मेरा आजीवन कारावास / माझी जन्मठेप (स्वातंत्र्यवीर सावरकर - काले पानी का ऐतिहासिक संस्मरण)

had not been free from censure! Some suggested that the speaker should be deprived of
his knighthood. Others hinted that he should be made to forfeit his pension. Ultimately,
the whole incident had proved to be nothing better than the proverbial storm in the tea-
cup, though it was not without its repercussions in India. The Indian National Congress
was alarmed by the news, and seemed to have lost its balance. Sir William Wedderburn,
the president of the Congress session that year, and Surendra Nath Bannerji, one of its
most prominent spokesman, while returning from the annual congress Session, attended a
public meeting at Calcutta, where, speaking on the incident, they put a gloss on Sir Henry
Cotton’s remarks upon me, and declared that the Congress had nothing to do with
Savarkar and his tribe and felt no sympathy whatever for him and his doings. I read this
news in the cutting of the Kesari noticed above. Strange to say, the Kesari itself in its two
leaderettes had sought to exonerate Sir Henry Cotton, and, in reference to me in that
matter, had used a form of address that was highly insulting to me. It had said, “ Sir
Henry Cotton did not even know who this Savarkar was, whether he was a black man or a
white man.” Even a nationalist paper like the Kesari at Poona had to write in that tone
then. It was a subterfuge, common in those days, to establish one’s innocence and
prestige by running down Savarkar as a traitor, and by referring to him, in name and
style, as the veriest criminal. Every political organization, at the time, used that handy
weapon to save its own skin. It was a cruel irony of fate, indeed, that an English
gentleman should speak of Savarkar in glowing terms, while his countrymen at home
should refer to him in newspapers and elsewhere in the language of insult and infamy.
But it was not the newspapers that were really to blame in this matter. It only showed the
wretched plight to which a foreign rule inevitably reduces a subject nation. It showed that
we lost under it even the sense of humanity which, as individuals, we ought to hold, as
the minimum that is due from one man to another. What a heavy price this, to pay for
bare existence!

Martyr or Rascal

Some one was peeping in through the bars of my door.

“How do you do, barrister?”

“ I am all right, by your grace”, I answered.

“ What is it that you say? Sir, where are you in worth? What am I before you?”, he
said. He continued that he had a talk with a friend from England from which he had learnt
that the whole of Europe was applauding me as a martyr. The newspapers in France and
Germany were comparing me with patriots like Woolfetone and Robert Emmett and
Mazzini. Even in far off Portugal, newspapers had published a sketch of my life as it
came to their hands. The gentleman from Europe had mentioned that he desired to see
me, but the man who was talking to me had informed him that it was impossible to grant