Exile in Europe 115their company and gave them a few lessons in European etiquette. See-
ing that they tilted their soup bowl away from them at the dinner table,
he pointed out that this was the British custom. He turned the bowl
toward himself, as was done on the Continent—a simple lesson in not
blindly following the manners taught by their colonial masters.^88 Once
the nephews had returned to the plains, Subhas was once again left
alone with his books and correspondence. On June 30, 1936, he wrote
to the chief secretary of the government of Bengal that Mahatma Gan-
dhi had “expressed a desire to correspond” with him on “non- po lit i cal
topics like Khadi, Harijan movement and village reconstruction.” The
governments of Bengal and India deemed these subjects to be “public
affairs” and denied Bose and Gandhi permission to correspond with
each other.^89 A letter dated July 8, 1936, from Nehru to Bose regarding
the formation of the Indian Civil Liberties Union was withheld by the
police.^90 Members of the central legislative assembly, such as S. Satya-
murti and V. V. Giri, kept up a steady barrage of questions about Bose’s
health during his continued detention without trial. In reply to a ques-
tion from Lord Kinoullin in the House of Lords, Lord Zetland said that
“nothing was more distasteful for any administrator than to have to
resort to mea sures of this kind,” but “in India it was unavoidable.” De-
scribing Bose as “a man of great ability and possibly of genius,” the
secretary of state thought it a pity that “he had always directed his abil-
ity to destructive rather than constructive purpose.”^91
From July, Bose was granted special permission to go for walks
within a one- mile radius of the bungalow. “It is of course not much to
be allowed only one mile radius,” Emilie commented, “but better than
nothing.” He wanted to take photographs of Pagla Jhora, or the “Mad
Waterfall,” which was within his walking radius. He acquired a gramo-
phone to keep him company, and asked Emilie to recommend some
good recordings of European music.^92 He requested a long list of po lit-
i cal writings and other works from Nehru, including An Historical Ge-
ography of Europe, by Gordon East; The Clash of Culture and the Con-
tact of Races, by George Pitt- Rivers; A Short History of Our Times, by
J. A. Spender; and Daedalus; or, Science and the Future, by J. B. S. Hal-
dane.^93 In July he was reading Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and try-
ing to apply what he read to his own dreams. In Europe he had learned