Exile in Europe 93Bose addressed a public meeting on India—the largest of its type ever
held in Geneva—under the auspices of the International Committee
on India, which published bulletins in French, German, and En glish.
He was, however, bitterly disappointed by the apathy of the League of
Nations toward the aspirations of colonized countries. On October 4,
he became a patient at Clinique La Lignière in Gland, where Vithalbhai
Patel was being treated after a serious heart attack. Bose’s abdominal
pain was back in acute form, and he could not decide whether to un-
dergo surgery.^19 For the moment, he was less concerned about himself
than about Vithalbhai Patel. And with reason: Patel declined further,
and died on October 22, 1933. The old man had willed a portion of his
fortune to Bose, to be spent “for the po lit i cal uplift of India and prefer-
ably for publicity work on behalf of India’s cause in other countries.”
But a legal challenge by the Patel family, including his youn ger brother
Vallabhbhai, ensured that Subhas did not receive a single penny desig-
nated for propagating India’s message abroad.^20 For fi nan cial support,
Subhas continued to rely mostly on Sarat’s friends, whose generous
loans would be repaid by the elder brother in 1936, after his release
from prison.
Bose did, however, inherit a more intangible legacy left by Vithalbhai
Patel, who had helped set up the Indian- Irish Inde pen dence League.
Subhas had always been a keen student of the Irish freedom strug-
gle. He began correspondence with the league’s president, the legend-
ary Maud Gonne McBride (whom Sarat had met in 1914), and with
the or ga ni za tion’s key functionary, Mrs. E. Woods. “In my part of the
country (Bengal),” he wrote, “recent Irish his tory is studied closely by
freedom- loving men and women and several Irish characters are liter-
ally worshipped in many a home.” Even though a visit to Ireland had to
wait until February 1936, contact had been established, and informa-
tion was being exchanged from 1933 onward.^21
Bose’s contact with Italy happened rather unexpectedly. In Decem-
ber 1933, Subhas went to Nice “in search of clear sky and sunshine.”
There, he suddenly received an of fi cial invitation to the opening
ceremony of the Ital ian Oriental Institute in Rome, scheduled for De-
cember 21. An admirer of Mazzini and Garibaldi, Bose accepted the
invitation with alacrity. An Asian Students’ Congress followed the in-