x Preface
of the hazardous submarine voyage he took with Netaji in 1943. S. A.
Ayer told many vivid anecdotes about Netaji’s time in Singapore and
Rangoon, including the pro cess of writing the proclamation of the pro-
visional government of free India. Another visitor, Lakshmi Sahgal,
described the formation of the women’s regiment of the Indian Na-
tional Army in 1943. Janaki Thevar Athinahappan spoke of the regi-
ment’s retreat with Netaji from Burma to Thailand in 1945. The battles
fought in Imphal, Kohima, and Burma came alive in the words of Prem
Kumar Sahgal, Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon, Abid Hasan, Mehboob Ahmed,
and many others. Their voices became thick with emotion whenever
they spoke about Netaji, and they wept for their lost leader de cades af-
ter he was gone.
One afternoon in early December 1940, Netaji called my father to
his side and inquired, “Amaar ekta kaj korte parbe?” The kaj (“work”)
that my father was being asked to do was to help his uncle escape from
British- ruled India. From that day on, my father never stopped doing
Netaji’s work. Despite his busy professional life as one of India’s leading
pediatricians, he was deeply committed to upholding the best tradi-
tions of India’s freedom struggle. In 1957, he established the Netaji
Research Bureau (NRB)—an institute devoted to his tory, politics, and
international relations—in Netaji’s ancestral house at 38/2 Elgin Road.
I grew up in tandem with that institution, to which he devoted far
more time and attention than to his children.
I did not fully appreciate the scale of my father’s achievement until I
turned to writing this book. Through half a century of dedicated effort,
he had managed to collect a trove of documents, letters, manuscripts,
relics, memoirs, photographs, voice recordings, and film footage con-
nected to Netaji and the Indian in de pen dence movement—materials
gathered from all corners of Asia and Europe and beyond. Though I
have made extensive use of archives in London, Delhi, and elsewhere,
no truly substantive biography of Netaji would have been possible
without the priceless resources available at the Netaji Research Bureau.
I remember with much fondness its first archivist, Naga Sundaram,
who as a young civilian recruit in the Indian National Army had fought
at the Battle of Imphal, and Benode Chandra Chaudhuri, who in the
NRB’s early de cades ran its publications division with unflagging zeal.