It was in these transnational wars of competitive imperialism that the Indian revolutionaries operated, trying to exploit these inherent fault lines to India’s advantage. On the eve of the First World War, in July 1914, the Kaiser Wilhelm II wrote: ‘Our consuls in Turkey and India . . . must inflame the whole Mohammedan world to wild revolt . . . for if we are to be bled to death, at least England shall lose India.’ 30 He was echoing his own statements of 1908 where he had said: ‘The British should be aware that war with Germany would mean the loss of India and thus the loss of their world position.’ 31 The Germans had always envied India’s important position in the grand imperial vision of the British Empire. They keenly watched the activities of the Indian revolutionaries and supported them when they were persecuted by the British government.
Germans repeatedly orchestrated major attempts to ship weapons to India via the American Ghadr network. The Ghadr movement that aimed to create disaffection among Sikhs in America and get them to return to India to raise an insurrection in the Punjab had little to do with Germany initially. However, with time, Har Dayal’s Ghadr Party and the Germans worked closely. Germany made attempts to attack India by sea using the nearest sea base of the Dutch East Indies and by land via Siam (Thailand), Persia and Afghanistan. The German consul in Shanghai was in charge of operations in the Far East and their active agencies were in Siam and Batavia (Java).
In April 1914, the ship Komagata Maru sailed with German arms and 376 men from San Francisco but was seized by British authorities once it reached Calcutta. A similar attempt was made the following month with the Tosa Maru , but it failed. SMS Emden was defeated and sunk at the Battle of Cocos in November 1914 by the light cruiser of the Royal Australian Navy HMAS Sydney . The crew was arrested and brought to Singapore. After this, the Singapore Naval Mutiny broke out in January 1915. This too was successfully suppressed by the French, British, Russian and Japanese warships.
In November 1914, Ghadr revolutionaries Satyendra Sen and Vishnu Ganesh Pingley arrived in the Bay of Bengal from America via SS Salamis and with German aid they were to instigate armed rebellion on the eastern front in Bengal and Burma. These are just a few examples of the numerous efforts that the revolutionaries had embarked upon in various parts of India with the help of the Central Powers.
In January 1915, dual attempts to attack British India were made with two ships, Annie Larson and SS Maverick . The motive was to ship ‘eleven carloads’ of arms at a cost of $140,000 from the coast of Mexico. The Maverick finally entered Indian waters by September after months of being lost at sea. It was to attack the Sundarbans. From here, revolutionaries in India such as Rash Behari Bose and Jatindranath Mukherjee (famously known as Bagha Jatin) were to assist the unrest in the United Provinces, the Punjab and Bengal. Jatin belonged to the Jugantar revolutionary group of Bengal. They armed themselves with fifty Mauser pistols and 46,000 rounds of ammunition. 32 Jatin sent one of his close associates, Narendranath Bhattacharya (later famous as M.N. Roy), to Batavia on the instructions of Virendranath Chattopadhyay to finalize the deal with the German consul on financial and arms assistance. However, the British got wind of the plan and in a bloody ambush at Balasore in Orissa where Jatin was stationed, liquidated him in September 1915. The SS Maverick was captured by the Dutch authorities. The five Indians on board were arrested and sentenced to death. 33
Following these failures, two more attempts were made: In June 1915, the Holland–American steamship, Djember , carrying 7300 rifles was captured by the British, and the similarly well-stocked Henry S . was captured the following month en route to Manila. 34 Undeterred, Rash Behari Bose coordinated a third armed ship to attack the Andamans in December 1915. This attack was to free all the political prisoners in the Andamans and lead them to Burma, while two other warships were to follow suit to carry out strikes. The ship was, however, sunk in the Andamans by the British heavy cruiser HMS Cornwall . 35
On the land front, the ‘Siam Project’ and the ‘Batavia Plan’ that the Ghadr Party in San Francisco and the Germans executed in collaboration was among the most crucial plans in this troubled period. 36 The details of these emerged through two people later arrested by the British. They were a European employed by the German secret service and held in Singapore by end July 1915 (mysteriously referred to as ‘X’) and a Punjabi arrested in Bangkok by end August 1915 (christened ‘Z’). Their idea was to organize 10,000 men on the Burma–Siam frontier and overrun Burma and then the whole of India. A German officer, George Paul Boehm, who was to train these armed men was arrested in Singapore by the British on 27 September 1915. One of the plans that ‘X’ revealed was that the Germans wanted to take over the Andaman Islands. An agent was to visit the islands as a merchant, land arms that were supplied by German sources, destroy the wireless systems, contact the revolutionaries at the Cellular Jail, free them and flee to Siam and then Rangoon. From ‘X’ was recovered the list of political prisoners that this group wished to free—on top of the list were the Savarkar brothers and members of the Maniktala Case. The list, he said, was written out for him by one Dr Haidar in Berlin, though the handwriting seemed to match that of revolutionary Bhupendra Nath Dutt. ‘X’ had a complete set of photographs of the jail and information on the number of officials, troops, police and warders across the Andaman settlements. This could not have been possible but for communication from someone from within the Cellular Jail who had passed on vital information to the revolutionaries abroad. The suspicion of the authorities naturally fell on Vinayak. Strict surveillance was placed on Vinayak and his movements within the jail, and the entire complex became an armed fortress. Vinayak writes about these turbulent times:
That our compatriots in India should so remember us, so cherish our memory, when we lay as prisoners in the Andamans and dead to the world without, filled our hearts with gratitude to them. And even in that dark dungeon of a prison-house, in the conditions of utter despair and horrid physical and mental torture, this living memory about us gave us hope and courage, which I feel it my duty to record in these pages. Every day we were in fear that a fresh charge of sedition and high treason might be trumped up against us as the result of a systematic campaign of misrepresentation going on against us during these days of war . . . But even in this daily suspense and anxiety, we felt gratified that the war had made the Indian question an issue of international importance. This world-earthquake was sure to fructify our hopes about India; that the desert of India would smile again like paradise—thoughts like these elated us; but a reaction also came that the war may end in turning the whole world into a desert with India included in it. 37
For many reasons the efforts of the revolutionaries and the Germans failed in achieving its objectives. The attitude of friendly neutrality adopted by the Government of Siam, the vigilance demonstrated by the Government of Burma, and the alacrity of the military police at Maymyo were some of the main causes for the failures of the combined plots of the Ghadr Party and the Germans. While not lacking in courage, many of them were badly organized and coordinated. In both Siam and Batavia, they suffered from handicaps related to communication and control. The Sedition Committee Report states this tersely: ‘Our examination of the German arms schemes suggests that the revolutionaries concerned were far too sanguine and that the Germans with whom they got in touch were very ignorant of the movement of which they attempted to take advantage.’ 38
With repeated failure, German interest in India slowly began to wane. Most of the revolutionaries were tried and sentenced to life transportation to Mandalay or given term convictions. Despite these reverses, the political prisoners of Cellular Jail were full of high hopes about the impending escape that they could undertake. However, yet another attempt to liberate Vinayak and also cause a cataclysmic change in Indian polity failed to fructify.
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In the dark confines of Port Blair’s Cellular Jail, we see a gradual metamorphosis of Vinayak from a young, brash radical revolutionary to a more sober and strategic
planner, whose focus was shifting towards an organization of Hindu society. One of the important causes for this was his experience at jail. Right from his early days here, and much before the creation of the library, Vinayak noticed that the Muslim warders and jamadars forbade Hindu prisoners from reading their scriptures. They would look at the pictures in some of the books, including the Ramayana of Tulsidas, and comment that it was utterly indecent and deemed it their religious duty to disperse the gathering that read such books. After petitioning higher officials, the Hindu prisoners managed to get permission to keep their religious books. Hindus received few or no religious holidays, but the same provision was readily made for Muslim prisoners. 39
But the matter, Vinayak realized, went beyond just this partial treatment. Several Hindu prisoners who were deported to the Andamans were being converted to Islam and began assuming Muslim names. As the ‘chalans’ began to reach the jail, simple and young Hindu prisoners would be segregated and subjected to extreme physical torture and labour by Muslim jamadars. With inducements of sweets and tobacco and less labour, the young lads would not mind switching faiths if that meant a more comfortable prison life. Immediately, they would be taken over to the other side, and made to dine with Muslim prisoners. 40 The jail had distinct kitchens for Hindus and Muslims, and separate cooks as well. They were made to eat separately too. All it took to ‘convert’ someone was to make the prisoner eat with fellow Muslims, where they ‘were served Mahomedan food’ 41 (possibly meaning beef). That would ensure their complete ban from their Hindu brethren who would thereafter refuse to accept them. They would be quickly given Muslim names and that would complete the so-called conversion process. It involved no recital of the Quran, offering of the namaz, or the usual practice of circumcision that accompanied conversions. These prisoners would register their names as Muslims and, with time, it would stick. Gradually, they would pick up the religious rituals of Islam and become full-fledged Muslims. The fact that there was no return, accompanied by fierce opposition and ostracism from his original community, left the neo-convert with no option but to carry on with the faith he had been induced into. The jamadar had very little to do; the Hindus themselves ensured with their obdurate and narrow-minded attitude that the convert stayed on in his new religion. 42
After the 1857 War of Independence, the British decided not to interfere too much in the religious affairs of Indians. While Christian missionaries converted convicts in other jails, Vinayak notes that in the Andamans they came, offered a prayer, but never made overt attempts at conversion. But here the thralldom of the Pathan jamadars and the incentive of less torture, if they complied, forced many Hindus towards conversion. ‘Every week or fortnight,’ notes Vinayak, ‘I had seen one Hindu prisoner at dinner sitting in the rank of his Mahomedan fellows. It was impossible for me to witness the scene. But I was only a prisoner here; what could I do to save them? I tried hard to infuriate the Hindu prisoners against this act of sacrilege. But one and all of them I found so callous. Each one of them used to say, “What is it to me?” and “What do I care?”’ 43 Even the political prisoners who were already suffering found it futile to raise their voice against conversion, and that too one spearheaded by their oppressive jamadars. They were unwilling to support Vinayak in any opposition to such practices. They argued that Hinduism was better off without such people who were willing to pawn away their faiths due to fear of coercion and torture. Vinayak rationalized:
The individual whom you try to convert may be a wicked man, a sinner or a drunkard. But after deep thought you have learnt the social law that if you make him a Christian or a Mahomedan, by means fair or foul, and if you change his name, you are really adding to their strength. In course of time children come into his family and it grows. The children become Muslims and Christians by name, birth and association. And they turn out better than their parents and add in number to the well-to-do, educated, well-behaved number of Muslim citizens. And, in that proportion, the Hindu society loses its good members . . . 44 Inspired by this conviction, I taught the Hindu prisoners of our jail, and chiefly its political prisoners, to rescue the worst of Hindu prisoners from the grip of Islam, to save them from the coercion and blandishments of their Pathan jamadars. 45
As early as 1913, within a year and a half of his arrival in the Andamans, Vinayak registered an official complaint against this coercive conversion. He stressed that he had no issue if an individual converted out of free will or change of heart. But the practice in the jail was clearly neither. Vinayak was harassed and attempts were made on his life too by the Pathans, including poisoning his food, and it was Babarao’s alertness that averted the disaster. 46 In one instance, with the connivance of a jail warden, a small bottle of poison was smuggled into the cell to be mixed with Vinayak’s food and served to him. But a sudden check by the superintendent petrified the smuggler and he did away with the bottle. Thus, rather fortuitously, Vinayak’s life was saved on many occasions.
Several prisoners who had turned informants for the jail authorities actively aided these attempts to attack Vinayak and Babarao. One of the chief informants among the convicts was a man popularly called Ainewala Babu or the ‘bespectacled gentleman’. He often made wild allegations against the Savarkars, including accusing Babarao of plotting a prison guard’s murder. He had sickles and other weapons planted in Babarao’s cell and then raised an alarm with Barrie that Babarao had gathered weapons to have him killed. However, his machinations failed each time due to Babarao’s watchfulness. He intercepted and read notes written in code language which were circulated by Ainewala Babu to avert any catastrophe befalling him or Vinayak. For supporting the anti-conversion drive, Babarao was once hit grievously on the head when he had just stepped out of his bath and suffered heavy bleeding.
The superintendent who arbitrated the conversion complaints candidly asked Vinayak why he could not reconvert them to Hinduism. Vinayak replied that Hinduism did not believe in the concept of conversion and hence it was not possible. But his thoughts immediately went to the efforts of Swami Dayanand Saraswati (1824–83) and the Arya Samaj.
Swami Dayanand had striven to revitalize Hinduism and return its religious practices back to its Vedic origins. He emphasized on the monotheistic and non-idolatrous aspects of Vedic Hinduism. He had also employed the tool of shuddhi (literally meaning ‘purification’) or the reconversion of former Hindus back into the fold. This practice had gained momentum only after his passing away. 47 Shuddhi ceremonies were held in various parts of Punjab and northern India. After Swami Dayanand, shuddhi gained momentum in the 1920s under Swami Shraddhanand of the Arya Samaj. Vinayak decided to utilize the same practice of shuddhi for the many converts. They were asked to bathe, put on new clothes, made to eat leaves of the sacred tulsi plant, hear and recite verses from the Bhagavadgita, and then read a chapter from the Ramayana of Tulsidas. This completed the simple reconversion process that ended with a distribution of sweets. They could get back their original Hindu names and, after a lot of convincing from Vinayak and others, to dining with their co-religionists.
But the opposition from the Hindu warders and the prisoners to Vinayak’s ‘blasphemous’ act was fierce. They ridiculed him often as ‘Bhangi Babu’ or someone who had lost his caste and become ‘untouchable’. But none of this deterred Vinayak. He reasoned with them on the superfluous nature of their beliefs of ‘pollution’ based on the food one ate and how easy it had hence become for others to poach on their fold, with something as meagre as tobacco or food. Slowly, the practice gained steam not only within the prison, but also among the convicts who went out for work or were released to Indian jails. The seeds of social reform, love for one’s religion and protecting it against such avaricious attempts had thus been sown. In Vinayak’s own words:
If the agitation in the Andamans . . . had only awakened the conscience of the Hindus to the possibility that a Mussalman can also be converted to Hinduism, I would have achieved a great deal. For up to that time the question that
was always put to us was, ‘A Hindu can become a Mussalman, no doubt; but how can a Mussalman be admitted into Hinduism?’ Hundreds of Hindus had asked me that question and sincerely believed that there was no answer for it. But none put such a conundrum before us any longer. For the Shuddhi movement had shown that it could be done, and we had done it. The food touched or prepared by the Muslims could be eaten by the Hindu without tarring his stomach and making him lose his caste and religion. Hinduism was not so anaemic as that; and the Hindus in the Andamans had realized the fact, as they had not done it before. This was a great achievement of the Shuddhi movement in that part of the world. For there are in the so-called wise and liberty-loving Hindus of India bigoted champions of Hinduism who, seriously enough, still seek to confound us by the same conundrum. This awakening in the Andamans was not confined to the few but had spread all over the place and the roots of the new feeling had gone deep down into the soil of the Andamans. 48
Vinayak advocated the cause for a larger Hindu sangathan , or unity, movement while in jail. He imagined a pan-India coalition of Indic faiths of all castes—Sikhs, Sanatanis (orthodox Hindus), Arya Samajis, Jains and Buddhists. While in England, he had arrived at this definition of what it meant to be ‘Hindu’; it was not limited narrowly to those practising the religion that came to be known as Hinduism. But he did not get an opportunity to flesh out the contours of this idea. It was the conversion episodes at Cellular Jail that gave him an impetus to develop this thought. It also awakened in him the need to create unity among a community ridden with numerous factions, which had time and again proved to be its nemesis. A ‘Hindu,’ postulated Vinayak, was ‘a man who recognizes our country as the land of his birth and religion.’ Such a definition, he believed, was a way ‘to prevent further divisions in our society, and to consolidate the Hindus as one community of the people of India’. 49 He writes:
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