226 HIS MAJESTY’S OPPONENT
near Dresden, where a crowd of Indian soldiers from peasant back-
grounds came to hear Bose speak on an autumn afternoon in 1942. He
addressed them in Hindustani for nearly an hour and a half:
Standing very erect under the shadow of a huge plane tree, Subhas be-
gan to speak to them. He spoke in Hindustani and we circled round
him, and as he warmed up I saw how the whole audience was coming
under his spell and how they were listening with the greatest attention
to ev ery word that fell from his lip. When he fin ished, this audience of
about four hundred men had almost acquired a new life, a new anima-
tion, and there was a new excitement among the men, who had mostly
come to the meeting out of sheer curiosity. Dozens of Jats, Sikhs, and
Pathans, many of them veterans of frontier wars, came crowding to-
wards us and asked us to enroll them.According to Mookerjee, Bose “liked the German form of military dis-
cipline, although he was never a militarist at heart.”^56 He had entrusted
the work of military recruitment to N. G. Swamy and Abid Hasan.
When M. R. Vyas offered to join the two, Bose humorously turned him
down saying: “I have enough to explain to Mahatmaji, but how can I
ever justify to him that I converted a Gujarati to non- violence?”^57
Bose spoke from the heart to his soldiers, but also strove to make
members of all religious communities feel a shared sense of belonging.
Vyas remembers that during their journey by car to the Annaberg
camp, Bose would ask A. M. Sultan “the proper Hindustani word or
expression for this and that.” He appreciated Abid Hasan’s efforts to
ensure that Hindu, Muslim and Sikh soldiers dined together instead of
eating in separate messes. Gradually, Muslims and Sikhs gave up their
insistence on being served meat separately that accorded with the ap-
propriate method of slaughter—halal or jhatka. The overenthusiastic
Hasan even came up with a common prayer that addressed neither the
Hindus’ Ishwar nor the Muslims’ Allah, but was directed to Duniya- ki-
Malik (“Lord of the Universe”). Bose suggested that he drop the idea,
arguing that if religion was resorted to in the name of unity, it could be
equally redeployed to divide the communities.^58
An attempt to divide the religious communities was in fact made by