God’s Beloved Land 17gripped India in 1900. It lasted nearly three years, and claimed a toll
ranging from 1.25 million lives (according to of fi cial fig ures) to nearly
5 million (in the estimates of Indian nationalists). When the viceroy of
India, George Nathaniel Curzon, or ga nized his glittering Delhi Dur-
bar—a courtly gathering of Indian princes and notables—in January
1903, there were still tens of thousands of famine victims eking out a
wretched existence in relief camps.
Newspaper readers in London and Manchester were aware of the
tragedies unfolding in India during the 1897 famine. The best that con-
cerned citizens in the imperial metropolis could do for the less fortu-
nate subjects of Queen Victoria was to con trib ute to charity in aid of
the relief works in India. For Indian critics, charity was not the answer
to the prob lem of poverty and famines. These had been caused by colo-
nial policies that had drained India’s wealth and could be remedied
only by changing them. There was nothing ancient about India’s pov-
erty, Indian nationalists told their colonial masters, and famines were
not natural di sas ters but products of a deeply flawed colonial po lit i cal
economy. It was at this moment, when economic debates between im-
perialists and nationalists were taking on a sharper po lit i cal edge amid
the specter of famine, that Subhas Chandra Bose was born in a remote
corner of Britain’s Indian empire.
CuttackIn the 1890s, Cuttack, located by the great river Mahanadi about 300
miles southwest of Calcutta, was a town of some 45,000 in hab i tants.
Unlike the temple towns of Puri, Bhubaneswar, and Konarak in its en-
virons, Cuttack was an administrative center both for the British and
for the numerous princely chiefs of Orissa, who had by then accepted
British “paramountcy”—a form of indirect imperial rule in return for
a mea sure of internal autonomy. The sprawling province of Bengal,
where the British had first obtained a po lit i cal foothold in 1757, in-
cluded Bihar, Assam, and Orissa. A rail link had yet to be established
between Calcutta, the cap ital of British India and second city (after
London) of the British Empire, and Cuttack, the premier town of
Orissa. Travel by cart exposed one to the risk of encountering “thieves