God’s Beloved Land 37Lancashire residence of the Dharmavir family—a Punjabi doctor, his
European wife, and their two little daughters, Sita and Leila. Subhas
developed an affectionate relationship with Mrs. Dharmavir, whom he
called “Didi” (“Elder Sister”). He later confessed to her that he was
never really happy in En gland, except during his brief stay with the
Dharmavirs at Burnley, Lancashire. He could not quite say what gave
him such joy, but he knew “both you and Doctor were responsible for
it.” He wished Mrs. Dharmavir would come to India, where “civiliza-
tion consists in the elevation of the human spirit and in the increasing
approximation of the human spirit to the Divine.” He was grateful to
her for showing an interest in his lonely thoughts. When she gave pack-
ets of nuts and fruits to him and his friends as their train departed, he
was “reminded of what an Indian mother would do under similar cir-
cumstances.”^51
The Dharmavirs’ living room was the venue for lively conversa-
tions about politics. Sitting in front of a crackling fire, the Cambridge
friends, as Dilip remembered, “often talked far into the night with a
glow of heart that only youth can command.” They discussed the ris-
ing Labour party in En gland and the communist revolution in Russia.
Drawing an analogy between India and Ireland, Subhas told his friends
that the Bengali revolutionaries of the Swadeshi era had not failed:
“You might just as well say that the Sinn Féin movement is a failure
also, since it hasn’t delivered the goods yet. When de Valera was sen-
tenced the other day to death, whoever thought he would be released
and then reimprisoned again in 1918 only to escape from Lincoln
Jail and visit America where he would raise six million dollars for the
Irish Republican movement?” The Bengali revolutionary movement
was “the first real movement” that instilled strength in a supine people
and “created the nucleus of national consciousness.”^52
Writing to another friend, Charu Chandra Ganguly, in India, Subhas
observed that in En gland he had come to fully grasp the need for mass
education and labor or ga ni za tion in India. He recalled Vivekananda’s
view that India’s prog ress would be achieved “only by the peasant, the
washerman, the cobbler, and the sweeper.” The West had already shown
what “the power of the people” could accomplish—and “the brightest
example” of this was Russia, the world’s first socialist republic. “The