Exile in Europe 123These lengthy commentaries on European and Asian affairs were
coming from a man who was soon to be at the helm of India’s premier
nationalist or ga ni za tion. “I shall probably be elected the President of
the Indian National Congress early next year,” Bose had written to
Mrs. Woods in Ireland on September 9, 1937. “The elections (by the
party branches) take place early in January, 1938.”^113 Gandhi had clearly
broached the subject with him by this time. A Gandhian connection to
Bose during the summer of 1937 was provided by Miraben (or Made-
leine) Slade, the Mahatma’s En glish disciple, who spent two months in
Dalhousie as a guest of the Dharmavirs at the same time as Subhas.^114
The Bose brothers offered to host Gandhi and Nehru during an im-
portant meeting of the All- India Congress Committee at Calcutta, in
late October 1937. Subhas therefore left Dalhousie on October 5, 1937,
and after briefly seeing his mother and other relatives in Calcutta,
went up to join Sarat in Kurseong to discuss plans for the future.^115 The
five months in Dalhousie with the Dharmavirs had done Subhas a
world of good. He was now in fight ing trim and ready to take on the
challenges ahead. At the crack of dawn, he would awaken his nephew
Sisir to join him on his six- mile morning walks in Kurseong. The
seventeen- year- old Sisir struggled to keep pace as his uncle marched in
his majestic swaying gait down from the bungalow on Gidhapahar to
Mahanadi—and did an about- face, without a moment’s rest, to head
back to Kurseong.^116
From Kurseong, Bose corresponded with Nehru and Tagore about a
delicate question touching on Hindu- Muslim relations that was slated
to come up at the Congress meeting in Calcutta. In the 1937 provincial
elections, the Congress had done remarkably well, while the Muslim
League had performed poorly. Even though the two parties had con-
tested the elections on similar platforms, the Congress did not need the
League’s support to form ministries in areas like the United Provinces.
The Congress success on the hustings had emboldened its president,
Jawaharlal Nehru, to claim that there were only two parties in India—
the British and the Congress—much to the chagrin of Mohammed Ali
Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League. With Congress holding of fice
in seven of the eleven provinces of British India, the League raised the
bogey of “Islam in danger.” The Congress response was to emphasize