Dreams of Youth 63said in reply. “I was gratified to know about the qualities of his head
and heart through the letter. What Subhas has said about art is unex-
ceptionable.”^34
On an impulse, Subhas wrote a letter to another popular literary fig-
ure of early twentieth- century Bengal, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay.
He felt that this novelist had penned the only truly insightful tribute to
the Deshbandhu, which had touched him deeply. Chattopadhyay wrote
and published his novel Pather Dabi (The Demand of the Road), about
a Bengali freedom fighter in Burma, during Subhas Chandra Bose’s
Mandalay years. “If I had not come here,” Subhas wrote to this master
of fiction, “I would never realize the depth of my love for golden Ben-
gal. I sometimes feel as if Tagore expressed the emotions of a prisoner
when he wrote: ‘Sonar Bangla, ami tomae bhalobashi [Golden Bengal, I
love you]!’”^35
This song, along with others by Tagore, Dwijendralal Roy, and vari-
ous devotional and folk poets, fig ured prominently in a notebook in
which he had transcribed his favorite songs. He believed that the songs
of Kazi Nazrul Islam, the revolutionary poet laureate of Bengal, had
been enriched by the composer’s lived experience in colonial prisons.
Distance strengthened his yearning for his regional homeland. “When I
see patches of white clouds floating across the sky in the morning or
the afternoon,” he wrote, referring to Kalidasa’s ancient epic poem, “I
momentarily feel—as the exiled Yaksha of Meghdut did—like sending
through them some of my innermost feelings to Mother Bengal. I
could at least tell her in the Vaishnavic strain: ‘To face calumny for your
sake, / Is to me a blessing.’”^36
The quotidian aspects of prison life were best captured in delightful
anecdotes that Subhas related in his letters to his sister- in- law Bivabati.
He felt happy that Bivabati found his stories to be highly entertaining.
Citing a Sanskrit saying that “God is but all- pervading delight,” he ex-
pressed relief that he had not lost all sense of humor in jail, for that
would have meant being bereft of the cream of life—ananda (“bliss”).
He narrated with sympathy the predicament of common convicts:
Maloy, an erstwhile village raja of Burma; Shyamlal, the foolish burglar
who had been awarded the title of “pundit”; and Yankaya, the illiterate
jailbird from Madras who communicated with the Bengali po lit i cal