1897-1945
Indian politician
1. Introduction
Subhas Chandra Bose (pronounced Soob-HARSH CHARN-dra Bose, rhyming with ‘rose’) was an Indian nationalist, known to some by the honorific ‘Netaji’ (‘Honoured Leader’). He served briefly as the president of the Indian National Congress and then as head of its radical Forward Bloc faction. He sided with the Axis powers in World War II, spending two years in Germany and two years in Japanese-occupied Asia. He formed the Provisional Government of Free India, based in Singapore, and relaunched the rebel Indian National Army to support the attempted invasion of India by Japan. He died from burns from an aircraft accident in Japanese-occupied Taiwan, four days after the end of the war.
2. Stories
- Although Gandhi admired Bose for his nationalist passion, he was very concerned about Bose’s willingness to use violence.
- The Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919, also known as the Amritsar massacre, provided impetus for Indian self-rule movements, sometimes including violent means.
- Bose evaded surveillance in India in 1941 and made his way to Germany via Afghanistan and the Soviet Union.
- Bose decided to seek Japanese support and made another long journey, from Europe to Asia by submarine and aircraft.
- The attempted Japanese invasion of India, supported by Bose’s army, made little headway and was repulsed.
- The British Indian Army that resisted Bose’s INA gave considerable support to the Allies in both World Wars.
- Bose died from burns after an aircraft crash in Japanese-occupied Taiwan, although theories about his survival are popular.
Although Gandhi admired Bose for his nationalist passion, he was very concerned about Bose’s willingness to use violence.
As a high school student at the prestigious Presidency College, Calcutta (now Kolkata) in north-east India, Bose was alleged to have assaulted an English professor for being derogatory to Indian students. He claimed he was only an observer but was nevertheless expelled. He gained an undergraduate degree in philosophy at the Scottish Church College in Calcutta and then headed to the UK to study for the Indian civil service exams. At the same time he attended Fitzwilliam Hall (now Fitzwilliam College, next to Churchill College), Cambridge University, obtaining a B.A. in Mental and Moral Sciences.
He did well in his civil service studies but decided that he could not work under the British authorities and did not sit his final exam. He returned to India in 1921 and met Gandhi, but disagreed with Gandhi’s refusal to use violence, an issue that would cause permanent tension between them. Bose became active in the Indian National Congress (‘Congress’) party in Bengal, north-east India, becoming general secretary of Congress nationally in 1927, and serving a short stint as mayor of Calcutta in 1930. He was jailed a total of 11 times for nationalist activities, contracting tuberculosis in Mandalay, Burma, during one of his prison terms.
Bose spent three years in Europe in the mid-1930s, based in Vienna and travelling widely to promote Indian nationalism, including meeting Mussolini. He hired Austrian Emilie Schenkl as his secretary who became his partner until his death. It is not clear if they formally married, but they seem to have had a Hindu wedding ceremony.
On return to India in 1937 (without Anita) Bose became president of Congress with Gandhi’s reluctant approval, then gained a second term against Gandhi’s wishes, but soon resigned after being politically outmanoeuvred. He formed the Forward Bloc, a left-wing faction within Congress which became a separate party in 1940, promoting military action against the British.
During a second stint in Europe, Bose reunited with Emilie and they had a daughter Anita in 1942, born in Vienna. Anita became an economist and German politician and married Martin Pfaff, also an economist and German politician. She was Bose’s only child.
The Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919, also known as the Amritsar massacre, provided impetus for Indian self-rule movements, sometimes including violent means.
Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer instructed troops to shoot, without warning, into an unarmed civilian crowd in the Jallianwala Bagh area of Amritsar city in Punjab, north-west India. A non-government organisation put the death toll at 379 and the number of injured at around 1200. Congress claimed that there were around 1000 deaths and 1500 injuries.
Dyer had feared that there would be a popular uprising after World War I emergency powers were extended in 1919. Gatherings of more than four people were banned and after some disturbances he sought to set an example of forceful implementation of the law. A large crowd had gathered for a religious festival in Amritsar and included some who were protesting against the recent expulsion of two nationalist leaders from the city. The gathering was in a large walled area from which there was hardly any escape from the soldiers’ shots.
In the UK, many in the House of Lords and some in the House of Commons endorsed Dyer’s action as being necessary to maintain order. Churchill, secretary of state for war and air at the time, described it as ‘a monstrous event’.1 Dyer was obliged to resign but faced no other consequences, returning to the UK unrepentant.
Dyer believed that his action would be a deterrent but it had the opposite effect. Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement, founded a few weeks earlier, gathered a large following, as did his later civil disobedience movement. Revolutionary groups included Bose’s Bengal Volunteers which assassinated an inspector general of police and an inspector general of prisons in 1930. Some individuals took matters into their own hands, including Bhagat Singh who shot a British policeman in 1928 and bombed the legislative assembly in New Delhi in 1929. He was executed, aged 23, becoming a folk hero, now honoured with a large statue next to Gandhi and Bose in Parliament House, New Delhi.
Another lone wolf was Udham Singh who assassinated Michael O’Dwyer, former lieutenant governor of the Punjab, in London in 1940 with a revolver bought from a soldier in a pub. O’Dwyer had approved Dyer’s course of action at Amritsar. Udham Singh was tried and hanged in London and some of his ashes are now in Jallianwala Bagh.
Bose evaded surveillance in India in 1941 and made his way to Germany via Afghanistan and the Soviet Union.
The Holwell monument used to stand in a prominent position in Calcutta as a memorial to the British soldiers and others who died of suffocation and heat in 1756 in a dungeon which became known as the ‘Black Hole of Calcutta’. Bose was planning a march to demand the removal of the monument but was jailed, then released under house arrest.
After arranging assistance from a Punjabi communist organisation, he left his Calcutta house in disguise one night in January 1941 and travelled 900 miles (1450 km) by car and train westwards to Peshawar on the India/Afghanistan border. He crossed the border on foot, posing as a deaf-mute Afghan, then trekked 120 miles (190 km) across the desert to Kabul, where he spent weeks trying to gain an audience with the Russian embassy, without success because of suspicion that he was a British spy. The Germans were interested in his concept of undermining the British in India but the Italians moved first, giving him a passport in the name of Orlando Mazzotta.
With the Germans and Russians now also supportive, ‘Mazzotta’ was driven in a Soviet diplomatic car to the Soviet border where he took a train for the 2200 mile (3600 km) journey to Moscow, then a flight to Berlin. He contacted Anita and she joined him there.
In Berlin, Bose founded the Free India Centre which broadcast propaganda radio programmes into India in multiple languages. They generated some interest but the prospect of Germany ‘liberating’ India from the British seemed remote and Gandhi’s Quit India campaign was already providing significant anti-British momentum.
Bose recruited around 3000 Indians from German prisoner-of-war camps into a new Indian Legion, out of a target of over 50,000. Recruitment was difficult due to the prisoners’ loyalties to their regiments but Bose made some headway with promises of opportunity and pay.
He met Hitler in May 1942 but was disappointed by his lack of support. Although Nazi Germany was favourable towards disruption in India, its other priorities and Aryan ideology made it ambivalent about supporting Indians against Britons. As a communist sympathiser, Bose was also dismayed by Hitler’s attack against the Soviet Union and began to consider alternative alliances.
Bose decided to seek Japanese support and made another long journey, from Europe to Asia by submarine and aircraft.
After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and its invasions of Malaya, Singapore and Burma, Bose envisioned the possibility of attacking India from Burma with Indian troops captured during the Japanese occupations. He appealed to Germany for transport to Asia, which was provided. In February 1943 he and his aide Abid Hasan were taken to German submarine U-180 near Kiel, northern Germany, which made its way round the north of Scotland, down past the west of Africa and back up towards Madagascar, sinking a British oil tanker on the way.
In difficult seas, Bose and Hasan were transferred by boat to Japanese submarine I-29, together with some German military manufacturing blueprints. In exchange, the German U-boat received two and half tonnes of Japanese gold and two Japanese engineers to be trained in Germany. The Japanese submarine took Bose and Hasan to a small island near Sumatra, Indonesia, from where they were flown via Singapore and Malaya to Tokyo, with Bose using the false name of Matsuda, a Japanese version of Mazzotta.
The Japanese outdid the Germans at every level in their relationship with Bose. On the submarine, instead of providing limited diesel-flavoured German food they served him large amounts of curry with specially procured spices. The captain was the head of the Japanese submarine flotilla. Bose’s new Azad Hind (‘Free India’) government was provided with all the accoutrements of diplomatic recognition including titles, property, a motorcade and an aircraft. Bose was acknowledged as the main Indian leader in Japanese-occupied Asia and was given attention by Prime Minister Tojo. Support was provided for his re-launch of the Indian National Army (‘INA’), a Japanese-sponsored anti-British force in southeast Asia consisting of released Indian prisoners-of-war and civilians.
As in Germany, Bose used numerous radio broadcasts and speeches to gain support, using phrases such as ‘Give me blood, and I shall give you freedom!’ and Jai Hind (‘Victory to India’). He is credited with the first use of the term ‘Father of the Nation’ for Gandhi, during a broadcast from Singapore in 1944.
The attempted Japanese invasion of India, supported by Bose’s army, made little headway and was repulsed.
The Azad Hind government was based in Japanese-occupied Singapore and was given authority over Indians in all Japanese-occupied British territory in south-east Asia. Its flag was the Swaraj (‘Independence’) flag, a tricolour of saffron, white and green with a spinning wheel in the centre, the same as the one adopted by Congress in 1931. The army flag had a springing tiger instead of the spinning wheel. Azad Hind declared war on Britain and the USA in October 1943.
Bose expanded the INA to around 40,000 soldiers. It is not clear how many were deployed to Burma in 1944 (records were destroyed by Azad Hind) to support the Japanese Fifteenth Army in Operation U-Go, a plan to invade north-east India. Bose’s expectation was that his soldiers would be welcomed as liberators from British rule. He may not have been fully aware that he was supporting a campaign that was a major contributor to the Bengal famine of 1943 (see Aung San).
However, military resistance was strong. The Japanese and rebel Indian advance was also considerably hindered by an early monsoon and a lack of air cover. In a four-month battle around Imphal, the capital of Manipur state, the invaders were held, then driven back. A similar situation happened near Kohima, the capital of Nagaland.
Battles between the regular Indian army and the INA continued in Burmese territory until Rangoon was taken by the Allies in Operation Dracula in 1945. Many of the INA surrendered but some retreated with Bose to Singapore through Thailand and Malaya, sometimes being attacked as they were leaving Burma by the forces of Aung San, which had now changed sides.
Bose intended to stay in Singapore to be tried and perhaps executed by the British which he believed would help stir up an uprising in India, but was persuaded otherwise by his colleagues. He left for Japanese-occupied China to try to contact advancing Soviet troops.
A number of captured INA officers were tried in Delhi in the ‘Red Fort trials’, the name taken from the location of a case involving three officers who were sentenced to deportation. There was a public outcry in support of the anti-British convicts and various military mutinies took place, resulting in the sentences being commuted.
The British Indian Army that resisted Bose’s INA gave considerable support to the Allies in both World Wars.
The British Indian Army (‘BIA’) had its origins in the three armies of the Bengal, Madras and Bombay presidencies, run by the East India Company and taken over by the British Crown upon adoption of direct rule over India in 1858. The armies were merged in the early 1900s by Lord Kitchener, commander-in-chief of India, shortly after Churchill’s military service in India in the late 1890s.
During World War I, the BIA had around 1.75 million volunteers of which over a million served outside their country in Europe, the Middle East and East Africa, losing around 70,000 lives. At the beginning of World War II, it had around 200,000 volunteers and by the end it had over 2.5 million, making it the largest volunteer military force in the world. As well as providing defence against the invasion of India, the World War II volunteers served in south-east Asia, North Africa, the Middle East and Europe, losing around 87,000 lives and being awarded 28 Victoria Crosses.
The British notion of ‘martial’ and ‘non-martial’ races had a major impact on the BIA’s ethnic composition, as well as on Churchill’s attitudes and Gandhi’s support for the British army in South Africa and India. Although the British favoured ‘martial’ races for military service, members of some of them had taken part in the Indian Rebellion of 1857, resulting in conflicting British views about whom to recruit, train and arm. The distinction was only officially abandoned in India in 1949 and may have had a lingering influence in Pakistan into the 1960s.
Upon the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, two thirds of military resources were assigned to India and one third to Pakistan (including even paperclips). Two months later, some of these resources were pitted against each other in the First Kashmir War, resulting in a stalemate that continues today.
As of 2024, the Indian Armed Forces (including navy and air force) had 1.5 million full-time participants, the second highest number after China and ahead of third-placed USA. Pakistan had 0.7 million, the seventh highest, behind North Korea, Russia and Ukraine.
Bose died from burns after an aircraft crash in Japanese-occupied Taiwan, although theories about his survival are popular.
On 18 August 1945, Bose was a passenger in an overloaded Japanese bomber that took off from Taihoku (now Taipei). At 100 feet off the ground, there was a bang, and the left propellor fell away. The aircraft crashed to the ground, killing the pilots. Bose and his assistant survived and managed to exit through some flames, but some fuel had leaked onto Bose’s clothes which caught fire, causing third degree burns to his chest and head before the flames could be extinguished. He was taken to a Japanese hospital but went into a coma and died of heart failure around seven hours after the crash.
He was cremated in Taihoku and his ashes were taken to Tokyo where they remain at the Buddhist Renko-ji temple. A number of Indian dignitaries visiting Tokyo have visited to pay their respects including Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. Mohandas Gandhi did not visit but wrote, ‘Subhas Bose has died well. He was undoubtedly a patriot, though misguided.’2
Many of Bose’s followers refused to believe that he had died, not least because he had disappeared on earlier occasions, reappearing later. The persistence of the rumours that he was still alive led to five official investigations (four Indian and one Japanese), each confirming his death from the aircraft crash. One of the Indian investigations included a dissenting opinion by Bose’s elder brother and fellow nationalist Suresh Chandra Bose, which helped in the spread of many survival theories including Bose living in the Soviet Union as a gulag prisoner, or in China as a soldier, or in India as a holy man.
A variant is that Bose did indeed die, but by assassination rather than by accident. The British are said to have arranged his death by means of the plane crash or to have tortured him to death with Soviet permission after he had reached the Soviet Union. This is sometimes conflated with alleged plans by Churchill’s wartime Special Operations Executive to have Bose assassinated as he travelled from India to Germany in 1941, foiled by his use of an overland route instead of flying via Turkey.
3. Biographical summary
| Occupation | Nationalist leader, army leader |
| Country | India |
| Career | CEO, Calcutta Corporation (1924-26). President, Bengal Provincial Congress (1927-28). General Secretary, Indian National Congress (1928). Mayor of Calcutta (1930). Medical treatment and political campaigning in Europe (1933-37). President, Indian National Congress (1938-39). President, Indian National Congress Forward Bloc (1939-41). Founded the Free India Centre and Indian Legion (1941). Leader, Indian National Army (1943-45). |
| Born | 1897 in Cuttack, Bengal Presidency, British India (now Odisha, India) (23 years younger than Churchill) |
| Father | Janakinath Bose (1860-1934), lawyer |
| Mother | Prabhabati Dutta (1869-1943), social activist |
| Siblings | Ninth of 14 children (six daughters and eight sons); sixth son. Including: – Sarat (brother) (1889-1950), barrister, nationalist leader – Sunil (brother) (1894-1953), cardiologist – Suresh (brother), member of committee investigating Subhas’s death |
| Education | Protestant European School, Cuttack; Ravenshaw Collegiate School, Cuttack; Presidency College, Calcutta (expelled); Scottish Church College, Calcutta (B.A. Philosophy); Fitzwilliam Hall, Non-Collegiate Students Board, Cambridge (B.A. Mental and Moral Sciences) |
| Spouses | Possibly married his partner Emilie Schenkl (1910-1996), vet’s daughter; Austrian; Bose’s secretary |
| Children | By Emilie: Anita (1942-), economist, German politician; married Martin Pfaff, economist and German politician |
| Died | 1945 (aged 48) in Taihoku, Japanese Taiwan (now Taipei, Taiwan) (20 years before Churchill); third degree burns after aircraft crash |
| Buried | Cremated, Taihoku crematorium; ashes kept in Renko-ji Temple of Nichiren Buddhism, Tokyo, Japan |
| Nickname | Netaji (‘Respected Leader’ in Hindi) |
| Height | 5’8½” (1.74 m) |
| Time magazine | Front cover: 1938 |
4. See also
India nationalism
- Gandhi, Mohandas
- Jinnah, Mohamed Ali (including partition of Pakistan)
Southeast Asia nationalism
- Aung San (Burma)
Japanese involvement in World War II
- Aung San
- Tojo, Hideki
- Yamashita, Tomoyuki
Churchill controversies
- Bengal famine
- Imperialism
- Singapore defeat
5. Further reading
Bose
- Bose, Sugata, His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle against Empire (Penguin Books Limited, 2013)
- Hayes, Romain, Subhas Chandra Bose in Nazi Germany: Politics, Intelligence and Propaganda 1941-1943 (Oxford University Press, 2011)
- Toye, Hugh, Subhash Chandra Bose (Jaico Publishing House, 2007)
Amritsar massacre and Udham Singh
- Anand, Anita, The Patient Assassin: A True Tale of Massacre, Revenge and the Raj (Simon & Schuster UK, 2019)
Indian independence movements
- Chandra, Bipan, Suchetta Mahajan, Aditya Mukherjee, Mridula Mukherjee, and K.N. Panikkar, India’s Struggle for Independence (Penguin Random House India Private Limited, 2016)
- Heehs, Peter, India’s Freedom Struggle 1857–1947: A Short History (OUP India, 1998)
Japanese invasion of India
- Lyman, Robert, Japan’s Last Bid for Victory: The Invasion of India, 1944 (Pen & Sword Books, 2011)
Indian armies
- Fay, Peter Ward, The Forgotten Army: India’s Armed Struggle for Independence, 1942-1945 (University of Michigan Press, 1995) (Indian National Army)
- Francis, J., Short Stories from the British Indian Army (Vij Books India Private Limited, 2015) (Indian regular army)
6. References
1 Winston S. Churchill, ‘Army Council and General Dyer’, Hansard, 1920.
2 Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Wars: The End of Britain’s Asian Empire (Penguin Adult, 2008), p. 21.