36 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
politics.” He was also curious about the historical struggle for liberty in
En gland, which he felt had some relevance for contemporary India. His
copies of the books he read, such as A. F. Pollard’s Factors in Modern
History, Arthur D. Innes’s A History of En gland and the British Empire,
and John Maynard Keynes’s Indian Currency and Finance, were heavily
marked and filled with extensive marginal notes.^49
In Subhas’s experience, relations between British and Indian stu-
dents at Cambridge tended to be cordial, but not intimate. More gener-
ally, the Indians were saddened to see the support among the British
middle classes for General Reginald Dyer, who had given the order to
shoot that resulted in the Amritsar massacre of April 1919. Nearly four
hundred innocent men, women, and children had been killed and
three times that number wounded in an enclosed park. Yet Dyer had
received a hero’s reception for teaching recalcitrant colonial subjects a
stern lesson and was given a sizable fi nan cial reward on his return to
Britain. There were smaller instances of racial discrimination that ran-
kled. The Indian tennis champion was not allowed to captain Cam-
bridge University’s team in the interuniversity tournament. Indian stu-
dents were not permitted to enlist in the university unit of the Officers’
Training Corps. Subhas and a fellow student, K. L. Gauba, were sent as
representatives of the Indian Majlis, a students’ or ga ni za tion in Cam-
bridge, to present their case before Secretary of State E. S. Montagu,
and the Earl of Lytton, Under- Secretary of State for India. Lytton
claimed that the India Office had no ob jec tion to admitting Indians to
a course on of fi cers’ training, but the War Office was worried that Indi-
ans who received training would seek commissions in the British army.
Indian of fi cers commanding white soldiers was not yet something that
Britain’s military brass was prepared to countenance. The Indian stu-
dents reassured the authorities that they were interested only in the
training and promised not to seek military commissions, but to no
avail. As the India Office and War Office passed the buck between
them, the Indian students felt the cold winds of exclusion.^50
During his Cambridge years, Subhas forged and deepened a number
of friendships with fellow students from India, including Dilip Kumar
Roy, Kshitish Prasad Chattopadhyay, and C. C. Desai. The Bengali trio
of Subhas, Dilip, and Kshitish found a home away from home at the