INDIA: The Cloud

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South Calcutta is an urban jungle of plaster, stone and faded palms, where reeking slums shelter ten people in a room, and ugly Victorian buildings rise beside modern terraced tenements. It is also a political jungle, inhabited by a million restive refugees, students, clerks, stevedores, mill hands, shopkeepers, petty bankers and lawyers. The lords of this jungle have been the three Bose brothers.

Most prominent of the three was fiery chauvinist Subhas Chandra Bose. He came out of South Calcutta's anti-British underground to go to the presidency of the Indian National Congress in 1938; then he broke with Gandhi, joined the Japanese to fight the British, met death in a Japanese plane in 1945.

His elder brother, Satish Chandra Bose, a quieter and steadier Congressman, was South Calcutta's delegate to the West Bengal Assembly until his death last year.

The third brother, Sarat Chandra Bose, now 60, fat and moonfaced, was Minister of Works, Mines and Power until the Congress in 1946 gave his cabinet job to a Moslem Leaguer. In a huff, Sarat Bose quit the Congress, organized his own Socialist Republican Party. He was in Switzerland, recuperating from a mild heart attack, when a by-election was scheduled for his brother Satish's legislative seat. Promptly he declared himself a candidate. Onto his bandwagon leaped opportunist Communists, disgruntled Socialists and rabid Hindu Communalists—all united against an old Congress Party warhorse, Suresh Das.

Bombs & Bombast. The campaign began just before the monsoon. Dhoti-clad Calcuttans left their steaming houses, clustered in the streets to drink lime squash, chew pan (made from the betel nut), and talk politics until tempers gave way and fists flew. Hoodlum gangs raced through the city, pasting posters, tearing down opposition signs, breaking up each other's soapbox meetings with shoes, brickbats, incendiary oil bombs, bursting bottles of nitric acid. A city ordinance banned loudspeakers, so electioneers shouted instead through megaphones, day & night.

Through all the sound & fury, Candidate Bose remained in Switzerland, rallying his supporters with long-distance statements: "Black-marketeering, profiteering, corruption, favoritism and nepotism stalk the land. There is resort to police terrorism on the slightest pretext. The Congress' name today is mud." Congress was split by petty quarrels, weakened by a 10% rise in food prices during the past year, and harassed by a Communist gang-up with Bose.

The West Bengal government had outlawed the Communists, but it could not outmaneuver them. "At a Bose rally I attended," reported TIME Correspondent Robert Lubar last week, "no party emblems were displayed and no one as much as whispered the word Communist. But the tenor of the meeting was clear. It was dominated by a huge, crude painting ridiculing Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. It showed him wearing a jeweled crown and a uniform with exaggerated epaulets. Under the portrait was scrawled: 'Down with British imperialism!'