Roads to Delhi 239on Germany in Europe, and the United States was steadily gaining on
Japan in the Pacific, gaining control of one island after another. Japan,
however, still occupied the erstwhile European colonial territories in
Southeast Asia. The presence of well over two million—if not three
million, as claimed by Bose—Indian civilians in that vast region gave
his planned movement in Asia potentially a very large social base of
support. The millennia- old ties between South and Southeast Asia had
grown stron ger in the modern era. Since the middle of the nineteenth
century, Indian cap italists, laborers, and professionals had been migrat-
ing in large numbers across the eastern Indian Ocean. Most of the fi-
nanciers, as well as the laborers working on Southeast Asian planta-
tions, came from the southern Indian region of Tamil Nadu. Indian
novelists, poets, artists, missionaries, mystics, soldiers, and anticolonial
visionaries had circulated across Southeast Asia in the early de cades of
the twentieth century. Rabindranath Tagore, for example, had made a
well- publicized voyage to Southeast Asia in 1927, to retrace the foot-
prints of “India’s entry into the universal.”^3
The first Indian National Army was formed on February 17, 1942,
two days after the British surrendered to Japanese forces in Singapore.
But it was in disarray by December. Bose possessed the stature, vision,
and or ga ni za tional ability to rekindle the spirit of anticolonial nation-
alism among the soldiers and weld them into an effective fight ing force.
If he was to achieve his dream of leading an army of liberation into
India, however, he had to win a desperate race against time. Could he
lead the Indian National Army into Calcutta, which he had left secretly
in the dead of night on January 16–17, 1941? Bengal, his home prov-
ince, was being devastated by a gigantic man-made famine just as he
assumed leadership of the Azad Hind (“Free India”) movement in
Southeast Asia. For years he had been keeping a handwritten calendar
of im por tant landmarks in his life: “Began work” was all he wrote next
to the date “July 1943.”^4 It was a euphemism for a concentrated spell of
tireless, frenetic activity pitting an individual’s will against the formi-
dable current of global military trends.
The crescent stretching from Singapore to Calcutta was the setting
for some of the most dramatic developments of the Second World War
in the years 1943–1945. During Bose’s first year in the region (mid-