60 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
he been born a few centuries earlier. Nadia was not just the home of
rational logic, but a locus of effervescent devotion. Das thought it was
“a matter of pride” rather than embarrassment that Bengalis were “sus-
ceptible to emotions.” “The fulfillment of the Deshbandhu’s national-
ism,” Subhas wrote with obvious admiration, “was in international
amity; but he did not try to develop a love of the world by doing away
with love for his own land. Yet his nationalism did not lead him to ex-
clusive ego- centricity.” C. R. Das’s unfulfilled dreams and hopes were,
in Subhas’s view, his “best legacy.”^29
In Mandalay Jail, Subhas studied much harder than he had for the
ICS examination. He read voraciously and filled his prison notebooks
with copious notes and analyses of the books that he requested end-
lessly from family and friends. His markings in multiple volumes of
Friedrich Nietzsche’s collected works showed that his interest in phi-
losophy was still alive. He read Bertrand Russell’s works on industrial
civilization and free thought. The great Russian novelists, Turgenev
and Dostoyevsky, fig ured on his reading list of European literature. The
broad range of subjects he studied included European his tory, histories
of empires and revolutions, social anthropology, po lit i cal memoirs,
comparative religion, psychology, criminology, exercise and dietetics,
and the color line in human relations.
He became something of a specialist in Irish his tory and literature.
He recorded in a marginal note that more human beings perished in
Ireland during the 1840s famine than had fallen by the sword in any
war En gland had ever waged. He transcribed Irish poems that touched
him, such as P. H. Pearse’s “Renunciation,” “The Rebel,” and “The Way-
farer,” and Dora Siegerson’s “The Dead Soldier.” Pearse had been a
leader of the Easter Rising in 1916, and was executed by the British on
May 3 of that year. Pearse’s lines about the rebel who came of “the seed
of the people that sorrow” must have seemed especially poignant to
Subhas:
I say to my people that they are holy,
That they are august despite their chains,
That they are greater than those that
Hold them, and stron ger and purer,