God’s Beloved Land 21the teacher read it out in class. Displaying a kind of dogged determina-
tion, Subhas made sure that on the annual examinations he obtained
the highest marks in the subject. His family background and mastery
of En glish in any case won him respect and gave him a sense of self-
con fi dence. An inspiring headmaster of the school, Beni Madhav Das,
instilled in him a sense of moral values and a love for nature that had
both aesthetic and ethical dimensions. Subhas took to “a species of
nature- worship,” choosing beautiful spots by a river or on a hill or in a
meadow to “practise contemplation.”^15
On reaching his teens, Subhas entered “one of the stormiest periods”
in his “psychical life.” Part of the tumult could be explained by the
usual changes of adolescence and the challenge of coming to terms
with his sexuality, which he struggled to “suppress or transcend.” But
his precocity and introverted nature made Subhas’s torment more in-
tense than that of other teenagers. “I had in some respects,” he would
later recall, “a touch of the abnormal in my mental make- up.” His
higher self impelled him to rise above the attractions of worldly pur-
suits. He embarked on an incessant search for “a central principle,” “a
peg to hang my whole life on.” It was not just the choice of his life’s
goal, but directing his “entire will to that single goal” that presented the
major challenge. As he negotiated the existential crisis and “trials of
becoming” of his adolescent years, books containing the works of one
man, Swami Vivekananda, appeared to him as God- sent.^16
“I was barely fif teen,” Subhas Chandra Bose wrote, “when Viveka-
nanda entered my life.” The message of this great Hindu sage, who
had preached a life of ser vice to suf fering humanity and died at the
early age of thirty- nine in 1902, gave him “an ideal” to which he could
devote his “whole being.” Vivekananda inspired an entire generation,
but none so profoundly as the young Subhas. From a comprehensive
reading of Swami Vivekananda’s letters and speeches, Subhas “emerged
with a vivid idea of the essence of his teachings” captured in the San-
skrit maxim, “Atmano Mokshartham Jagaddhitaya[ca].” That aspira-
tion—“For your own salvation and for the ser vice of humanity”—was
to be his “life’s goal.” The hita (“good”) of humanity was rendered
here as achievable through seva (“ser vice”). To this formulation Subhas
added another element: the ser vice of humanity included the ser vice of