1. 'The Indian Struggle' is a historical treatise of unique attributes. Highly commended by Romain Rolland, it remains a masterpiece penned by Netaji about a tempestuous period of India's political history, the freedom struggle in the Gandhian phase in which Netaji himself was a premier participant. Yet, Rolland remarks, the dispassion which Bose exhibits in critically delineating the diverse elements of the national movement even as he was in the thick of it is unique in historical chronicling and indicative of a rare ability in the author of objective distancing from an event so current and happening.
How Rolland must have reflected on Bose's subsequent alliance with the Fascist forces is unknown to me owing to paucity of relevant reading but it is doubtful that he would have endorsed it, having witnessed the horrors of Nazism at first hand in France and bearing as it was his opposition to such terrible tyranny of the times in the rest of Europe. But Rolland's appreciation of Bose's historical appraisal of the pertinent times in Gandhian India cannot be dimmed by whatever subsequent developments nay have taken place in the political landscape of the world and in the French savant's mind on account of it.
2. The relation between Gandhiji and Netaji is much talked about these days but, alas, with not much clarity or comprehensiveness. There is mere acrimony that spews online as disparaging remark about the sage of Sabarmati with not much of analytical observation or researched original output, creative and credible. In this department Netaji's followers are most viciously active, their hatred of Gandhiji and Pandit Nehru knowing no bounds whatsoever.
History, though, does not record any such viciously acrimonious relation between Netaji and Gandhiji. Ideological differences between them were sharp and path-defining in the consequential conflict that ensued over them but personal relations remained unimpaired. Netaji held Gandhiji in the same veneration after parting ways with him at Tripuri as he had held him prior to it. His radio broadcast from Rangoon at the height of the Second World War even hailed the Mahatma as the 'Father of the Nation'.
Unfinished and expanding ...
Written by Sugata Bose
Photo : courtesy, Keshab Bhattacherjee
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