Subhas Chandra Bose

• 1. Introduction

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  Subhas Chandra Bose is remembered in India as Netaji, a Hindustani title that means Respected Leader. The name did not begin on Indian soil. It was first used in early 1942, in Berlin. The speakers were soldiers of the Indische Legion, together with German and Indian officials at the Special Bureau for India. Today the title is used across the whole of India. Bose defied British authority, and many Indians count him a hero. Yet he also sought partners in Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan, and those alliances still trouble historians. What made a privileged young man choose rebellion, and why did he fall out with Gandhi's movement? What did he build abroad, and how did it end? And why did some of his followers refuse to believe he was dead?

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• 2. Two Schools, One Boy

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  In January 1902, Subhas Bose followed his five older brothers into the Baptist Mission's Protestant European School in Cuttack. Most pupils were European or Anglo-Indian, and every lesson was taught in English. The curriculum covered Latin, the Bible, good manners, British geography and British history, but no Indian language. His father, Janakinath, had chosen the school. Janakinath was a successful lawyer and government pleader, loyal to British India, and he wanted his sons to speak flawless English because it won access to the British.

  At home in Cuttack, where Subhas was born on the 23rd of January 1897, only Bengali was spoken. He was the ninth child and sixth son of Janakinath and Prabhabati Bose. Prabhabati, known fondly as Mā jananī, had her first child at fourteen and went on to have thirteen more. She worshipped the goddesses Durga and Kali, told stories from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and sang Bengali religious songs. From her, Subhas took a wish to help people in distress, and he preferred gardening to sports. Janakinath was reserved and busy, and Subhas later thought his own childhood nondescript. Still, the father loved English literature, including Milton, Cowper, Arnold and Shakespeare's Hamlet.

  In 1909, twelve-year-old Subhas joined the Ravenshaw Collegiate School, again following his brothers. Bengali and Sanskrit were taught there, along with ideas from the Vedas and the Upanishads. He began wearing Indian clothes and thinking about religion. His long letters to his mother show he knew the mystic Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, his disciple Swami Vivekananda, and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's novel Ananda Math. He could still focus when exams demanded it, and in 1912 he placed second in the University of Calcutta's matriculation examination.

  In 1913 he followed his brothers once more, this time to Presidency College in Calcutta. There he studied philosophy and read Kant, Hegel and Bergson. A friend named Hemanta Kumar Sarkar shared his religious yearning, and the two declared their pure love for each other in the language of religious imagery. In the long vacations of 1914 they travelled through northern India for months in search of a spiritual guru. His family had not been told clearly, and they thought he had run away. No guru was found, and Subhas fell ill with typhoid fever. His parents broke down on his return, and Janakinath exchanged angry words with his son. Tempers settled only when his favourite brother, Sarat Chandra Bose, came home from law studies in England.

  On the 15th of February 1916, a group of students cornered E. F. Oaten, a professor of history at Presidency, on a stairway and beat him with sandals. The students claimed that Oaten had made rude remarks about Indian culture and pushed some of them. Oaten said they had simply been too loud outside his class. He was unhurt and could not name his attackers. But a college servant said he saw Bose and a classmate, Ananga Dam, running away. Bose was alleged to have masterminded or joined the attack, and both young men were expelled and rusticated from the University of Calcutta. Family connections were used to pressure the vice-chancellor, Asutosh Mukherjee, but the expulsion held until the 20th of July 1917. Then the university's Syndicate let him return to a different college. At Scottish Church College he took his B.A. in 1918, in the First Class with honours in philosophy, second among all philosophy students at Calcutta University. His father soon urged him toward England and an examination that promised a very different life.

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• 3. The Examination He Refused

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  Bose arrived in London on the 20th of October 1919 and prepared his application for the Indian Civil Service. As references he listed Lord Sinha of Raipur, Under Secretary of State for India, and Bhupendranath Basu, a wealthy Calcutta lawyer on the Council of India. He also wanted a place at Cambridge, but the admission deadline had passed. The Non-Collegiate Students Board offered a university education at low cost without a college place. On the 19th of November 1919 he entered the university register. He chose the Mental and Moral Sciences Tripos, shortened to two years because of his Indian degree.

  Six vacancies were open in the civil service when Bose sat the competitive exam in August 1920. He placed fourth. A final examination in 1921 remained, covering the Indian Penal Code, the Indian Evidence Act, Indian history and an Indian language, plus a riding test. Bose feared none of it and could ride, so success seemed within easy reach. Yet doubts grew over the following months, and he exchanged many letters with his father and with Sarat.

  In one letter to Sarat, Bose wrote that "it is not possible to serve one's country in the best and fullest manner if one is chained on to the civil service." By April 1921 his decision was firm. He apologised to Sarat for the pain it would cause his parents and the rest of the family. On the 22nd of April 1921 he wrote to the Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu: "I wish to have my name removed from the list of probationers in the Indian Civil Service."

  The following day he wrote to Sarat again about a letter from their mother. Despite what his father and others thought, she preferred the ideals for which Mahatma Gandhi stands. Bose said the letter was worth a treasure to him, because it lifted something like a burden from his mind.

  C. R. Das, a lawyer who had risen to the top of Bengal politics, had been in touch with Bose and urged him to return to Calcutta. Bose sat his Cambridge B.A. finals half-heartedly and passed in the Third Class. He sailed for India in June 1921 and asked a fellow Indian student to collect his diploma.

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• 4. Congress and Gandhi

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  On the morning of the 16th of July 1921, Bose, aged 24, came ashore at Bombay and at once sought a meeting with Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi, aged 51, was in the city and agreed to see him that afternoon. In Bose's own account, written many years later, he fired question after question. He found Gandhi's answers vague, his goals unclear and his plan unfinished. They clashed over means, since Gandhi held non-violence to be non-negotiable while Bose accepted any means against colonial rule. They clashed over ends too, because Bose was drawn to totalitarian models that Gandhi condemned. Historian Gordon notes that Gandhi sent Bose to C. R. Das, and in Das Bose found the leader he sought.

  Das was more flexible than Gandhi and more sympathetic to the extremism that attracted idealistic young Bengalis. Bose became one of three foremost lieutenants of Das, alongside Birendranath Sasmal and Jatindra Mohan Sengupta. In 1922 he founded the newspaper Swaraj and took charge of publicity for the Bengal Provincial Congress Committee. In 1923 he was elected President of the Indian Youth Congress and Secretary of the Bengal State Congress. He also edited Forward, the paper Das had founded. When Das became mayor of Calcutta in 1924, he made Bose chief executive of the Calcutta Municipal Corporation, choosing him over the more experienced Sasmal. That same year Bose led a protest march and was jailed with Maghfoor Ahmad Ajazi and others. After a roundup of nationalists in 1925, he was sent to prison in Mandalay, in British Burma, where he contracted tuberculosis.

  Released in 1927, Bose became general secretary of the Congress and worked with Jawaharlal Nehru. In late December 1928 he organised the Congress annual meeting in Calcutta and commanded its volunteer corps as general officer commanding. Author Nirad Chaudhuri recalled that the officers wore steel-cut epaulettes and that Bose's own uniform came from Harman's, a firm of British tailors. A telegram addressed to him as GOC was even delivered to the British General in Fort William, and the British Indian press gossiped. Gandhi, a sincere pacifist, disliked the strutting, boot-clicking and saluting, and he called the session a Bertram Mills circus. After another jailing for civil disobedience, Bose became Mayor of Calcutta in 1930.

  In the mid-1930s Bose travelled in Europe, visiting Indian students and politicians, among them Benito Mussolini. He watched party organisation and saw communism and fascism at work. He wrote the first part of his book The Indian Struggle, which covered the independence movement from 1920 to 1934. It was published in London in 1935, and the British government banned it in India for fear of unrest. In Vienna, Otto Faltis organised the Indian Central European Society, which supported him. In England he exchanged ideas with Labour figures and thinkers including Clement Attlee, Harold Laski and Sir Stafford Cripps, and with Lord Halifax. Only Labour and Liberal politicians would meet him, while Conservative officials refused him courtesy because he came from a colony. He came to believe that India needed two decades of socialist authoritarianism on the lines of Turkey's Kemal Atatürk. The British refused him permission to meet Atatürk in Ankara.

  In 1938 Bose declared that the Congress "should be organised on the broadest anti-imperialist front with the two-fold objective of winning political freedom and the establishment of a socialist regime." He accepted nomination as Congress President and stood for unqualified Swaraj, including force against the British. Gandhi opposed his presidency, and the party split. In 1939 Bose attended the Congress meeting on a stretcher and was elected again, defeating Gandhi's preferred candidate, Pattabhi Sitaramayya. U. Muthuramalingam Thevar mobilised votes across south India for him. Still, manoeuvres in the Congress Working Committee forced Bose to resign the presidency. On the 22nd of June 1939 he organised the All India Forward Bloc, a leftist faction whose main strength lay in Bengal. When he visited Madurai on the 6th of September, Thevar greeted him with a massive rally.

  When war broke out, Viceroy Lord Linlithgow declared war on India's behalf without consulting the Congress. Bose urged mass civil disobedience in protest, and Gandhi would not agree. He organised protests in Calcutta demanding removal of the Holwell Monument, which stood at the corner of Dalhousie Square to commemorate those who died in the Black Hole of Calcutta. He was jailed, then released after a seven-day hunger strike. The CID kept his Calcutta house under watch, but the watch would hold only until January 1941.

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• 5. Escape to Berlin

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  In the days before his escape, Bose claimed to want solitude, which let him avoid British guards while he grew a beard. On the night of the 17th of January 1941 he left his Elgin Road house in Calcutta, dressed as a Pathan in a brown long coat, a black fez-type cap and broad pyjamas. His nephew Sisir Kumar Bose went with him. They reached Gomoh Railway Station in Bihar, which today carries his name.

  Bose reached Peshawar with help from the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service. There Akbar Shah, Mohammed Shah and Bhagat Ram Talwar met him, and he stayed at the home of a trusted friend, Abad Khan. On the 26th of January 1941 he began the journey toward the Afghan frontier. Mian Akbar Shah, a Forward Bloc leader in the North-West Frontier Province, saw a danger. Bose spoke no Pashto and would be an easy target for Pashto speakers working for the British. Shah suggested he pretend to be deaf and dumb and let his beard grow like the tribesmen's. Their guide, Bhagat Ram Talwar, was, unknown to Bose, a Soviet agent.

  Supporters of the Aga Khan III helped Bose cross into Afghanistan. There an Abwehr unit posing as road construction engineers from the Organization Todt guided him through Kabul to the Soviet border. Along the way he used the identity of a Pashtun insurance agent called Ziauddin. For Moscow he travelled on the Italian passport of an Italian nobleman, Count Orlando Mazzotta. In the Soviet Union the NKVD took him to Moscow, where he hoped Russian hostility to British rule would win support for a popular rising in India. The Soviet response disappointed him, and he was quickly passed to the German ambassador, Count von der Schulenburg. At the beginning of April the ambassador flew him to Berlin on a special courier aircraft, where Joachim von Ribbentrop and the Foreign Ministry officials on the Wilhelmstrasse would hear him more favourably.

  In Berlin, Adam von Trott zu Solz led the Special Bureau for India, which ran the German-sponsored Azad Hind Radio. Bose founded the Free India Centre and raised the Indian Legion from Indian prisoners of war who had fought for the British in North Africa before Axis forces captured them. Several thousand men joined. The legion was attached to the Wehrmacht and later transferred to the Waffen SS. Its men swore to obey "the leader of the German race and state, Adolf Hitler" as commander of German forces in the fight for India, whose leader was Bose. Bose was also willing to imagine an invasion of India through the Soviet Union by Nazi troops, with the legion at the front. Many have questioned that judgment, since the Germans might not have been easily persuaded to leave afterwards.

  Historian Romain Hayes records that the German Foreign Office found Bose a luxurious residence with a butler, a cook, a gardener and an SS-chauffeured car. Emilie Schenkl moved in with him openly, and the Germans, aware of the relationship, stayed out of it. Most of the Special Bureau staff did not get along with her. Historian Leonard Gordon names Adam von Trott, Alexander Werth and Freda Kretschemer as intensely hostile. They believed that she and Bose were not married and that she was enjoying a comfortable wartime life, and differences of class made things worse. In November 1942, Schenkl gave birth to their daughter.

  The Germans hesitated to ally with Bose because they considered him less popular than Gandhi or Nehru. By the spring of 1942 the German army was bogged down in the USSR. Disappointed by the lack of response, Bose wanted to move to Southeast Asia, where Japan had just won quick victories. Hitler met him only once, in late May 1942, and brushed aside his requests, though he did arrange a submarine voyage to East Asia. Bose came to believe that Hitler valued his men more for propaganda victories than for military ones. In February 1943 he left Schenkl and their baby daughter and boarded a German U-boat. The men he had recruited were left leaderless and demoralised.

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• 6. The Army in the East

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  Southeast of Madagascar, after the German submarine U-180 carried him around the Cape of Good Hope, Bose moved to a Japanese submarine. It was the only civilian transfer between two submarines of different navies in World War II. He disembarked in Japanese-held Sumatra in May 1943.

  The Indian National Army began as the idea of Japanese Major Iwaichi Fujiwara, who headed an intelligence unit called the Fujiwara Kikan. His mission was to raise an army that would fight alongside the Japanese army. Through Pritam Singh Dhillon, president of the Bangkok chapter of the Indian Independence League, he recruited a captured British Indian army captain, Mohan Singh, in December 1941. The two agreed on a first army in the second half of that month and picked the name in the first week of January 1942. It was linked to the Indian Independence League, which expatriate nationalist Rash Behari Bose headed from Tokyo. In December 1942 that first army was disbanded, because Mohan Singh came to believe the Japanese High Command was using it as a pawn and propaganda tool. He was taken into custody, and his troops returned to the prisoner-of-war camp.

  At a meeting in Singapore in July 1943, Rash Behari Bose handed the organisation to Subhas Chandra Bose. Subhas reorganised the army and drew large support from expatriate Indians in southeast Asia, who enlisted and gave money. The army included a women's unit, the Rani of Jhansi Regiment, named after Rani Lakshmi Bai and led by Captain Lakshmi Swaminathan. It is seen as a first of its kind in Asia. The troops served under a Provisional Government, the Azad Hind Government, which produced its own currency, postage stamps, court and civil code. Nine Axis states recognised it, including Germany and Japan, though five of those authorities were set up under Axis occupation. In November 1943 it attended the Greater East Asia Conference as an observer. Bose was driven and charismatic, but the Japanese regarded him as militarily unskilled.

  The Japanese had taken the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in 1942. A year later, the Provisional Government and the army were established there, with Lieutenant Colonel Arcot Doraiswamy Loganathan as Governor General. The islands were renamed Shaheed, meaning Martyr, and Swaraj, meaning Independence. Yet the Japanese Navy kept essential control. During Bose's only visit, in early 1944, his hosts carefully kept him from the local population. At that time the Japanese administration was torturing Diwan Singh, the leader of the islands' Indian Independence League, who later died of his injuries in the Cellular Jail. Several locals tried to alert Bose, apparently without success. Loganathan, aware he held no real administrative control, resigned in protest and returned to headquarters in Rangoon.

  On the Indian mainland, an Indian Tricolour modelled on the Congress flag was raised for the first time in Moirang, in Manipur. Japanese divisions and the Burmese National Army besieged nearby Kohima and Imphal, with INA brigades named the Gandhi and Nehru Brigades. The operation carried the Axis codename Operation U-Go. On the 4th of July 1944, Bose spoke to Indians at a rally in Burma and said in Hindi, "Give me blood, and I shall give you freedom!" Two days later, in a broadcast from Singapore on Azad Hind Radio, he called Gandhi the "Father of the Nation" and asked for his blessings. It was the first time Gandhi had been called that. Another call he gave his troops was Dilli Chalo, meaning On to Delhi.

  Operation U-Go failed. Commonwealth forces held out in the towns, then counter-attacked, and the Axis forces fell back into Burma. After the defeats at Kohima and Imphal, the hope of a base on the Indian mainland was lost for good. Almost half of the Japanese forces and fully half of the participating INA contingent were killed. The army still fought at Meiktila, Mandalay, Pegu, Nyangyu and Mount Popa. With the fall of Rangoon, Bose's government ceased to be an effective political entity. A large proportion of the troops surrendered under Loganathan, and the rest retreated with Bose toward Malaya or made for Thailand. Bose chose to escape to Manchuria and seek a future in the Soviet Union, which he believed had turned anti-British.

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• 7. The Crash at Taihoku

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  At about 2:30 pm on the 18th of August 1945, a Japanese bomber carrying Bose began its take-off at Taihoku, in Taiwan. As the aircraft left the standard path, passengers heard a loud sound like an engine backfiring. Mechanics on the tarmac saw the portside engine, or part of it, and its propeller fall away. The plane swung wildly to the right, crashed, broke in two and burst into flames. The chief pilot, the copilot and Lieutenant-General Tsunamasa Shidei were killed instantly. Shidei, Vice Chief of Staff of the Kwantung Army, was to have negotiated for Bose with the Soviet army in Manchuria. Bose's assistant Habibur Rahman blacked out briefly. Bose was conscious and not fatally hurt, but soaked in gasoline. The rear door was blocked by luggage, so the two men ran through the flames toward the front. Ground staff saw a figure staggering toward them like a human torch. It was Bose, whose gasoline-soaked clothes had ignited.

  A truck serving as ambulance rushed the survivors to the Nanmon Military Hospital south of Taihoku. Dr. Taneyoshi Yoshimi, the surgeon in charge, was called at around 3 pm. He saw third-degree burns on many parts of Bose's body, especially his chest, and doubted he would live. Historian Leonard Gordon interviewed all the hospital personnel. Bose was bandaged after a disinfectant, Rivamol, and a white ointment were applied. Yoshimi gave him four injections of Vita Camphor and two of Digitamine for his weakened heart, about every 30 minutes. A third doctor, Dr. Ishii, gave a blood transfusion, and Ringer solution replaced lost fluids. Bose kept a clear head, which Yoshimi found remarkable for such injuries. Then he fell into a coma. Between 9 and 10 pm on Saturday, the 18th of August 1945, he died at the age of 48.

  Two days later, on the 20th of August 1945, Bose was cremated at the main Taihoku crematorium. On the 23rd of August the Japanese news agency Do Trzei announced his death and Shidei's. On the 7th of September, Lieutenant Tatsuo Hayashida carried the ashes to Tokyo. The next morning he handed them to Rama Murti, president of the Tokyo Indian Independence League. A memorial service followed on the 14th of September, and a few days later the ashes went to the priest of the Renkōji Temple of Nichiren Buddhism. They have stayed there ever since.

  Conspiracy theories appeared within hours of his death. Many supporters in Bengal refused then, and still refuse, to believe the fact or the circumstances, and the theories have kept martial myths about him alive. Among INA personnel there was shock and trauma. The worst affected were young Tamil Indians from Malaya and Singapore, who made up most of the civilians who had enlisted. The professional soldiers, mostly Punjabis, faced an uncertain future and feared reprisals. Gandhi wrote to Rajkumari Amrit Kaur: "Subhas Bose has died well. He was undoubtedly a patriot, though misguided." Some two and a half million Indian soldiers had served in the British Indian army, and they were split over the INA, with some calling its men traitors. The British Raj tried 300 INA officers for treason but backtracked, facing opposition from the Congress and a new British mood for rapid decolonisation.

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• 8. Ideas and Afterlife

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  Bose drew inspiration from the Bhagavad Gita, and Swami Vivekananda's teachings on universalism and social service inspired him from a young age. Historian Leonard Gordon observes that his inner religious explorations continued into adulthood, which set him apart from the growing number of atheistic socialists and communists in India. In a 1930 speech in Calcutta, Bose first said he preferred "a synthesis of what modern Europe calls socialism and fascism". He later called Nehru's 1933 claim of "no middle road" between communism and fascism fundamentally wrong. In 1944 he stated, "Our philosophy should be a synthesis between National Socialism and communism."

  In his autobiography An Indian Pilgrim, Bose argued that the split between Hindu and Muslim was largely artificial, like the Catholic and Protestant quarrel in Ireland, which rulers had helped to stoke. He called it a misnomer to describe India before the British as Muslim rule. Hindus and Muslims ran administrations together, he wrote, and the 1857 rebellion was fought under the flag of a Muslim, Bahadur Shah. On government, Bose said India "must have a political system, State, of an authoritarian character" and "a strong central government with dictatorial powers for some years to come". He had earlier said democracy was India's best option. Some scholars suggest his Axis alliance was more than pragmatism, while others call him a militant nationalist who was neither Nazi nor Fascist, since he backed women's empowerment and secularism.

  The pogrom called the Night of Broken Glass took place on the 9th of November 1938. In early December, Hindu Mahasabha journals published articles supporting German anti-Semitism, and the Congress answered with a statement on the 12th of December. Within the Congress, only Bose opposed that stance. In April 1939 he refused to back a party motion that Jews could find refuge in India. Though he denounced Nazi racial policy in 1938, in 1942 he published an article in the journal Angriff calling Indians true Aryans and brethren of the Germans. He urged that anti-Semitism belong in the Indian liberation movement, and The Jewish Chronicle labelled him "India's anti-Jewish Quisling". Hayes writes that among all the papers and broadcasts Bose left in Germany, he showed no concern for the millions who died in the camps. Not even the exposure of Auschwitz in early 1945 drew a reaction.

  India has stamped his image on postage since 1964, and coins since 1996. Kolkata's airport, a metro station in Delhi and a bridge in Cuttack bear his name, as do universities and stadiums. In 2018 the Government of India renamed Ross Island as Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Dweep, with Neil and Havelock Islands renamed Shaheed Dweep and Swaraj Dweep. A museum on Bose and the INA opened at the Red Fort in 2019. In 2021 his birthday became Parakram Divas, and in 2022 a statue of him was unveiled at India Gate. On the 23rd of August 2007, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe visited the Netaji Bhawan in Kolkata and told the family that Netaji is a much respected name in Japan.

  Filmmakers have returned to him often, starting with the 1947 documentary Netaji Subhash, directed by Chhotubhai Desai. Shyam Benegal's 2004 film Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose: The Forgotten Hero won two National Film Awards. Sugata Bose published the biography His Majesty's Opponent in 2011. In 2017 a nine-episode web series, Bose: Dead/Alive, starred Rajkummar Rao as Bose and Anna Ador as Emilie Schenkl, and it dramatised the book India's Biggest Cover-up. Also in 2022, the government created the Subhas Chandra Bose Aapda Prabandhan Puraskar, an award for excellent work in disaster management.

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