Subhas Chandra Bose

Subhas Chandra Bose, known to admirers as Netaji, "respected leader", was an Indian nationalist who broke with the non-violent leadership of the Indian National Congress and sought India's freedom through armed struggle with the help of the Axis powers. He led the Indian National Army alongside Japan in the Second World War and died after a plane crash in 1945. Revered by many Indians, he is also criticised by historians for his alliances with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan and his embrace of authoritarian ideas.

Bose was born on 23 January 1897 in Cuttack, now in Odisha, the ninth of fourteen children of a prosperous Bengali lawyer. He attended an English-medium mission school, then Presidency College in Calcutta, from which he was expelled in 1916 after an assault on a British professor. He took a philosophy degree elsewhere in 1918 and was sent to England, where he studied at Cambridge and in 1920 came fourth in the open examination for the Indian Civil Service. In April 1921, rather than serve the colonial government, he withdrew from the service and sailed home.

Back in India he met Mahatma Gandhi, whose methods he found vague, and attached himself instead to the Bengali leader C. R. Das. Through the 1920s he edited nationalist papers, ran Calcutta's municipal administration and spent long spells in British prisons, including Mandalay. With Jawaharlal Nehru he led the Congress left, and in 1930 he became Mayor of Calcutta. In Europe in the mid-1930s he met Mussolini and studied fascist and communist party organisation.

Elected Congress president in 1938, Bose was re-elected in 1939 against Gandhi's preferred candidate, but opposition from the party's leadership forced him to resign. He founded the Forward Bloc and, when Britain declared war on India's behalf in 1939, called for mass civil disobedience.

In January 1941 Bose slipped away from his Calcutta house in disguise and travelled through Afghanistan and the Soviet Union to Berlin. With German money he opened a Free India Centre and, from Indian prisoners of war captured in North Africa he raised an Indian Legion, of several thousand men according to different accounts, whose members swore an oath to Hitler. Yet Germany offered little real backing. After meeting Hitler in May 1942 he decided to move to Asia, and in February 1943, leaving behind his Austrian partner Emilie Schenkl and their baby daughter, he set out by German submarine, transferring to a Japanese one off Madagascar.

In Singapore in July 1943 he took over the Indian independence movement in Southeast Asia and its army, recruited mainly from Indian soldiers captured by Japan and from the Indian community of the region. He proclaimed a Provisional Government of Free India, recognised by Germany, Japan and other Axis states and puppet regimes. In 1944 units of his army joined the Japanese invasion of India, launched while [Hideki Tojo] was Japan's prime minister(/person/hideki-tojo). Its defeat at Imphal and Kohima ended any hope of a base on Indian soil, and the army disintegrated during the British reconquest of Burma in 1945.

After Japan's defeat Bose set out for Manchuria, hoping for Soviet help. On 18 August 1945 his plane crashed on take-off at Taihoku in Japanese-ruled Taiwan, and he died of severe burns that night. Many supporters refused to believe he had died, and conspiracy theories persist. Gandhi called him a patriot, "though misguided". The British put INA officers on trial for treason after the war but backed down in the face of public opposition.

Airports, stations and islands across India bear his name, but his record is also troubling. He argued that India would need an authoritarian government for years after independence, according to a 1942 report in London's Jewish Chronicle he wrote in a Goebbels-run journal that antisemitism become part of the Indian struggle, and, as the historian Romain Hayes notes, he expressed no concern in his wartime papers for the victims of the Nazi camps.

Our 1938 map shows British India during his time as Congress president, and the 1945 map shows Asia at the war's end, after the defeat of the Empire of Japan.