Speak, Memory

V.D. Savarkar is everywhere—in and outside the Andaman Cellular Jail—while the contributions of other revolutionaries who were imprisoned there receive little attention

- Soham Das

THERE are no busts of freedom fighters Ullaskar Dutta and Barin Ghosh at the Andaman Cellular Jail, and no plans to install them—this is how the Ministry of Culture most recently responded to the query raised on March 13, 2025, by Ritabrata Banerjee, a Trinamool Congress Member of Parliament from West Bengal, serving in the Rajya Sabha since December 2024. The Ministry also made it clear that the jail is not protected under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act, 1958, and no proposal was made to announce the British-era prison as a national monument, either.

Exactly a month before this exchange, in response to another question raised by Banerjee, the Ministry had said that out of 585 revolutionaries jailed between 1909 and 1938, 398 were from Bengal, making up as much as 68 per cent of the total count. As Banerjee complained, despite undivided Bengal’s lion’s share of the contribution to the freedom struggle, this part has been deliberately ignored by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government, which spared no effort in promoting Vinayak Damodar Savarkar—the only ‘freedom struggle icon’ of the Hindutva ideologues, imprisoned there for a substantial period of time from 1911-21.

This is not the first time Banerjee has raised the issue. In 2017, as a Rajya Sabha MP on a Communist Party of India (Marxist) ticket, he urged the government to engrave the names of teenaged revolutionaries who took part in the Chittagong uprising of 1930 and were sent to the Cellular Jail (many of whom went on to become Communists), which he claimed was missing from the display on the premises.