Rash Behari Bose

Rash Behari Bose was born on May 25, 1886, in the village of Subaldaha in the Bardhaman district of Bengal, then part of British India ^[1]. His father, Binod Behari Bose, held a government post, and the boy spent much of his childhood with relatives, receiving his early schooling in Bengal before moving to Chandannagar, a French enclave north of Calcutta, where an uncle looked after his education ^[2].

Bengal at the turn of the century was the most restless province in the Raj. The partition of the province in 1905 set off a wave of protest, boycott, and secret society activity, and Chandannagar, lying outside British jurisdiction, sheltered many young men drawn to armed methods. Bose grew up inside this ferment. Accounts of his youth describe a boy fascinated by tales of rebellion and impatient with the slow constitutional politics of the early Congress ^[2][3].

Unable to find a path into the army, which did not commission Indians in that period, Bose took clerical work instead. He eventually secured a post at the Forest Research Institute in Dehradun in the United Provinces, far from the police surveillance that blanketed Bengal ^[1]. The respectable government job became his cover. By day he was a diligent clerk; outside office hours he built links with revolutionary cells in Bengal, Punjab, and the United Provinces, work that would soon place him at the center of the most audacious attack yet attempted on British authority in India.

On December 23, 1912, the Viceroy of India, Lord Hardinge, rode in state through Chandni Chowk in Delhi to mark the transfer of the imperial capital from Calcutta. A bomb thrown at his howdah wounded him seriously and killed an attendant. The attack, carried out in front of enormous crowds at the symbolic heart of the new capital, stunned the government ^[1][3].

Bose had planned the operation. The bomb was thrown by Basanta Kumar Biswas, a young recruit whom Bose had trained, while Bose himself slipped back to Dehradun by the night train and reported for work as usual the next morning. He even joined official expressions of sympathy for the wounded Viceroy, a piece of cool-headed theatre that kept suspicion away from him for months ^[2][3]. The subsequent Delhi Conspiracy trial sent several of his associates to the gallows, including Biswas, but the police never laid hands on the principal organizer.

The episode made Bose one of the most wanted men in India. It also displayed the qualities his colleagues later remembered: meticulous preparation, a talent for disguise, and a willingness to let years pass between blows. For the next two years he moved between Bengal and north India under assumed names, holding together networks that the police were steadily dismantling ^[3][4].

The outbreak of war in 1914 seemed to offer the opening the revolutionaries had waited for. The Ghadar Party, founded by Indian emigrants on the Pacific coast of North America, sent hundreds of returning migrants to Punjab with plans for a mutiny in the Indian Army while Britain was preoccupied in Europe. Bose was asked to direct the rising in north India, and in early 1915 he moved to Lahore to coordinate the date, eventually fixed for February 21 ^[4].

The plot collapsed from within. A police informer inside the Lahore group betrayed the plan, the date was hurriedly advanced, and the authorities struck first, arresting the conspirators and disarming suspect regiments. The Lahore conspiracy trials that followed sent dozens of Ghadarites to death or transportation. Bose once again evaded the net, escaping to Benares and then to Calcutta as the hunt for him intensified ^[3][4].

With India closed to him, he looked east. In May 1915 he boarded a ship for Japan under the name Priyanath Tagore, posing as a relative of the poet Rabindranath Tagore, and reached Tokyo in June ^[1][2]. He was twenty nine years old. He would never see India again, though he spent the remaining three decades of his life working for its independence from a distance.

Japan was formally an ally of Britain, and the British embassy soon demanded Bose's extradition. In late 1915 the Japanese government ordered him to leave the country. At that moment the pan-Asianist politician Mitsuru Toyama and his associates intervened, hiding Bose from the police. The family of Aizo and Kokko Soma, owners of the Nakamuraya bakery in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo, sheltered him at great personal risk ^[2].

The connection became permanent. In 1918 Bose married the Somas' daughter, Toshiko, and the couple had a son, Masahide, and a daughter, Tetsuko. Toshiko died in 1925, still in her twenties, worn down by years of hiding and strain, a loss Bose felt for the rest of his life ^[2]. In 1923 he became a naturalized Japanese citizen, which finally ended the threat of extradition and allowed him to live openly ^[1][2].

Bose supported himself partly through the family business, where he introduced an Indian style curry that the bakery began selling in 1927. The dish, still marketed in Japan as Nakamuraya curry, made him a minor celebrity and earned him the nickname of the father of Indian curry in Japan ^[2]. Behind this domestic surface he remained a full-time political man. He wrote for Japanese journals, lectured on Indian affairs, cultivated army officers and pan-Asianist societies, and argued for years that Japan should back Indian independence as part of a wider Asian revival ^[2][5].

The Pacific War transformed Bose from a propagandist into an organizer of armies. Japan's rapid conquest of Malaya, Singapore, and Burma in 1941 and 1942 brought tens of thousands of Indian soldiers of the British Indian Army into Japanese captivity, along with large Indian civilian communities across Southeast Asia. Bose, as the senior Indian nationalist in Japan, moved to weld them into a movement ^[5][6].

He convened a conference in Tokyo in March 1942 and a larger one in Bangkok that June, out of which came the Indian Independence League, a civilian body claiming to speak for Indians across East and Southeast Asia, with Bose as president. Under its umbrella the first Indian National Army took shape, recruited from prisoners of war under the command of Captain Mohan Singh ^[5][6].

The first experiment faltered within months. Mohan Singh and the Japanese military fell out over the army's control and purpose, and in December 1942 he was removed and detained, leaving the INA in disarray. Bose held the framework together through the crisis, but he was aging, unwell, and conscious that the movement needed a leader with a mass following in India itself. When Subhas Chandra Bose reached East Asia in 1943 after his voyage from Germany, Rash Behari handed over the presidency of the League and leadership of the revived INA at ceremonies in Singapore that July ^[1][6][7]. The two men were not related, but the transfer joined their names permanently in the history of the movement.

After 1943 Bose withdrew to an advisory role in Tokyo. His health, weakened by tuberculosis, declined through the last years of the war, and he suffered the private blow of knowing his son Masahide was serving in the Japanese army; the young man was killed at Okinawa in 1945, shortly after his father's death. The Japanese government conferred on Bose the Order of the Rising Sun, Second Class, a rare honor for a foreign-born subject, weeks before he died in Tokyo on January 21, 1945 ^[1][2].

He did not live to see the outcome of the movement he had built. The INA's military campaign in Burma failed, but the trials of its officers at the Red Fort in late 1945 set off protests across India and unsettled the loyalty of the British Indian armed forces, developments many historians count among the pressures that hastened the British departure in 1947 ^[5][7].

Any fair account of Rash Behari Bose achievements has to span two continents: the Delhi bomb and the Ghadar network in India, then the League and the first INA in East Asia. For readers asking who was Rash Behari Bose, the answer is a bridge figure, the man who kept the idea of armed independence alive in exile and built the structure that Subhas Chandra Bose later made famous. In India he is commemorated on postage stamps and in the naming of institutions in Bengal; in Japan he is remembered both as a revolutionary sheltered at Nakamuraya and, more lightly, through the curry that carries the shop's name ^[1][2]. Among the harder Rash Behari Bose facts is this one: he spent twenty nine years in exile without abandoning the single purpose he had set as a young clerk in Dehradun.