58 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
lay in the 1920s was an unhealthy place with high mortality from
plague and smallpox epidemics. In a letter to his brother written soon
after his arrival, Subhas described the town as “a kingdom of dust”: “In
Mandalay the dust is in the air—therefore you must inhale it. It is in
your food, therefore you must eat it. It is on your table—your chair
and your bed—therefore you must feel its soft touch. It raises storms,
obscuring distant trees and hills—therefore you needs must see it in all
its beauty. Verily, dust in Mandalay is all- pervading—it is ev erywhere.”
The cellblocks in Mandalay Jail were made not of brick but of wooden
bars or palisades. “I am sure that when we are locked in at night,” he
wrote to Sarat, “we look like so many human beasts prowling about in
a lighted cage. It gives one an uncanny feeling—at the same time, no
one who possesses any sense of humor can fail to enjoy the experi-
ence.”^24
Subhas bore the rigors of prison life with a combination of stoicism
and humor. He was inspired by the fact that Balwantrao Gangadhar
Tilak, the veteran nationalist leader from Maharashtra in western In-
dia, had written his “monumental and epoch- making” commentary on
the Gita as a prisoner in Mandalay from 1908 to 1914. This jail was, to
Subhas, “a place of pilgrimage sanctified by one of India’s greatest men
by continuous residence for a period of six years.”^25 He felt that he
would be “spiritually a gainer” through his imprisonment. “When I
pause to re flect calmly,” he wrote to his friend Dilip, “I feel the stirring
of a certitude within that some Vast Purpose is at work in the core
of our fevers and frustrations.” But he gently rejected his friend’s de-
scrip tion of his detention as martyrdom. Since he had “some sense of
humor and proportion,” he could “hardly arrogate” to himself “the
martyr’s high title.”^26
In those years in Burmese prisons, from 1924 to 1927, Subhas Chan-
dra Bose grew from a lieutenant into a leader. During the noncoop-
eration movement and its aftermath, he had wholeheartedly accepted
Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das as his po lit i cal mentor. He displayed
total devotion to that magnanimous and far- sighted statesman, who
was prepared to make great personal sac ri fices for the cause of India’s
in de pen dence and Hindu- Muslim unity. But the apprenticeship was
cut short by the Deshbandhu’s untimely death, on June 16, 1925. When