26 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
of radicalism to engage in spiritual pursuits. Subhas found the heirs of
Ramakrishna and Vivekananda’s mantle the most congenial to associ-
ate with. This group was led by Suresh Banerjee, a medical student, and
had as one of its key members Hemanta Kumar Sarkar, who became
Subhas’s close friend during his early years in college. The religious
calling was to Subhas “a pragmatic necessity” which he felt able to rec-
oncile with a “rational philosophy.”^29 The battle with sexual desires
persisted, since he believed at this stage of his life that the overcoming
of sexual urges was a sine qua non for achieving spiritual prog ress. But
from individualistic yoga, he turned increasingly toward social ser vice.
Subhas traveled with his friends to Murshidabad in search of Ben-
gal’s his tory, met Rabindranath Tagore in 1914 to learn about village
reconstruction, discussed plans with the poet to set up an excellent
educational institution, and spent some time in a camp on the River
Hooghly wearing ocher robes in the manner of Hindu ascetics. He be-
gan reading Aurobindo Ghose’s essays in the journal Arya from 1914
onward. Aurobindo had inspired Bengal’s young revolutionaries of the
Swadeshi era, before retiring into a life of religious contemplation in
- Shankara’s doctrine of maya, or the illusoriness of human life,
had been troubling Subhas. Aurobindo’s metaphysics was based on “a
reconciliation between Spirit and Matter, between God and Creation,”
and a synthesis of yoga—the union of the human with the divine—as a
means to attaining the truth, and for Subhas it supplied a way out of
“the cobwebs of maya.” Subhas was impressed by Surendranath Baner-
jee, the moderate leader of the Indian National Congress, but he was
inspired by Aurobindo’s stirring call: “I should like to see some of you
becoming great; great not for your own sake, but to make India great,
so that she may stand up with head erect amongst the free nations of
the world.”^30
During vacations Subhas returned to Cuttack, where he joined a
group to nurse cholera patients in the surrounding villages during an
epidemic. This experience unfolded before him “a picture of real India,
the India of the villages—where poverty stalks over the land, men die
like flies, and illiteracy is the prevailing order.”^31 Subhas’s discovery of
India, unlike that of his great contemporary Jawaharlal Nehru, oc-
curred very early in his life, while he was still in his teens. It happened
