Maharashtra Minister Ashish Shelar Visits Cellular Jail, Seeks Support For Veer Savarkar Memorial In Andaman Islands

Sri Vijaya Puram: Ashish Shelar, Maharashtra cabinet minister for cultural affairs, visited the Cellular Jail in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, where Vinayak Damodar Savarkar had spent his punishment term during British colonial rule.

"I went to the dark cell in the Cellular Jail in Andaman and Nicobar where the tyrannical British regime had imprisoned freedom fighter Vinayak Damodar Savarkar to serve his sentence of imprisonment, and bowed down before the statue of Savarkar," Shelar said in a post on X on Friday.

Shelar further remembered the torture Savarkar might have faced at the cellular jail, adding, "Touching the walls on which Savarkar wrote his immortal poems, I was filled with excitement. That jail, the rope worn by Savarkar, and looking at those objects, one can imagine the deadly torture suffered by this great son of Mother India.. But at the same time, the meaning of these lines "Anadi Mi Anant Mi" Avadhya Mi Bhala... also begins to unfold."

Shelar later met with Chief Secretary of the union territory, Chandra Bhushan Kumar, requesting his cooperation to build a memorial of Veer Savarkar in Andaman Nicobar Islands.

He also informed the chief secretary that he had written to the Union Home Minister requesting the same. Shelar requested the support and cooperation of the local administration to build the memorial.

The cellular jail, also known as Kalapani was where multiple Indian freedom fighters spent their jail term, including Nani Gopal Mukherjee, Nand Kumar, Pulin Behari Das, Bhai Parmanand, Prithvi Singh Azad, Trailokyanath Chakravarty alias Maharaj, Ananta Singh, Pandit Ram Rakha and many others. The political prisoners of Alipore Bomb Case after the Bomb incident of 30 April 1908, were the first group of people sent to Kalapani.

People convicted in various conspiracy and bombing cases were also sent to the cellular jail on the island. Savarkar himself was convicted in the Second Nasik Conspiracy Case and sentenced to 50 years of imprisonment. He was brought to the Andamans in 1911 by the vessel SS Maharaja. Savarkar's book Majhi Janep (in Marathi) along with its English translation The Story of My Transportation for Life (1950) by VN Naik and its Hindi translation Ajanm Karavas (1966) narrate his life of prisoners along with the agonizing routine along with various methods of torture.

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