An Indian Revolutionary Gains Favor Posthumously Film Boosts Interest In Anti-Colonial Fighter
By John Lancaster Washington Post Foreign Service Monday, May 23, 2005; A12
CALCUTTA -- Asha Pachiasia has a problem with Gandhi.
Sure, she said, the frail, cotton-robed independence leader -- known as "the Mahatma" -- did his part and then some, leading the nonviolent rebellion that drove British colonial rulers from the subcontinent in 1947.
But as a hero and symbol of India's freedom movement, Pachiasia said, Mohandas K. Gandhi leaves something to be desired.
"I don't believe so much in Gandhi's policy of just showing the other cheek," said Pachiasia, a 47-year-old Montessori teacher. "I think now Indians are more aware that we should have fought for our freedom. I see how the Americans celebrate the Fourth of July. Mentally, we are still in the chains of the British Raj."
Pachiasia's attitude helps explain her presence the other day at a popular new movie on another, lesser-known icon of independence, Subhas Bose. A Cambridge-educated aristocrat who launched his political career here in the capital of West Bengal state, Bose rejected Gandhi's pacifist ways in favor of violent revolution, to the point of forming a rebel army and joining forces with the Axis powers in World War II.
A controversial figure in the West, where his choice of allies won him few admirers, Bose is enjoying a surge of renewed interest and popularity in India. The new film -- "Bose: The Forgotten Hero" -- is the latest in a series of books, magazine articles and other tributes to "Netaji," or "the Leader," as Bose is generally known.
Directed by veteran Indian filmmaker Shyam Benegal, the 3 1/2 hour, $5.5 million epic -- an exceptionally costly film by Indian standards -- focuses on Bose's war years, when he made a daring escape to Nazi Germany via Afghanistan and later led his ragtag followers in quixotic battle against British forces in the jungles of Burma.
"It was a great adventure story," Benegal said by telephone recently from Madrid, where he was attending a retrospective showing of his work. Bose "had this impossible dream."
In part, the public's fascination with Bose reflects continuing questions about his disappearance and presumed death in a plane crash, shortly after the Japanese surrender in 1945. Fueled by reports that he might have survived, the mystery has been the focus of several government inquiries, the latest of which is slated to report its findings soon.
But the biggest reason for Bose's renewed popularity, analysts say, probably has more to do with India's changing self-image, from an underdeveloped, aid-dependent champion of the Non-Aligned Movement to a rising economic power with nuclear weapons and an increasingly important role on the world stage.
In that context, Bose -- a militant nationalist and revolutionary -- has become for many Indians a more compelling symbol of India's independence struggle than the ascetic and pacifist Gandhi, especially among the fast-growing middle class.
"People think that now that India is entering the globalized world in a more serious fashion, the conventional heroes who fought against imperialism in the conventional way, even if they have lost, their tragedy must also be articulated," Ashis Nandy, a prominent sociologist, said in an interview. Many Indians, he added, "feel saddled with this kind of idea of Indians who do not hate back."
Gandhi, who was assassinated in 1948, remains a revered figure, the saintly "father of the nation" whose portrait hangs in classrooms and government offices. Generations have grown up on hagiographic portrayals such as Richard Attenborough's "Gandhi," the 1982 epic starring Ben Kingsley in the title role.
But in recent years Indians have embraced a more muscular sort of nationalist hero. In 2002, audiences flocked to see "The Legend of Bhagat Singh," a historical drama about an Indian revolutionary who was hanged by the British in 1931 at age 24 after detonating a bomb in the British-controlled national assembly.
Judging by appearances, Bose was a somewhat less swashbuckling figure. Plump and bespectacled, he was conversant in the works of Wordsworth and Hegel, spent several years at Cambridge and breezed through the entrance exam to the prestigious, British-run Indian Civil Service. But the fires of nationalism burned fiercely in Bose, who rejected a cushy government post in favor of joining the pro-independence Indian National Congress.
He was a frequent guest in British jails and eventually broke bitterly with Gandhi over the Mahatma's embrace of nonviolence. "Bose wrote that 'Gandhi wants to change human beings, and all I want to do is free India,' " recalled Benegal.
His movie picks up with Bose's daring escape from British India soon after the outbreak of World War II, when Bose makes his way to Kabul disguised as a mute Pashtun tribesman. He travels on to Berlin, where he lays the groundwork for an Indian national army composed of prisoners of war and deserters from the British Indian army.
Before he went underground, Bose wrote admiringly of some aspects of European fascism, for which he has been criticized by leftist historians and communists in India. But he also made clear his distaste for Adolf Hitler's theories of racial superiority.
With minimal support from the Japanese, Bose's army was never more than an irritant on the battlefield. In the aftermath of the Japanese surrender, Bose flew to Taiwan, where he was reported to have died in a plane crash on Aug. 18,1945.
But Bose's efforts were not in vain. As word of his army's exploits spread in postwar India, he and his followers became enormously popular. An attempt by the British to prosecute Bose's officers as traitors sparked nationwide protests and, by most accounts, hastened the British departure from India.
In Calcutta, Bose's memory lives on at the spacious three-story home where he began his political career. Now a museum, the house draws a steady stream of visitors, who gaze through a glass partition at his study, which is much as he left it in January 1941. Parked outside is the German-made Wanderer sedan in which he made his famous escape.
Although some Bose admirers have taken issue with aspects of Benegal's film, most people here seem grateful that their hometown hero is finally getting the recognition they say he deserves.
"These children, they're so much into other things," said Pachiasia, the Montessori teacher, who brought her teenage daughter to see the film. "They should have that patriotic feeling."