Review Essays
Published in Re-Markings Vol. 16 No. 3 September 2017
Bose: Immortal Legend of India’s Freedom – Contemporary Critical
Orientations. Re-Markings Special Number Vol.16 No.1, January 2017.
Edited by Nibir K. Ghosh, A. Karunaker & Sunita Rani Ghosh. New Delhi: Re-Markings
in Association with Authorspress, 2017. pp. 307. ` 599.
Bose: Enigmatic Icon
Jonah
Raskin
For this review, I’d like to call the January 2017 Special Number
on Bose a “book” because in my view the word “book” accords the volume the
respect it deserves. Yes, it’s a collection of essays, interviews, poems and
personal recollections with an introduction about Bose by Nibir K. Ghosh who
did the editing with help from his wife, Dr. Sunita Rani Ghosh, who teaches at
Agra College, and from Professor A. Karunaker, who teaches at Osmania University.
If I were to make this book required reading in a class, I would invite students
to think about the ways that writers represent historical figures. Indeed, the
Bose special number is a study in representation.
Granted, the contributors offer facts, including the date of
Bose’s birth on the 23 rd of January 1897 and the date of his death
on the 18th of August 1945, nine days after the U.S. dropped a nuclear bomb on Nagasaki, Japan and 12 days after the U.S. dropped a nuclear
bomb on Hiroshima. What the dates say to me is that Bose was born at the end of
nineteenth century when the British Empire was at its peak and that he was
still alive at the birth of the nuclear age and the emergence of the U.S. as a
world power. Indeed, Bose was aware of the use of the atomic bomb. He noted
that while Japan had surrendered, India would not, and that the struggle for
Indian independence—which fueled his very soul—would continue.
Yes, there are facts aplenty in this
book, and wonderful quotations from Bose that bring him to life. But it is the
many different interpretations of Bose that make this book fascinating reading.
The title for my essay, “Enigmatic Icon,” is not original with me. It comes
from a passage in Sukalpa Bahattacharjee’s essay titled “Netaji in Our Times:
Weaving Fragments of a Great Life.” Bahattacharjee’s phrase “enigmatic icon” is
amplified, it seems to me, by an image of Bose in the essay by Ajit Mukherjee and
Pranamita Pati that’s titled “Subhas Chandra Bose: A Visionary Spiritualist.”
Mukherjee and Pati write that, “Subhas Bose remains a hard nut to crack.” Indeed,
enigmatic icons like Bose are always hard nuts to crack” because they have so
many different sides.
The thirty-three contributors to this
volume call Bose all sort of names: a “nationalist hero,” “the true architect
of modern India, a “military general,” “a visionary,” “a statesman,” “a
politician,” “a trade union leader,” “a seer,” “a great orator,” “a radical
thinker” and “a guru.” No doubt, he was all of those things and more.
If I were to write a biography of Bose
I might have the word “love” or “lover” in the title. I would begin the book
with the quotation from Bose that’s included in the aforementioned essay in
which the authors call him a “Visionary Spiritualist.” The quotation is from
“My Faith, Philosophical” in which Bose wrote, “The essential nature of reality
is LOVE.” For emphasis he capitalized the word love. He added that, “LOVE is
the essence of the Universe and the essential principle of human life.”
Bose used the word “LOVE,” I think, in
much the same way that Che Guevara did when he said that, "The true revolutionary is guided by a great
feeling of love.” Che added, “It is impossible to think of a genuine
revolutionary lacking this quality."
Bose also used the word love in much the
same way that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. used it when he talked about the
“Beloved Community.” Reading the essays, interviews and poems and the short
play in this book makes it clear that Bose loved the Indian people and that he
loved life itself. The essay “Emilie Schenkl: In Letter and Spirit” by Sunita
Rani Ghosh makes it clear that Bose also loved his Austrian wife who gave birth
to their child and who loved him deeply and passionately and that she supported
him in the struggle for Indian independence.
Sunita Rani Ghosh quotes a letter from
Bose to Emilie in which he called himself “a wandering bird that comes from
afar, remains for a while and then flies away to its distant home.” Bose saw
his fugitive nature clearly. Moreover, if he was a nationalist, a trade union
leader and a military general, he was also a poet who used poetical language
like “wandering bird” and “iceberg,” another image he used to describe himself.
The iceberg melted in the love that Emilie offered him.
Before I go on, I think that it’s
essential to say that I am writing this review essay in my home in Santa Rosa,
California on April 10, 2017. It’s only three days after my return from a two-week
sojourn in India when I met some of the contributors to this volume including Dev
Vrat Sharma, who showed me great kindness in Jaipur, and Monali Bhattacharya
who greeted me when I arrived at Jaypee Institute of Information Technology in
Noida and who made sure that I had food to eat and a place to sleep.
I would not be writing this essay now
in the way that I am writing it if I had not been to India. Indeed, this essay
is written from the perspective of a traveler who crossed boundaries and who
saw India for the first time in his life. Having been in India, albeit only for
two weeks and in only a small part of the country, I think I understand India
far more than before I went to India. I also see and appreciate Bose in his
many-sidedness, as a nationalist and as an anti-imperialist who recognized that
World War II provided a critical moment to drive a stake into the heart of the
British Empire and who also saw that it might be necessary to form tactical
alliances with Germany and Japan. Let’s remember that Stalin and Hitler had a
non-aggression pact and that Irish nationalists thought along lines similar to
Bose.
I am also reminded at this moment of
Bernadette Devlin, the Irish revolutionary who served as a Member of Parliament
from 1969 to 1974 and who said famously of the British “kick them when they’re
down.” Like Devlin, and like Che Guevara and Nelson Mandela, Bose knew that
revolutions often demand not only love but also armed struggle. Indeed, the
American abolitionist and ex-slave Frederick Douglass noted, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It
never did and it never will.”
As this book shows, Netaji Subhas
Chandra Bose belongs in the same company with Douglass, Mandela, Guevera and
Devlin—and with Gandhi and Nehru who were among my boyhood heroes. For decades
the West has represented the Indian independence movement as non-violent and as
pacifist. Now, with this book it will no longer be as easy for the West to
ignore Bose and to turn a blind eye on the army of Indian soldiers that he
helped to create.
Bose’s life was also a series of
adventures. All the way through this book I could see it transformed in a movie
with drama and conflict and love and tragedy. It’s too bad, and so sad that
Bose died at that critical moment in human history at the birth of the nuclear
age. Still, this book brings him to life. The editors and the contributors are
to be congratulated for producing a fascinating study in the representation of
an Indian hero too often ignored and forgotten. And may I please end this
review/ essay with a sobering fact that’s included in this book—namely that the
British authorities imprisoned Bose eleven times. The odds seemed to be against
him. The world appeared to be hostile to him and his cause and yet he did the
right thing for the brief time—just 48 years—that he was on the face of the earth.
When the Special Number was launched in
March 2017 in Agra, Subhas Chandra Bose’s grand-nephew Sugata Bose graced the
event with his presence. The Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs
at Harvard University and a Member of Parliament in the current Lok Sabha,
Sugata Bose is an internationally renowned scholar and a living embodiment of
his grant-uncle’s legacy. Nibir K. Ghosh’s lively, informative interview with
Sugata appears near the front of the Special Number. Sugata offers a slew of
important replies to Ghosh’s questions. He observes, for example, that Netaji (the
Hindi word for “Respected Leader) was motivated by love and that if he hated,
it “was reserved for the oppressive British rule, not the British, and he
advocated the friendliest relations with the British people once freedom was
won.”
Sugata also says that Netaji “genuinely
admired Gandhi” and that there was no final parting of the ways between the
Mahatma and his grand-uncle. I also found it significant that Sugata noted that
Bose “criticized Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union” and that he, Sugata,
admires Hugh Toye’s study of Bose titled, The
Springing Tiger. “Considering that it was written by a British intelligence
officer who had fought against Netaji and interrogated INA prisoners, the book
was remarkable for its broad-minded and balanced approach.” Now there’s a
fascinating human element in the story.
If Ghosh’s interview with Sugata Bosh
sends readers to The Springing Tiger
that’s not a bad thing. Then, too, if it inspires a young scholar or two to dig
into the historical record and write a full, complete biography of Netaji
that’s all to the good. The Special Issue can only generate more discussion and
debate about a man no longer lost in the folds of history. Thanks to Nibir K.
Ghosh and the whole team, Netaji Lives!
- Jonah
Raskin, a
frequent contributor to Re-Markings, is the author of 14 books, including
literary criticism, reporting, memoir, and biography. He has taught
journalism, media law and the theory of communication at Sonoma State
University, U.S.A. During the height of the cultural revolution of the
1970s, he served as the Minister of Education of the Yippies (the Youth
International Party), and maintained close connections with the Black
Panthers, the White Panthers, the Weatherpeople, and with radical groups
in France, England and Mexico.
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Love’s Labour Gained
Ramesh Chandra Shah
It’s
“Love’s Labour” literally, this issue of Re-Markings devoted to Subhas
Chandra Bose, Immortal legend of India’s freedom struggle. And, it has borne
fruit. For decades Netaji has been consigned to oblivion by our political,
academic and cultural seats of power. Reasons for such a collective amnesia of
conspiracy of silence are obvious as well as not so obvious. But these facts of
reality have, I think, been illuminated for the first time from so many angles
and perspectives through a journal which is hardly expected to undertake a
stupendous and out of its way task, because of its literary character and
orientation. But, paradoxically, now this accomplished event seems to me to
acquire and reinforce a strange sense of long-delayed justice and
inevitability. Yes, it’s a very complex scenario and history as well as
politics (in their set grooves) seem to be of little help in enabling you to
crystallize in your anguished mind and sensitivity a substantially, essentially
and factually true image of Bose – redeemed from all misunderstandings,
distortions and irrelevant accidents. How does one come to terms with such a
heroic figure emotionally and intellectually? All times, these present times as
well as those bygone times, seem to be utterly out of joint. Who can set them
right? Dr. Ghosh’s initiative in this Special Number on Bose has demonstrated
the relevance of this question, and to a great extent, has done the job.
We writers in particular – who are
innately accused, doomed to comprehend everything through our sensibility
rather than pure logic or ideological orientations (side-taking) – how are we to make sense and substance of events and phenomena
so remote and so tangled or confused? Especially me, who happens to have been
nurtured on the example and precepts of heroes like historic figures as Gandhi
and Aurobindo – poles apart politically and temperamentally and yet so
inseparably related, relevant, and vital to and dependent upon the self-image
of our country – our India and our Indian identity, am I any better equipped to
know who I am at 80, than I was at 18? How does such a man do justice to such a
trio – so inextricably blended together in his imagination – in his idea of
India and the uniquely beautiful and meaningful Indian (Hindu) way of walking
upon this earth?
I thank Dr. Sisir Kumar Bose – for
his “Editorial Note” to Netaji and India's Freedom, published
in this issue – for arousing in me an exact image of that emotion, that actual
feeling of the “revolutionary situation, without parallel in the history of the
Indian struggle and pregnant with immense possibilities including a forcible
seizure of power, was obtaining in India in 1945-46 as a direct outcome of
Subhas Chandra Bose's activities during the war.” Dr. Bose has given us a feel
of how “Subhas Chandra Bose provided to his countrymen in 1945-46, in absentia
and as a direct outcome of his wartime activities, a most wonderful opportunity
to realise in full the aims of India's national struggle as proclaimed since
the Lahore session of the Indian National Congress in 1929.” He rightly adds,
“The man who commanded Indian history in 1945-46 paid the price of failing to
arrive when independence came to the divided subcontinent in 1947.” I
appreciate his realistic appraisal of the votaries of a strange and spurious
new Bose cult joined by frustrated and defeated politicians.
I must make a special mention of
Sunita Rani Ghosh’s essay entitled “Emilie Schenkl: In Letter and Spirit” that
highlights a relatively less known chapter in Netaji’s otherwise tumultuous
life. It was nothing short of a revelation for me to be acquainted with the
rare and exemplary personality of Emilie Schenkl who, despite hailing from an
alien culture, states Sunita Rani, “remained very steadfast in her love for
Subhas, the love that asked no question, the love that stood the test in
allowing him the freedom to offer upon the altar of his nation the dearest and
the best.”
Though every piece in this precious
collection is a must read for anyone interested in the legendary hero, the two
interviews published in the volume are bound to be of special significance. In
his conversation with Nibir K. Ghosh, Sugata Bose – the grand-nephew of Subhas
Chandra Bose, Harvard Historian and Lok Sabha M.P. – illuminates various
dimensions of the personality and contribution of Netaji to the Indian Freedom
struggle. His statement, “No one spoke truth to power as Bose did….Bose’s life
was an example of tyag or
renunciation of power and privilege,” rekindled in me memories of the popular
image of Bose that we had in those old days. Mrs. Zeenat Ahmed’s interview (conducted
by Tara Sami Dutt and Zara Urouj) reminded me of the film, Rome: An Open
Space, wherein a terrible portrait of what the brave intellectuals were
made to face at the trial. Well, the Britishers were not equivalent to Nazis
and Fascists but “they did everything to break their spirits.” Her plaint, “It
is the younger generation who need to bring his name back into prominence,” is
something we truly need to ponder on to create an India that Bose dreamt of.
To conclude, I am optimistic in
sharing my hope that this Re-Markings’ Special Number, Bose: Immortal
Legend of India’s Freedom, will take its rightful place among the most
valuable works on the life and times of Subhas Chandra Bose.
·
Padmashree Dr. Ramesh
Chandra Shah is an
eminent Hindi writer. Besides 11 acclaimed novels, his publications include several collections of Short Stories,
Poems, Essays and Plays. He has recently been honoured with the Sahitya Akademi
Award for his novel Vinayak.
v
Subhas Chandra
Bose: A Legend of
India’s Freedom and Idea of India
Abdul Shaban
To overcome the
contemporary emerging challenges to India’s diversity, plurality and
nationalism, it is important that Netaji’s ideas and visions get rediscovered
and celebrated.
In a span of two years or so, India in 1940s lost two of its
rebellious sons. These were Subhas Chandra Bose, popularly known as ‘Netaji’
and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who is lovingly called ‘Bapuji’. The former was
lost fighting the British colonialism on India while the latter was killed by a
Hindu fanatic while fighting for ‘plural’ India and Hindu-Muslim unity. Both of
these leaders differed in their approaches to make India free but the aim was
to have free and independent India and to secure its people social justice,
equality and development. Whereas Bapuji rebelled through old methods of
mobilising people and adopted ‘ahimsa’
against the most powerful colonial and military power of the time, Netaji
rebelled from Gandhi’s Ahimsa and allied and negotiated with Axis Powers of the
time to forcefully decolonise India from the British. Despite enormous
differences in their approaches to make India free, there were some interesting
commonalities between them and most important was that they believed in social
and ethnic plurality of India and if any of them could have succeeded in
securing Independence the way they wanted, the partition of the country could
have been avoided.
It is an irony that where Bapuji could get his recognition and
received meaningful State and social attentions, which he deserves, Netaji
largely got forgotten and today mainly gets portrayed as only regional and
ethnic icon, mainly that of Bengal and Bengalis. To overcome the contemporary
emerging challenges to India’s diversity, plurality and nationalism, it is
important that Netaji’s ideas and policy get rediscovered and celebrated. This can
be done not only thorough available documents and evidence, but also through
compiling people’s memories and oral narratives about him.
A small, but a meaningful, attempt in this direction has been made
by the Special Number of English literary journal Re-Markings (Vol.16,
No.1, 2017) launched at Agra by Professor Sugata Bose,
grandnephew of Netaji, on 18th March 2017. For many of us it was a
rare occasion where people from different religious groups presented their
claims to Netaji as their own and in whose dreams they also could locate and
imagine their own futures and idea of Independent India.
Twenty nine scholarly contributions have been published in this
special issue of Re-Markings These papers have closely examined life and
the contributions of Netaji from various perspectives. While releasing the
special number of the journal Sugata Bose, Professor of Oceanic History,
Harvard University, U.S.A., remarked, “The refusal to compromise with injustice
and wrong was one of the most appealing features in Bose's character. His life
was an example of tyag or
renunciation of power and privilege. Though Netaji has been neglected in
official histories and textbooks, he looms large in popular memory, not just in
Bengal, but throughout the subcontinent.” A detailed interview of Mrs. Zeenat
Ahmad, wife and companion to Colonel Mahboob Ahmad of Indian National Army
(INA), by Tara Sami and Zara Urouj, has been published in this issue. Zeenat Ahamd
says, “Bose lost his life for the country and he is not given the recognition
he deserves.... We desperately need someone like him, someone who is not
self-seeking but can put the country before himself. The idea of being an
Indian is dying out”(48). In his paper, Shanker A. Dutt argues, “Subhash
Chandra Bose is no exception to the idiosyncrasies of the writing and the writing-into-silence
of History…. Remembrance would be meaningful if we understand Bose, the human
person, engaging in dialogue with his life, convictions, his writings and his
idea of India” (102-110).
In his paper, Abdul Shaban argues that had Subhas Chandra Bose
been alive, the partition of the country could have been averted.... He was
capable and had all the potential of changing the destiny of the subcontinent
and take humanity in this region to a different direction and a brighter common
future (78). In a similar vein, N.S. Tasneem argues, “India attained freedom … after
the country had been partitioned in a ruthless manner. But it was not freedom
of the land that had been envisioned by Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose” (100).
Bose’s representation of Hindu-Muslim unity and women’s empowerment are
examined by Mohammad Asim Siddiqui and Sanjukta Sattar, respectively. Siddiqui
argues that Netaji “was very clear about the question of Hindu-Muslim unity.
His Azad Hind Fauj was remarkable for drawing soldiers from different sections
and different communities” (132), while Sanjukta Sattar argues, “Netaji firmly
believed that no country can develop without women's participation and their
emancipation and strongly advocated gender equality” (180).
Examining Netaji’s personal life (and charms he could create)
through the letters he wrote to his German wife, Emilie Schenkl, Sunita Rani
says,“…let us remember with pride and fondness how Emilie Schenkl, a non-Hindu
woman from an alien clime and culture could so selflessly devote and dedicate
herself, like the legendary Indian women of bygone ages, to her first and only
love” (151). And this defines the other side of Subhas’s personality who could
connect with his intimates so closely. Shrikant Singh, in his paper on “People
who influenced Subhas Chnadra Bose,” argues that even Rabindranath Tagore
praised Netaji’s dedication and attachment to the national cause and devoted
his song "Ekala Chalo Re"
to Bose. This also speaks volumes of the love and reverence Tagore had for
Bose.
In sum, papers in the volume make important contribution to the
already existing literature on Netaji’s life, his personality, and his vision
for India. They convey that we need to celebrate his ideas and his vision, and
this need is felt all the more in the current changing political context.
·
Dr.
Abdul Shaban is
Professor in the School of Development Studies at Tata Institute of Social
Sciences, Mumbai and Deputy Director, Tuljapur Campus. He is author of Mumbai:
Political Economy of Crime and Space (2010); Editor of Lives of Muslims in
India: Politics, Exclusion and Violence (2012) and Muslims in Urban India:
Development and Exclusion (2013).
v
© Nibir K. Ghosh
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