Rash Behari Bose, Exiled in Japan Since 1915, Chaired the Indian Independence League at Bangkok, Rebuilt the Indian National Army After December 1942 and Handed Both to Subhas Chandra Bose in July 1943

Rash Behari Bose was a Bengali revolutionary who lived in Japan from June 1915, chaired the Indian Independence League when it was formed at Bangkok in June 1942, and gave the League and the Indian National Army to Subhas Chandra Bose at Singapore in July 1943. He died in Tokyo on 21 January 1945, aged 58.

The record sits in several places. The Sedition Committee’s report of 1918 covers the Delhi bomb and the Punjab rising plan. A wire dispatch printed on the day of the Delhi attack gives the scene. Peter Fay’s The Forgotten Army has the fullest account of the League. Ramachandra Guha’s essay in The Telegraph, which draws on Takeshi Nakajima’s biography, fills in the Japan years. Where they disagree, the text says so. What Subhas Chandra Bose did after July 1943 is told in the earlier piece on the Azad Hind Fauj.

A head clerk in Dehradun

The Press Information Bureau’s magazine gives his birth as 25 May 1886 in Subhalda village, Bardhaman district. Fay puts him in the generation of Bengalis who turned to terrorism after the partition of Bengal.

By 1912 he held a government desk job. The Sedition Committee calls him Head Clerk of the Forest Research Institute at Dehra Dun, and says he schooled three young Hindus, Dina Nath, Abad Behari and Balmokand, in revolutionary politics, arranged for seditious leaflets to be spread, and introduced his servant, a young Bengali named Basanta Kumar Biswas, to the group.

Chandni Chowk, 23 December 1912

The Associated Press dispatch from Delhi, printed that day by the Asheville Gazette-News, says the Viceroy’s elephant procession had just left the railway station and was passing through Chandni Chowk when a man on a housetop threw a bomb. It hit the howdah, the basket seat on the elephant’s back, in which Lord and Lady Hardinge were riding.

The attendant holding a large parasol over them was killed at once, and another attendant was seriously wounded. Lord Hardinge was wounded in the shoulder, and surgeons at the hospital found the wound slight. Lady Hardinge was unhurt but badly shaken. Sir Guy Fleetwood Wilson, the finance member of the Governor-General’s council, took the Viceroy’s place in the procession, and at the durbar camp he read out a message from Hardinge saying he was only slightly injured.

The Sedition Committee wrote in 1918 that the thrower “was not discovered” and that one of Hardinge’s attendants had been killed. Five months later, on 17 May 1913, a bomb in the Lawrence Gardens at Lahore killed an Indian orderly who rode over it on his bicycle in the dark. The committee says Biswas placed it. Four men were convicted and hanged: Amir Chand, Abad Behari, Balmokand and Biswas. Dina Nath, a fifth, turned approver. Of the Delhi accused, the report says the evidence at their trial gave “a strong suspicion that they themselves contrived the Delhi outrage.” It adds that “Rash Behari escaped.” A second bomb in Delhi, thrown inside the Legislative Assembly in 1929, is told in the piece on Bhagat Singh.

Who threw the bomb is the contested point. Guha, reading Nakajima, writes that Biswas threw it and that Bose took the evening train back to Dehradun the same day and went on with his work. Kaveri Jain of Japan Calling calls Bose the main architect of the attack, and Fay writes only that he was suspected of complicity. No document used here names Bose as the thrower.

The rising planned for 21 February 1915

The Sedition Committee reports that by early 1914 Bose had arrived in Benares and “practically took charge” of a revolutionary circle there. A reward had been offered for his arrest and his photograph had been circulated, but he lived in the Bengali quarter for most of 1914, apparently unknown to the police. On the night of 18 November 1914 two bomb caps went off while he was examining them, and injured him and a younger associate, Sachindra Nath Sanyal.

That month Vishnu Ganesh Pingley came back from America with Sikhs of the Ghadar party. Ghadar, meaning mutiny, was the name the committee gives to a party of Indian emigrants in America and to its newspaper. An approver, a conspirator who testified for the Crown, said Pingley told the Benares circle that four thousand men had already come from America. At a meeting there in January 1915 Bose announced that a general rebellion was coming.

He then went to Amritsar, where a house was found for him. The committee says he worked with the Sikh revolutionaries there and arranged a general rising for 21 February, with Lahore as the headquarters. Emissaries went out to cantonments in upper India. A declaration of war was drawn up, along with flags, bombs, and tools to cut railways and telegraph wires. The committee’s tribunal recorded that Bose contributed four revolvers.

A spy had told the Government. On 19 February the Lahore headquarters was raided. Thirteen men were taken in all and twelve bombs were seized. The Lahore plotters had already moved the date, because they suspected one of their number of informing. The Benares group never learned of the change and waited on the parade ground on the evening of the 21st. Soldiers had been approached at Meerut, Cawnpore, Allahabad, Benares, Lucknow and elsewhere, and the committee says the success attained was “extremely small,” but that the seed sown would have caused tragedies had the rising not been “nipped in the bud.”

Bose and Pingley both got away from Lahore. Pingley was arrested at Meerut on 23 March in the lines of the 12th Cavalry with a box of ten bombs, and sentenced to death. Bose met a few disciples in Calcutta, told them he was going to “some hills” and would be away two years, and left the country. Haroon Khalid writes that the First Lahore Conspiracy Trial gave its judgement on 13 September 1915, with 24 sentenced to death and 27 to transportation for life. Sanyal, tried separately under the Defence of India Act, was transported for life.

Kobe, 5 June 1915

Guha, citing Nakajima, says Bose sailed in April 1915 under an assumed name and reached the port of Kobe on 5 June. He went on to Tokyo by train. Kaveri Jain says he travelled under the alias P. N. Tagore. Neither writer names the ship, and no other source opened for this piece does, so none is named here.

Japan was then Britain’s ally. Azizul Jalil writes in The Daily Star that Bose lived incognito for some time. The Japan Center for Asian Historical Records, part of the National Archives of Japan, says he met Sun Yat-sen, then in exile, in 1915, and that in October of that year Britain asked for his extradition. He took shelter at the Nakamuraya bakery in Shinjuku, Tokyo, with the family that owned it. Guha adds that a deportation order against him was later withdrawn as relations between Japan and Britain cooled.

He married the owner’s daughter Toshiko in July 1918, Guha writes. She died of pneumonia in 1925. Nakamuraya added Indian curry to its menu in 1927 using recipes he supplied, and by Guha’s account the dish outsold the bakery’s custard buns. Fay writes that Bose learned Japanese, married a Japanese and became a naturalised Japanese subject, and Jain gives the year as 1923. Neera Majumdar in ThePrint says the Soma family hid him in the bakery’s basement.

Tokyo and Bangkok, 1942

As Japanese victories spread, Fay writes, Indian leagues multiplied in Malaya, but the leadership of the movement came from Tokyo because Bose lived there. Japan’s General Staff, looking for a way to widen what Major Fujiwara had been doing with Indian prisoners, turned to him. His advice was to go ahead with Mohan Singh’s army but attach it to a political body speaking for Indians across Southeast Asia, one he would run. An invitation went out in his name, through Japanese military channels, for a conference in Tokyo.

Early in March 1942 about twenty people met at the Singapore home of the lawyer S. C. Goho to consider it, and a delegation under the Penang barrister N. Raghavan left for Tokyo at the end of March. Fay says the delegates did not wholly trust Bose, who “had lived too long among the Japanese.” The Tokyo conference decided nothing. The delegates returned in April with Bose, who chaired a public meeting at which an All-Malayan Indian Independence League was announced.

The single League for the whole region was formed at Bangkok in June. It had a Council of Action at the top and a Committee of Representatives from about a dozen Indian territories, with seats in proportion to population, Burma 21, Malaya 14 and Thailand 6 among them. The army answered to it, Fay says, and Bose occupied the chair of the Council. The Bangkok resolutions asked Japan to recognise free India’s sovereignty, to respect its territory, to hand over Indian prisoners of war to the army and to treat it as an allied force. One resolution asked the Japanese to arrange passage for Subhas Chandra Bose.

Fay writes that the Azad Bharat Sabha, the Free India Association that Lakshmi Swaminathan joined in Singapore, passed 100,000 members in four months, and that its card, printed in English and Japanese, was used to draw rations and to get past checkpoints.

December 1942, and an army that Bose had to rebuild

By the autumn the Indians and the Japanese were quarrelling over recognition, evacuee property in Burma and the use of Indian prisoners as labour. On 8 December the Japanese arrested Gill, a senior Indian officer of the army. Every member of the Council of Action except Bose resigned that evening. Mohan Singh treated the Council as defunct and demanded that Japan deal with him directly.

Bose spent three weeks trying to bring him round. On 29 December Mohan Singh was called to the bungalow of Colonel Iwakuro Hideo, Fujiwara’s successor, and told the terms on which he could stay in command. He refused them and was handed a letter of dismissal signed by Bose. The Japanese took him into custody, and he spent the rest of the war on Sumatra.

With Mohan Singh gone, Fay says, Bose “had the field to himself.” He went from camp to camp, talking to officers and men, and most came back. Zaman Kiani resumed command of the troops, Prem Sahgal became military secretary at a new Military Bureau, and Shah Nawaz Khan took the operations branch. Bose brought the League’s headquarters down from Bangkok and tied the revived army to it. The force was smaller. Scores of officers and several thousand men declined to rejoin, and the Japanese shipped many of them to distant labour sites.

Fay quotes K. R. Palta, who met Bose in Rangoon in September 1942 and saw a “wrinkled old man” still living in the world of the Bengal bomb throwers of thirty years before. Palta thought the battalions a token force. He also credits Bose’s many services, including the resurrection of the army. Fay adds that a great many Indians in Rangoon, Bangkok and Singapore were waiting for another Bose.

The Cathay cinema, Singapore, July 1943

Subhas Chandra Bose reached Singapore on Friday 2 July 1943, in rain, and almost no one was at the airfield. The PIB profile says he came to Tokyo on 20 June at Rash Behari’s invitation, and Guha says the two met in June and spoke in Bengali.

On Sunday 4 July, Fay writes, the Cathay Building’s movie theatre was packed with League members and the two men sat on the platform. Rash Behari spoke first, looking weary and ill, briefly and in English. Fay calls it his swan song, and writes that the old Bengali gave up his league and his army to the younger man with dignity. Subhas followed, and by the end, Fay writes, the man he was supplanting was practically forgotten. On Monday 5 July Subhas addressed the men of the Indian National Army, who in Fay’s account had never really accepted Rash Behari because he was a civilian and a Bengali. The PIB profile dates the handover of command to 5 July. Jalil writes that Subhas called him the father of the Indian independence struggle in East Asia and made him chief adviser to the provisional government.

What the sources do not settle

Three points stay open: the ship and sailing date of 1915, the name of the man who threw the bomb at Chandni Chowk, and whether the handover fell on 4 or 5 July 1943. His death is dated 21 January 1945 by Guha, Jalil, Jain and the PIB profile, while the glossary of the Japan Center for Asian Historical Records gives January 1944. Guha writes that his lungs collapsed in February 1944. Jalil writes that the Japanese government awarded him the Second Order of the Merit of the Rising Sun before his death and sent an imperial coach to carry his body.