An Indian Pilgrim

Subhas Chandra Bose’s ‘discovery of India’, unlike Jawaharlal Nehru’s, occurred very early in life, when he was barely in his teens. ‘How many selfless sons of the Mother are prepared, in this selfish age,’ the fifteen-year-old Subhas asked his mother in 1912, ‘to completely give up their personal interests and take the plunge for the Mother? Mother, is this son of yours yet ready?’ As he stood on the verge of taking the plunge by resigning from the Indian Civil Service in 1921, he wrote to his elder brother Sarat: ‘Only on the soil of sacrifice and suffering can we raise our national edifice.’

In December 1937 Bose wrote ten chapters of his autobiography, providing a narrative of his life until 1921 and a reflective chapter entitled ‘My Faith-Philosophical’. The autobiography is complemented with a fascinating collection of seventy letters of Bose’s childhood, adolescence and youth. It is not often that remembrances written later in life can be read together with primary source materials of the earlier, formative phases.

This volume thus supplies the material with which to study the influences – religious, cultural, moral, intellectual and political – that moulded the character and personality of the revolutionary leader of India’s freedom struggle.