Nehru & Bose: parallel lives by Rudrangshu Mukherjee penguin books; Price: Rs.599; Pages 256
Critics and laymen who complain the history of India in the 20th century is overly dominated by the towering personalities of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and his offspring, are not unjustified in voicing dissatisfaction. Several scholarly and informative biographies have been written about Nehru, independent India’s first prime minister, his daughter Indira Gandhi, free India’s longest serving prime minister and her son Rajiv who succeeded her. But other stalwarts of the freedom movement notably Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, Vallabhbhai Patel, Rajendra Prasad, Subhas Chandra Bose, and Lal Bahadur Shastri have not attracted the attention of professional historians with (English) language proficiency, scholarly discipline and capability to sift trivia from substance.
This lacuna vis-à-vis Subhas Chandra Bose (1897-1945), one of the most romantic and dashing leaders of the Congress party and uncompromising champion of India’s liberation from British imperialism, has been handsomely filled by this eminently readable comparative biography of Nehru and Bose. Free-flowing, balanced and rich with insight and the revealing anecdote, this volume tracks the career progression of two individuals of broadly alike upper-middle class backgrounds (both sired by successful lawyers), who developed a deep friendship sharing a common radical ideology, while rising high in the inner councils of the Congress party, as under the leadership of Gandhiji it planned and plotted to end British rule.
Although Nehru’s privileged home schooling by English tutors in the parental mansion (which inter alia offered a swimming pool and tennis court) followed by Harrow and Cambridge is the stuff of legend and folklore, the information deficit about Bose’s background, is made good by Oxford-educated historian Rudrangshu Mukherjee (Awadh in Revolt, 1857-1858; The 1857 Kanpur Massacres; Penguin Gandhi Reader), former editor of The Telegraph, Calcutta and currently first vice chancellor of the mint-new Ashoka University, Gurgaon.
Like Motilal Nehru in Allahabad, Janakinath Bose, a successful Cuttack (Orissa)-based lawyer also ensured that his son received “the best education the English could offer”, albeit in India. Subhas studied at the Protestant European School and seven years later at Ravenshaw Collegiate School, Cuttack where he learned to read and write Bengali and discovered Swami Vivekananda and Ramakrishna Paramhansa.
Unlike the fashionably upper crust Nehru eight years his elder, who scraped through his exams in Harrow and Cambridge which awarded him a second-class degree in the natural sciences in 1910, Bose was a brilliant student and topped the matriculation examination conducted by Calcutta University. In 1913, he was admitted into Presidency College, where typically, he got into trouble for allegedly assaulting an English professor of history who had “manhandled” some of his batchmates.
Although it’s doubtful he was directly involved in the assault, Bose was expelled from Presidency and forced to return to Cuttack “where there were no words of recrimination from his family”, and he immersed himself in social work. A year later, he was re-admitted into Calcutta University and read philosophy at the Scottish Church College, graduating with a first class degree.
In 1919, his fond family decided to fund his education at Cambridge University to study for the elite Indian Civil Services (ICS) examination. Inevitably, Bose passed the demanding ICS exam — designed to keep Indians out — successfully. But shortly afterwards in a brave decision, he declined the service on the grounds that “every government servant whether he be a petty chaprasi or provincial governor only helps to constitute to the stability of the British government in India”.
Back in India, the two contemporaries became involved with the freedom movement lead by Gandhiji, which acquired momentum after the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh in 1919. Nehru had the backing of his influential father Motilal, arguably India’s top-ranked lawyer and Congress party leader, and was parachuted into the top councils of the party. However after experiencing the deep poverty and despair of the peasantry when he toured rural Uttar Pradesh in 1920, he transformed into a life-long socialist determined to ameliorate their “wretched condition”.
Meanwhile, landing in India in 1921, Bose went to meet Gandhi who had published the Congress party’s non-cooperation charter the previous year. He came away “depressed and disappointed”, not impressed by the Mahatma’s swaraj-within-a-year goal.
Nevertheless, Bose took the Mahatma’s advice to return to Calcutta to work with Bengal’s much-admired Congress leader C.R. Das, in whom he found a man “who knew what he was about”. Under Das’ leadership, the young and idealistic Bose organised a hartal to protest the visit of the Prince of Wales to India in 1921, as also a boycott of British cloth for which on December 10, he suffered the first of his 11 imprisonments under British rule. Nehru suffered his first imprisonment on December 5 — five days earlier.
Unlike Nehru, Bose had to fight to get to the top of the Congress hierarchy in 1938 when he opposed Gandhi’s candidate Pattabhi Sitarammya, forced a national election and won, as painstakingly detailed by the author. It marked the beginning of the end of Bose’s career in the Congress, and a sharp downturn in his relationship with Nehru, with whom he had been united on the issue of socialism as the most suitable economic development model for India.
As Congress president, Bose was given very little room to pass resolutions or articulate his views on the Congress decision to accept office in the provinces following the enactment of the Government of India Act, 1935 or on the party’s economic policies.
Yet the final break between these two friends and ideological allies came after the rise of fascism in Europe and war clouds gathered. As a committed socialist Nehru would have no truck with Mussolini and Hitler, whereas Bose, for whom the top priority was India’s independence, was prepared to sup with the fascist devils to attain this goal.
On several occasions the author speculates about Bose’s conspicuous silence on the inhuman persecution of European Jews by Mussolini and Hitler. Nevertheless, Bose’s bold escape from British custody in Calcutta, his heroic overland and undersea voyage to Germany and later to Japan and Singapore, and his formation of the Indian National Army (INA) are described in stirring prose in this excellent dual biography.
It can be safely assumed that Nehru had judged the British as the lesser evil while implacably opposing Nazi and Japanese fascism. Bose was perhaps naïve in allying with the Axis powers to attain the same objectives — independence and socialism — as his friend turned foe. But that doesn’t make him any less heroic. A must-read work of scholarship and racy prose for all interested in learning about an untold parallel history of freedom at midnight.
Dilip Thakore
The Narrow Road To The Deep North by Richard Flanagan london, chatto & windus; Price: Rs.407; Pages 448
True heroism novel
In his 2014 Booker Prize-winning novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Tasmania (Australia)-born author Richard Flanagan journeys into the past along several routes. The title is taken from one of the haiku poems of 17th century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho, and each of the five sections of the novel uses a haiku to introduce an intensely poetic yet philosophical perspective on life, lived experience and death. This novel which revisits the brutalities of the Second World War through the memories of prisoner 335 (the writer’s father), a survivor of the Burma Death Railway, is a remarkable celebration of the spirit of survival which gives depth and meaning to the harshest truths. 
The fictional protagonist is Col. Dorrigo Evans, an Australian surgeon and prisoner of war, interred in Siam (now Thailand) in 1943 and obliged to follow “a straight line of surveyor’s pegs hammered into the ground by Imperial Japanese Army engineers to mark the route of a railway” to be constructed along a 415-km route traversing Thailand-Burma.
While documenting the “desperation and fanaticism”, and “myth and unreality” of the brutality and suffering the project involved, Evans becomes aware of the irony of his own post-war situation when aged 77, and after the war is over, he is resurrected and celebrated as a war hero. Yet as a necessary act of correction and contrition he experiences the obligation to restore to “rightful memory”, lives of the forgotten others who were perhaps real war heroes — his comrades Darky Gardiner, Jack Rainbow, Jimmy Bigelow, Rabbit Hendricks — transformed into “things not human”.
The monstrosity of war is embodied in the Japanese camp commandant Major Nakamura who tells Evans whose division is enduring hell on Earth in the dense jungles of Thailand/Burma, that “the Japanese spirit is now itself the railway, and the railway the Japanese spirit, our narrow road to the deep north, helping to take the beauty and wisdom of Basho to the larger world”. The novel documents the destruction of this dream, the decimation of South Asian and Australian POWs forced to realise the Japanese spirit as enunciated by Nakamura, as also the latter’s post-war machinations to avoid being tried as a war criminal.
The Narrow Road is not just about war and its psychological scars, but about the tactics of survival both during and after the senseless violence. Dorrigo’s story moves back and forth in time and experience, connecting the cataclysmic global war to a more personal one. His work as a surgeon teaches him to preserve the life of others, to make sacrifices, as well as to snatch moments of desire, enjoyment and love. His intimacy with Amy, his uncle’s wife, during his training in Adelaide is set off against his tame marriage to Ella who had loyally waited out the war period for his return. These passions were as turbulent as his many infidelities.
Beyond love, laughter and loneliness, it seemed to Dorrigo “that the world simply allowed for some things and punished others, that there was neither reason nor explanation, neither justice nor hope. There was simply now, and it was better just to accept this.”
The loathsome realities of camp life along the “line” are detailed in the climactic third section which depicts several brutal deaths of Darky Gardiner, Padre Bob, a Tamil romusha, and others of the thousand POWs called Evans’ J Force which depleted it to a ridiculous low. Dorrigo’s encounters with cholera, dysentery, malaria, malnutrition, jaundice and his heroic efforts to save and heal the sick by haggling with Nakamura, are stories of profound humanity and hope in the face of inhuman conditions. And then follows the waste of all that happened, “For the Line was broken, as all lines finally are; it was all for nothing, and of it nothing remained.”
Flanagan’s narrative style is sensitive to poetry which transforms and frees his writing of the mundane, savage and ugly. The real-life drama of love experienced by Dorrigo Evans remains inconclusive as Ella’s letter in the bag of camp mail, delivered six months later, ripped off the end like the torn romance that he was reading before going to sleep on his “haphazard cot”. “The book of his life just broke off,” he writes.
A great novel which transcends historical documentation and provides insights into the human condition, depicting challenge and adversity and the true heroism which imperfect individuals can exhibit when pushed to the limit of endurance.
Jayati Gupta