20 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
involved the boring routine of memorizing passages from the sacred
text. The children gained a solid grounding in the En glish language,
but no Indian language was taught. British his tory and ge og ra phy be-
came part of the mental world of the young Subhas. The curriculum
aimed, as he remembered later, “to make us as En glish in our mental
make- up as possible.”^12
Subhas was not unhappy in his primary school. He was good at
his studies and usually at the top of his class. He was too young and
too far away in Cuttack to be in flu enced by the anticolonial Swadeshi
(“Own Country”) movement that swept Calcutta and Bengal proper
from 1905 onward. That year, Curzon had partitioned Bengal into a
Muslim- majority province, comprising eastern Bengal and Assam, and
a Hindu- majority province that included western Bengal, Bihar, and
Orissa. Bengali nationalists were determined to undermine what Cur-
zon regarded as the “settled fact” of partition through a campaign of
passive resistance and boycotts of British goods and institutions. The
antipartition po lit i cal agitation had coincided with a new flowering of
Bengali literature, art, music, and culture, along with an effort to revive
indigenous industries and promote national education. The P.E. School
remained a European island in the po lit i cal backwater of Orissa, its
children protected from the powerful currents of change unleashed by
the forces of Bengali pa tri ot ism, Indian nationalism, and Asian univer-
salism. The school atmosphere presented a contrast to the broader
cultural environment. It was only toward the end of his seven years at
the P.E. School that Subhas realized that he had been inhabiting “two
distinct worlds” which “did not always match.” He felt a vague sense of
“maladaptation” and “a strong desire to join an Indian school.” When
he fi nally bid goodbye to the Prot es tant European school, in January
1909, he did so “without a momentary pang.”^13
With the move from the P.E. School to the Ravenshaw Collegiate
School, a sense of alienation yielded to a feeling of promise and possi-
bility, tinged with anxiety.^14 Ravenshaw, consisting mainly of Bengali
and Oriya teachers and students, proved far more congenial for making
lasting friendships. Initially, Subhas’s lack of training in reading and
writing Bengali was a challenge, and the grammatical mistakes in his
first Bengali essay elicited much laughter from his fellow students when