Shaheed Dr Diwan Singh Kalepani

Dr Diwan Singh "Kalepani" was a physician, Punjabi poet and community leader in the Andaman Islands. SikhNet gives his birth as 22 May 1897 at Ghalotian Khurd village in Sialkot district, now in Pakistan. Orphaned as a child, he was raised by his maternal uncle and grandmother, passed matriculation at Khalsa High School, Sialkot, in 1915, and studied medicine at Agra. From 1919 he held government medical posts at Rawalpindi, Bannu, Kohat, Waziristan and Dagshai. SikhNet says he was reportedly moved to Rangoon because the British disliked a government employee criticising them.

He reached the Andamans in 1925 and in 1927 took charge of the hospital of the Cellular Jail, the notorious "Kala Pani", which gave him his pen name Kalepani. His granddaughter told The Tribune in 2023 that he served there as a medical officer for 17 years.

Key moments

• 1937: he built a gurdwara at Port Blair open to people of every faith, with language classes and a library of newspapers. In 1948 it was renamed the Dr Diwan Singh Gurdwara.
• 1938: his first poetry collection, Wagde Pani (Running Water). Antim Laharan followed in 1964 and Malhian de Ber in 1986.
• 23 March 1942: Japanese forces occupied Port Blair. Under the occupation he headed the Peace Committee of the Indian Independence League, which tried, with little success, to reduce the people's suffering.
• 23 October 1943: he was arrested on false charges of spying for the British. SikhNet adds that he had objected to Japanese plans to use Korean women in the gurdwara. His son, Mohinder Singh Dhillon, wrote in The Tribune in 1998 that about 2,000 of his associates were arrested within a week.
• He was tortured for 82 days (SikhNet says 83) and died in the Cellular Jail on 14 January 1944, the day of Maghi. His son lists hanging by the hair, water torture, electric shocks and nails pulled out.

In that 1998 article his son writes that he met the Japanese Governor daily to ask for relief for the people, and protested after the killings in the spy case.

He is remembered as a Shaheed. A museum named for him stands at Siswan, near Chandigarh, and in 2017 an SGPC delegation asked the Lieutenant Governor of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to name an island after him. The Tribune reports only that a memorandum was submitted.