Hi, Everyone! Savarkar’s Marseilles
leap is my favorite subject of research, and fortunately, I have been able to
ferret out all kinds of details about it—two of my favorites are: the actual location
where the S.S. Morea was docked and
the mapping out of Savarkar’s escape route—I am giving a link below to my
articles that give particulars of Savarkar’s Great Escape (as I like to call
it) and also the videos that I have made for it. I was not able to include this
topic in my book Burning for Freedom.
It was beyond the scope of it. I compromised by including it in the
introduction. Here it is:
Introduction
T
|
he day—July 8, 1910; the hour—early
morning; the place—the harbor at Marseilles, France. As the fingers of dawn
curled across the sky, a tiny figure wriggled out of the porthole from the
belly of the SS Morea and took the historic
leap into the ocean, the cry “Hail! Victory to Mother India!” on his lips. That
was the twenty-seven-year-old Vinayak Damodar Savarkar devoted heart and soul
from childhood to just one cause: India for the Indians!
By the early
1900s, Indians were brainwashed into being satisfied with their slave status
under the British rule. In this ambience, Savarkar—a Chitpavan Brahmin Hindu
with the blood of the warrior Peshwas[1]
flowing through his veins—was the first
freedom fighter to proclaim that nothing less than total independence would do for India. Certainly, more drastic
measures were required than the mewling of the
Indian National Congress[2]
to the British government for mere concessions for India. Savarkar applied his
considerable brilliance, intelligence, and charm to the problem. He established
Abhinav Bharat, his secret revolutionary society, which spread surely and
swiftly within India. In July 1906, at the age of twenty-three, he set off for
London, ostensibly to become a barrister. In reality his goals were manifold: studying
the British law to circumvent it in his mission; spreading patriotism in the
hearts of the intelligentsia of India, the Indian youth studying there; contacting
revolutionaries of other countries and making a common cause for freedom of all slave countries; and making the
plight of India an international issue.
This young lion was
extraordinarily successful in his mission. The British realized the danger
Savarkar posed to their empire. But they had only enough proof to make a case
against him for supplying arms to India. To doom him for eternity on that
flimsy evidence, he had to be
extradited to India. The laws there were molded, like putty, to quash the first
sign of any threat to the British Empire. They had no grounds for it, though. Desperate,
they tangled Savarkar in a concocted charge by using a speech he had given four
years earlier in India! A warrant was then issued to extradite him to Bombay,
India. He was charged with sedition, waging war against the King of England,
and procuring and distributing arms in London and India. After a few gyrations
by the courts in London, to circumvent Savarkar’s valid legal appeals that he
be tried in England, an order was issued to execute the warrant. Now the Jaws of
Hell—the judiciary system of India—could swallow him whole!
And here he was
on this day making a final bid to escape just that fate. He swam
single-mindedly until he reached the nine-foot high quay wall. At the second
attempt—with only the grout between
the dressed stone of the wall for toes and fingertips to grip!—he scaled that
sheer wall. Incredibly, he had made
it …! He now had a right to claim asylum in France. But no—he was not yet safe;
his guards were chasing after him down the ramp to the quay. With no time to
even catch his breath after that courageous, daredevil escape, he ran for his
life—the guards hot on his heels. Seeing a French sergeant, he stopped and
tried desperately to communicate his plight to him. But it was too late …!
His guards swooped down upon him in French
jurisdiction—quite, quite illegally—and
dragged him willy-nilly back to the Morea—trampling
all over the territorial sovereignty of France in the process.
His escape plan
had failed, but in this failure was also success. Such gross miscarriage of
justice would not, could not,
be swept under the rug. An international hue and cry was raised. Savarkar’s
heroic escape and the treachery of the British were exposed throughout the
world. But the die was cast. Savarkar was now at the mercy of the British to do
with him as they pleased. He was sentenced to a total of fifty years
transportation[3] to the Cellular Jail in
the remote and dreaded Andaman Islands.
The British had hoped,
no doubt, that this was the last they would hear of this Prince of the Revolutionaries.
They could not have been more wrong. At sixteen, he had taken an oath to fight
for the freedom of his beloved country—Mother India must be freed from
the British stranglehold; her honor must be reinstated! And even under
the most horrendous conditions, there
was never a day, never a moment, that Savarkar swerved from his path.
He suffered
within the walls of the Cellular Jail from July 4, 1911, until May 21, 1921; he
was then transferred to the Indian mainland jails as the Andaman Penal Colony
was closed down. Hard labor, even being yoked to the oil mill like a bullock,
was his lot for almost thirteen long years before he was conditionally
released—though not set free—from jail on January 6, 1924.
Throughout his
life, Savarkar remained ever uncompromising of his principles and duty. He says
in his poem, Upon the Death Bed:
Those for the essence of the welfare of the human race,
Only such deeds did I consider to be righteous.
Joyously have I borne this burden
of my duty,
Ever true to my oath have I been.
He stood,
unequivocally, for freedom and equality of all people. His ultimate political
goal was a World Commonwealth of Nations. Savarkar believed that Hindus could
work toward freedom and equality in the whole world. But first they needed to
be free themselves.
Hail! Attaining freedom themselves—
To uphold the cause of love and equality,
For the protection of the good people—
The Hindus shall set free the world![4]
To this end he
developed and published the concept of Hindutva in 1923—while still
incarcerated—and later put forward his basis for a constitution for free India.
The heritage and history of Hindustan[5]
is age-old, going back thousands of years before the birth of the three great
monotheistic religions. The people of Hindustan should feel a sense of
belonging to it; Hindustan should be their fatherland[6]
and their holy land. That is the crux of Savarkar’s Hindutva. As Savarkar puts
it:
O Beloved Hindustan, you
are
Our holy land! Our fatherland!
Our honor and our pride![7]
In 1937,
Savarkar once again burst upon the political scene of India, free after twenty-seven
years of British bondage. India was in dire straits; the political milieu then
was one of Muslim appeasement, one of sacrificing Hindu rights. Injustice to anyone was intolerable to Savarkar. Undeterred
by adverse publicity, maligning, or misrepresentation by his detractors, he
fought to defend the rights of
the Hindus; he fought to preserve the integrity of India, to reinstate the honor
of his motherland without ripping her heart out or chopping off her arms and
legs.
Burning for
freedom, his heart beat but one refrain:
“O Goddess of Freedom,
Life is to die for you,
Death is to live without
you!”[8]
Savarkar: The Great Escape, Part I
Savarkar: The Great Escape, Part II
-
Anurupa
[1] Prime Ministers of the Maratha rulers wielding the
actual power.
[2] To be referred to as Congress throughout the novel.
[4] Quote from the translation
of Savarkar’s poem, Hark What the Future
Portends.
[5] Age-old name of India. Meaning of Hindustan is “Land
of the Hindus.”
[6] In Hindutva, perspective of
Hindustan is pitrubhumi, “the Land of
the Ancestors.” Fatherland is the
closest English translation of that Sanskrit word.
In the freedom movement, perspective of Hindustan is matrubhumi—motherland—the Divine
Mother who gives birth to and nurtures the Hindustanis.
[7] Quote from the translation
of Savarkar’s poem, Beloved Hindustan.
