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

beat him with all your strength." The caning was done and Parmanand bore it
unperturbed.

It has to be noted that he was not taken to the hospital for dressing the wounds but
marched straight to his cell and locked up. This was the first occasion for a political
prisoner to be punished this way.

Young Parmanand felt nothing; nor did the other political prisoners feel for him.
For they knew that Parmanand was the aggressor and had beaten Mr. Barrie. They did
not think it a heavy price to pay for Mr. Barrie's disgrace throughout the prison and for
the fear it had engendered in the hearts of them all for political prisoners as a class. The
spirited action of Parmanand was a lesson to them all. Parmanand had defied prison-
regulations and he was caned for that defiance. There we were quits. But Mr. Barrie
was not entitled to abuse Parmanand. And he had abused him and, therefore, we had a
right to show our resentment for that action. So there was sympathetic strike in the
prison. The Superintendent and Mr. Barrie went round pacifying the strikers. The
Superintendent pledged his word that Mr. Barrie shall no longer abuse the prisoners. The
strikers were requested to resume work, no matter how much they did it or did not do it.
After this the strike, of course, came to an end.

The resistance offered by the first batch to the highhandedness of Mr. Barrie made
life easier for those who came after it. Even then, Mr. Barrie would, now and then, try to
exercise his authority and extract additional work from one or another minor political
prisoners. Sometime he would ask them to weave four pounds of coiled rope instead of
three, and sometime he would exact more quantity of picked oakum from them.
Sometime he would slyly seek to put some one on the Kolu, so on and so forth. But these
political prisoners would not tolerate anything from him. And if he threatened caning
they would straight tell him, in that case, they would all stop work at once. The spirited
and the daring among them beat Mr. Barrie on all scores. These daily scuffles always led
some one or another of these political prisoners to resist Mr. Barrie. They never gave Mr.
Barrie more work than what the prison-regulations had laid down for them. And, some-
time, they gave much less. Every day they had to put up on the prison-gate the roll of
those present and absent in their record of daily work. Since the entry of political
prisoners in that jail the absentees on the roll were never marked as zero. The resistance
in some form or another had continued from day to day and, therefore, neither Mr. Barrie
nor the Superintendent dared continue their policy of repression any longer, or carry
things in their usual high-handed manner.

The warders carry complaints against me

I have narrated in the last chapter with what suspicion and severity they treated
me in this prison. And when these new batches of prisoners had begun to come in, their