The Patient Assassin by Anita Anand

Author:Anita Anand [Anand, Anita]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781471174230
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

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* Literally translated as ‘brotherhood’; it carries a particularly tribal/caste/geographical context when used by Punjabis.

CHAPTER 17

LOSING GOD

Multan Jail, Udham’s home for the next five years, was a newly built institution 250 miles south-west of Amritsar. A sentence of ‘rigorous imprisonment’ entailed ten hours of hard labour daily, poor rations, and the strictest of disciplinary regimes. Beatings were frequent. The best way to survive a sentence of RI was to keep one’s head down and attract as little attention as possible. That, however, was not Udham’s style now.

Prisoner Sher Singh was uncooperative from the start. He preached the Ghadar message to inmates, spoke of the evil of British rule and was thrown into solitary confinement and frequently flogged for his acts of agitation.1 Released back into the general prison population, he would do the same thing again . . . and again. Multan jailers eventually tired of his antics. Udham was a contagion. He needed to be sent somewhere else.

As Udham himself put it, in the space of those five years he was ‘transferred from one prison to another’.2 There are few prison records that survive from this time, but it is more than likely that one of the prisons that played host to the troublesome inmate from Multan was Mianwali Jail, some 200 miles north-east of Lahore, in the Dera Ismail Khan Division of Punjab province.

Mianwali was one of the most ferocious penal institutions in India, with a regime specially designed to deal with political prisoners. With a population of around 500 in 1927, the accommodation was basic, consisting of clay-lined walls, bucket latrines, straw mats and little else. When the sun went down after a day of hard labour, prisoners were plunged into exhausted darkness with nothing but their thoughts to wrap around themselves, and the prospect of another back-breaking day ahead.

Dysentery, typhoid and lice were constant companions in Mianwali, as were difficult nationalist prisoners. The most notable among them was a young man called Bhagat Singh. He would become one of the most important figures in Udham’s life.

Articulate, educated and softly spoken, Bhagat Singh seemed out of place in the harsh environment of Mianwali Jail. While other prisoners collapsed in grateful sleep, Bhagat, a bookish young man of twenty-two, spent his evenings in the dim light of his cell studying the Raj’s penal code. He used what he learned against the wardens and higher prison authorities, complaining frequently about conditions, the quality of food and the indignity of tasks he and his fellow prisoners were forced to perform. Objections were polite, succinct and appeared to be written by a lawyer. None of them made his life any easier. Bhagat Singh already knew he was going to die and was resigned to the fact. He just did not want to make it too easy for the authorities while he waited for his execution.

Bhagat Singh, who supposedly made the pilgrimage to Jallianwala Bagh after the massacre in 1919, had murdered a British policeman, Assistant Superintendent John Saunders, and for that he would hang.

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