DESHBANDHU AND SUBHAS CHANDRA

This insufficient post is merely to stimulate sufficient interest in a man of epic proportions whose seminal contribution to the freedom movement is yet to be sufficiently estimated and recognised. He was the political mentor of Subhas Chandra Bose when the latter was barely a fledgling freedom fighter, and he remained the lifelong political guru of the finest patriot the motherland has given birth to in her recent annals. Our prostrations to Deshbandhu, the truest friend of the nation, the liberator of Aurobindo Ghosh from the tentacles of toxic criminal law that had indicted him on charge of sedition, the co-founder of the Swarajya Party in eminent opposition to Mahatma Gandhi's boycott of the State Legislatures and the one nationalist who first sent his family members to jail before exhorting others to bear such hardship for the liberation of the nation.

Subhas Chandra had once spent ten months with his mentor in a British prison and learnt first-hand the finer art of politics and this singular experience of proximity with a selfless soul for such a protracted period of time had left such an indelible impression on his youthful absorbing mind that he reminisced it with fondness and fervour in later life whenever the occasion arose, and it served as a perennial source of inspiration for him as he surged ahead full-steam into revolutionary activity to free his motherland from British bondage.

The untimely death of Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das came as a body-blow to the young Subhas who lost in him a father-figure and a moderating moral influence as he felt his way through the emerging politics of the times. Subhas was now a man, so to say, and he essayed his way through the turbulence of the times with a singular passion for his motherland's freedom and a dispassion for anything that threatened to derail his set-out career for life.

P.S. : Basanti Devi, the valorous wife of Chittaranjan Das, looked upon Subhas as her son and doted on him for his sterling qualities. The love and affection received from these invincible spirits among our then renascent womanhood must be recounted in glowing terms to comprehend the mainspring of inspiration that carried our freedom movement forward en route to its destined end. Subhas Chandra Bose is set in our imagination as the samurai that eclipsed the British Raj in the twilight of its pernicious career, but let none forget that his own dawn of political awakening had been heralded by the affectionate graces of the motherly Basanti Devi and the fatherly Deshbandhu, the great Chittaranjan Das who had renounced every luxury of his erstwhile affluent living to identify wholeheartedly with the nation's cause. He was an object lesson for the young Subhas Chandra and remained through the revolutionary's future career as the beacon for freedom that lit up his tortuous path to the truth that he bore in his heart --- a truth given utterance to by the one he counted as his spiritual guru, Swami Vivekananda --- 'freedom, freedom is the song of the soul'.