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As a part of a workforce which had helped with the analysis for a few of the displays, I used to be naturally eager to see what the Housing Infrastructure Growth Company (Hidco), the state public sector enterprise (PSU) tasked with the execution of the mission, had made from the heritage web site. However the crowds streaming into the museum have been a deterrent, and we determined to come back again when the preliminary pleasure receded.
It had practically been a yr in the past after we had stepped into the jail after signing a register on the gate. The campus then bore all of the marks of a spot that had been vacated not too long ago, with particles and garbage strewn all over the place. However we additionally obtained a way of how a working jail might need been, an atmosphere probably misplaced with the latest adjustments. On the entry, there are two doorways marked ‘admission’ and ‘launch’, the place inmates have been processed as they both got here in or left on the finish of their sentences.
As one stepped into the primary campus, one noticed the famed Alipore Printing Press on the best, one of many oldest working presses within the nation, courting again to 1857 and transformed right into a profit-making enterprise by the then inspector-general FJ Mouat. The press constructing – together with the solitary cells, the barracks and the jail hospital – have been all in regulation purple brick. The barracks and cells have been radially organized, with a watchtower on the centre which might allow the jailers to keep up fixed surveillance. There was a chapel on the bottom ground of the watchtower for inmates and prisoners of the Christian religion.
A lot of the solitary cells are accompanied by signage about a few of their most well-known inmates. Thus, there may be the Nehru Cell the place India’s first prime minister India was lodged for 80 days in 1934 for his half within the Civil Disobedience Motion. It’s believed that his daughter Indira Nehru visited him repeatedly, and that father and daughter sat below a tree within the cell courtyard. However like most tales concerning the Alipore Jail, there isn’t any documentary proof.
Nobody is aware of the place the guests’ books have gone. Some of the disheartening options of our visits to the jail was to see how little of the jail archives remained. The few registers and scraps of paper that had survived have been handled with excessive callousness by the federal government departments engaged on the location.
The opposite well-known inmates of the jail have been Chittaranjan Das, Subhas Chandra Bose, Jatindra Mohan Sengupta, and Bidhan Chandra Roy. They have been all lodged in cells in what’s now referred to as the ‘Netaji Cell Constructing’. However the normal wards have been extra fascinating – a protracted slim constructing with rows of stone beds at proper angles to the longer partitions. There have been stone headrests as effectively, however with alternating instructions, in order to discourage dialog between adjoining prisoners. There was a small temple at one finish of the barrack as effectively.
But it surely was the gallows and the condemned cells for loss of life row convicts that actually introduced dwelling the brutality of the system. Prisoners can be saved in one of many three cells the evening earlier than the execution. One other unverifiable jail lore was that a few of the extra troublesome prisoners have been saved in a constructing reverse the gallows in order that they might see the execution. It was at these gallows that the likes of Anantahari Mitra, Promod Ranjan Chowdhury, Dinesh Gupta, Ramkrishna Biswas and Dinesh Mazumdar have been hanged between 1926 and 1934. One hopes that the brand new museum is ready to do justice to their reminiscence and legacy.
The author is writer, Jadavpur College Press
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