Sharma : was he a man of courage in the physical sense?
Chavan : Well, looking to his revolutionary activities, naturally he was a man or courage.
Sharma : But in one of his letters written from jail, there is a sentence, where he says that he would not go to jail again. I think, during this period, he was probably not prepared to go to jail again and suffer.
Chavan : It would be very unfair to say about a man who had suffered all his life that he was not prepared to go to jail, sacrifice. I know that, It is a futile way of leading a revolutionary life, going and sitting in jail And jail-going has been glorified in the political context. He was not that sort of jail goer. He went to jail for more than five years. And he was a mn who wanted to work hard and organise. Concept of jail-going for the sake of sacrifice was not his idea. This is what I understood.
Only because hy says in his letter that he would not like to go back to jail does not mean that he lacked courage. His whole life was full of courageous things – the way he changed his life, the way he changed his life, the way he prepared this country for a revolutionary change. As a matter of fact, he thought it futile, unproductive and unrevolutionry to sit in jail, doing nothing. But Gandhiji believed that jail was a kind of tanasya. He created some sort of atmosphere in the country, in the people's minds. It had its own relevance. I don't say that it had not. It also worked in the Indian context. But only because Roy had said that, I don,t say that he was not a courage man.
