Click to play videoAndaman (Andaman and Nicobar Islands): The Cellular Jail in the Andaman Islands, better known as Kalapani or black waters was called the place from where no man could ever return.
It was a place of punishment for freedom fighters who dared to defy the British.
Kalapani found its place in history because of Veer Savarkar who was brought to the Cellular Jail in 1911 when he was caught trying to escape from a ship in Marseille. The Cellular jail was every Indian's nightmare, notorious for torture and solitary confinement.
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| Veer Savarkar was brought to Kalapani in 1911 when he was caught trying to escape from a ship in Marseille. |
"So many of the people were tortured and they used to hung with their head down in the sun," an old settler of the island, P L Roy says.
However, today India's former Bastille is a place of pilgrimage. It stands for what our freedom fighters had to go through in their fight for independence.
The gallows haven't been used in years but they bring back images of the painful deaths that Cellular Jail witnessed.
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| The gallows bring back images of the painful deaths that Cellular Jail witnessed. |
The prisoners' only access to food was a makeshift machine with a bowl attached to the top. Their meals would appear through a small hole in the floor of their cells. And through little windows, high up on the wall, prisoners like Savarkar would try to hold on to every ray of sunlight that came in.
A controversial clemency from the British government which Savarkar got after he promised to give up revolutionary activities brought Savarkar back to mainland India in 1921. But not all were so lucky.
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| The prisoners only access to food was a makeshift machine with a bowl attached to the top. |
"His idea was to get out of the cellular jail, and so he didn’t mind giving it in writing that he would not participate in the freedom struggle. I don’t see any wrong in that," Archana Herse of the Veer Savarkar Smrity says.
Today the Cellular Jail is a national memorial, a museum where the past has been carefully preserved. The walls have a fresh coat of paint and the corridors where the footsteps of the guards sounded menacing to the prisoners no longer evoke fear.
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| The Cellular Jail today is a national memorial, a museum where the past has been carefully preserved. |
But there is a belief in the Andaman's that the spirit of freedom and the freedom fighters still lives around the hallowed corridors of the Celluar Jail.
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