God’s Beloved Land 23ography) that he took part in an essay competition on King George V’s
coronation. His father had been government attorney and public pros-
ecutor in Cuttack since 1905, and would be rewarded with the of fi cial
title of Rai Bahadur in 1912. Politics was a taboo in his house, and he
had removed the pictures of Bengali revolutionaries his sons had put
up in their study.^19 The appearance of Vivekananda’s works in Subhas’s
life in 1912 caused “a revolution within and ev ery thing was turned
upside down.”^20 It was with his own country and his own people that
Subhas could be “in touch with humanity in all its concreteness.”^21
Vivekananda had famously described his motherland as the queen of
his adoration. Once under the spell of the sage’s magical words, Sub-
has’s love for the country was tinged with a religious sensibility and ex-
pressed as devotion to the Mother. Yet he was dismayed at the current
state of both the country and of religion: “Now, wherever religion is
practised there is so much bigotry and sin.” He asked his own mother,
“Will the condition of our country continue to go from bad to worse—
will not any son of Mother India in distress, in total disregard of his
selfish interests, dedicate his whole life to the cause of the Mother?”^22
The stream of consciousness that flowed in the nine letters he wrote
in Bengali to his mother in 1912–1913 was the product of a precocious
and ultrasensitive mind. “Ideas come surging within me from time to
time,” he wrote, “as when flowers come to bloom in a garden and I of-
fer them at your feet as outpourings of my heart.” He wanted to see less
pomp and more sincerity in the worship of the Mother Goddess, and
questioned the purpose of education of the kind on which his parents
were spending so much if it did not produce real men prepared to do
God’s work. He derided his own class of Babus, who were not prepared
to use their legs to walk or let their precious hands engage in manual
labor. He castigated Bengali gentlemen who had become “ease- loving,
narrow- minded, characterless, and given to jealousy.” He disliked read-
ing and writing letters on “the worldly things of life” and wanted letters
“full of ideas.” The purpose of human existence was to find God. Like
rivers flowing inexorably toward the sea, human lives could attain fi-
nality only in the Supreme Being. Despite the plethora of sin and cor-
ruption that vitiated the contemporary world, he still had faith that
India was “God’s beloved land” which had been blessed with Saviors