Roads to Delhi 249Burma’s freedom: “From 1925 to 1927, I used to gaze from the veran-
dah of my cell in Mandalay prison on the palace of the last in de pen-
dent king of Burma, and I used to wonder when Burma would be free
once again. Today Burma is an in de pen dent state and I am breathing
the atmosphere of that liberated country.”^26 He offered a nazar (“gift”)
of 250,000 rupees—around $76,000—donated by Indians in Southeast
Asia to the Burmese government, as a token of India’s appreciation of
Burmese hospitality.
In the Bengali literary imagination, Burma had been the setting of a
romantic battle for freedom. A popular Bengali novelist, Sarat Chandra
Chattopadhyay, had published Pather Dabi (The Road’s Demand) in
1926, when Bose was a prisoner in Mandalay Jail. Bose would have
been familiar with this story, about a superhuman Bengali revolution-
ary organizing India’s freedom struggle in Burma. In Rangoon, Ba
Maw thought Bose looked “a little sad and wistful,” apparently because
Bose was thinking of “the long and bloody journey still ahead of him
and his forces before India too would be free.”^27 The cause of Bose’s
sadness was more likely to be the terrible man-made famine that was
decimating his home province of Bengal, just across the border. More
than three million people belonging to the vulnerable sections of soci-
ety perished in this avoidable calamity. The British, focused on the war,
were interested only in feeding their soldiers and in keeping the indus-
trial areas around Calcutta quiet by making rice available to workers at
subsidized prices through ration shops. The masses of agricultural la-
borers, market- de pen dent sharecroppers, and jute- growing smallhold-
ing peasants lost their ability to obtain food as prices soared. The Brit-
ish also instituted a “denial policy” under which they con fis cated boats,
bicycles, and all modes of transport within fifty miles of the coast,
thereby depriving people in those areas of their livelihood. The famine,
which began in March 1943, was not acknowledged in the British Par-
liament until October of that year. The nineteenth century’s fabled
“famine code,” which would have triggered the or ga ni za tion of relief,
was not even invoked by the colonial state. External supplies of food
were either not sought or not accepted to aid in famine relief. Large
injections of food into the public distribution system were needed to
break the famine’s grip on the economy and society. In July 1943, the