LOST TO HISTORY, LOCKED IN MY MIND, JOGI DADU, A SOLITARY SOUL

Jogi Dadu is dead and gone decades ago but he lives on radiant in my memory as a valiant son of Mother India who suffered the torment of dependence and the torture of incarceration in the Cellular Jail which had no equal in brutality in British India. I can still vividly recall his calm impassive face with a resolution of something I knew not what it was then writ large on his face which bespoke of an iron unbending will to accomplish the goal come what may the hindrances be. Jogi Dadu was a revolutionary terrorist of the day in Bengal who had taken up arms against the British Raj and was in consequence sentenced to transportation to the Andaman Islands for incarceration in the notorious Cellular Jail, the habitat of all enemies of the Crown who had adopted the path of revolutionary violence against the British.

Jogi Dadu had turned revolutionary in his early teens. He was orphaned early and was brought up by the four winds of revolution rife in the air which led him to the heart of so-called seditious activity against the British Government. If I am not erring, he was sent to the Andamans in the early 1930s where he endured customary torture that typified British jail conditions in those days. Nails were plucked out from fingers, iron nails driven in between the finger nails and the flesh, incessant water-drop fall from high above onto a specific point of the head --- these were some of the exercises in British barbarism to which he was along with his comrades-in-arms subjected to.

What was tragic in this revolutionary's life was that throughout its entire span he lived in extreme poverty without home and hearth, without family --- for he remained a bachelor all his life --- and without much of an income and a permanent shelter, living off what chanced his way through the mercy of Providence daily, here a meal, there a few hours of hospitality. A lifelong of uncertainty of living endured with a fortitude and an uprightness of character, a calm forbearance and an equanimity in daily distress I have witnessed in Jogi Dadu even in my childhood when he was in his early fifties. This life of luminous poverty characterised by a simplicity of existence, a bareness of living, a frugality that would put friars to shame and an unimpeachable character full of the fire of revolutionary fervour despite the severe odds of life makes Jogi Dadu live on lustrous in my memory as a perennial source of inspiration to do something for the motherland in my own feeble way.

The wistful look in his eyes I can clearly see as if peering into his island past when his peers suffered torture and he witnessed, when he suffered torture and chanted 'Bande Mataram' in defiance and when his comrades died on the scaffold to the helplessness of those that lived on but could do nothing by way of retribution for the perfidies perpetrated against them. But through it all I can still recall how affectionate he was to us, children, but as if always from a mile apart as he told us stories of his days of incarceration in the Indian Bastille, the Kaala Paaani from where they never returned.

It seems today that Jogi Dadu had, since his tormented days at the Cellular Jail where his name is still enshrined in a marble plaque along with his comrades, ever lived in an island of his own where alone he strode like a lost monarch with unfulfilled dreams and aspirations unanswered by the representative government of independent India, a man tortured by the cataclysm of Partition and the poverty of hundreds of millions among whom even he numbered, a being in the twilit consciousness of his evolving understanding, tormented by that eternal question 'why?' to all that went about in the name of independence which never came the way they had dreamt it would but was a betrayal of the blood of the martyrs spilled, their agonised cries for even their flesh pained, and the hopes of a nation sold out to self-interest and darkest deceit.