A Mirror to the British: From Savarkar to Sands.
When politicians like Suella Braverman express “pride” in the British Raj, they are relying on a sanitized, romanticized caricature of empire. They refer to an alternate reality which consists of railways, cricket, and legal institutions. They consciously ignore the brutal, humiliating realities on which that empire operated.
Out of decency we cannot ask Suella Braverman on social media if she would like to serve the British army the way girls of India were enjoined to serve in the brothels run by British Cantonments. But she will take pride in the exposure of this pimping activity by British parliamentarians. Elizabeth W. Andrew and Katharine C. Bushnell were the brave parliamentarians who wrote the report after their visit to India from 1891 to 1893.
Braverman proves the rule about British society: an assimilated person can be as insensitive as a naturally born British person. Congratulations to Braverman for complete assimilation.
It is people like Braverman who inspired me to document British rule in short articles to demonstrate what the British are: Failed Humans.
The Sanitization
History books often sanitize imperial brutality with smooth academic language. Terms like administrative necessity, famine management, and bureaucratic detachment are widely used. They create a comfortable moral buffer for those who benefit from the narrative. Sociological lectures invoke the Milgram obedience experiment to explain colonial cruelty. They present systemic torture as an unfortunate but understandable institutional phenomenon.
That framing is fundamentally dishonest. When a ruling class forces political prisoners to replace oxen on oil mills, that is a choice. When guards lock human beings in cells with their own waste all night, that is deliberate. When administrators ship grain out of a starving province, that is a decision made by a conscious mind. No laboratory experiment explains away personal moral agency.
The Cellular Jail at Port Blair, known as Kala Pani or Black Water, stands as one of the most honest monuments to colonial cruelty. It was built between 1896 and 1906 using puce bricks imported from Burma. Its architecture was designed with a single purpose: to prevent any human contact between prisoners.
Total Isolation
Do you know what is the worst torture for a human being? It is not physical torture, as the human body collapses under extreme pain. It is the psychological pain which has a lasting effect.
Ask any person to spend a weekend without internet or a cellphone. What would the answer be? When Article 370 was repealed from the Constitution of India, the internet was blocked in Kashmir. A night curfew was imposed.
BBC reporter Gita Pandey could visit Kashmir and meet people, yet she and the BBC were outraged and called it an Open Prison. She supported the violence by quoting a hypothetical parent who was willing to pick up a gun due to ‘harsh conditions.’ It appears the BBC removed this story from their website, and it is now part of the Wayback Machine.
They have conveniently forgotten about the Cellular Jail created in India, which ensured the total isolation of prisoners. They were prevented from seeing another human being, let alone talking to or meeting another person. Gita Pandey should visit this prison sometime, and the BBC should tell its readers about it and compare it to the conditions that were created in Kashmir for a few months.
For the record, The Guardian of the UK was also not far behind the BBC in condemning the ‘blackout’ in Kashmir. Overall, British reporting generally treated the blackout as an extreme measure that isolated ordinary people, hindered independent reporting, and raised human-rights and free-expression concerns.
Cellular Prison
Within a few years of the visit of British women parliamentarians to India, the British took upon themselves another task: the task to teach discipline to the ‘natives’. The discipline being a euphemism for submission or surrender.
They started building a prison on a remote island in the middle of the sea, a thousand kilometers away from the mainland of India. But this location cost them dearly in their future policy when they left India. More about that later.
The Spoke-and-Wheel Layout of the prison had seven three-storey wings radiating from a central inspection tower. It is the same prison design shown in many science-fiction Hollywood movies.
The prison housed 693 individual cells (hence “Cellular”). Each cell faced the blank brick wall of the opposite wing. A prisoner could never see, speak to, or hear another human being through those iron grill doors.
Inside each cell measuring 13.5 by 7.5 feet, two earthen pots were kept. One held scarce brackish drinking water. The other pot served as an open night latrine. The cell doors were locked at 6:00 PM and opened at 6:00 AM.
In the tropical heat of Port Blair, breathing in that sealed room meant breathing next to open human waste for twelve hours without interruption. The proximity of contaminated water and open excrement bred amoebic dysentery, cholera, and intestinal infection. For many prisoners, these diseases proved fatal before any sentence was completed.
If these quarters look like torture or cruelty, then meet these prisoners during the day.
Physical Labor
The physical labor was designed to match the humiliation. The British looked at an oil press mill designed for a blindfolded beast and decided to harness human intellectual rebels. Educated political revolutionaries, men who were poets, lawyers, and nationalist intellectuals, were harnessed to such machines. Each prisoner was assigned a daily quota of coconut or mustard oil extraction. Failure to meet the quota had consequences of flogging, iron fetters, or extended solitary confinement. Productivity was counted; health was irrelevant.
Veer Savarkar, incarcerated for over a decade from 1911 to 1921, wrote poetry on cell walls using stones and nails rather than paper and pen. Barindra Kumar Ghosh and Ullaskar Dutt were sent there following the Alipore Bomb Case. Batukeshwar Dutt arrived after the Central Assembly bombing alongside Bhagat Singh. Sachindra Nath Sanyal and hundreds of others were imprisoned under similar circumstances.
When these men organized hunger strikes to protest their conditions, the state responded with force-feeding. A 1933 hunger strike ended with the death of Mahavir Singh due to complications from forced feeding. A 45-day strike in 1937 finally brought enough nationwide pressure to halt political deportations.
Because of the prison, the British maintained Port Blair as Imperial territory. When Subhas Chandra Bose with his army arrived and put up the flag of free India, there was no resistance. With islands like Port Blair and other groups of islands, free India got extended territory in the Indian Ocean. The British regretted it immensely. They tried to dismember India and were successful to a large extent. But their actions led to events that made taking the Indian Ocean away from India impossible.
If you think what happened in Cellular Jail was an isolated event of colonial empire, think again. The British did it again under Margaret Thatcher, the leader of free economy. She too did not like free humans.
Ireland and Bobby Sands: The Modern Continuity
Colonial brutality did not end when the last British administrator left Asia or Africa. The identical cruel treatment was extended to Irish republican prisoners in Northern Ireland during the 1970s and 1980s, within the lifetime of millions of people alive today.
When Margaret Thatcher’s government withdrew Special Category Status from Irish political prisoners in 1976, they effectively declared that political struggle was mere criminal behavior. This was the same logic which was deployed against the prisoners confined in Cellular Jail. Here, Irishmen were the second-class natives.
Dirty Protest
Irish prisoners refused to wear standard prison uniforms. Their clothes were taken away, and they were left with only grey blankets. This became the Blanket Protest.
Just like in the cells of Port Blair, young men were confined to tiny concrete rooms with a chamber pot. When warders stopped emptying them or attacked prisoners during “slop-out,” inmates began smearing excrement on the walls to manage the waste. Excrement accumulated on cell walls. This became the Dirty Protest.
British authorities publicized the resulting conditions to depict prisoners as barbaric. The media completely erased the fact that the state had manufactured those conditions. The collusion of the media was real barbarity.
In 1981, Bobby Sands began a hunger strike. Sands was elected to the British House of Commons while on his deathbed in prison. It proved to the world that his struggle had overwhelming popular political legitimacy.
Sands’ political status meant nothing before the non-imperial power of the British island. Britain had just recovered from its debt crisis with a loan from the IMF. A little glimmer of relevance to world politics made its politicians revert to their basic nature: a bloodhound ruler.
Bobby Sands and his fellow prisoners demanded five basic rights. They asked for the right to wear civilian clothes, to refuse prison work, to associate freely with other prisoners, to organize educational and recreational activities, and to receive one letter, one parcel, and one visit per week. These were not revolutionary political demands. These basic standards were applied to prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention.
The Empire was gone, but the mindset did not change. Society did not change. Thatcher came from an ordinary British family. She was no royalty. Yet she behaved like one. Her background of being a grocer’s daughter did not come in the way. Why? Because as explained in Chapter 1, this is British culture: exploit and be cruel to those who are under your power and control.
Thatcher, running high over her economic policy, refused every demand. She made a single statement that defined her position completely: crime is crime is crime; it is not political. My reply to Thatcher:
Inhuman is inhuman is inhuman. Politics is for humans.
Bobby Sands died on May 5, 1981, after 66 days without food. Nine fellow prisoners followed him. Each death was announced with the same administrative rigidity. Ten men were allowed to starve to death by a state that had every reason to prevent it, but its intoxication with power prevented it.
In 50 years, the British did not change. Nothing can change them. Today they are an island nation with no power in the world except providing financial conduits to all kinds of shady businesses and fugitives.
The moment the British feel powerful, they will repeat their basic inhuman conduct without any pretext.
These are two similar examples divided by five decades. British atrocities are spread all over the globe. In the next chapter, we shall deal with that.
References:
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Savarkar, V.D. My Transportation for Life (originally in Marathi as Majhi Janmathep). First published: May 1927. Originally serialized in Kesari (1925-26) and Shraddhanand (1927). Modern editions: Prabhat Prakashan, New Delhi; also available through Abhishek Publications and the Swatantryaveer Savarkar Rashtriya Smarak Trust (savarkarsmarak.com). The primary firsthand account of imprisonment at Cellular Jail, recording the kolhu labor, solitary confinement conditions, and psychological warfare of British prison administration.
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Sands, Bobby. One Day in My Life. Publisher: Mercier Press, 1983. ISBN: 978-1-85635-349-6. (It was written on toilet paper with a biro refill and kept hidden on his person to prevent confiscation. A firsthand account of a single day during the Blanket Protest in Long Kesh, recording the physical and psychological conditions of British detention in Northern Ireland.)
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Milgram, Stanley. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. Harper & Row, 1974. (The foundational psychological research often cited by Western academia to rationalize institutional detachment and bureaucratic obedience).
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Government of India, Home Department (Political Branch) Records, 1933. File on the Hunger Strike of Political Prisoners in the Cellular Jail, Port Blair, and the Forced-Feeding Death of Mahavir Singh. National Archives of India, New Delhi.
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UK House of Commons Parliamentary Records, April 9, 1981. Fermanagh and South Tyrone By-Election Official Results. (Official parliamentary record of Robert Gerard ‘Bobby’ Sands elected MP for Fermanagh & South Tyrone while imprisoned in H-Block / Long Kesh).