# Savarkar and the Cellular Jail
**सावरकर और सेल्युलर जेल**

- Canonical page: https://indianepics.online/event/cellular-jail-1911/
- Chapter: [Crown and the freedom struggle](https://indianepics.online/chapter/raj.md)
- Track: evidence (archaeology and documents)
- When: 1911 CE – 1921 CE
- Where: Cellular Jail, Port Blair (11.675, 92.748)
- Tags: political, colonial

## Summary

V. D. Savarkar reaches Port Blair's Cellular Jail in 1911 with two life sentences; he and his brother are moved to mainland jails in 1921.

1911 में वि. दा. सावरकर दो आजीवन सज़ाओं के साथ पोर्ट ब्लेयर की सेल्युलर जेल पहुँचे; 1921 में उन्हें और उनके भाई को मुख्य भूमि की जेलों में भेजा गया।

## Account

The Cellular Jail, finished in 1906, had nearly 700 solitary cells in seven wings radiating from a central tower, built so that no prisoner could see or speak to another. Convicts of the Alipore bomb case were sent there from 1909. Savarkar had led the circle at India House in London; one of its members, Madan Lal Dhingra, shot Curzon Wyllie at the Imperial Institute on 1 July 1909 and was hanged at Pentonville on 17 August. Arrested in London in March 1910, Savarkar slipped out of a porthole at Marseilles on the voyage home and was recaptured on the quay. Special tribunals in Bombay gave him two sentences of transportation for life, one of them for abetting the murder of the Nasik collector, A. M. T. Jackson, with a pistol he had sent from London. He reached Port Blair in July 1911.

Prisoners worked the oil mills and coir yards, and hunger strikes over conditions ran into the 1930s. Savarkar and his brother Ganesh were moved to mainland jails in May 1921; Vinayak was released in 1924 on condition that he stay in Ratnagiri district, and in 1937 he became president of the Hindu Mahasabha. Hindutva, his essay defining Hindu nationhood, was written in jail at Ratnagiri.

His clemency petitions of 1911, 1913 and later are the most argued part of his life. Admirers read them as tactics open to any political prisoner, critics as a surrender that ended his opposition to British rule.

## Sources

- Savarkar, My Transportation for Life (Marathi original 1927; English translation)
- Sedition Committee 1918, Report (Rowlatt report) — https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.285698

## Image

Cellular jail or kaalaapani. Jomesh at Malayalam Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ACellular_jail_or_kaalaapani.jpg

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