God’s Beloved Land 35dents at his of fice on Cromwell Road. The adviser was not of much
help, and so, at the urging of friends, Subhas boarded a train for Cam-
bridge. He called on Mr. Reddaway, the censor (head) of Fitzwilliam
Hall, who granted him permission to enroll for the Moral and Men-
tal Sciences Tripos—the degree course at Cambridge in philosophy—
even though the deadline had passed. “Without Mr. Reddaway,” Subhas
wrote later, “I do not know what I would have done in En gland.”^48
The general elections of December 1918 in Britain had led to the
installation of a coalition government of the Liberals, led by David
Lloyd George, with the Conservatives, under Andrew Bonar Law. From
1919 to 1921, the country witnessed the rise of the Labour party and a
spate of strikes by miners and other workers, even as the British Em-
pire contended with anticolonial challenges in Ireland, Egypt, and In-
dia. Cambridge was po lit i cally conservative at war’s end, more so than
Oxford, which was beginning to take a liberal turn. But after enduring
the stifling atmosphere of wartime Calcutta, Subhas enjoyed breathing
the air of freedom in Cambridge and was deeply impressed by the es-
teem that was shown to young students. He attended the debates at the
Union Society, where he found the atmosphere enabling the freedom
of expression “so exhilarating.” Coming from a British colony where
dissent amounted to sedition in the eyes of the government, he could
appreciate the biting humor of a pro- Irish speaker who drew a contrast
between “the forces of law and order on the one side and of Bonar Law
and disorder on the other” (Andrew Bonar Law was then home secre-
tary in the U.K. government). In addition to taking part in extracur-
ricular activities, Subhas regularly went to lectures on ethics, psychol-
ogy, and metaphysics for his Philosophy tripos. But the bulk of his
time had to be devoted to diligent preparation for the ICS examina-
tion. He studied nine diverse subjects: En glish composition, Sanskrit,
philosophy, En glish law, po lit i cal science, modern European his tory,
En glish his tory, economics, and ge og ra phy. Of these, he found delving
into po lit i cal science, economics, En glish his tory, and modern Euro-
pean his tory to be “ben e fi cial” in the long run. A reading of Bismarck’s
autobiography, Metternich’s memoirs, and Cavour’s letters gave him a
sense of the distinctiveness of continental Europe in relation to Britain
and aided his un der stand ing of “the inner currents of international