London: C. Hurst & Co. Ltd., 2023. US$32.00, cloth. ISBN 9781805260424.
Much has been written about Subhas Chandra Bose, the controversial Indian nationalist who sought Axis support for India’s freedom during World War II. Despite his alliances with Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and imperial Japan, Chandra Bose is today celebrated as a nationalist hero in India. Sugata Bose, the grand-nephew of Chandra Bose, wrote a biography about his grand-uncle in 2011 that was widely criticized in academic circles for offering a simplistic narrative, bordering on hagiography, of Chandra Bose’s engagement with fascism and Axis empire-building projects (His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle against Empire, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011). At the core of Sugata Bose’s argument was a question that continues to bedevil serious academic discussion not only about Chandra Bose, but in regard to all anti-colonial activists who adopted the strategy of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” in their struggle for self-determination: Was he a collaborator or a pragmatic opportunist?
This question is also at the core of Joseph McQuade’s book, Fugitive of Empire: Rash Behari Bose, Japan and the Indian Independence Struggle. With lucid writing, McQuade brings to life the story of Rash Behari Bose, an Indian revolutionary who fled to Japan during World War I and sought Japanese support for India’s independence struggle. Beginning his first chapter with Behari Bose’s 1912 assassination attempt on Lord Hardinge, then viceroy of India, McQuade proceeds to discuss Behari Bose’s early life (chapter 2), his involvement in the Ghadar movement and attempt to stir a rebellion among soldiers serving in the British Indian Army (chapter 3), his escape to Japan and connections with other Indian and Asian revolutionaries (chapters 4 and 5) in Tokyo, his encounter with interwar Japanese imperialism (chapter 6), and finally culminating in the foundational role that Behari Bose played in the creation of the Indian National Army during World War II (chapter 7). Although Chandra Bose would eventually and famously lead the Indian National Army (INA) as part of Japan’s last-ditch attempt to reverse its wartime fortunes by invading northeast India in 1944, McQuade points out that the INA was the brainchild of Behari Bose and the fruit of his decades-long activism in Japan and elsewhere in East and Southeast Asia (xvii).
As McQuade notes in his prologue, Fugitive of Empire is not the first book to be written about Rash Behari Bose (xvii). While much has been written about Behari Bose in Japanese and in various Indian languages, there is comparatively little written about him in English, aside from a few journal articles and mentions in works addressing the history of transnational anti-colonial revolutionary movements during the first half of the twentieth century. For a long time, the English translation of Takeshi Nakajima’s biography of Rash Behari Bose was the closest that anglophone scholarship had to a book-length study on the Indian revolutionary (Bose of Nakamuraya: An Indian Revolutionary in Japan, Prem Motwani trans., Promilla and Co., 2009). McQuade has now provided us with what is perhaps the first academic biography in the English language on Behari Bose’s remarkable life. For this alone, Fugitive of Empire is a landmark achievement.
From the outset, McQuade issues a disclaimer: Fugitive of Empire is almost entirely based on English-language sources, the only exception being Sachindranath Sanyal’s memoir of Rash Behari Bose in Hindi (xxii–xxiii). Behari Bose was a prolific writer in Japanese and contributed to a wide range of newspapers and journals in popularizing the Indian nationalist struggle in Japan. Although McQuade does not directly engage with Japanese-language archival and secondary sources, this is not necessarily a fault, and he marshals a wide range of sources in the English language. Some of these archives have been mined extensively in narrating the story of Rash Behari Bose, such as British intelligence reports. But McQuade’s novel contribution is the extensive use of Behari Bose’s private correspondence and the English-language journal New Asia, which Behari Bose inaugurated in 1933 in Tokyo. These archives give an anglophone audience a fascinating picture of how Behari Bose located his anti-colonial activism, often in contradictory ways, in relation to developments in India, Japan, and elsewhere around the world.
However, the story one tells is often guided by the sources and methodology used. McQuade’s biography of Rash Behari Bose is located squarely in the field of transnational studies of South Asian anti-colonial nationalism. There is little attempt to situate Behari Bose’s activism within critical English-language scholarship on the Japanese empire and the often-deceptive allure of Pan-Asianism as expressed in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (Ethan Mark, Japan’s Occupation of Java in the Second World War: A Transnational History, Bloomsbury, 2018). Nor is there any discussion of the complicity of Behari Bose’s Indian Independence League (IIL) and its invocations of Indian nationalism within a Pan-Asianist framework in the horrific exploitation of Tamil and Indian POW labour in Southeast Asia during the Asia-Pacific War, something that has been well documented by both Japanese and anglophone historians and anthropologists (for example Michiko Nakahara, “Malayan Labor on the Thailand-Burma Railway,” in Asian Labour in the Wartime Japanese Empire, ed. Paul Kratoska, Singapore University Press, 2006). McQuade notes that Behari Bose’s endorsement of Japanese imperialism sat uncomfortably with his calls for Asian self-determination and racial solidarity (169). However, McQuade’s approach throughout the book is to refrain from reconciling these tensions (xxiii). For scholars of Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, as well as historians and anthropologists who have worked on South Asian diaspora communities in East and Southeast Asia, who have more rigorously grappled with the question of collaboration and complicity, this aspect of McQuade’s methodology may not be entirely satisfactory.
While McQuade rightly reminds readers to not simply caricaturize Behari Bose by dismissing him as a pro-Japanese collaborator, emphasizing that he was a pragmatic, if contradictory, nationalist committed to Indian and Asian freedom comes with its own issues (229). It is true that Behari Bose did not see himself as an agent of Japanese imperialism, and certainly did not wish to present himself as such to his Indian audience. Yet it should not be ignored that his entanglements with Japan’s Pan-Asianist ideology and its military and civilian leaders had real consequences for the very people that he claimed to be fighting for. The lack of critical engagement in problematizing Behari Bose’s “pragmatism” in the context of interwar and wartime Japan is a glaring omission in what is otherwise a beautifully written book. Nevertheless, McQuade’s biography is a welcome contribution that provides a very useful and engaging introduction to Behari Bose’s life and promises to generate important conversations across East Asian and South Asian studies.
Aaron Peters
Ambrose University, Calgary