Penguin Random House India announces the acquisition and publication of the critical biography of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose by Chandrachur Ghose, prominent researcher and founder of pressure group Mission Netaji. Titled Bose: The Untold Story of An Inconvenient Nationalist, the book is poised to open a window to many hitherto untold and unknown stories of Netaji. To be released in February 2022 under the Viking imprint, this title is currently available on pre-order on all major e-commerce websites.
As we come closer to the 125th birth anniversary of Netaji, it is the ideal time for fresh assessment of his life and times. The book throws light on Bose’s intense political activities around the revolutionary groups in Bengal, Punjab, Maharashtra and the United Provinces; his efforts to bridge the increasing communal divide and his influence among the splintered political landscape; his outlook on and relations with women; his plunge into the depths of spirituality; his penchant for covert operations; and his efforts to engineer a rebellion among the Indian armed forces. With this new information, what had appeared earlier to be dramatic now becomes more intense with plots and subplots under one man’s single-minded focus on freeing the motherland and envisioning its development in a new era.
One of the most sensitive issues that has prevented India’s political parties and successive governments from talking much about Bose is his joining the Axis camp during the second world war. While Jawaharlal Nehru and other prominent Congress leaders publicly denounced the move, the Communist Party of India went on a prolonged vilification campaign. Sardar Patel issued instructions to Congress leaders to defend the INA soldiers without eulogizing their leader. Vilified by the Western media and largely cold-shouldered by Indian official establishment and intelligentsia, the alternative political language of Bose has remained outside India’s mainstream political discourse.
Commenting on the upcoming book, the author says, ‘Subhas Chandra Bose is among the most misunderstood icons of modern India because much information about his work and his ideas have either remained unutilised or inaccessible. The alternative which emanates from his thoughts and activities to the officially sponsored Gandhian-Nehruvian paradigm that has been used to define the India project has not received the attention that it deserves. Most importantly, the central role played by Bose and the Indian National Army in accelerating the end of the British Raj still remains officially unacknowledged. This book attempts to discover the real person by transcending the typecast created by his previous biographies, which have largely followed the same pattern with slight variations. It demolishes the stereotyping of Bose as a brave warrior with an authoritarian streak, who was so consumed by the aim to free India that he didn’t pay much attention to the problem of reconstruction of free India. It brings a fresh perspective on a host of issues, including his thoughts on independent India’s development, the problem of communalism, geopolitics, his own political ideology, how he negotiated with the political parties, revolutionary societies and the government, and how he was relegated to the ringside in free India as a consequence of his conflict with the key political groups.’
This critical narration of Netaji’s life history gives readers an inside look into his ways of thinking, attempting to answer many questions that have remained disputed for long, such as – Was Bose a Nazi Sympathizer? Why did he risk his own political image by allaying with the Axis powers during the Second World War? What was his model for addressing the communal question? It also dissects his relationship with the Gandhian leadership of the Congress and other leftist parties. Pacey, thought-provoking and unputdownable, Bose: The Untold Story of An Inconvenient Nationalist will unveil many unrecounted stories of Bose.
Premanka Goswami, Executive Editor at Penguin and the commissioning editor of the book says, ‘Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s life, philosophy and works have significantly influenced a wide spectrum of people in India and abroad. Bose’s role in India’s freedom movement against the British hegemony; his relationships and ideological differences with Nehru, Gandhi and Patel; formation of INA; and alliance with the Axis force, among others, this new biography of Netaji opens a window to many complex aspects associated with him, which largely remains untold and therefore unknown for a long time.’
About the author
Chandrachur Ghose is an author, researcher and commentator on history, economics and environment, having graduated from Visva Bharati and the University of Sussex. Ghose has co-authored Conundrum: Subhas Bose’s Life After Death, which features among the bestsellers in Amazon. Ghose is one of the founders of the pressure group Mission Netaji that has been the moving force behind the declassification of secret documents related to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose. His activism led to the declassification of over ten thousand pages in 2010.