Even as probashi (non-resident) Bengali kids, we were aesthetically awakened to Kazi Nazrul Islam’s robust songs and Rabindranath Tagore’s dance-drama Chitrangada to protect our ‘superior’ identities. And, of course, the ‘Mahalaya’ recitations on pre-dawn radio, even as it was dark and wintry, and Goddess Durga was just about arriving on earth, perhaps on an elephant or a boat.

On the walls of the drawing room were framed pictures of Bengal’s icons: Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar, Swami Vivekananda, Tagore and Subhas Chandra Bose. On festival days, my mother, who wasn’t really religious, would put a chandan tika on their forehead, and wrap a garland of jasmine around them.

In my childhood home in Saharanpur, in western Uttar Pradesh, and, as I presume, in every middle-class house across Bengal in the post-Independence decades, there was one inevitable title in the bookshelves alongside the works of Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, Tagore and other greats. The iconic book in hardback, reeking of naphthalene, was Aami Shubhash Bolchhi by Shailesh Dey. It was at once a journey into the life and times, as also the magic and miracle of the heroic figure of Bose, popular as Netaji. This book was always a testimony that Bose was never dead. He just could not die.

In a landscape addicted to lost icons — as that of lush green Bengal with the autumnal ‘kash’ flowers (which, interestingly, is a variety of grass in white) on riverbanks, as depicted in Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali — the memory of Bose would always arrive with, first, a pang of angst. The angst ran deeper; how Bengal was betrayed by the Congress leadership, especially Mahatma Gandhi.

The other betrayal, among several on the list, has been the two tragic partitions (1905 and 1947). The separation of West and East Bengal by the British in 1905 led to a psychosomatic sense of exile. This was exemplified in Ritwik Ghatak’s Komal Gandhar (1961), which shows a train coming to an abrupt, screeching halt on what seemed like a dead end, the border of the imagined homeland.

That Kazi Nazrul and Tagore were left on two sides of this painful milepost, made their musical repertoire more poignant for the Bengali cultural kaleidoscope. Here, the synthesis is indigenous and unique, driven by the political unconscious across ideological barriers — between the bhadralok and revolutionary, the poet and dropout, the unrequited lover and perennial drunkard, the brother-in-law and beautiful boudi (brother’s wife), the eclectic and intellectual.

The angst would inevitably be followed by the romantic longing for a charismatic revolutionary-intellectual. That he was Cambridge-educated, young, handsome, radical, and a Civil Services’ topper who rejected the power, perks and privileges of the British Empire, added to his magnetism.

That he rose quickly in the freedom movement, was as famous as Jawaharlal Nehru, became Congress president twice, was ‘backstabbed’ by the Mahatma, was arrested numerous times, and that he escaped from house-arrest in Calcutta in Robin Hood fashion, and travelled across Afghanistan and beyond, marked his presence in Germany, Singapore, and other dots on the world map, is part of legend. That he allied with the fascists to wage a war to overthrow the British has never really diluted Bose’s enigma for the uncritical Bengali hero-worshipper.

Indeed, Amitav Ghosh, in one of his finest journalistic essays, documented the incredible stories of the ‘rag-tag’ soldiers of the Azad Hind Fauj, including scores of women, who fought hunger, mosquitoes and disease in hard terrains, to wage a difficult war led by Bose. In the essay, ‘India’s Untold War of Independence’, in The New Yorker (A Reporter At Large, July 23, 1997), Ghosh writes: “He had participated in Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent campaign early in his career and remained an admirer all his life. But over time his own tactical thinking had become, as it were, the inverse of Gandhi’s... He believed that Britain’s enemies were his natural allies, and he had no qualms about seeking their help. The British, for their part, treated Bose with untiring, vengeful hostility, jailing him repeatedly. In January 1941, he slipped out of his Calcutta home in disguise, and made his way across the Indian subcontinent to Afghanistan. He made approaches to the Soviet Union and, upon being rebuffed, travelled to Hitler’s Germany, in another vain attempt to garner support for India’s independence. His biographer, Leonard Gordon, said that Nazi Germany depressed him. At a solemn ceremony in Singapore’s Cathay Theatre, Bose took over the leadership of the Indian National Army. During the remaining 20 months of his life, he gave the Army a new sense of purpose... On August 18, 1945, he died in a plane crash at Da Nang...”

Indeed, the declassified files in Kolkata are pointers to all the ‘Bose myths’, including that he did not die in the Taipei plane crash, that he was spotted in sundry Siberian prisons, that the British hated and feared him, and so did the Nehru dynasty, and, that they snooped on his family and were jittery that he would make a grand comeback. He did not.

Later, the mythical Bose, still alive, emerged in various forms, including as an enigmatic Gumnami Baba with blazing eyes in Faizabad in UP. He was also spotted at Lal Bahadur Shastri’s funeral 1966), among other places.

The files also reveal what has been ‘drawing room’ gossip in Kolkata. Indeed, there is no reason for Delhi to be so secretive about the files buried in its dossiers. For all you know, there is no ‘Deep Throat’ twist in the tale.

(Amit Sengupta is Associate Professor, English Journalism, Indian Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi)

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