Biography of Savarkar, Post 11: Last Few Years of Incarceration

Plaque of Ganesh (Babarao) Savarkar's Quote

·        Savarkar made several petitions to the Government seeking to be released. He held that it was the duty of a true patriot to escape from prison any way he could, even by making petitions and signing pledges. No patriot was bound by them.

·        1920: on April 6, he submitted a petition to the Indian Government depicting his ideal of Human Government and World Commonwealth.

He also discussed the situation in Cellular Jail at length with the Jail Committee and that went a long way in shutting down the jail.

·        1921: he recommended the convicts to settle as free men in Andaman rather than being imprisoned in mainland jails. He had seen the ideal opportunity these islands presented as a navy base the first instant he had laid eyes on the land.

·        In his last year in jail he was made an overseer.

·        May 2, 1921: he was repatriated to the mainland. The suffering and hardship started once more. Even so he still put together the same kind of programs as his Andaman ones.

·        Savarkar watched worriedly from the jail as the reins of the freedom of his beloved Hindustan went into the hands of Gandhi, especially after the death of Tilak. He tried to educate the political prisoners about the pitfalls of nonviolence and the abyss that was the Khilafat Movement.

·        1923: he wrote Hindutva—a book that is the bedrock of the Hindutva Movement to this day—under the pseudonym Maratha from the Ratnagiri jail, where the conditions were so inhuman that he had even contemplated suicide.

·        January 6, 1924: he was released from jail on the condition that he refrained from politics in public or private and was confined to the backwater Ratnagiri District.

  - Anurupa