The Horror House of Andaman

chapter7

Daily life became so dire for Sushil and his inmates that they decided to protest in the only way possible and during 1932-1937 many of them took part in a series of hunger strikes. On 3 January 1933, he and seven other men stopped eating and outlined demands for proper toilets and better food after being fed for months on a meagre diet of rice, bread and vegetables, which often contained small stones and inedible wild grass. Four months later, they took part in a mass hunger strike on 12 May 1933, which lasted 45 days. "Life in the Cellular Jail was nothing but torture, hunger and loneliness," Anup says, explaining his father's decision to take part in the strike. "They were desperate."

But things were about to get worse. On the sixth day of the hunger strike the guards came for some of the men. A decision had been made among some of the British officials to start the long and brutal procedure of force-feeding the prisoners.

Taken forcefully from his cell, an inmate would be made to lie down on a bed, his head propped up with a pillow, his limbs held down by several attendants. A doctor would then insert a rubber tube into his nose and push it down his throat to pump a mixture of milk, sugar and eggs into his stomach. Prisoners, of course, fought the feeding – some by coughing heavily to dislodge the tube – which meant the whole, tortuous process took several hours.

For three men – Mahavir Singh, Mohan Kishore Namadas and Mohit Moitra – resistance came at a cost. They all died from force-feeding after milk seeped into their lungs, resulting in pneumonia.

Sushil and the rest of the inmates heard the news of the men's deaths within a day or two, Anup says. "Their bodies were thrown in the sea with stones weighing down the bags."

People on mainland India heard the stories too, but it wasn't until four years later that Mahatma Gandhi – who underwent 17 fasts during India's freedom struggle – successfully managed to intervene. In 1937, he and Rabindranath Tagore, a writer of the time who was involved in India's freedom struggle, made an agreement with the head of the British administration in India, Lord Linlithgow, which paved the way for the prisoners to be released.

That same year the prisoners began to be repatriated to their respective states in India and the process of closing down the Cellular Jail began. Sushil was returned to a local jail in West Bengal on 18 January 1938 and the following year the Cellular Jail shipped out its last few prisoners. However, it wasn't until 1943 that Sushil tasted freedom – something that was unfortunately short-lived.

By the time he was released, Gandhi's non-violent movement was sweeping across India. "The revolutionaries could see that people of India had learnt how to die without any arms," Anup explains how his father joined Gandhi's movement. So groups like the Jugantar party agreed to put down their weapons.

Eventually on 15 August 1947, the Indian Independence Act was passed but the country was far from being at peace. "Calcutta was under severe communal disturbances at the time of independence," says Anup. "The Father of the Nation [Gandhi] advised all his followers to carry out peace processions to restore communal harmony."

So on 11 September 1947, Sushil took to the streets on Park Circus in Calcutta to lead a peaceful demonstration, a month after the Indian Independence Act had been passed and a year after four thousand people had died in the city during riots between Hindus and Muslims. Tragically, Sushil's demonstrators were attacked and he was fatally stabbed. He had experienced only four years of freedom.

***