5
The Warrior and the Saint
Your strength has been sorely taxed by imprisonment, banishment
and disease, but rather than impairing, these have helped to
broaden your sympathies—enlarging your vision so as to embrace
the vast perspectives of his tory beyond any narrow limits of terri-
tor y.
—rabindranath tagore on Subhas Chandra Bose, January 1939In February 1938, the revolutionary leader from Bengal came to pre-
side over the fifty- first session of the Indian National Congress in Guja-
rat. His arrival in the home province of the apostle of nonviolence
carried powerful symbolic meaning. It represented the meeting of two
generations and the merging of two strands of the anticolonial move-
ment that had been often at odds with each other. Subhas Chandra
Bose was taken to the Congress venue, located in the rural setting of
Haripura, in a chariot drawn by fifty- one white bulls. The spectacle
connected agrarian and urban India and evoked an idyllic past por-
tending a dynamic future. Seeing Gandhi and Bose in earnest conversa-
tion on the dais, at the plenary session of the Congress, warmed the
hearts of millions of Indians looking forward to a united nationalist
stand against the British raj. As Aurobindo Ghose had argued in his es-
say “The Morality of Boycott” three de cades before, in the pursuit of
justice and righ teous ness the saint’s holiness had to be complemented
by the warrior’s sword.^1 Much like Aurobindo, Bose had agreed to es-
chew violence as a strategic necessity, though not on grounds of po lit i-
cal morality. The warrior and saint were thus able, for the time being,
to share a platform against the British raj.