Exile in Europe 101gether the book leaves us with a wish to see Mr. Bose take a lead in In-
dian politics.The Sunday Times review by Sir Alfred Watson was more critical, but
still found The Indian Struggle “a valuable book for the enlightenment
of opinion. It has a point of view dif fi cult for the British mind to com-
prehend, but it accurately describes a side of the Indian movement that
cannot be ignored.” The renowned diplomatic correspondent W. Nor-
man Ewer, of the Daily Herald, described it as “calm, sane, dispassion-
ate” and “the ablest work I have read on current Indian politics. This is
the book of no fanatic, but of a singularly able mind, the book of an
acute, thoughtful, constructive mind, of a man who, while still under
forty, would be an asset and an ornament to the po lit i cal life of any
country.” Sir Frederick Whyte, writing in the Spectator, found the book
“valuable as a document of contemporary his tory.” The reviewer in the
News Chronicle, J. Stuart Hodgson, described Bose as “unusually clear-
headed for a revolutionary” and added: “His picture of Gandhi is very
interesting as an Indian view. It is firmly and convincingly drawn. He
does full justice to the marvelous qualities of the saint without con-
doning in the least the ‘Himalayan blunders’ of the politician.” The
banning of the book in India created a stir among left- leaning British
politicians and intellectuals. George Lansbury thanked Bose for the
book, from which he was “learning a great deal.”^42 The proscription in
India of a book that was circulating freely in Europe was a blatant ap-
plication of the rule of colonial difference. “Is En glish law to have one
interpretation in Great Britain and another in India?” Bose asked in-
dignantly in a letter to the editor of the New Statesman and Nation.^43
From continental Europe, the most insightful commentary on the
book came from Romain Rolland, who found it so interesting that he
ordered a second copy so that his wife and sister would each have one.
“In it, you show the best qualities of the historian,” he wrote to the au-
thor, “lucidity and high equity of mind. Rarely it happens that a man of
action as you are is apt to judge without party spirit.” He was full of
admiration for Bose’s “firm po lit i cal sense” and thought it “a pity that
all the ablest leaders of the Indian Social Movement,” including Bose