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As part of a team which had helped with the research for some of the exhibits, I was naturally keen to see what the Housing Infrastructure Development Corporation (Hidco), the state public sector undertaking (PSU) tasked with the execution of the project, had made of the heritage site. But the crowds streaming into the museum were a deterrent, and we decided to come back when the initial excitement receded.
It had nearly been a year ago when we had stepped into the prison after signing a register at the gate. The campus then bore all the marks of a place that had been vacated recently, with debris and rubbish strewn everywhere. But we also got a sense of how a working prison might have been, an ambience likely lost with the recent changes. At the entry, there are two doors marked 'admission' and 'release', where inmates were processed as they either came in or left at the end of their sentences.
As one stepped into the main campus, one saw the famed Alipore Printing Press on the right, one of the oldest working presses in the country, dating back to 1857 and converted into a profit-making venture by the then inspector-general FJ Mouat. The press building - along with the solitary cells, the barracks and the jail hospital - were all in regulation red brick. The barracks and cells were radially arranged, with a watchtower at the centre which would enable the jailers to maintain constant surveillance. There was a chapel on the ground floor of the watchtower for inmates and prisoners of the Christian faith.
Most of the solitary cells are accompanied by signage about some of their most famous inmates. Thus, there is the Nehru Cell where India's first prime minister India was lodged for 80 days in 1934 for his part in the Civil Disobedience Movement. It is believed that his daughter Indira Nehru visited him regularly, and that father and daughter sat under a tree in the cell courtyard. But like most stories about the Alipore Jail, there is no documentary evidence.
No one knows where the visitors' books have gone. One of the most disheartening features 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 were treated with extreme callousness by the government departments working on the site.
The other famous inmates of the prison were Chittaranjan Das, Subhas Chandra Bose, Jatindra Mohan Sengupta, and Bidhan Chandra Roy. They were all lodged in cells in what is now called the 'Netaji Cell Building'. But the general wards were more interesting - a long narrow building with rows of stone beds at right angles to the longer walls. There were stone headrests as well, but with alternating directions, so as to discourage conversation between adjacent prisoners. There was a small temple at one end of the barrack as well.
But it was the gallows and the condemned cells for death row convicts that really brought home the brutality of the system. Prisoners would be kept in one of the three cells the night before the execution. Another unverifiable prison lore was that some of the more troublesome prisoners were kept in a building opposite the gallows so that they could see the execution. It was at these gallows that the likes of Anantahari Mitra, Promod Ranjan Chowdhury, Dinesh Gupta, Ramkrishna Biswas and Dinesh Mazumdar were hanged between 1926 and 1934. One hopes that the new museum is able to do justice to their memory and legacy.
The writer is publisher, Jadavpur University Press
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