Exile in Europe 131
“You are the first woman I have loved,” Subhas had written to her. “God
grant that you may also be the last. Adieu, my dearest.” His prayer was
granted.^132
“I am now having coffee at this Munich station with some Indian
friends,” Subhas wrote to Emilie on January 8, 1938. “All well.” He had
come by train from Salzburg to Munich, and was waiting to take the
train to Brussels. On January 9, in Antwerp, he went with friends to
see a film on Charles Parnell, the late- nineteenth- century nationalist
leader of Ireland, and afterward he recommended it to Emilie. His
friends took him by car to Ostend for the Channel crossing to Eng-
land.^133 On November 25, 1937, Bose had written from Badgastein to
Lord Zetland, the British secretary of state for India, asking him to lift
the ban on his entry to En gland.^134 The British government had obliged
by quietly withdrawing the legally nonexistent ban on the man who
was soon to become the Congress president. Sixteen and a half years
after he had left the shores of Britain, following his resignation from
the Indian Civil Service, Bose returned to a warm and enthusiastic wel-
come. Representatives of a wide array of Indian associations gave him a
reception at Victoria Station. The stationmaster personally escorted
him from the train to the waiting car, which was fly ing the Congress’s
tricolor flag. A hundred journalists had gathered at a West End hotel
for a press conference. Bose fielded their questions “coolly, adroitly and
with the greatest good humor.”^135
“I have been frightfully busy these days,” Subhas informed Emilie on
January 16, 1938, “and so could not write.”^136 In all his meetings, Bose
urged the British to drop their scheme of future federation with the
princes. India wanted and deserved to frame its own democratic con-
stitution. If the British allowed that to happen, he saw “no reason why
India and Britain should not be the best of friends.” At a reception held
in his honor at the Saint Pancras Town Hall on January 11, he told his
audience that “India’s destiny” was “bound up with the rest of human-
ity,” and that the Congress was beginning to realize that “India’s strug-
gle for freedom, democracy and socialism was part of the world strug-
gle.” In his address, he spe cifi cally mentioned China, Abyssinia, and
Spain, where a civil war was raging.^137 “My personal view today,” Bose
said in an interview to Rajani Palme Dutt, a leftist Indian intellectual,
“is that the Indian National Congress should be or ga nized on the