God’s Beloved Land 19from Calcutta University. The Boses tended toward the Shakta strand
of Bengali Hinduism, which worshiped the Supreme Being as an em-
bodiment of strength in the form of the mother goddess Durga, or
Kali. But some family members were also attracted to the Vaishnava
current, which sought union with the godhead through devotion or
the way of love. Janakinath himself was deeply in flu enced by the re-
formist Brahmo Samaj, a religious society founded by Rammohun Roy
in 1828 that emphasized the monotheism of the Upanishads and took
a stand against the more egregious forms of caste and gender discrimi-
nation in contemporary Hindu society. He was a great admirer of the
Brahmo leader Keshub Chunder Sen, whose powerful oratory on social
issues inspired many young Bengalis in the 1880s. Subhas later passed
the rather harsh judgment that despite “a profound moral awakening
among the people during the formative period of my father’s life,” “po-
lit i cally the country was still dead.”^10
Subhas’s mother, Prabhabati, born in 1869, was an offspring of the
Dutts of Hatkhola, in northern Calcutta, a prominent family who had
acquired education and wealth under British rule. Prabhabati was of
a more orthodox religious bent than her husband, with whom she set-
tled in Cuttack after their marriage. From 1887 onward, her life was
dominated by a series of pregnancies and childbirths. But she pos-
sessed a strong personality and “ruled the roost” on the domestic front;
in family matters, “hers was usually the last word.” A grandson remem-
bered her as “Queen Victoria of the Bose Empire and a hard taskmas-
t e r.”^11 As a child, Subhas felt lost among a large brood of siblings and
cousins. He held his father in awe, and relations with both parents were
marked by a distant reserve.
It was no wonder, then, that Subhas looked forward to going to
school just before his fifth birthday, in January 1902. His parents had
chosen to send him to the Prot es tant European (“P.E.”) School, run by
the Baptist Mission. The P.E. School was primarily designed for Euro-
pean and Anglo- Indian boys and girls, but the Bose children formed
part of the 15 percent minority of Indians who enrolled in it. Subhas
and his classmates “loved” their teacher Miss Sarah Lawrence, while lik-
ing, tolerating, or hating a range of other teachers. The Latin declen-
sions—bonus, bona, bonum—were taught early, and daily Bible lessons