१८५७ का स्वातन्त्र्य समर (वीर विनायक दामोदर सावरकर - अंग्रेजों द्वारा छपने से पूर्व प्रतिबन्धित महाग्रन्थ)

THE STORY OF THIS HISTORY
when the last and the most determined effort was made to
organize an army on the largest scale, yet recorded, to invade
India to free her from the British bondage, by Rash Bihari
Bose, the President of the Hindu Maha Sabha branch in Japan,
and which army was later on commanded by Netaji Subhas
Chandra Bose. Unimpeachable evidence recorded by patriots
and warriors who took an actual part in the invasion shows
that this ‘History’ was read and re-read in their camps and
was looked upon as a veritable text-book for the soldiers and
officers in the army. A stray copy of a Tamil edition was
also ransacked. Its tattered pages were glued and the volume
was rebound and circulated in the army. But it is not known
when or by whom the Tamil translation was made and
published.
The Sixth English Edition to Challenge the Ban on the Book
While throughout the last thirty or forty years the revo-
lutionists were thus bringing out secretly, edition after edition
of this history, an open public agitation was also going on in
India demanding the raising of the Governmental ban not only
on this history but on several other books written by Veer
Savarkar. Public meetings and protests made by literary socie-
ties went unheeded by the British Government in England as
well as in India. Even when the so called National ministries
formed by the Congressites came to power some ten years ago,
they too did not raise the ban on Savarkarite literature as
perhaps, it not only did not countenance but positively de-
nounced the vagaries of the half-witted and even immoral
doctrine of absolute non-violence to which the Congressites
swore only verbal allegiance. But when the recent World War
II was over and the present Congressite ministries came into
power, the public demand for the raising of this ban
grew so unruly that some enthusiastic patriots threaten-
ed to challenge and break the ban. They raised funds
and secretly printed a new English edition in Bombay with a
view to selling it openly and publicly courting arrests. They
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