Cellular memory: Tales of exiles and prisoners from the Dagshai jail museum

Hindustan Times

14-06-2025

The lights went out and the maximum-security prison was plunged into the clotted darkness of night. Muffled groans and cries seemed to emanate from 54 narrow cells.
Built in 1849, the mountaintop Dagshai prison held a range of political activists and freedom fighters in the British colonial era. Indians who fought in the Revolt of 1857 were held here, in particular Gorkha soldiers who took up arms in nearby battlefields in that first war of independence.
Irish soldiers of the Connaught Rangers regiment were held here too, after they mutinied against their English officers in 1920.
One of the prison's last inmates was Mahatma Gandhi's assassin, Nathuram Godse, who spent a night in a cold, dark cell here, while on his way to stand trial in Shimla.
Our burly army guide was a reassuring presence in the dark. His whispered tales were not
As the lights flickered on again, we continued our tour of the what is now the Dagshai jail museum in Himachal Pradesh. No one ever escaped its walls, except to the cemetery on its grounds, said our guide (who asked to go unnamed, in keeping with protocol).
The cells were designed to be part of the punishment. Tiny and dark, the only source of light was a heavily barricaded window in the central corridor. A gallows house stood nearby, and an area for firing-squad executions. Among those executed here in this manner was the 20-year-old Irish soldier James Daly, part of the 1920 rebellion.
The torture chamber still has chains on its walls, like the ones from which prisoners were suspended. Those who continued to rebel were put in a cage, a 3 ft wide cell with iron bars on the front (above), and fed only bread and water.
Interestingly, Dagshai has a long history with criminals that far predates the jail.
In the Mughal era, lawbreakers were banished to the dense, mountainous forests here as punishment. Before being exiled in this manner, such offenders were branded on the forehead with a 'royal mark' or 'daag-e-shahi', which is how this beautiful Himalayan town got its name.
The curator of the prison museum, military historian Anand Sethi, has close ties to Dagshai too. His father, Balkrishan Sethi, was the first Indian appointed Cantonment Executive Officer, in 1941-42. He lived in a cottage right next to the jail and would later tell his son vivid stories about it.
Sethi says he wondered, from time to time, what became of the prison after Independence. 'After all, history lies trapped within its walls,' he adds.
About 20 years ago, he decided to find out. He moved to this nook of the mountains and found that the jail had been invaded by the forest, and was starting to crumble.
Sethi approached then brigade commander (later lieutenant general) P Ananthanarayanan, who greenlit the project to restore the prison. With Sethi overseeing the project, soldiers ushered hordes of monkeys out of the premises, fixed the leaks in the walls, repainted and repaired, but left much of the rest unchanged.
It felt fitting, Sethi says, to turn what might seem like a footnote in India's history into a museum with a message: that the painful past must never be allowed to repeat itself.