18 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
and robbers,” while on the journey by sea one had to contend with “the
winds and the waves.” Boat was the preferred mode of travel, since it
was deemed “safer to trust in God than in brother man.”^8 Passen-
gers would travel on seagoing ships to Chandbali, and from there on
smaller steamers to Cuttack, through an intricate network of rivers and
canals.
In 1885, the twenty- five- year- old Janakinath had moved from Cal-
cutta to Cuttack in search of a career in the British law courts. The ge-
nealogy of the Boses could be traced back twenty- seven generations to
one Dasarath Bose, the progenitor of their southern Bengal clan. They
belonged to the Kayastha caste, one of the three upper castes among
the Hindus of Bengal. If the Brahmans were the sacerdotal elite and the
Vaidyas made their mark in the field of medicine, the Kayasthas formed
a literati that generally did well in government ser vice. The glory days
of the Boses, based in a village called Mahinagar, fourteen miles south
of Calcutta, lay in the era of the pre- Mughal Muslim sultans of Bengal.
Mahipati, eleventh in descent from the founder, Dasarath, rose high as
minister of fi nance and war and was honored with the title Subuddhi
Khan, no doubt in recognition of the subuddhi (“good counsel”) he
had offered the king. One of Mahipati’s grandsons, Gopinath Bose,
became a vazir, or minister, in charge of fi nance and the navy in the
court of the great Sultan Husain Shah (1493–1519) and acquired the
proud title of Purandar Khan. He combined an aptitude for war with
considerable literary talents and was a noted composer of devotional
poems. It was a “misnomer,” Subhas Chandra Bose later wrote in his
unfin ished autobiography, “to talk of Muslim rule when describing the
po lit i cal order in India prior to the advent of the British,” as “the ad-
ministration was run by Hindus and Muslims together.”^9
By the 1800s, after experiencing many turns of fortune through the
centuries, the Boses were still ensconced in their cluster of villages in
the Twenty- Four Parganas, a district to Calcutta’s south. Men belong-
ing to the family were find ing opportunities in the ser vices and the
professions under the new British dispensation. Janakinath, born in
1860, was well versed in En glish, having studied at Albert School, St.
Xavier’s College, and Scottish Church College in Calcutta before grad-
uating from Ravenshaw College in Cuttack and taking his law degree