Dreams of Youth 59Subhas received this terrible news as a prisoner in Mandalay, he felt
“desolate with a sense of bereavement.”^27 Dazed and stunned though he
was by the demise of his leader, he wanted all im por tant papers and
documents to be carefully preserved. “A biography will be written in
due time”—and in anticipation of that task, he wanted the materials
for it to be gathered now. When they had been in jail together in 1921–
1922, Das had been preparing a book on the philosophy of Indian na-
tionalism. If his leader’s notes were available, Subhas thought he might
be able to construct something definitive out of those.^28
Subhas’s lengthy prison essay on the Deshbandhu, written in Febru-
ary 1926, contains insights into the fundamentals of his own po lit i cal
beliefs. “I do not think that among the Hindu leaders of India,” he
wrote, “Islam had a greater friend than in the Deshbandhu. Hinduism
was extremely dear to his heart; he could even lay down his life for his
religion, but at the same time he was absolutely free from dogmatism
of any kind. That explains how it was possible for him to love Islam.”
It was this spirit of broad-minded generosity in the matter of India’s
religious diversity that Subhas sought to emulate in his own politics,
and it was a quality he found to be sorely lacking in most of the other
nationalist leaders. This was not secularism in the sense of a separation
between religion and politics, but a politics based on respect for and
reconciliation of religious differences. “That Swaraj in India meant pri-
marily the uplift of the masses, and not necessarily the protection of
the interest of the upper classes,” he emphasized, “was a matter of con-
viction with the Deshbandhu.” This, too, was an ideal not shared by
many of the other front- rank leaders, but to which Subhas Chandra
Bose was deeply committed.
To the large question of whether “culture” was unitary or diverse, his
answer was that it was “both one and many.” The Deshbandhu, he
pointed out, was first and foremost a friend of Bengal. He “loved Ben-
gal with all his life,” but that did not make him forget India as a whole.
The pursuit of Nyaya, a philosophical system developed in the district
of Nadia in Bengal during the early modern period, had shaped the
“logical and argumentative” strand within Bengal’s intellectual tradi-
tion. It was a talent that made Das a great barrister in the modern era,
but he would have been a famous logician of the Nabadwip school had