Netaji's Ideals And Struggles

Netaji: Collected Works: Volume 1: An Indian Pilgrim: An Unfinished Autobiography
by Subhas Chandra Bose, Sugata Bose (Editor), Sugata Rose (Editor)
About this title: This autobiography evokes the socio-cultural environment in which Subhas Chandra Bose grew up and the lineaments of his intellectual development.

Subhas Chandra Bose IN BURMESE PRISONS: Correspondence May 1923 - July 1926 edited by Sisir K. Bose
Subhas Chandra Bose’s exile in Burmese prisons from 1924 to 1927 witnessed the transformation of a lieutenant into a leader. During the non-cooperation movement and its aftermath he had wholeheartedly accepted Deshbandhu Chitta Ranjan Das as his political mentor. The apprenticeship was cut short by Deshbandhu’s death in June 1925. When Subhas received this terrible news as a prisoner in Mandalay, he felt “desolate with a sense of bereavement”, as he wrote to his friend Dilip Kumar Roy. Netaji’s letters cover a very wide array of topics—art, music, literature, nature, education, folk culture, civic affairs, criminology, spirituality, and, of course, politics. He bore the rigours of prison life with a combination of stoicism and humour. This volume is indispensable to an understanding of India’s greatest revolutionary leader and will interest all historians of modern India.

Netaji Subhas Confronted the Indian Ethos (1900-1921) : Yogi Sri Aurobindo's 'Terrorism', Poet Tagore's 'Universalism', and Mahatma Gandhi's 'Experimental Non-Violence'/Adwaita P. Ganguly. Dehra Dun, Vedantic Research Centre, 2003, xviii, 224 p., photographs, ISBN 81-87530-04-9.
"In our first work entitled Life and Times of Netaji Subhas: From Cuttack to Cambridge (1897-1921) we explored how Subhas Chandra Bose had constructed his philosophy of life. It was a difficult task, but we did it with scientific precision, within an artistic framework of five chapters.
"The present work is a bridge between the previous work on Subhas and the next work entitled Life and Times of Netaji Subhas: From Cambridge to Mahatma (1921-41). In the previous work, 'chapter one' elaborates the central philosophy of Vedanta, as interpreted by Vivekananda - the spiritual Guru of Subhas; 'chapter two' is an interpretation of Subhas's family background and early schooling; 'chapter three' delves into what happened to him when he confronted Calcutta; 'chapter four' tells about his various experiences in England culminating in his resignation from the Indian Civil Service; and finally 'chapter five' is about Subhas's philosophy of life that he constructed by exploring both Indian and Western thought. Subhas summed up his philosophy on 'reality' thus: "reality....is spirit, essence of which is love, gradually unfolding itself in an eternal play of conflicting forces and their solutions" (An Indian Pilgrim, p. 144).....This work is also indispensable for those who are interested in knowing the ideological basis of India's struggle for independence, and how Subhas discovered the gaps in the ideals cherished by Sri Aurobindo, Tagore, and Gandhi. Through his analytical intellect, he worked out his 'action-plan' which ultimately forced the British to quit India, but at the cost of the greatest human tragedy, owing to the wrong policy of Mahatma Gandhi towards appeasement of the minority communities." (jacket)...read+

Institute for Historical Review
Subhas Chandra Bose and India's Struggle for Independence
By Andrew Montgomery
When one thinks of the Indian independence movement in the 1930s and early 1940s, two figures most readily come to mind: Mahatma Gandhi, the immensely popular and "saintly" frail pacifist, and his highly respected, Fabian Socialist acolyte, Jawaharlal Nehru.
Less familiar to Westerners is Subhas Chandra Bose, a man of com­parable stature who admired Gandhi but despaired at his aims and methods, and who became a bitter rival of Nehru. Bose played a very active and prominent role in India's political life during most of the 1930s. For example, he was twice (1938 and 1939) elected Pres­ident of the Indian National Congress, the country's most important political force for freedom from the Raj, or British rule.
While his memory is still held in high esteem in India, in the West Bose is much less revered, largely because of his wartime collaboration with the Axis powers. Both before and during the Second World War, Bose worked tirelessly to secure German and Japanese support in freeing his beloved homeland of foreign rule. During the final two years of the war, Bose -- with considerable Japanese backing -- led the forces of the Indian National Army into battle against the British...READ MORE