I'm here in the stunning Indian paradise of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
But these islands also have a very very dark past
when it comes to Freedom Fighters and the Indian Freedom Movement.
That's what we are gonna explore behind me at Cellular Jail.
I've just entered Cellular Jail, also known as Kaala Paani or Black Water.
And this is a place that the British used to send and house Indian freedom fighters and political activists.
And this wasn't a normal jail.
This was kind of like an experimental jail for the British.
It involved torture of the prisoners, medical tests on the prisoners, forced labor..
All this kind of torture is just unimaginable.
That's how they treated these Indian freedom fighters and political activists..
people who are trying to free India from the British.
This is the way that they tried to kind of stifle and stop the Indian freedom movement
by sending them to this torturous prison,
1300 km across the water here in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
Yeah it was that far away from India.
It was so far away from India that people would die on the boat voyage here.
It's a real death camp, this place.
𝑊𝑜𝑛'𝑡 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑠𝑎𝑣𝑒, 𝑠𝑎𝑣𝑒, 𝑠𝑎𝑣𝑒, 𝑠𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑚𝑒?
Oh, 𝑠𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑚𝑒.
𝑆𝑎𝑣𝑒, 𝑠𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑚𝑒.
𝐼'𝑣𝑒 𝑏𝑒𝑒𝑛 𝑡𝑟𝑎𝑝𝑝𝑒𝑑 𝑖𝑛 this 𝑑𝑎𝑟𝑘𝑛𝑒𝑠𝑠 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑓𝑎𝑟 𝑡𝑜𝑜 𝑙𝑜𝑛𝑔 now.
The very first thing you notice when you get here is the way the jail was developed.
And so if the prisoners made it this far.. made it on that massive voyage here,
they were put in these cells here which was designed for solitary confinement.
Their cell faced the back of somebody else's cell
and they couldn't see the other person or talk to that person because of the distance between the cells.
So yeah. Once they got here, it was solitary confinement and torture.
And so many Indians died here in this jail.
To me, this is a very special place because so many Indian revolutionaries were sent here.
This was where the British sent the people they were so scared of..
the people they called terrorists.
But in India, they are called revolutionaries. Not terrorists.
Oh, 𝐼'𝑚 𝑟𝑢𝑛𝑛𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑜𝑢𝑡 𝑜𝑓 𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒.
𝐼 have 𝑡𝑜 𝑠𝑡𝑎𝑦 𝑠𝑡𝑟𝑜𝑛𝑔
And this is the example of one of the cells here at Cellular Jail.
It was just all brick and concrete.
And you'll notice there is no toilet in here at all.
They were allowed to go toilet in the morning and at night.
And the rest of the time, they were just locked in here all day long.
And they couldn't communicate with anybody. See? Who can they talk to?
There's no windows. There's no nothing.
And they couldn't talk to the guards outside because all they could see was a brick wall.
This was the design to keep them in solitary confinement.
Three of this prison's most, kind of popular inmates were Batukeshwar Dutt.
He was a Bengali freedom fighter who joined Bhagat Singh in a bunch of his activities.
Then you have Yogendra Shukla.
He was a Bihari freedom fighter.
And finally the most famous freedom fighter who was housed here was Vinayak Savarkar.
And he is very contentious today.
He termed the phrase 'Hindutva'.
And what Hindutva means is... man I can't even explain it.
There are so many different definitions and understandings of what it means today.
Let's start off with a tiny bit of history.
So originally the word 'Hindu' meant people living below the Indus river up in Kashmir.
It was a geographical term, actually.
It didn't stand for the religion that we know today.
It was purely geographical.
So everybody below that river was a Hindu or a Hindustani.
But the word 'Hindutva' came along and confused all of that.
So much so that now, people don't like to use the word Hindustani anymore
because people think and translate it to the land of the Hindus.
But that's not what Hindustani or the word Hindu originally meant.
So Hindutva came along and it changed the word Hindu from a geographical term to a religious term.
And I'm not even gonna try and define Hindutva
because it's been so confused and it's been defined and understood in so many different ways
that today, it is mainly associated with Hindu religion nationalism..Hindu nationalists.
And it's used to exclude religions from the Indian identity.
It's used to exclude religions like Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Zoroastrianism
from the Indian identity as not being Hindu.
But these nationalists are happy to accept Sikhism, Buddhism and Jainism alongside Hinduism
as part of Hindutva and part of the Indian identity.
So friends, yeah, we are all Hindustanis.
Don't confuse it for meaning people of the Hindu religion.
It's probably better to use the word Bharatiya, simply Indian,
because it's free of this confusing history.
So on the way with everybody else to Savarkar's jail cell now and...
the first time I ever saw this jail cell was when Narendra Modi, the current Prime Minister..
he meditated in it on a trip here a few years back.
It was on national TV so..
you got to have a little look inside cellular jail and clearly he was a huge fan of Savarkar.
So this is Savarkar's jail cell now.
It's basically a little kind of tribute to him and his ten years that he spent here.
And he is one of the few lucky ones who actually made it back to India after staying here.
I say "make it back to India" but it's because we are so far from India, this doesn't feel like India.
But make no mistake, Andaman and Nicobar Islands is a Union Territory of India.
We are up in the very center point of the jail now and you can kind of see the design from up here.
So there's only three wings left that you can see here.
They originally were seven wings that went in a kind of circular shape around this area
and just look at the view this place has.
This has to be the jail with the most beautiful view and in the most stunning location in the world.
So this guy is busy being forced to make 30 pounds of coconut oil
and this guy is making 10 pounds of mustard oil.
And all the prisoners had to produce this every single day..
30 pounds of coconut oil and 10 pounds of mustard oil.
Or else, face the consequences. And the consequences were like flogging here.
This guy is busy getting beat.
Or wearing something like this.. these kind of bars that held your kind of feet to your hand.
All right. Now to the spookiest place of this jail
and this is the gallows where the Indian freedom fighters were hung.
Well, assassinated really. So...
they get hung by this noose and the man pulls the chain and this trapdoor falls
and the body just falls down and the guy snaps his neck.
I'll take you under stairs now and show you that too.
So this is the bottom of the gallows here
where the bodies would fall.
Once the hangman pulled the liver, they fall down from these trapdoors
And yeah, it is so creepy being in here
where so many great Indians were assassinated by the British.
Terrible!
The jail was finally closed and the Indian prisoners were released in 1939.
But then something quite funny happened so..
The Japanese came to India and they invaded these islands and took them.
And then they imprisoned prisoners of war here and they were the British.
So the British were stuck in their own jail by the Japanese.
But god, imagine what would have happened if the Japanese had taken over India like they took control from the British.
I'm pretty sure it would have been worse than the British.
Both were bad but I'm sure the Japanese would have been worse.
So then after the Japanese lost World War 2, they had to retreat.
And the Andaman and Nicobar Islands here were the first part of India to become independent in 1947.
Jai Hind!
And if you guys haven't checked out my other videos here from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands,
you have to do it because this place here is an absolute paradise in India.
A few of the things I do on this channel is...
I take people behind the scenes of life here in India.
I explore the places in India that other people don't explore and don't make YouTube videos on.
It's part of what I do.. going to these amazing beautiful places.
And I've visited 33 of the 36 Indian states and Union Territories.
And India before partition.. so Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Just going to be finishing off visiting all the states and Union Territories here in India this year.
𝑆𝑜 𝑠𝑎𝑣𝑒, 𝑠𝑎𝑣𝑒, 𝑠𝑎𝑣𝑒, 𝑠𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑚𝑒.
𝑊𝑜𝑛'𝑡 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑠𝑎𝑣𝑒, 𝑠𝑎𝑣𝑒, 𝑠𝑎𝑣𝑒, 𝑠𝑎𝑣𝑒 𝑚𝑒?