Vinayak then decided to place his own double agent, twenty-year-old M.P. Tirumala Acharya, to convey misinformation to Scotland Yard. Vinayak and Aiyar were initially wary of Tirumala Acharya and watched him closely to ensure there were no dubious activities. He was given the task of a double agent only after being convinced of his loyalty. Acharya was an affable young man who managed the kitchen too and shopped for groceries and other requirements at India House. He managed to make an extra £5 with the false information that he was supplying to a happy and satisfied Scotland Yard.
In India too there were several Abhinav Bharat members who acted as double agents. Balkrishna Janardhan Marathe, Bhaskar Ramachandra Khare, Gangadhar Ganesh Chitale, Shankar Narayan Moghe and G.R. Vaishampayan were some of the members who helped leak government messages exchanged between India and England regarding the activities of the revolutionaries. 56 Many of them joined the postal department and worked in the telegraph service. The exchange of telegrams between the two countries was usually during the night in India, given the time difference. The British assigned only Anglo-Indian workers during such sensitive shifts. But these double agents somehow managed to befriend them and offered to bear their burden, while they could steal some time out at night with their love interests! Moghe, for instance, had once managed to procure an entire cache of telegrams on the subject. Since he was unaware of the code language in which the messages were transcribed, he secretly broke open the cupboard that explained the codes. Using this, he managed to decode the messages dispatched. Moghe was shocked to find a telegram from Lord Morley to Lord Minto that referred to a certain ‘G.K.’ who had informed him that given the proximity between Tilak and the Savarkar brothers and Bapat, a close watch on them was necessary. Given that Gopalkrishna Gokhale was then touring London and was regularly meeting Lord Morley, they deduced that the mysterious ‘G.K.’ was none other than him and that he was passing on information about the revolutionaries to the British. Coincidentally, a few days after this, the police instituted a regular surveillance on Babarao. This enraged many revolutionaries such as Brahmagiri Bua, Palande, Paranjpe and Shidhaye from Poona and there was an unsuccessful attempt on Gokhale’s life. Much later, they all confessed to their crime and were sentenced. 57
Another important link for the Abhinav Bharat who acted as a mole was Bhaskar Ramchandra Khare. On completing his matriculation, Khare joined a European company, mastered shorthand and typing and thereafter got introduced to the influential barrister Jamnadas Mehta. Mehta recommended Khare to Dorabji Tata who was in urgent need of a good typist and shorthand expert. Joining the Tata group gave Khare easy and regular access to the Imperial Secretariat at New Delhi. Excelling at his work, Khare secured several promotions, including one with Sir Reginald Craddock of the sensitive home department. Yet, all the time, his motive remained constant—leaking information out to the revolutionaries. 58 Thus, either side kept a track of developments happening on the other, through their own ingenious ways.
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On 10 May 1908, Vinayak distributed copies of the ‘O! Martyrs!’ pamphlet on the occasion of the anniversary of 1857 War of Independence. Unsurprisingly, within a month, on 8 June 1908, C.J. Stevenson-Moore of the Department of Criminal Intelligence wrote to the home department about the pamphlet and its seditious and incendiary content. The home department noted that quite possibly the pamphlet was written and printed in England as the ‘phraseology is better than usual, and unlike other fulminations we are accustomed to here’. 59 Interestingly, one also finds a nationalist like Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya informing J.W. Hose of the United Provinces government about the pamphlet, but without taking Vinayak’s name:
I enclose a most seditious leaflet, which I received yesterday with the English mail. Evidently it is a copy of the same to which his Honour referred in his speech on the political situation. I was going to tear and throw it away as I did not wish that it should fall into the hands of any person; and as I thought it was not necessary to send it to Government as the contents of it are already known to them. But it struck me that I should yet inform you that this incendiary leaflet is still being mailed out to this country, so that the Government may take such further steps as it may deem proper to prevent the circulation of such poisonous matter. 60
In addition to surveillance, the British government decided to also issue ‘Certificates of Identity’ to Indian students living in Britain. These were intended to be simple forms that provided the government biographical details of Indians living in Britain, while ensuring that the India Office would have a record of every Indian in the country at any given point of time. Indian students found the process cumbersome, discriminatory and highly denigrating. In the nationality column, the applicants had to fill ‘British subject by birth’ in clear, black ink. The assertion here was that the nationality of Indians or their Indianness did not matter. Such documents existed throughout the Empire. Gandhi, commenting on the use of these documents in the Transvaal during the early twentieth century, argued that the use of such permits set Indians apart as a separate, polluted class, akin to the treatment of ‘bhangis’ by upper-caste Indians. 61 Indians travelling to Britain most probably associated these new certificates of identity with these earlier documents of negative and discriminatory racial profiling.
By 1909, under the leadership of the undersecretary of the Political and Secret (P&S) Department, William Lee Warner, a kind of a bureau of information for Indian students was created. While on the outside the bureau appeared to provide career-related guidance and advice to Indian students coming to Britain, it also managed to control and gather information about them. While the bureau failed to penetrate India House, it helped prevent, to a certain extent, some of the new migrant students from switching over to the revolutionary side or get influenced.
Despite knowing fully well that they were perpetually on the radar, several members of India House wanted to learn how to wield a gun. But they were never allowed membership at the shooting range. On 14 January 1909, the home department even wrote to the India Office in London with a sense of alarm about how permission could be granted for the establishment of a miniature rifle shooting range by Lord Robert’s Association, close to India House. 62 To circumvent the problem, Dr T.S.S. Rajan decided to join a polytechnic in London that imparted skills in cooking, saloon services, photography and so on. After giving them the impression of being a very diligent student and learning a few skills, he requested to be taught shooting as well. The unsuspecting institute allowed him to, and soon he was adept at shooting a revolver at short and long range. Meanwhile, Mirza Abbas and Sikandar Hayat Khan organized to smuggle a large cache of arms—twenty automatic Browning pistols purchased from Paris, and thousands of cartridges. They were neatly packed in a false-bottom box and dispatched to India with the India House chef, Chaturbhuj Amin, who had done diplomas in cooking and tailoring in London.
Leaving London on 15 February 1909, Amin set sail, dodging detectives and customs officials, and reached Bombay on 6 March. 63 The parcel was delivered to Gopalrao Patankar as Hari Anant Thatte, then president of Abhinav Bharat in Maharashtra, could not be reached due to surveillance troubles. By March 1909, Amin was back in London with the news of the safe delivery of the consignment.
But along with this news, Vinayak also received the tragic message of the death of his four-year-old son, Prabhakar, due to smallpox. His comment, made in jest while departing from India, that Prabhakar might reach the God’s abode if not vaccinated, had unfortunately come true. He was overwhelmed with emotion and he poured his heart out in a very poignant elegy—‘Prabhakaras’. Suddenly, everything seemed to unravel in the most unfortunate manner for Vinayak.
Nashik, 1909
Misfortunes, they say, never strike alone. Even as Vinayak was grappling with the tragedy of the death of his only child, he received another alarming news from back home. On 28 February 1909, Babarao had gone to Bombay to visit his maternal cousin, V.M. Bhat, in Girgaum, when there was loud ba
nging on the door of their home. The police had come looking for Babarao and arrested him under Sections 121 and 124A of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). Babarao had mentioned to a friend about Amin’s delivery of pistols from London. The police got wind of this and an arrest warrant was issued for him. The dreaded Section 121 referred to aiding and abetting treason against the king and if convicted, it could result in confiscation of property and death by hanging or ‘transportation for life’. A year earlier, on 17 June 1908, Babarao had been convicted under Section 151A of the IPC and Section 127 of the Bombay Police Act, on extremely frivolous charges of inciting a mob of 500 to 600 people to help free S.M. Paranjpe who had been arrested on charges of sedition. At the time, Babarao was sentenced to a month-long rigorous imprisonment at Dongri Jail in Bombay and later, Thane Jail.
This time, Babarao was taken back to Nashik in a police vehicle and constantly questioned en route. Even before he could alert his younger brother to destroy or hide some of the explosive literature at home, the police raided their house in Nashik on 2 March 1909. Among the documents found concealed in the eaves were about sixty pages of closely typed material in English, which was in fact the ‘Bomb Manual’ that Hemchandra and Bapat had procured. The intelligence agencies verified that similar copies had been found in Bengal in connection with the Maniktala Case. The book had about ‘45 sketches of bombs, mines, and buildings to illustrate the text’. 64 They also discovered Frost’s Secret Societies of European Revolution, 1776 to 1876 65 that contained details of the ‘Russian nihilists consisting of small circles or groups affiliated into sections, each member knowing only the members of the group to which he belonged’ 66 —quite like how Abhinav Bharat was structured. Four poems of Aabaa Darekar, alias Kavi Govind, that Babarao had published were also confiscated. These included two Marathi poems—one was titled ‘Bodhapur Puratan Mauj’ that made Puranic references of gods and demons to assert Indian victory over the British. In another, titled ‘Shivakalin Lokamanovrutti’, the poet had imagined Indians requesting Lord Ganesha seeking the birth of an icon such as Shivaji.
C.J. Stevenson-Moore of the DCI elaborated to the district superintendent of police in Nashik, Mr J.F. Guider:
An incriminating letter written by Tatya (Vinayak) to his brother was intercepted along with The Indian Sociologist in the Sea Post Office. The Bombay Police have now made an important find in the brother’s house. One item is the Manicktolla Explosive Manual. This is the first copy of the Explosive Manual, which has been found outside Calcutta and perhaps P.M. Bapat brought it. There was only one complete copy of it in Calcutta. Were it and the Bombay copy written by the same hand? Deputy Director, please inquire regarding this and note. If necessary, get photos of the first page from Calcutta and Bombay. Neither original is available now. We should send to Bombay any information about the Savarkars, which they are not likely to have and ask for copies of the statements against them when complete. 67
The ‘incriminating’ letter that the police had confiscated was of Vinayak writing to Babarao to send him the Bande Mataram essay. 68 Vinayak was termed as a ‘well-known rank extremist’ 69 and it was decided that his residence in London, India House, needed to be searched thoroughly. Eight letters written by Vinayak to Babarao were translated and sent to the India Office on 13 May 1909. Stevenson-Moore himself admits to the letters being hardly ‘dangerous’:
The Tatya letters do not in themselves amount to much; the worst document in that collection is the Vande Mataram effusion; which, however, was not, as I gather, the production of Vinayek Damodar Savarkar at all. It is found in his brother’s house at Nasik, and in several of his letters Vinayek asks for it to be sent to him. Vinayek gives mostly the facts reported by secret agents of Scotland Yard as to his doings and speeches at the India House. These are ostensibly private meetings, and I question whether these reports would carry much weight with the Benchers of Gray’s Inn. It seems that the only public occasion on which Vinayek really let himself go was the Guru Govind meeting in London on 29th December 1908. But I question whether a single wild utterance would tell much against him. 70
On the one hand, attempts were being made to find evidence against Vinayak and build a legally tenable case to justify his possible arrest and extradition to India. While the government could justify its detention of Babarao with the excuse of having found the ‘Bomb Manual’ and other revolutionary literature, in Vinayak’s case, was he to be tried only through guilt of association? On the other hand, the idea was to influence the Gray’s Inn to prevent admission to Vinayak at the Bar, now that he had completed his course in London. This is the dilemma that Stevenson-Moore discusses in his letter above.
Babarao’s trial was initially conducted before the district collector of Nashik, Arthur Mason Tippetts Jackson. Advocate Gole was the public prosecutor with the deputy superintendent of police assisting him. The youngest of the three brothers, Narayanrao Savarkar, desperately tried to find an advocate to represent Babarao and even managed to raise Rs 200 for the trial costs. No one was prepared to take up the case. He finally went to advocate Thosar in Thane and pleaded with him to help them in this hour of crisis. Thosar was moved and agreed to assist along with his fellow advocates, Pradhan, Sathye, Ketkar and Gadre. Advocate Gole brought to the judge’s notice the seditious content of the literature seized from Babarao’s house, including the ‘Bomb Manual’, revolutionary poems by poet Govind, and the books and pamphlets published under the Abhinav Bharat Mala series.
In his written deposition to the court, Babarao said:
I published these materials but due to the tumultuous situation in India, I had neither time nor inclination to look into their sales. I am solely responsible for my actions. Though I have not written the books or poems, I do not think that they were written to preach treason or incite people to rebel against the King . . . Some of the items found in the raid on my house on 12 March 1909 belong to me. The other items have been planted in my house by the police who bear ill will towards me. For the last three-four years, there has been enmity between the police and myself and they have built up a false case against me. 71
The judge, Justice B.C. Kennedy, was not convinced and on 8 June 1909 he pronounced his verdict:
The Penal Code has given me very little leeway to decide the quantum of punishment. Under Section 121, I sentence Ganesh Damodar Savarkar to Transportation for Life in the Andamans and order forfeiture of his entire property. Under Section 124A, I sentence him to two years’ rigorous imprisonment. This sentence has to be served simultaneously with the sentence given under Section 121. 72
It was a severe blow for the Savarkar family. But as the Kesari of 15 June 1909 reports: ‘Babarao heard this terrible punishment stoically.’ 73 The Black Waters, or Kalapaani, of the Andamans was notorious for its monstrosity and torture. Convicts seldom returned alive or healthy from this hellhole. Babarao’s wife, Yesu Vahini, had lost two children in their infancy and now with her husband transported for life, she had nothing to look forward to. Yet, she bore the verdict with determined courage. The police confiscated all their belongings including utensils. It is said that when neighbours came to offer their condolences and sobbed at her piteous condition, she remained resolute and consoled them instead: ‘Do not cry! It is only when several homes such as ours are devastated that the nation will prosper!’ 74
People began to shun Yesu and hurl insults at her since they considered her to be from a family of convicts. She was boycotted from all social events. If they had to share a bullock cart with her anywhere, they would turn away or insist that she dismounted. She was often abused in public as kaidyaachi baayko (wife of a convict). Each time she visited her maternal home, the women in the neighbourhood passed jibes at her being a woman who was a ‘burden on her maternal home’. 75 Yesu bore these abuses and insults with immense fortitude.
However, the Abhinav Bharat members and family friends took care of Yesu and Narayanrao who was still completing his studies. Madame Bhikaji Cama began sending Rs
30 every month for the family’s maintenance. Aabaa Darekar, or the poet Govind, was so moved by the Savarkar family’s condition that he raised money for them and boosted their morale. He even composed a poem for her in the form of a prayer seeking protection for Babarao—‘Sankati raksha mama kaant, kaant ’ (Protect my husband from crisis!). Yesu would often keep humming this prayer to herself.
Before being taken to the jail, Babarao was publicly humiliated by being paraded on the streets of Nashik in fetters and handcuffs, wearing prisoner clothes, his meagre belongings of a small bundle of clothes, a rusted plate and water pot balanced precariously on his back. He spent a month in a Nashik jail before bidding adieu to Nashik and his family. Babarao was then shifted to the Yeravada jail in Poona as convict number 4193. As a precursor to the harsh times ahead in the Andamans, his abusive jamadar, or constable, Malhari ordered him to grind 25 pounds of grain each day. This was then increased to 35 pounds. He was then given the punishment of ‘standing handcuffs’ 76 which entailed standing with his arms hung to the wall for six hours in the morning and four hours in the evening. This would go on for several weeks. At times he remained handcuffed all through the night and had to sleep in the same standing position. The half-cooked food of millet or wheat breads caused bouts of intense diarrhoea. Convicts even had to pass stools in their cells standing handcuffed. He was administered electric shocks in a bid to make him confess to his crimes. In about six weeks, his body gave in and he developed high fever. He was then shifted to the hospital for treatment. Thereafter, he was given a lighter job of spinning wool.
Narayanrao came to see his elder brother and his heart broke at the hardships Babarao was undergoing. They decided to appeal against the verdict at a higher court. But on 21 November 1909, the Bombay High Court upheld the sentence. Babarao was shifted to the Alipore prison in Calcutta and from there transported to the Andamans in the S.S. Maharaja . Prisoners and convicts were locked in the ship’s basement. Suffocated by the stench and in the inglorious company of thugs, murderers, dacoits and rapists, Babarao reached the wretched Cellular Jail of the Andaman Islands. Little did Babarao know that he would soon get a companion in the dreaded jail—his younger brother Vinayak.
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