Dreams of Youth 49
committee and appointed principal of a newly established national col-
lege. He made his mark as an able writer and editor for the vibrant
anticolonial press, but efforts to lure students away from the govern-
ment curriculum toward national education were largely unsuccessful.
Bonfires of British textiles burned much brighter in the late summer
and autumn of 1921 than the lamps of Indian learning that some na-
tionalists, including Subhas, tried to light. As winter approached, the
government supplied fresh fuel to the conflagration by announcing a
visit to India by the Prince of Wales. The Congress called for a hartal,
or general strike, on November 17, 1921, the day the heir to the British
throne arrived in Bombay. While the streets of Bombay witnessed a
pitched battle between those who wished to welcome the prince and
those determined to boycott him, Congress volunteers directed by Sub-
has Chandra Bose ensured a complete shutdown in the city of Calcutta.
The government was provoked, and in retaliation declared all national
volunteer or ga ni za tions illegal.
The noncooperators now decided to put the British ban to the test
by organizing small groups of five volunteers each to go out into the
streets of Calcutta to hawk khadi, the cloth that served as the emblem
of Gandhi’s movement. To give a spur to the campaign, Das decided to
send his wife at the head of one group aimed at provoking arrest. Sub-
has, the chief or ga nizer, objected, but was overruled. The sight of Ba-
santi Devi, the revered wife of the Deshbandhu, being hauled to prison
caused a furor across the city and upset even loyalist politicians and
police constables. Basanti Devi was set free by midnight, much to the
relief of an emotional Subhas, who had come to look upon her as a
second mother.^4 The colonial government’s miscalculation in arresting
her meant there was no dearth of volunteers on the following day. The
two large prisons in the city were filled to over flowing, as were the
makeshift detention camps. On December 10, 1921, in sheer exaspera-
tion, the government arrested Chittaranjan Das and Subhas Chandra
Bose. This was the first of Subhas’s eleven journeys to British jails.
“We are proud of Subhas and proud of you all,” Janakinath Bose
wrote to Sarat on December 12, 1921. The father who had strenuously
opposed his son’s resignation from the ICS now professed his belief in
“the doctrine of sac ri fice.”^5 During the eight months of that first stint