Subhas Chandra Bose

Biography

Subhas Chandra Bose was born in Cuttack in 1897, the ninth child of a successful Bengali lawyer. Expelled from Presidency College, Calcutta, in 1916 after an assault on a British professor, he graduated in philosophy from Scottish Church College in 1918 and went to Cambridge in 1919. He passed the Indian Civil Service examination but resigned from the service in 1921 to join the nationalist movement under C. R. Das.

In Bengal Bose ran nationalist newspapers, served as chief executive of the Calcutta Municipal Corporation, and was repeatedly imprisoned, including in Mandalay. He became a general secretary of the Indian National Congress in 1927 and mayor of Calcutta in 1930, and in the mid-1930s travelled in Europe and wrote The Indian Struggle. Elected Congress president in 1938 and re-elected in 1939 against Gandhi's candidate, he was forced to resign and founded the All India Forward Bloc.

After another arrest Bose escaped from house surveillance in Calcutta in January 1941 and reached Nazi Germany through Afghanistan and the Soviet Union. In Berlin he ran propaganda broadcasts and raised the Indian Legion from prisoners of war, and he met Hitler in 1942. In 1943 he travelled by submarine to Japanese-held Southeast Asia, took over the Indian National Army in Singapore and proclaimed the Provisional Government of Free India (Azad Hind). The army's part in the Japanese offensive on Imphal and Kohima in 1944 failed. Bose died of burns on 18 August 1945 after the plane carrying him crashed at Taihoku in Taiwan. He remains a hero to many Indians, while historians criticise his alliances with the Axis powers.