Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose Read online

  Yet, with the footfalls of British arrogance in all spheres of life, changes in the Bengali thinking had begun.

  Thus, just after the 1857 debate which ended with prominent Bengali intellectuals and giants like Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, and Rishi Aurobindo telling their countrymen successfully and convincingly that while Anglo-Saxon influence could be tolerated (if nothing could be done immediately), but their influence should not blind people to the high spiritual and moral values that Indian civilisation represented, and must be revived to build a greater nation.

  A lone German scholar, Max Müller, meanwhile did a momentous job by translating classical Sanskrit texts from the Vedas and Upanishads, and helped a section of non-political scholars in the West to understand the greatness of Indian culture, heritage, philosophy, and its civilisation.

  However, the victory for Indian civilisation and a statement for nationalism wasn’t an easy one. After decades of experiments and rejection of Anglo-Saxon values and after deciphering their real intent, a stand could be taken.

  Even if there wasn’t a blood shed during its formative years in Bengal, there was great toil and cultural inner-conflicts, struggle and experiments, while launching radical social reforms, such as the abolition of sati, and widow marriages, that Bengal could come out with a political statement after a process of rejection and acceptance.

  What was more interesting that during experiments to keep the influence of Christianity and the Anglo-Saxon culture away, there was a spiritual movement known as the Brahmo Samaj. The Samaj movement inspired by lofty Hindu theosophy of Vedas and Upanishads, outrightly rejected its peers’ (fellow Hindus’) worship of Hindu Gods and Goddesses as a distortion of true Hinduism (as Rig Veda said ‘E-kam bahudha badanati’: God is one but described and worshipped in various forms). The shloka recognised that a man can worship any form of divinity he/she liked most, which ultimately reflects freedom in the spiritual world, both in terms of choosing a path and a divine symbol which people could worship as the only God.

  However, much to the annoyance of the British, the Samaj movement could not split up the Hindu society, despite differences among the leaders of social change and the various schools of thought they represented.

  As for example, the disciples of Samajists did not always find themselves in agreements with Vidyasagar, Ramakrishna, or Vivekananda. Samajists were represented by Devendranath Tagore, Keshav Chandra Sen (Sen, however, later became a disciple of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa) and other well-known, influential men of society.

  Often there was an element of hidden zealousness, but that did not add to the advantage of British strategy to defeat the process of the spiritual awakening of Bengal.

  Importantly, the thesis of Raja Ram Mohan Roy to create a sort of ‘new cultural pluralism, one that incorporated Christian ideals alongside Hindu and Muslim text, just as Gandhi would do a century letter’ could not get a universal approval, observed Herman.

  However, Roy’s thesis eventually fumigated with the fading out of the Brahmo Samaj and the appearance of Ramakrishna’s Hindu universalism.

  Even though the Brahmo Samaj, unlike the monistic Arya Samaj of Dayanand Saraswati in North India, could not flourish due to its elitism and remained somewhat confined to the rich and educated elite, it also contributed in reviving interest in the ancient scriptures among the educated Bengalis.

  However, the most brilliant product of the movement was Rabindranath Tagore. And to sum up, the awakening in Bengal wasn’t without its aberrations or its share of disappointments to reject what wasn’t its own.

  Many brilliant young Bengalis educated in English ways became cultural, and at times religious, converts. There were many such examples and perhaps the brightest of them all was poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt. Despite his literary genius, his trying to imitate Western styles (for he was also a linguist in European languages) not only left him spiritually bankrupt, but also his earnest efforts later in life to come back to his Indian ethos would only greet him with a half-hearted success, though he also had the genius of a great poet. Dutt was a typical but odd mix of Anglo-Saxon influence as imagined and prescribed by Lord Macaulay’s prescription of how to initiate religious and cultural conversion, and Dutt’s literary experiments with great Indian themes often made him a little superfluous in interpreting them. For example, when he wrote Meghnad Badh Kavya (The Killing of Ravana’s Son, Megnad), an epic, Dutt, due to his Western influence from which he could never free himself (like his obsession with liquor and beef), not only failed to appreciate the greatness of Lord Rama and some of his great lieutenants, but he drew up both a plot and literary layout in Western style with criticism of Lord Rama’s military strategies which were essentially based on Western literary rationalism with a perfect disconnect from Indian reality.

  As for example, he failed to realise, trained as he was in the Western value system, that Lord Rama mobilising people (not his own army) to fight a tyrant like Ravana, and his idealism to serve the people he led, even at the cost of all his personal material and emotional comforts helped India to connect and evolve itself to its own democratic system vis-à-vis prajas (the English word ‘subjects’ isn’t a very happy translation for Sanskrit term ‘praja’).

  It might look ‘an obnoxious interpretation’ for both emancipated right and left intellectuals even in India, at the age of globalisation and multinational-company-inspired technology and reform-driven culture which have already been lapped up by moneyed Indians, but this was how Indians reacted at that point of their historical crisis. And it contained a wise lesson which must not be lost nor ignored.

  Another turning point came for Bengal. As the struggle to liberate Bengal from pro-English cultural influence went on, the traders-turned-foreign rulers shifted their focus on Bengal’s agriculture and tribes, they converted rural Bengal into a poverty-stricken area, and left it bleeding. Commercial crops were forcibly cultivated by Indigo planters, and the after effects of their caprice echoed in the cities. Rapes and plunders were carried out like the medieval invaders of India, even equalling the brutalities of barbarian Nadir Shah.

  But educated Bengalis openly decided to fight their case in British courts and public places, notwithstanding prosecution by men who wielded the spectre in the Writers’ Buildings in Calcutta.

  These developments were reported in the Hindu Patriot, a paper edited by a great patriot-journalist Harish Mukherjee, as well as in the drama Neeldarpan, bared the medieval mindset of traders, and the often-uneducated English brutes who landed in Bengal, the first province to come under their rule, to take part in a great pillage.

  This also eventually sealed the fate of the greater and more expansive cultural ties of Bengal’s Indian consciousness with the racially-arrogant rulers, though, at the end of these brutalities, their educated counterparts who sat in the present Raj Bhawan, then the Viceroy’s palace, were forced to end it all because of violent protests, and later felt somewhat apologetic about with their hypocritical politeness.

  Bose, with his analytical mind could not escape the way how the British scripted the ruin of the rural Indian economy with anti-national local forces. Under the façade of introducing ‘great administrative reforms’, rural India, forests, and mines were meant only for exploitation.

  Of course, the pillage created a sound educational mechanism, a mechanism to maintain law and order (it was used more to identify anti-British forces and areas of profits) but rural India remained plagued with recurrent pestilence, famine, and death in hundreds without any government intervention to stop it. In the education sector, though numbers swelled, it could not cover the huge rural population.

  For Bose, who belonged to an enlightened and religious, if not vocally anti-British, middle-class family, unlike many of his political contemporaries, an understanding of the Indian culture was a matter of inheritance.

  He had very carefully studied hundreds of years of cultural evolution and awakening in Bengal which began with t
he Krishna Chaitanya, the great Vaishnav prophet born in fifteenth-century Bengal who could successfully tie the knot of a degenerated Bengal with an Indian mainstream, revived Vrindavan and Mathura, the great place of Vaishnavik pilgrimage, and came up with a philosophy of tolerance, peace, love, and spiritual progress for all, but without any wrong sort of compromise, irrespective of castes and religions.

  With the passing of days and years, Krishna Chaitanya’s introduction of love for all as well as the moral courage to fight any wrong was later lost due to a love for misinterpreted human pursuits, purely the baser side of it, which delinked the great tradition of the Prophet temporarily as Bengal slipped into darkness again. Noted historian Dr Ramesh Chandra Mazumdar in his History of Medieval Bengal.

  The efforts were revived again successfully after Ramakrishna appeared on the scene, and as a whole, Krishna Chaitanya’s efforts culminated in the coming of another prophet in Ramakrishna.

  Being an avid reader of Indian history, Bose also knew that in the Thirteenth century, a great poet of Bengal, Boru Chandidas, told the men of his time: ‘Listen you all my men, no truth is greater than humanity (shuno re manush bhai, sabar upore manush satyo tahar upore nai).’ He spoke of humanism centuries before the Europeans would talk in political-philosophical terms about human emancipation after Christ, Though Bertrand Russell was never quite convinced about the liberal pretension of the West as he said: ‘The last and first Christian died with Christ.’

  Bose wasn’t unaware of Lord Macaulay’s intent who scripted the British education policy for India, and tried to doom spiritual backbone of India.

  In a letter he wrote to his father on 12 October 1836, he laid bare the British intention.

  He stated that in Hooghly (in West Bengal), ‘1400 boys were learning English and the effect of that on Hindus was prodigious.’

  He was sure that a Hindu who received English education would never remain faithful to his religion and some of them would embrace Christianity. And if the British education plan was followed, there would not be a single idolater among the respected classes in Bengal.

  All this conversion would be done without any proselytising or religious interference. (He only pleaded for creating men like Dutt, which the process of cultural and spiritual awakening prevented in Bengal.)

  About why Lord Macaulay’s intent was so zealous about making India a materialist, spiritual colony of England, he said,‘I do not think we would ever conquer this country unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage.’

  ‘I have travelled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such calibre that I do not think we would ever conquer this country unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and therefore I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native culture, and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation.”

  Even though Macaulay deciphered the real strength of India, what he did not understand was that with the help of British education, the consciousness of Bengal was set to defeat British cultural ambition and arrogance.

  Certainly, Macaulay did not come across men like Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar who not only set Indianness to a high pedestal before the racially arrogant Englishmen, making them a little unstable, but also showed Indians that they need not feel inferior to their new, White rulers.

  He made it a point for Englishmen of importance that this dhoti-kurta- clad and chappal-wearing Bengali could only be approached on equal terms or it would spell humiliation for them or their big officers in the education department. Ishwar Chandra did all these at least 60 years before Gandhi giving Indian style a global recognition.

  Another courageous Indian was a zamindar, Rani Rashmoni, who taught the British administration a lesson that despite their superior technology and advanced administrative mechanism, she could not be cowed down morally when it came to the choice of asserting her rights, she wasn’t afraid to invite the rulers’ wrath, and did it time and again.

  However, Bose, who was sent to an English school – a fad for Bengali middle-class parents (even now) – felt ‘here education has no links with anything Indian.’ And when he realised the truth he left school in hidden disgust and joined an Indian school in Cuttack, he felt that he missed nothing! An Indian Pilgrim.

  Gradually, he got initiated into a great Indian education system with his encounter with Sankara, Ramakrishna, his disciple Vivekananda, and his headmaster Benimadab Das.And thus, Macaulay’s planned, cultural British ‘Foreign direct investment’, about which he was so sure and enthusiastic, did not touch a young and spiritually-initiated Bose, who, like many of his contemporaries, also accepted the nationalist statement of Bengal.

  The growing English racial arrogance, which had actually never ebbed or diminished, also doomed Macaulay’s thesis.

  Punjab’s Jallianwala Bagh mass genocide of innocent and unarmed men and women (1919,19 th April ) by Reginald Dyer was a case in point. A little less than a hundred years since Macaulay campaigned for his cultural and religious conversion thesis, when his countrymen, who ruled India, reacted with great racial prejudice and later ended the same, and scripted its ignominious retreat which ended any avenues for political reconciliation with nationalist India.

  Bose was one among those Indians who were deeply hurt, and with a difference, turned irreconcilable with British gestures that were to follow during the rest of its rule.

  Like most patriotic Indians, for Bose it was an unforgiveable crime that the unarmed, innocent people of India were subjected to, by mere racial arrogance and for no ‘criminal conspiracy’ which the Britishers always presumed.

  Describing the incident, some of the British historians, who no doubt condemned it, suggested that Dyer’s hysterical reaction had its root in the much deeper racial prejudices of his men, that got more developed psychologically as upright and patriotic Indians became more conscious and aggressive about their political rights.

  Thus the butchery, while ending any path of reconciliation with Indian nationalism, also actuated the Indian people, somewhat unconsciously, into a quest for a leadership that would teach the British a lesson.

  The massacre also revived the memory of British butchery during the riot of 1857, the first national armed uprising against the British rule, which some of the awakened Bengalis opposed on grounds that the ‘morally-bankrupt’ Mughal rulers would script the return of medieval darkness.

  Thus, as Bose developed into a fulsome leader, British feared none other than Bose, both for his unrelenting faith in India’s spiritual and cultural revival which was inclusive of Indian Muslims, as well as for his uncompromising anti-British stand.

  Let alone the Britishers who ruled India, but even for the so-called liberals and likes of British Communist Party (BCP) here is an interesting revelation. In a letter by the BCP leader Ben Bradley, when Bose was exiled in Europe by the British Indian government, he wrote to one his fellow Indian comrades (Abani Mukherjee): ‘Do not allow Bose to return to India’.

  Bose’s radical views which were not inspired by any foreign ideological Direct Investment influence of his time, and did not have many takers in the National Congress even among radicals, such as Nehru, M N Roy and Congress socialists, who always ‘saw his nationalism as extreme’ type and suspected his loyalty to the faith in socialism. (NG Jog, In Freedom’s Quest, a biography of Bose).

  Bose was nevertheless selected as the President of the Congress by Gandhi in 1938. Some British historians and commentators felt that Gandhi’s decision to elect Bose was like offering an olive branch to young India who got agitated in the 1930s after a series of brutal British repressions, which resulted in the martyrdom of revo
lutionaries such as Suraya Sen, Jatin Das, Chandra Shekhar Azad, Jatin Das, Bhagat Singh and others.

  Another reason was the failure of the Gandhi-Irwin Pact. Gandhi, sensing the agitation in the minds of young Indians. said, ‘(that as he believed in an honest Christian in Irwin) I succumbed to a Christian in Irwin.’ He could not satisfy the Indians as a whole, but as a shrewd judge of men and political trends, he sensed violence in the air.

  So Bose emerged as the Congress President in 1938 with a new statement of Indian Nationalism, which, like his countrymen believed, could be achieved after a total defeat of English arrogance, as well as their racial pride and military might.

  Thus, Bose was made the president despite his links with revolutionary groups, as well as his views which did not support Gandhi’s political strategy or his thesis of socio-economic road map for India.

  Bose’s thesis of planned economic growth (it is Bose who set up the National Planning Commission) included aggressive family planning, spreading basic education, aggressive industrialisation, and a more well-defined anti-British foreign policy. It was a strategy that the government of Manmohan Singh adopted, renaming it as ‘inclusive growth’ with government intervention. He was President despite his differences with Gandhi. Even though some of Gandhi’s lieutenants had serious objections to his selection as Congress President, Gandhi was convinced that Bose could be his ideological convert.

  When they met on a train in Calcutta, just a little before the formal election, Gandhi told Bose to severe all his links with ‘terrorist groups’. To this, a smiling Bose replied, ‘In that case, first I must severe my links with you.’ Both enjoyed a hearty laugh!

  Bose Goes Into Ideological Isolation

  After Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Sri Aurobindo, and Lala Lajpat Rai, only Gandhi and Subhas Chandra Bose remained truly Indian till the very end and felt that India would need to travel into a new Indianhood when it emerged free from British bondage.