Exile in Europe 121later, he wrote with a sense of relief that he had received her letter the
day before and had “understood ev ery thing.”^107
“I believe in God,” Subhas wrote from Dalhousie to the youn ger
brother of an old college friend, who had asked for advice. “I also
believe in prayer,” he added, “though I do not do much of it myself.”
He had been practicing self- assertion, self- analysis, and self- surrender.
Self- assertion in the form of peaceful meditation served as an aid to
“overcome the human frailties”—lust, anger, temptation, and fear. Self-
analysis preceded self- assertion as an effort to inquire into his own
mind and identify any weakness. Since the mind was a subtle thing and
often deceived itself, continual self- analysis was required as “a daily
mental exercise.” His study of abnormal psychology and psychopathol-
ogy had helped him to analyze himself. The practice of self- surrender
involved trying to think of “a mighty stream of Divine Energy, some-
thing like Bergson’s ‘élan vital’” and merging his existence in it: “I try to
feel that as a result of this merging (or self- surrender), the Divine En-
ergy flows through me and that I am but an instrument in the hands of
the Divine. I never consciously pray for anything material. It is mean
and sordid. On the contrary, I try to repeat to my mind—‘Thy will be
done,’ in a spirit of self- surrender.” The “greatest joy” he had felt, he
told his young interlocutor, was in living “a life of uncertainty and ad-
venture—and a life devoted to a cause”; the “greatest pain” had been
in flicted by “the behavior of human beings,” often friends who had
been less than noble. He did not have enough time anymore to pursue
his interest in philosophy, but had kept up with psychology. He was
now devoted to the study of “po lit i cal philosophy and international
politics.”^108
Upon arrival in Dalhousie in May 1937, Bose had been reading Rob-
ert Briffault’s Europa and Aldous Huxley’s novel Eyeless in Gaza. He
noted the erotic passages in both, and commented that the popularity
of Huxley’s book in En gland showed that “even En glish society is not
as prudish and hypocritical as it was before.”^109 This was a somewhat
odd charge to lay at the door of the En glish, given Subhas’s own prud-
ish past. Leaving novels behind, he focused his reading and writing,
during the later months of his sojourn in Dalhousie, on analyses of
global politics. In particular, he wrote two very substantial essays on