Twice to the Andamans
Sachindranath Sanyal memorised a book in a cell, founded the HRA, and was sent back
In the Cellular Jail around 1917, Sachindranath Sanyal built a book in his head because prisoners were not allowed paper. It became Bandi Jeevan, the book Bhagat Singh read. This lesson follows him from the Benares conspiracy of 1915 to the founding of the Hindustan Republican Association in 1924, and back to the Andamans a second time, the only Indian sent there twice.
The Man in Cell Block Seven
It is around 1917, in the Cellular Jail at Port Blair. A convict in a coarse prison shirt sits on the floor of his cell with his back against the wall. The cell is about four metres by three. There is one small window, set high and out of reach. Outside, the sea is close enough to hear.
His name is Sachindranath Sanyal. He is in his middle twenties. He has been in the Andamans since his trial in the Benares Conspiracy Case. The sentence was transportation for life. That was the Raj's name for a one-way journey across the Bay of Bengal.
The prisoners here are not allowed to write. Paper is issued, counted, and taken back. Sanyal is building a book anyway, sentence by sentence, in his head. He is memorising his own life.
The book will be called Bandi Jeevan, "the prisoner's life". It will reach print in 1922. Boys who were not yet born when Sanyal went to the islands will read it in Lahore and Kanpur. One of them will help start the party that hangs for Kakori. The question this lesson answers is how a man got from that cell to founding that party. And then how he got sent back.
Benares, 1913
Go back four years from the cell.
Sanyal was born in Benares in 1893. The city was a centre of Sanskrit learning and of pilgrimage, and by the 1910s it was also a centre of something else. After the 1905 partition of Bengal, the secret societies of Calcutta had spread west along the railway. Benares, with its student population and its floating crowd of pilgrims, was a good place to hide.
Around 1913, while still a student, Sanyal set up the Benares branch of the Anushilan Samiti, one of the two big underground societies of Bengal. He was about twenty. The branch did what branches did: found young men, tested them, taught them, and waited.