Dreams of Youth 8328, 1931, Mahatma Gandhi arrived in Bombay as a deck- passenger on
the S.S. Pilsna.
With the new viceroy, Lord Willingdon, in a bellicose mood and ut-
terly unwilling to make concessions to the nationalists, Gandhi and the
Congress leadership had little option but to announce the resumption
of civil disobedience in January 1932. British goods and institutions
were boycotted once more, and nonviolent protesters courted arrest by
violating what they deemed to be unjust laws. In the interim, the Brit-
ish government had perfected their plans to crush a renewed rebellious
movement. The Congress or ga ni za tion was declared unlawful and its
leaders were put under arrest. Even though larger numbers of civil re-
sisters—more than a hundred thousand—were imprisoned in 1932
than in 1930, this was more an indication of the effectiveness of British
repression than the vitality of the Indian resistance. The surprise ele-
ment in Gandhi’s 1930 strategy, which had centered around the novel
undermining of the salt laws, was missing on this occasion, making it
easier for the government to deal with the movement. Subhas was nat-
urally among the Congress leaders who were arrested; he was sent to a
rather remote jail in a place called Seoni in the Central Provinces. The
only saving grace on this occasion was that he soon had his brother
Sarat as his companion in prison. Sarat had suspended his legal prac-
tice to join the civil disobedience movement, and now paid the price by
being put away for four long years in British jails.
In prison, Subhas kept himself busy reading Henri Bergson’s Creative
Evolution and other philosophical works. He asked a friend to send him
recent biographies of Lenin and Trotsky, the four- volume memoirs of
Alexander Herzen, and literature on Thoreau. From late February 1932
he began to experience severe abdominal pain, and by mid- May had
lost twenty- eight pounds. The civil surgeon of Chindwara thought
there was something wrong with his gallbladder, but the doctors could
offer no defi nite diagnosis.^76 As the health of both brothers deterio-
rated—Sarat had early diabetes—they were transferred to Jubbulpore
Central Jail. Subhas was subsequently shifted to the Madras Peniten-
tiary, the Bhowali Sanatorium, and Lucknow Jail in quick succession,
and thus was kept far from Bengal. Stringent bureaucratic instructions
were issued by the government to the superintendents of the Bhowali
Sanatorium, the Balaram Hospital in Lucknow, and the Madras Peni-