24 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
more often than any other country “for the enlightenment of the peo-
ple, to rid this earth of sin and to establish righ teous ness and truth in
ev ery Indian heart.”^23
If Subhas’s missives to his mother in Bengali were mostly concerned
with nation and religion, his letters to his elder brother Sarat in Eng-
lish, during the same period, reveal his curiosity about the wider
world. It was with this particular brother, the second son of Janakinath
and Prabhabati, that Subhas developed a special bond. As Sarat pre-
pared to leave for En gland in 1912 to study law, Subhas asked him to
describe what he saw on his journey and how he felt among “strange
and foreign associations.” He wondered, when the ship left port, which
of the American author Washington Irving’s lines would ring true to
his brother: Would he find “time for meditation” upon closing one
book and before opening another, or would he feel “sent adrift upon a
doubtful world”? He pleaded for a de scrip tion of a sunset at sea and
provided one of his own imagining. He wrote to his brother about
Rabindranath Tagore, a year before the poet’s Nobel Prize, and la-
mented “how indifferent Bengal had been in showering laurels upon
him” while foreigners “extolled him as the greatest poet the world has
produced.” Subhas was overjoyed to receive his brother’s vivid de scrip-
tions of the voyage and of En gland, and peppered him with more
probing questions about life in En gland. “Another year has rolled by,”
he wrote on January 8, 1913, “and we find ourselves responsible to God
for the prog ress or otherwise that we have made during the last twelve
months.” Subhas, not yet sixteen, saw darkness, despair, and decline
engulfing India, but “the angel of hope” had appeared in the form of
“the saintly Vivekananda.” That seemed to provide some solid ground
for Tennyson- like optimism. “A brighter future is India’s destiny,” Sub-
has told his brother. “The day may be far off—but it must come.”^24
The Cuttack phase of Subhas’s life was drawing to a close. In his
autobiography, he noted some of the advantages of having grown up
in Orissa. He had the opportunity to forge interprovincial contacts,
and his Bengali immigrant family enjoyed cordial relations with their
Oriya- speaking hosts. The Bose family lived in a predominantly Mus-
lim quarter of Cuttack, with Muslim neighbors, teachers, and class-
mates, and took part in Muslim festivals. Subhas believed his “mental