Savarkar had been admitted to chambers in London. The 50th anniversary of the
Lucknow massacre loomed and Lord Curzon's decision to partition Bengal was
threatening to destabilise the province. Savarkar, aged 23, took digs in a
student hostel in Hampstead; he found it had become the headquarters for the
newly-formed Free India Society. He turned his hand to translating Russian bomb
manuals, and hollowing out copies of The Pickwick Papers to be filled with guns
for India.VinayakSavarkar, was accused
of sending arms to the Bengali student revolutionaries, deported to India and
then transported to the new Cellular Jail.
Every
day, the Jail warden would sit puffing on a cigar, watching the prisoners yoked
to a press that they turned until they had produced 30lbs of mustard oil. And
if the college boys fell sick, there was no sanctuary in the prison hospital,
where a new recruit, Dr FA Barker, certified patients fit for flogging. Ullaskar
Dutta was another who was brutalised.
Not sure whether one of the characters who sees many deaths and
threatened ends up insane is a depiction of him.
In Dec 1997, 68 of
them in their twilight years, basked in their moment of glory outside the
infamous Cellular Jail. Physically
infirm, but their spirits still soaring, those freedom fighters and the widows
of those who were incarcerated in the Cellular Jail had assembled there to
receive felicitations at the hands of the President of India in a ceremony marking the Golden Jubilee of
Indian Independence. The idea was conceived and organised by the
Lt.Governor of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Shri Iswari Prasad Gupta, to invite
and honour all the freedom fighters who were locked up in the Cellular Jail
from different parts of the country. It gave an opportunity to those worthy
sons of India to revisit the very jail where they spent years of their youth,
suffering untold inhuman tortures for the sake of their motherland. The history
of Cellular Jail is replete with such charismatic personalities like great
Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and his brother Ganesh Damodar Savarkar, NaniGopal
Mukherjee, Nand Kumar, Putin Das, Bhai Paramanand, Prithvi Singh Azad,
TrailakyaMaharaj, Anata Singh and a host of other revolutionary fighters. The
list is long and distinguished. These
great men, convicted for trying to free their country from the British yoke,
found themselves confronted among others by the notorious, cruel jailer David
Barry who posed as if he was destined to suppress these enemies of British rule
in India with vile abuse and crude violence.
The prisoners were cruelly beaten, abused and subjected to all types of
torture.
Prime
Minister of India, Shri Morarji Desai in Feb 1979, declared the Cellular Jail as a memorial to
the nation. The Indian Bastile stands
today as a mute witness to the hallowed memory of those gallant revolutionaries
who made supreme sacrifices for the sake of their country. As a small poetic justice, David Barry, too had
to pay for his sins. Terminally ill, he was sent to Calcutta somewhere in
mid-1920s, never to reach England. The airport at Port Blair, Andaman and
Nicobar's capital, has been named Veer Savarkar International Airport. The commemorative blue plaque on India House
fixed by the Historic Building and Monuments Commission for England reads
"Vinayak Damodar Savarkar 1883-1966 Indian patriot and philosopher lived here".
With regards – S.
Sampathkumar
25th
Sept. 2015.
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