01-26-2006, 06:13 PM
<b>India's last freedom heroes recall torture under British rule</b><!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->KOLKATA, India (AFP) - Bimal Bhowmick is 92, his voice frail and his memory failing. But unlike most of India's one billion population he still remembers the cruelty inflicted by the country's former British colonial masters.
Bhowmick is one of the few surviving Indians who went to a jail in the remote Indian Ocean Andaman and Nicobar islands built by the British a century ago as punishment centre for largely non-violent campaigns by freedom fighters against colonial rule.
He also represents a past linked to icons such as the country's father Mahatma Gandhi and first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru that has all but been forgotten as the number of people left from that generation of fighters for independence approaches zero.
Bhowmick is one of only three people out of 104 families who had relatives at the jail to have answered a call from the Indian government which wants to honor them at the prison's centenary on March 10.
British rulers occupied the islands in 1857 to develop them as a penal colony. A sentence to Cellular Jail, named after its 698 cramped cells, came to be known as "Kala Pani" or black waters, because of the cruelty inflicted on the inmates.
"I was sent to Kala Pani in 1936. There were various means of torture. We used to think it was the end for us," Bhowmick recounts, speaking by telephone from Murshidabad district in eastern West Bengal state, where he lives with his son's family.
According to the jail's website, 384 freedom fighters were repatriated to the Indian mainland a few years before independence in 1947, of which only 28 were alive when the country celebrated 50 years of its independence from British rule in 1997.
Most of them are believed to have died since then.
The country still officially honors the freedom fighters. In India's grand Republic Day parade in New Delhi Thursday, a float commemorating them will be paraded along with the usual tanks, soldiers, missiles and fighter jets.
"The jail and the freedom fighters will be the theme of a tableau from the Andamans for the parade this year. We have put up statues showing people who fought for the country," says jail curator Rasheeda Iqbal from Port Blair, capital of the Andaman and Nicobar islands.
<b>-- Hunger strike --</b>
Bhowmick, a member of the Jugantar (revolution) Party fighting against British occupation was arrested in 1934 under the Arms Act, from Rangpur village in what is now Bangladesh.
"Then, we were called terrorists. Now, they call us freedom fighters," he says.
"My grandfather had guns at home for self-defence. They were never needed," Bhowmick's 15-year-old grandson Mallar chimes in.
After two years in the district jail in Rangpur, Bhowmick was sent to the Andamans and said he is a witness to physical abuse by the British jailers.
"Even at district jail, we were shackled. We slept in the cold," he recalls.
"They broke an inmate's leg by beating him up. They beat two people till they died. We drank water from a dirty pit."
To protest against the harsh treatment, the inmates went on their second hunger strike in 1937. The first such strike in 1933 claimed the lives of three men, after which there was an outcry against the British rule.
According to the jail website, activists on the mainland also came out in support of the second strike.
"Doctors were asked to force us on a liquid diet. We called off the strike after Mahatama Gandhi sent us a telegram," Bhowmick says about his last days in incarceration.
The strike paved the way for the release of all the 384 inmates locked up at the time.
When Bhowmick is asked to describe his life after India's independence from British rule in 1947, his memory fails him.
His family says that the freedom fighter later joined a communist party and started private medical practice to make ends meet.
"My father gave up the prime of his life for the country. What did he get?" says his son Gautam, a primary school teacher.
"It's my sacrifice too. If my father had got a good education, today my life would have been so different."
Despite the hardships the family endured, Gautam Bhowmick is proud of what his father has done.
"There is nothing bigger for me than knowing that today a billion people celebrate their freedom because of people like my father."
Another freedom fighter Dinesh Dasgupta, 96, says the four years in the Cellular Jail still haunt him.
"We were often chained and forced to grind mustard seeds throughout the day," he said with tears welling up from his sunken eyes at his home on the outskirts of Kolkata, formerly Calcutta.
<b>"Even today I cannot use mustard oil as it reminds me of the British policy in India,"</b> he adds
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Bhowmick is one of the few surviving Indians who went to a jail in the remote Indian Ocean Andaman and Nicobar islands built by the British a century ago as punishment centre for largely non-violent campaigns by freedom fighters against colonial rule.
He also represents a past linked to icons such as the country's father Mahatma Gandhi and first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru that has all but been forgotten as the number of people left from that generation of fighters for independence approaches zero.
Bhowmick is one of only three people out of 104 families who had relatives at the jail to have answered a call from the Indian government which wants to honor them at the prison's centenary on March 10.
British rulers occupied the islands in 1857 to develop them as a penal colony. A sentence to Cellular Jail, named after its 698 cramped cells, came to be known as "Kala Pani" or black waters, because of the cruelty inflicted on the inmates.
"I was sent to Kala Pani in 1936. There were various means of torture. We used to think it was the end for us," Bhowmick recounts, speaking by telephone from Murshidabad district in eastern West Bengal state, where he lives with his son's family.
According to the jail's website, 384 freedom fighters were repatriated to the Indian mainland a few years before independence in 1947, of which only 28 were alive when the country celebrated 50 years of its independence from British rule in 1997.
Most of them are believed to have died since then.
The country still officially honors the freedom fighters. In India's grand Republic Day parade in New Delhi Thursday, a float commemorating them will be paraded along with the usual tanks, soldiers, missiles and fighter jets.
"The jail and the freedom fighters will be the theme of a tableau from the Andamans for the parade this year. We have put up statues showing people who fought for the country," says jail curator Rasheeda Iqbal from Port Blair, capital of the Andaman and Nicobar islands.
<b>-- Hunger strike --</b>
Bhowmick, a member of the Jugantar (revolution) Party fighting against British occupation was arrested in 1934 under the Arms Act, from Rangpur village in what is now Bangladesh.
"Then, we were called terrorists. Now, they call us freedom fighters," he says.
"My grandfather had guns at home for self-defence. They were never needed," Bhowmick's 15-year-old grandson Mallar chimes in.
After two years in the district jail in Rangpur, Bhowmick was sent to the Andamans and said he is a witness to physical abuse by the British jailers.
"Even at district jail, we were shackled. We slept in the cold," he recalls.
"They broke an inmate's leg by beating him up. They beat two people till they died. We drank water from a dirty pit."
To protest against the harsh treatment, the inmates went on their second hunger strike in 1937. The first such strike in 1933 claimed the lives of three men, after which there was an outcry against the British rule.
According to the jail website, activists on the mainland also came out in support of the second strike.
"Doctors were asked to force us on a liquid diet. We called off the strike after Mahatama Gandhi sent us a telegram," Bhowmick says about his last days in incarceration.
The strike paved the way for the release of all the 384 inmates locked up at the time.
When Bhowmick is asked to describe his life after India's independence from British rule in 1947, his memory fails him.
His family says that the freedom fighter later joined a communist party and started private medical practice to make ends meet.
"My father gave up the prime of his life for the country. What did he get?" says his son Gautam, a primary school teacher.
"It's my sacrifice too. If my father had got a good education, today my life would have been so different."
Despite the hardships the family endured, Gautam Bhowmick is proud of what his father has done.
"There is nothing bigger for me than knowing that today a billion people celebrate their freedom because of people like my father."
Another freedom fighter Dinesh Dasgupta, 96, says the four years in the Cellular Jail still haunt him.
"We were often chained and forced to grind mustard seeds throughout the day," he said with tears welling up from his sunken eyes at his home on the outskirts of Kolkata, formerly Calcutta.
<b>"Even today I cannot use mustard oil as it reminds me of the British policy in India,"</b> he adds
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->