Cellular jail
This was one of the highlights of the trip and personally something some of us had wanted to see for a long time. Most of us have never studied about it in our school curriculum, but it should be a place of pilgrimage for all of us. This is where some of our unsung heroes and martyrs lived and died. They gave their todays for our tomorrows.
This large prison had seven wings radiating from a central tower (some of the wings were destroyed in the Japanese attack during world War 2, although some said later that 4 wings were torn down during the Nehru era to build a government hospital). It was built as an implementation of the diabolic Panopticon, the jail where the inmates do not know when the jailer is observing them. Therefore they have to be on best behavior all the time, and they are under constant stress. The irony is that the person who came up with this idea is the noted 19th century 'liberal' Briton Jeremy Bentham.
A tour of the premises brings you across tableaux depicting inhuman tortures as well as executions that brave freedom fighters were subjected to. We get to see the tiny claustrophobic cells they lived in.
The son et lumiere show was, unfortunately, in hindi which meant some of the finer points were lost on some of us. There is an English version too, but it would have entailed a wait of an hour or more.
The story of the Cellular Jail ("Kaala pani") is an example of our collective amnesia about the patriots and martyrs who strove to gain independence, and often paid with their lives. The film "Kaalapani" which came out a few years ago was apparently not exaggerated.
Off in the distance is Ross Island, where the British would always go at dusk. The jailers were mostly Indian, including many who were convicts themselves, who had been 'promoted'.
There are several statues of martyrs in the park next to the jail, and brass plaques providing some little detail about the lives and deaths of a few martyrs: often tortured to death, sometimes death by force-feeding as they went on hunger-strikes. Kaala pani reminds you of the hellish Tuol
Sleng torture camp in Cambodia, from which no one ever escaped; and Alcatraz in the middle of San Francisco Bay.
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