Netaji was one of the most visionary leaders of the Independence movement: Sumantra Bose

Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose was, in his grandnephew Sumantra Bose’s words, “incomparable”. Bose, a political scientist and director of Netaji Research Bureau, Kolkata, recently compiled, edited and translated a collection of essays on Netaji by his mother Krishna Bose that provide rare insights into the man, the political leader and, freedom fighter, his relationship with other leaders of India’s independence movement, his views on faith and religion and much more.

In a conversation with My Kolkata, Sumantra Bose gives a peek into the book, NETAJI: Subhas Chandra Bose’s Life, Politics and Struggle:

You have recently translated a collection of essays on Netaji. Could you tell us a little about the book?

Krishna Bose, my mother, did extensive original and seminal research from the early 1960s on Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s life, politics, and his role in India’s freedom struggle. Her two best-known books on the subject are Itihaser Sandhane, which is an account of Netaji in Europe in the 1930s and early 1940s, and Charanarekha Taba, an account of Netaji in southeastern Asia as the leader of the Azad Hind movement from 1943 to 1945. These books, published a decade apart in 1972 and 1982, are, I would say, minor classics. It’s a great pity that they were not translated into English and made available to a national and international audience. Because, of course, interest in Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose goes far beyond the Bengali-speaking public. It’s evident across India, across the subcontinent and globally as well. Some of the finest works on Netaji’s life have been published by European and American scholars.

I have long felt that a selection of my mother’s writings on Netaji should be made available in English for national and global audiences. Initially, I thought of translating Itihaser Sandhane and Charanarekha Taba. Then I realised that my mother had also written some very important essays on the various aspects of Netaji’s life, politics and his struggle for India’s freedom. Most of these articles that she wrote between the early 1960s and 1990s were brought together in a Bengali volume titled Prasanga Subhas Chandra, first published in 1993. It’s a very well-known anthology of my mother’s essays on Netaji. This book — NETAJI: Subhas Chandra Bose’s Life, Politics and Struggle — contains 18 essays on different aspects of Netaji’s life, politics and struggle. Around 12 of the essays are English translations of my mother’s Bengali writings. In addition, my mother also wrote articles on Netaji in English, which have been slightly edited and included in this book.

The last of the 18 articles, ‘The Taipei Tragedy’, traces Netaji’s last journey and is a translation from a Bengali article published in Desh on the 70th anniversary of India’s Independence in 2017 and to commemorate the 72nd anniversary of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s death. So, I am thrilled that for the first time my mother’s seminal writings on Netaji will now be available to an English-reading audience. My only regret is that this is a posthumous publication. I am sure she would have been very happy to see this.

Some saw the Indian Independence as a triumphant conclusion to two hundred years of struggle. Others considered it as a transfer of power. What was Netaji’s idea of independence/freedom for India?

In May-June 1943, Netaji spent almost six weeks in Tokyo. He travelled in a submarine from the port of Kiel, north of Hamburg, Germany, to the island of Sabang, just off Sumatra, in Indonesia on May 13 in 1943, and then flew to Tokyo. In Tokyo, during those six weeks, Netaji met almost all the top Japanese politicians and military commanders and he lectured them relentlessly while they took notes on the history of India’s struggle for freedom. Netaji’s narrative began with the first war of Independence in 1857-58. As a political scientist with a historical bent, I can say that the Indian freedom struggle, especially in its three climactic decades — 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, when it became a mass movement for freedom, initially inspired by the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi — that’s one of the great popular mobilisations of the 20th century.

But what happened in August 1947 was a bit of an anti-climax. The transfer of power was supervised by an arch-imperialist, Lord Mountbatten. Of course, the greatest blow to Indian nationalists was that the country was divided. The Partition of India on religious lines was something that Netaji would never have countenanced and I think he would have gone to any length and done his utmost to prevent the partition of India on religious lines. Netaji believed in a united and undivided India that would be free. That was not realised.

Netaji was also one of the most visionary leaders of the Indian Independence movement. Many have a limited and even distorted understanding of Netaji as a man of action. Or as a romantic hero. Netaji was, in fact, one of the most thoughtful, philosophical and reflective leaders of the Indian Independence movement. He thought in great detail from the 1930s onwards, if not earlier, about the shape of free India. What it should be. And he wrote about it. He lectured about it. He had very clear ideas about what free India should be like. First of all, it should be undivided based on the equality and amity of all religious and other communities. He strongly believed in that and practised it in the Azad Hind Fauj. He realised that the greatest need in India would be the eradication of poverty and myriad forms of inequality. In short, a gigantic task of development awaited in rebuilding India. He was quite sure that the task could only be tackled with a modernist mindset through application of latest scientific technologies and on the basis of industrialisation.

Now it’s been 75 years since our political independence was achieved. We are still a lower-income developing country. So clearly Netaji’s dream has not been realised. The country was divided in 1947 into two parts. The gigantic task of rebuilding India from the ravages of two centuries of colonialism remains unfulfilled. And, of course, the India that we live in today is characterised by all manners of continuing social inequalities, widespread incidence of mass poverty, and poor relations between religious groups. All these certainly would have bothered Netaji very much.

INA was made up of people from different faiths, castes and creeds. The idea of an all-woman-regiment — The Rani of Jhansi Regiment — was incredibly progressive. Was this a reflection of Netaji’s pluralistic ideas?

Netaji was an immensely progressive leader who implemented his progressive ideas. So the Indian National Army or Azad Hind Fauj was like a showcase of amity between members of different religious faiths, different ethnic and linguistic communities and different regions of India. The senior-most field officer of the INA was a man called Mohammad Zaman Kiani. His name is not very well-known in India because he was from the Rawalpindi district of Pakistan, where he lived after the Partition. So, we tend to know the names of the Red Fort heroes — Shah Nawaz Khan, Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon and Prem Kumar Sahgal. We tend to recall these names much more readily. However, Kiani was a major-general personally promoted by Netaji in 1944 for his services. A disproportionate part of the INA’s officers were Muslims. There were many others like Shaukat Malik, Inayat Jan Kiani, Habibur Rahman, Mahboob Ahmed, Abid Hasan and so many others along with the Hindus and Sikhs.

The Anglo-Indian community generally stayed aloof from the freedom movement. I think it’s fair to say that most were loyal to the British Raj. Netaji even broke that loyalty down. One of the senior INA officers featured in this book is Col Cyril John Stracey. He was from the southern part of India and he became the quartermaster general of the INA headquarters in Singapore in 1943 after Netaji’s arrival in south-east Asia. And then, two years later, Netaji entrusted him with building a martyrs’ memorial to the INA war dead. A replica of that memorial stands outside the room we are in (in the driveway of Netaji Bhawan, Kolkata). It’s a three-pillar monument. At the end of the war in July-August 1945, Stracey designed and built this memorial in record time. It was dynamited on Lord Mountbatten’s order two weeks after its inauguration. Stracey was captured and tortured, perhaps more because he was an Anglo-Indian. He was pressured to say that he was coerced into joining the INA. He refused to. My mother and my father Sisir Kumar Bose personally met Col Cyril John Stracey a few days before his death at his retirement home in Coonoor in the Nilgiris, where he lived after a successful career in the Indian Foreign Service. It’s remarkable how he recalled those days in the INA to my mother.

The Rani of Jhansi Regiment on which my mother’s article was published first in 1976 in Bengali is also part of this book. It is remarkable how vivid the article is. My mother was, of course, at an advantage as Captain Lakshmi Swaminathan, who became Lakshmi Sahgal after her marriage to Col Prem Sahgal, was a close friend. So was the Regiment’s deputy commander, Lieutenant Janaki Thevar.

Can you tell us a little bit about Abid Hasan?

I remember him. When I was growing up, he used to come to Kolkata very often and stay in our home. Abid Hasan had gone to Germany as an engineering student. He had gone there before the war broke out and was stranded there during the war. When Netaji arrived in Germany in April 1941, after his famous escape from India, Abid Hasan was one of those Indian expatriates who joined Netaji and helped him set up the Free India Centre based in Berlin and also a small military force of a few thousand men called The Indian Legion, which was drawn mostly from British-Indian prisoners of war taken by Germans fighting in north Africa. As fate would have it, Abid Hasan was chosen by Netaji to be his sole companion on his 93-day submarine journey to south-east Asia. And then Abid Hasan continued to be Netaji’s shadow because he lived in the same house as Netaji in Singapore and in Rangoon and ran the household among other responsibilities. Abid Hasan acquired military training from the German armed forces in 1942. On Netaji’s last journey in August 1945, Abid Hasan was among the six INA officers and Azad Hind Government ministers who had gone to see him off from Saigon to Taipei.

The slogan ‘Jai Hind’ was coined by Abid Hasan in Germany sometime in 1942. Abid Hasan had joined the Indian Legion after his military training in Germany. In the Indian Legion’s barracks, it was noticed that there was no common greeting among the men. The Muslims greeted each other with salam alekum, the Sikhs said Sat sree akaal, the Rajput soldiers said Jai Ram ji ki and others said namaskar. The focus of the Indian Legion, as with everything else Netaji did, was building unity. So, Abid Hasan started thinking about how there could be a common greeting. He lay awake for several nights, thinking, and the greeting Jai Ram ji ki kept coming back to him... That made him think of Jai Hindustan ki and then Jai Hindustan but he felt they were too long and did not sound quite right. Then he came up with Jai Hind. Abid Hasan went to Netaji and shared it with him and he approved. Thus it became the common greeting not just for the Indian Legion, but the entire Azad Hind movement.

I should point out that Jai Hind was not used as a slogan in the Azad Hind movement. In independent India, it’s used as a slogan. Nehru started it. At the end of his Tryst with Destiny speech, he said Jai Hind. Since then all Indian Prime Ministers, including Lal Bahadur Shastri, Indira Gandhi and others have used it. In the Azad Hind Movement, Jai Hind was used as an interpersonal greeting between freedom fighters.

Do you agree that Netaji had his own interpretation of faith and he drew strength from it?

This is a very important question, especially in the times we live in. Netaji was a deeply spiritual person from his adolescence, if not earlier, till the end of his life. He came across Swami Vivekananda’s teachings when he was about 15 and that shaped his outlook. So you are completely right that Netaji drew immense strength from his very personal version of faith. My mother has written in the book that he used to do a little puja in the morning at his Singapore home. This was in the second half of 1943. There was a small Bhagavad Gita and some prayer beads in his bedroom. We also know from S. A. Ayer, who was a top associate of Netaji and the information minister of the Azad Hind government that Netaji proclaimed in Singapore on October 21, 1943, that sometimes in the evening Netaji would go to the Ramakrishna Mission in Singapore. He would take off his military uniform and wear a dhoti. He would sit in a room alone and meditate. S.A. Ayer has noted that Netaji would always emerge from his meditation sessions with renewed energy. But at the same time, Netaji was absolutely insistent that religious faith should be and remain a private matter and it should not be dragged into the public sphere or into politics.

I will share with you an anecdote from the book that illustrates the point. In the Indian Legion in Germany in 1942, there were no restrictions on worship. The Hindus had small temples, the Muslims had small mosques and the Sikhs gurdwaras — all makeshift.

Some jawans came to Abid Hasan, who was like a political commissar in the camp, and said that they would like to abandon their separate prayers. Interestingly, Sikhs took the lead in this. Abid Hasan was thrilled. This is exactly what is needed, he thought. This is what Netaji wants. So they all sat down and wrote down a common prayer. And Abid Hasan later told my mother that the prayer was beautiful, of Kabirian simplicity and written by Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs from the villages of India. So when Netaji next visited the camp, all the soldiers stood together and recited the common prayer. Netaji heard it but he did not say anything. After a while, Abid Hasan was called to meet him privately. To his surprise, Netaji was quite angry. He said he didn’t want faith dragged into the movement and into Indian nationalism. He said to Abid Hasan that today you are using faith to unite yourselves, but tomorrow someone will use the same sentiments to divide you. It’s a double-edged sword. He felt that Indian nationalism should not be grounded in religious syncretism or be based on interfaith solidarity. National identity must stand above all religious identities.

The incident with professor E.F. Oaten at Presidency College got Netaji expelled. But the accounts of Krishna Bose’s meeting with Oaten later in England paint a very different picture. Can you tell us about that?

The Oaten incident is justly famous because in a way it launched Subhas Chandra Bose’s political career. And he himself acknowledged this. He never admitted his role in the assault but he never denied it either. He maintained, shall we say, a strategic ambiguity. So, we can’t be sure what his role was. Was he the ring leader or was he not? We don’t know. He kept it unclear even in his autobiography. Now, when this incident took place in February 1916, Subhas had just turned 19. Edward Farley Oaten was a young professor of English, in his early thirties at the time. He might have been somewhat arrogant and impatient and would lose his temper easily, especially with students he thought were indisciplined or misbehaving. This is what led to this confrontation. Now, most Indians only know that Oaten was a horrible man and probably a racist and Subhas beat him up. Then Subhas was expelled from college and banned from Calcutta University. Later he was reinstated in Calcutta University because the principal of the Scottish Church College agreed to take him in.

Somewhere down the line, however, Oaten became an admirer of Subhas Chandra Bose. When he heard about Netaji’s death in the air crash in Taipei in August 1945, he wrote a beautiful sonnet. It is a eulogy to Subhas Chandra Bose, the Indian freedom fighter. In September 1971, my parents met professor Oaten in England. He was 87 years old and his eyesight was failing. Throughout the day, Oaten kept reminiscing about his time in Kolkata and also spoke highly about Subhas. He kept nodding his head and saying that Subhas was a remarkable man. My mother had taken a tape recorder along and requested Oaten to read his sonnet aloud. Oaten said his eyesight was very bad and he had trouble reading from books (the poem had been published in one of his books). Then he said that he would recall it from memory and recite, which he did flawlessly. So, my mother’s article on Oaten ends with three questions that came to her mind — Was Oaten’s behaviour some kind of an English sense of magnanimity and fair play? Or was it his individual sense of magnanimity? Or was it something about Netaji’s character that converted adversaries into admirers?

Netaji has often been criticised for his association with the Nazis and the Fascists. How do you respond to that?

My mother took this issue head on. I say in my introduction to the book that this is certainly the most controversial aspect of Netaji’s political life. It’s an aspect that his critics, his enemies have used against him. One of the 18 articles in this book is about Hitler and Bose’s equation. It did not amount to much because Netaji met Hitler only once although he stayed in Germany for 22 months. He was given only one audience with Hitler and that was 14 months after he arrived in Berlin. The meeting took place on May 29, 1942. It was a rather bizarre meeting, it was mostly a monologue by Hitler. One of Netaji’s key associates in Germany was a Bengali gentleman called Dr Girija Mookerjee. Girija Mookerjee has written that after the meeting Netaji said to him in Bengali that “Lokta boddho unmad ( that man is completely insane)”. So, that was his impression from the one meeting with Hitler. Hitler was very anti-Indian, and an admirer of the British Empire. He openly said it over and over again for a long time that it was both natural and right for Indians to be ruled by the English. Just as it was natural and right that inferior and subhuman Russians and other Slavic peoples, as he saw them in his racist view, should be ruled by the Germans, the master race. So he actually saw the model of the British Empire as a role model to emulate for his own Third Reich. And Netaji’s life was dedicated, as we know, to freeing India of two centuries of British colonial rule. So this is really apples and oranges.

The Czech-American historian Milan Hauner, who my mother cites in this book, has written that the one meeting with Hitler left Bose profoundly disillusioned and rid him of his last hopes of any real assistance from Germany to the Indian Independence movement. Of course, Netaji’s original plan was to organise an armed thrust into the north-west of India through Afghanistan. But that plan was upended when Hitler decided to attack the Soviet Union in June 1941. Netaji was very upset, he told senior German officials quite clearly that not only did he not agree with this but the people of India definitely saw the Germans as the aggressor. He wrote that Germany was “another dangerous imperialist power”.

My mother says the clues are in his own writings and pronouncements. Netaji wrote that in seeking support for India’s freedom abroad, one should not be overly concerned about the form of regime or the kind of government a country has. He wrote in the 1930s, that in every country — Europe and beyond — men and women who are sympathetic towards India’s aspirations should be asked for support, regardless of that particular country’s regime or form of government. This applied to Germany as well, not all Germans were Nazis. He had many German and Austrian friends who were not Nazis and were even anti-Nazis. These people were mostly from Austria. This amounted to a very realist approach to foreign policy.

This is what contrasts Bose with Jawaharlal Nehru. Both had an interest in international affairs, both travelled extensively, especially in Europe, to seek and obtain support for India’s freedom movement. However, Nehru had a more idealistic approach to foreign policy. It became evident in his Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai concept in the 1950s and we all know where that led. Nehru was revolted by the persecution of European Jews. Now, it was not that Bose was not disturbed by the violence and ruthlessness of Nazi Germany — he was, and said so openly — but he was willing to accept help from any quarter abroad, regardless of the regime. Now, both the idealistic and realistic approaches have their merits and limitations. Nehru was independent India’s first Prime Minister as well as its foreign minister for 17 years, while Subhas Chandra Bose got to lead the Provisional Government of Azad Hind for less than two years. In that capacity as leader of the Provisional Government of Free India, he stood up very bravely and strongly to ruthless men like Hitler and Tojo. Tojo, unlike Hitler, helped Netaji a lot but he was a very hard-nosed person. He was won over by Netaji’s magnetic personality and became a great supporter. Netaji conveyed to Tojo that he was a representative of India’s independence movement and sought support that must be unconditional and that the two would be equals. Tojo was so impressed by Netaji that he accepted that. Hitler had written derogatory things about Indians in Mein Kampf. Netaji asked him to remove these references when he met Hitler. Of course, Hitler wasn’t about to listen to Subhas Chandra Bose, but it showed Netaji’s mettle.

Since Netaji, there has hardly been any Bengali political leader who could capture the imagination of Indians like Netaji. Why do you think that is?

Because Subhas Chandra Bose is, you know, one in a billion. And it’s very hard to think about any other Indian leader of that time who can be compared to Netaji. The only one who is clearly in the same league as Netaji, and whom Netaji respected all his life despite their political differences, was of course Gandhiji. In a broadcast from south-east Asia, Netaji sought Gandhi’s blessings for the INA’s struggle and its imminent war of liberation in India as the INA thrust into India’s north-east. It was actually Subhas Chandra Bose who gave Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi the title ‘Father of the Nation’.

So it’s not just about Netaji having no peers among Bengalis, it’s hard to find another Indian leader even among the galaxy of figures in the freedom movement who can match Subhas Chandra Bose’s stature or present-day popularity.

His relationship with Tagore was a very interesting one…

The article on Tagore and Bose is, I think, one of the many highlights of this book.

Netaji met Tagore at sea in 1921. They were returning from England on the same ship. Subhas had just resigned from the Indian Civil Service. In the 1920s and into the 1930s, Tagore did not particularly take to Subhas Chandra Bose despite Subhas’s growing stature and popularity in the national movement. It’s difficult to say why. But in 1939, Rabindranath composed an extraordinary eulogy to Subhas called Deshnayak in which he anointed him as the leader of the country. It was a stirring and stunning affirmation of Subhas’s leadership. Tagore had wanted Subhas to be Congress president for the second time in 1939, but Gandhi wouldn’t agree to the poet’s request and so Netaji had to contest the presidency and win against Gandhi’s candidate. There is an interesting anecdote about Subhas’s relationship with Tagore. During Netaji’s escape from Kolkata in January 1941, my father Sisir Kumar Bose, then twenty, drove him from 38/2 Elgin Road (Netaji Bhawan) to Gomoh in Bihar (now Jharkhand). In end-March, a secret emissary brought news to my father in Kolkata that Netaji had probably reached Germany. Sometime in April or May 1941, roughly three months before Rabindranath’s death, the poet invited Sarat Chandra Bose, my grandfather, to Santiniketan. The poet knew he was in the last stage of his life. He was very worried about the future of Visva-Bharati. He wanted Sarat Chandra Bose to have a leading role in Visva-Bharati’s affairs. Sarat Bose went to Santiniketan and my grandmother Bivabati Bose accompanied him. One evening, Tagore said to my grandfather: “Tumi amake bolte paro (you can tell me — meaning the truth about Subhas)”. This put Sarat Bose in a great bind. Because Sarat Bose had kept the truth about what had happened — the escape — even from Subhas’s mother Prabhabati Bose. But after returning to Kolkata, Sarat Bose told my father that the poet was clearly in the last stages of his life. His concern for Subhas was so heartfelt and genuine and his plea “tumi amake bolte paro” was so powerful that I told him the truth. Rabindranath’s private secretary stood guard at the door while Sarat Bose told him. Only my grandparents Sarat Bose and Bivabati Bose were present with Tagore in the room, all the others were asked to leave. Three months later, Rabindranath Tagore passed away.