Subhas Chandra Bose: A Biography

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This biography of Subhas Chandra Bose is being brought out on the occasion of the country-wide celebrations of his birth centenary. Subhas Chandra Bose, often simply Netaji to his countrymen, is perhaps the most legendary figure in India's struggle for freedom. In 1944, he had written: "I have been a dreamer of dreams. But the dream of all my dreams, the dearest of dreams of my life, had been the dream of freedom for India". His entire life was a struggle to make this dream come true and it was in the pursuit of this dream in his own way that he parted company with many of his associates and comrades and adopted a path different from theirs. Since the late 1920s, he had been a leader of the radical trend in the Congress and of the youth and before the end of the 1930s, he had become, in the words of Rabindranath Tagore. Deshanayak. One of his dreams for India struggling for independence had been for her to have her own army of liberation. It was in fulfilment of this dream that the Azad Hind Fauj (Indian National Army) was formed by him outside India for the liberation of India. While differences among scholars over Netaji's understanding of world developments and the path he had chosen would continue, there has been no doubt during the past half a century and more that his object, as he himself said, 'in leaving India was to supplement from outside the struggle going on at home'. Or that the inspiration that he and his Azad Hind Fauj provided during the Second World War and after was a major factor in the post-war anti-imperialist upsurge in the country and in the achievement of freedom.

We are approaching the 50th anniversary of Indian independence. It will be an occasion for politicians, statesmen and historians alike to recall the colourful history of India's struggle for independence, spread over more than a century. Indian independence was won not only due to the contributions of a number of outstanding leaders but also due to the heroic role of nameless millions, without whose active participation a handful of leaders, however great they may have been, could have achieved very little. Hence, when we get down to the task of writing a political biography of any one of the titans of our freedom struggle, we should study and critically analyse their role vis-a-vis the masses.

Historians of all trends will perhaps agree that the most outstanding architect of India's struggle for independence and of our mighty million-headed mass national movement was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. With his innovative technique of non-violent non-cooperation and Satyagraha, he roused India's backward and usually timid peasant millions, instilled in their consciousness a kind of fearlessness, which our octogenarian stalwart historian Professor Hirendranath Mukherjee calls abhaya. There were other giants in our mighty national struggle like Jawaharlal Nehru, Abdul Ghaffar Khan and Subhas Chandra Bose. But all of them in the beginning (and some till the end) were the followers of Gandhiji. At major turning points of our national struggle, differences arose between Gandhiji and some other leaders. Yet it was only in the case of Subhas Chandra Bose that differences with Gandhiji ultimately led to a total break. Subhas charted an alternative course for himself, a march towards freedom through a different path. However, both Gandhiji and Bose never looked at each other as opponents but continued to love and respect each other. In many of his radio speeches from various parts of South-East Asia as the head of the Azad Hind Government, Subhas Chandra saluted Gandhiji as the supreme leader of our struggle for independence. Gandhiji also, differing sharply ideologically from Subhas Chandra and his INA, nonetheless paid glowing tributes to the great contribution of Subhas to India's struggle for freedom. We shall remember all this as we get down to the task of writing an objective detailed biography of Subhas Chandra Bose, on the occasion of his birth centenary, for the younger generations of today, tomorrow and the day after.

It is a difficult task to write a popular biography of so colourful a man, with so many complexities, understandable to teenagers yet faithful to scholarship. All that I can say is that we shall give it a good try in respectful homage to the man who was born Subhas Chandra Bose on 23 January 1897 but who disappeared like a brilliant meteor on 20 August 1945 as Netaji of India's armed struggle for national liberation.