2 God’s Beloved Land
India is God’s beloved land. He has come into being in many coun-
tries in human form but not so many times in any other country—
that is why I say, India, our motherland, is God’s beloved land.
—subhas chandra bose to his mother, Prabhabati, 1912“I rose early,” Janakinath Bose, a lawyer in Cuttack, Orissa, wrote in his
diary on January 23, 1897, “but found Prabha was still suf fering. A son
was born at midday. Prabha felt very ill—but thank God she somehow
got through.”^1 The sixth son and ninth child of Janakinath and Prabha-
bati was named Subhas, “One of Good Speech”—a name that would
prove prophetic when his stirring words inspired India’s army of liber-
ation during the Second World War. The boy was born into a well- to-
do family, though not into opulence. The country of his birth was, by
contrast, mired in poverty.
“Many babies have already been born at the works,” the Times of
London reported that January morning in a news item titled “The
Famine in India.” The “works” referred to were the relief operations the
British had initiated in the Punjab on the new Jhelum irrigation canal,
where forty thousand “coolies” labored. “The mothers are then main-
tained gratuitously for a time,” the report continued, “and receive two
pice extra for each baby. Young infants who have been deserted or
whose mothers are unable to nurse them are fed with prepared Swiss
milk by means of feeding bottles.” This story of human interest from
Jhelum was supplemented by a fac tual report provided by Reuters from