Dreams of Youth 77under Subhas Chandra Bose, who now took charge of the funeral
rites. After the rites were completed, Subhas returned home with a
small packet and stood somber- faced like a marble statue on the mar-
ble stairs of 1 Woodburn Park. “I have brought a little bit of the re-
mains of Jatindranath Das,” he said to Bivabati. “Please preserve them
with care.”^64
In October 1929, Subhas made the journey from Calcutta to Lahore
and delivered his message of complete emancipation to the Punjabi
students’ conference. He lauded the sac ri fice of Jatin Das in the cause
of freedom. “Jatin today is not dead,” he insisted. “He lives up in the
heavens as a star ‘of purest ray serene’ to serve as a beacon light to pos-
terity.” Bose saw the students’ movement as a school for “the training of
the future citizen.” He felt that the Congress “should depend, for its
strength, in flu ence and power on such movements as the labor move-
ment, youth movement, peasant movement, women’s movement, stu-
dents’ movement.” “To be free or at least to die in the pursuit of free-
dom” was the motto he gave to the students.^65 The people of Punjab, he
reported in a letter, had given him “love, kindness and honor in an
abundant mea sure.” But there was also a hint of loneliness in the midst
of the crowds. “I have been shy by nature since my boyhood,” he con-
fessed, “and I continue to be so until today—in spite of the fact that I
go about making speeches at public meetings.”^66
On October 31, 1929, the viceroy, Lord Irwin, announced that he
had been authorized by the Labour government in London to state that
dominion sta tus was the logical culmination of India’s constitutional
prog ress and that a round- table conference would be convened after
the Simon Commission’s report was published. A majority of the Con-
gress leaders signed a manifesto in response to this overture, looking
forward to the framing of a dominion constitution for India. Jawahar-
lal Nehru was initially hesitant, but eventually fell into line, as he had
been selected by Gandhi to preside over the Lahore session of the In-
dian National Congress in December. “Jawaharlal has now given up
Inde pen dence at the instance [sic] of the Mahatma,” Subhas informed
Basanti Devi.^67 Subhas Chandra Bose and two others, Saifuddin Kitch-
lew of Lahore and Abdul Bari of Patna, issued a separate manifesto
calling for complete in de pen dence and rejecting the round- table con-