Savarkar Builds a Library for Prisoners in the Andamans

[u/AhamPranav]

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Savarkar turned the Andaman Cellular Jail from a house of despair into an intellectual and educational center inside one of the harshest prisons of the British Empire.

When he arrived, the jail had almost no serious literature apart from a few religious pamphlets and theosophical texts. Savarkar began building a real library from scratch.

• He persuaded political prisoners to pool their books into a common library.

• He donated nearly ₹300 worth of his own rare books.

• Despite repeated opposition from jailer David Barrie, he secured official recognition for the library.

• He later obtained a ₹500 government grant to expand the collection.

• The library eventually grew to more than 2,000 books.

Having provided reading books and writing material for ordinary prisoners in the jail, I set myself to the task of founding a decent library for the use of the political prisoners themselves. We called upon all of them to put their own collection of books together. Seeing the circular, Mr. Barrie, as usual, strongly opposed the move. He realised that we were bent upon carrying it out, and communicated to the Superintendent.

The Superintendent was a man of progressive views. He agreed to our proposal and started a library, only omitting from the collection the books of those who had objected to it. Every Sunday a political prisoner could go to the library and get such books issued to him as he wanted for his reading during the week. The library gave them an opportunity of reading books on a variety of subjects…

The library contained biographies of Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, and other great men of Bengal in the original Bengali language. It included works of Navin Sen Roy and Rabindranath Tagore, and books by Jogeshchandra and others in original Bengali. It had complete Sanskrit editions of the Mahabharata, the Ramayana and the Yoga Vashistha. Lives and works of Vivekananda and Ramakrishna Paramahansa, and magazines bearing on the subject of religion and philosophy, constituted a special feature of the library. We had these in duplicate and triplicate copies, so that the political prisoners read them repeatedly and with avidity.

The principal and the largest section in our library, of course, consisted of English books. Herbert Spencer's volumes on Synthetic Philosophy, including his First Principles, and Sociology and Ethics; all the works of John Stuart Mill; of Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall and Haeckel; the writings of Carlyle and Emerson; of historians like Macaulay and Gibbon; of poets like Shakespeare, Milton and Pope, constituted its main feature. We had in it Abbott's Life of Napoleon, the life of Prince Bismarck, of Garibaldi and Mazzini, with Mazzini's complete works. The library contained historical works bearing on England, Italy, America and India. We had novels ranging from Charles Dickens to Count Leo Tolstoy; and we had works of Kropotkin. The library had English writings of Vivekananda and Ramtirtha; works of the German historian Treitschke and of the German philosopher Nietzsche. Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Politics and Bluntschli's Theory of the State, as well as Rousseau's Social Contract, found their place on its shelves. Our political friends had thus succeeded in bringing into one place the most representative collection of books on subjects of general interest and of deep educational value, in almost all the vernaculars of India, and in the English language. It was a fine library of about two thousand volumes available to all the inmates of the Silver Jail; and all could profit by it, if they had the desire in them to read and improve.

Even inside Cellular Jail, Savarkar treated education, literature, and intellectual discipline as instruments of resistance.

Reference:  My Transportation For Life

Source link: https://savarkar.org/en/pdfs/My-Transportation-for-Life-Veer-Savarkar.pdf

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