God’s Beloved Land 27before rather than after (as in Nehru’s case) a direct encounter with
Europe, and was intimately connected with a spiritual quest. In the
summer vacation of 1914 Subhas quietly left home with a friend, with-
out telling his parents, in search of a guru or a spiritual preceptor. He
visited all of the major pilgrimage sites of northern India, including
Lachhman- Jhola, Hrishikesh, Hardwar, Mathura, Brindaban, Benares,
and Gaya. At Hardwar, a third friend joined the search party for a guru.
The two- month expedition made possible a few meetings with some
truly holy men, but overall it ended in disillusionment and disenchant-
ment. Subhas witnessed first- hand the deeply ingrained caste preju-
dices in northern India and the petty sectarian rivalries of the men of
religion. Brought face to face with “the patent shortcomings of Hindu
society,” he returned to Calcutta “a wiser man, having lost much of
[my] admiration for ascetics and anchorites.” Within a few days of his
return, he came down with typhoid—“the price of pilgrimage and
guru- hunting.”^32 As he lay ill in bed, he received news of the outbreak
of the First World War.
It was at this time that Subhas’s po lit i cal consciousness was aroused.
The racism that Indians suf fered at the hands of the British in the
city of Calcutta was constant and ubiquitous. Subhas encountered this
haughty superiority on his daily tram- car journeys from home to his
college. He often had to engage in verbal duels with arrogant Eng-
lishmen. At the same time, the shock of the eruption of global war af-
fected him greatly. Lying in bed and reading the newspapers, he began
to question whether it was possible “to divide a nation’s life into two
compartments and hand over one of them to the foreigner, reserving
the other to ourselves.”^33 He doubted the efficacy of separating the
home from the world, the inner spiritual life from the outer material
domain. Yet the year 1915 passed without any major crisis. Subhas im-
mersed himself in the study of the philosophy of Kant, Hegel, and
Bergson. His extracurricular activities were numerous: he was the
elected class representative on the students’ consultative committee, the
secretary of the debating society and of a famine relief committee for
east Bengal, and a member of the board of the newly launched college
magazine. While recruiting debaters, he got to know a fellow student
named Dilip Kumar Roy, son of the famous poet and songwriter Dwi-