Prisons are also called Correctional Facilities, meaning where a flaw in a person is detected and it is corrected, while that person is kept in isolation from society. Many a times, this is true only in philosophy; in reality, prisons, due to their inherent brutality, harden and criminalise more than they reform. Some jailors are known to boast that it’s their duty to punish criminals, not reform them. Yet, there are instances where criminals have used their time in prison to learn, educate, introspect, and come out as better humans, than what they were when they entered the Purgatory.
Creativity in exile
There have been many political prisoners in India, during British colonial rule, who used their time in prisons to let their creative and spirituality evolve. Wajid Ali Shah, Emperor of Awadh was dethroned by Robert Clive and exiled to Calcutta. In those days exile was as good as imprisonment, since it cut one off from one’s land and people, severed one’s roots and set one adrift without a rudder, sail, or anchor. Expressing his anguish in the only way he knew best, Wajid Ali Shah penned the immortal ballad about his love for his lost land and the pain it caused him; even today when Babul mora naihara chuto ri jaye is sung or recited, the love of Wajid Ali Shah for his land and his anguish at having been exiled from it, fills the hearts of listeners with pathos. Although Wajid Ali Shah wasn’t imprisoned, exile in his time was as good as being incarcerated; he used it to hone his creativity.
After the first battle for freedom in 1857, the last Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar was dethroned and exiled to Rangoon, Burma, and spent his days there in captivity and isolation. He was an accomplished poet and an expert calligrapher. The British, in their own brand of civilised cruelty, denied him writing material. It is said that for those with a poetic bent, adversity and sorrow enhances their creativity and they render some of their best works in that frame of mind. Bahadur Shah Zafar was no different. Using a sharpened stick, he inscribed some of his most renowned works on the walls of his prison, Lagtâ nahîñ hé jî mérâ ûjaø’é dayâr méñ, kiskî banî hé âlam-e-nâ-pâyedâr méñ’, is one of his most passionate lament scratched on the walls of his prison.
If neither Wajid Ali Shah nor Bahadur Shah were exiled and imprisoned, literature would have been deprived of these gems. It was their banishment and incarceration that must be credited for these master pieces.
Political prisoners produced sterling work
Closer to our times, Lokmanya Bal Gangadhar Tilak was prosecuted for seditious and provocative writings against the Crown. Tilak was convicted and sentenced to imprisonment for six years. From 1908 to 1914, he was imprisoned in Mandalay in Burma. While in prison, Tilak Maharaj utilised his time to acquire more knowledge and to hone his idea of Swaraj. He wrote his seminal work Gita Rahasya from his prison cell.
The revolutionary V. D. Savarkar was arrested in London and transported to India on charges of inciting violence against the British Crown. He was sentenced to serve two consecutive sentences of 20 years and transportation to Kala Paani. The British had built a prison on the island of Port Blair in the Andamans for prisoners, and subsequently used it to send political prisoners away from the mainland to be incarcerated in complete isolation, and to suffer barbaric treatment without reports reaching the mainland. Andamans itself was considered to be a Penal Settlement and the Cellular Jail was designed to psychologically torture political prisoners and dehumanise them. Each cell was isolated and apart from hearing sounds and voices, the prisoners could not see anything else but the blank wall of the wing of the jail in front of their cell, and a bit of sky while they were locked up in their tiny cells. Other prisoners were allowed to mingle with fellow prisoners while they were forced to do slave labour, but Savarkar was kept in complete isolation. While in his tiny isolated cell of the Cellular Jail, before his spirit was broken and he surrendered to the British and sought pardon from them, Savarkar honed his ideology of Hindu Nationalism and the idea of a Hindu Rashtra. In a state of frustration at being thus confined to a solitary, isolated existence, Savarkar the poet flourished and he scratched some immortal verses of his ballad Kamala on the walls of his cell. After he was pardoned and transported back to the Indian mainland and confined to the town of Ratnagiri in the Konkan, other prisoners saw Savarkar’s verses scratched on the walls and memorised the verses. It was due to this that the nation read this ballad penned by Savarkar. The British plastered the walls of his cell and his writing was lost for eternity. Savarkar the firebrand revolutionary was broken and destroyed in Kala Paani, but the poet in him flourished and the verses he penned there were poignant and filled with his longing and his desire to soar unfettered in the heaven of freedom.
Barrister Gandhi’s imprisonment and evolution
Barrister Mohandas K. Gandhi endured many insults and much injustice as a person of colour in South Africa. Right from the time he arrived there to represent an Indian merchant in a business dispute, he was thrown out of a train for daring to travel in the “Whites Only” first class compartment of a train. He was called by derisive and prejudiced terms like ‘coolie’ and ‘kaffir’. Unable to take any more humiliation and injustice, and upon witnessing the kind of abuse and injustice suffered by Asians in British South Africa, Gandhi decided to fight for equal rights as citizens of the British Empire. He challenged the colonial government and launched a series of agitations and movements. He was abused, beaten up, prosecuted and imprisoned. South African jails were not easy, during his earlier imprisonment Gandhi was kept with criminals and suffered much humiliation and brutality. He did not allow this to break his spirit. On a couple of occasions he was imprisoned in the notorious Johannesburg Fort Prison. This was known to be one of the most brutal prisons, and a hell hole created by the empire to break criminals and political opponents alike.
On one of his imprisonments, Barrister Gandhi was marched from the railway station to the Fort Prison by foot, handcuffed and fettered. In the prison he was made to strip and sit in the compound along with other prisoners for hours. He was subjected to body cavity search and many such traumatic indignities. This could have broken many a person, indeed many were broken, but Barrister Gandhi suffered this brutality and beastly treatment to learn, understand and empower. Every insult, every indignity inflicted on him strengthened his resolve to fight for justice, dignity and equality. He planned his future strategy, he forced the prison officials to treat the prisoners according to the rules and regulations of the jail manual, not only for himself but for all his fellow political prisoners, and he utilised the time in the prisons to enhance his knowledge and his spirituality. After 22 such years, Gandhi left South Africa and returned to India on 9 January 2015, on the advice of his political guru Gopal Krishna Gokhale. After obeying his master’s advice and travelling through India, understanding the land and its people, Gandhiji entered the political arena and became active in the Indian National Congress. After the deaths of Gokhale and Tilak, the Congress was adrift and ineffective. Gandhiji took up the issues of the farmers and the unjust taxes imposed by the British, and the brutal manner in which they collected the taxes. He was requested to visit Champaran in Bihar and witness the plight of the landless farmers of Champaran, where farmers were forced to grow indigo, and inhuman taxes were imposed on them. It was here that Gandhiji first waged a war for justice against the colonial administration and forced it to concede. It was here that he was for the first time detained by the British in India.
Gandhiji and his stay at the mandirs
After that, apart from his ashrams, prisons became his alternate residence. He was sentenced to six years in jail on charges of sedition, and was imprisoned in the Sabarmati Jail in Ahmedabad and then in Yervada Prison in Pune. Gandhiji used to call the prisons he was locked up in as mandirs or temples. So Sabarmati Jail was called Sabarmati Mandir and Yervada Prison became Yervada Mandir. While in prison and even when he was released prematurely from the prison for the pendency of his sentence, Bapu refrained from participating in political activities and worked for social reforms. During many of his imprisonments, Bapu read and wrote profusely. Many a times he was imprisoned along with his associates and other political leaders. After the Dandi Kooch when Bapu and the entire senior Congress leadership was arrested, Bapu, Sardar Patel and later, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru were imprisoned in Yervada Jail. Mahadev Desai, Bapu’s secretary for 25 years has written about the time in the prison and the interactions between Bapu, Sardar and Panditji. They would discuss the movement, languages, food habits, their vision for independent India and its history.
During one of his imprisonments Bapu translated into English the multi faith prayers, the verses from the Gita and the many bhajans sung during the morning and evening prayers in the ashram and wherever Bapu was, every day of his life, for the benefit of his British disciple Madeline Slade aka, Meera behen. He fine tuned his belief in Gram Swaraj, the need for an education system that not only educated, but empowered the millions in India’s villages, his belief in equality for people of different castes and between the genders, and his ideology of antyodaya, the uplift and emancipation of the poorest of poor and the weakest of the weak. For Bapu, imprisonment never meant inactivity, for him imprisonment was spiritual and an opportunity to empower and introspect.
Patel and Nehru benefitted from their prison stays too
Sardar Patel utilised his many imprisonments to network with other freedom fighters and to strategise for the battle for freedom. Pandit Nehru was imprisoned several times too; during one of his stints in prison he wrote a series of letters to his daughter Indira Priyadarshini explaining the history of India and its civilisation from ancient to contemporary times. This correspondence between father and daughter was so astute and scholarly, and yet it was narrated in such a simple manner that later it was published as a collected tome called ‘Discovery of India’. One could claim that had he not been in prison, Panditji may have never written such a passionate, true and vividly descriptive account of a nation and its people.
The legendary Nelson Mandela’s 22 year isolation
Away from India’s shores too, many leaders have utilised their time in prison to educate and empower themselves.
Nelson Mandela, the liberator and architect of the Rainbow Nation, South Africa, started as a militant revolutionary who did not believe in non violence and professed that only a violent revolution could liberate his people. He was arrested for conspiring to blow up the racist parliament of South Africa and for inciting violence. He was transported to the infamous Robben Island Prison and incarcerated with his comrades in isolation for 22 years. It was here that Madiba Mandela discovered non violence and Bapu. In his memoirs Madiba said that in his solitary cell in the Robben Island Prison he was never alone, Gandhi was in his cell with him. His imprisonment, brutal, and dehumanising, transformed the fiery revolutionary into a mature, peace loving statesman and on release, Madiba ensured that the transition to freedom for his nation would be peaceful and devoid of bitterness and hate. This may not have happened if Madiba was not imprisoned for such a long time and spiritually discovered a mentor in Gandhi, whose methods he had earlier contemptuously rejected.
These are the stories of people who achieved greatness, who did not allow adversity to destroy them, but utilised the opportunity to educate, empower and spiritually awaken themselves. People of creative abilities who used the experience and isolation to produce some of their best works. Titans who transformed prisons, purgatories into Correctional Facilities, in the truest meaning of the word.
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Tushar Gandhi
The writer a social activist, is the great grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and the Managing Trustee of Mahatma Gandhi Foundation, Mumbai.[/column]