A Life Immortal 321sion that Netaji had indeed died a martyr’s death in Taipei on Au-
gust 18, 1945.^34
General Tsunamasa Shidei’s family never questioned the circum-
stances of his death. His ser vice record, obtained by the Shah Nawaz
Khan committee of in quiry, stated the date of death as August 18, 1945,
and the place of death as “Taihoku Airfield.” The “cause of death” was
described as “death by war.” “The same was true of Netaji,” the 1956
report aptly commented, “only in his case it was a different war, the war
for the in de pen dence of India. His war was continuing. He was only
changing over from one battlefield to another, from Southeast Asia
to Manchuria.”^35 India’s freedom struggle had many noble martyrs,
but Netaji was the only front- rank leader of the Indian in de pen dence
movement who laid down his life in the battle for freedom.
The LegacyIn his po lit i cal testament, composed on the eve of his hunger strike in
November 1940, Subhas Chandra Bose expressed his conviction that
nobody could lose through suf fering and sac ri fice. “If he does lose any-
thing ‘of the earth, earthy,’” he wrote prophetically, alluding to Christ’s
resurrection, “he will gain much more in return by becoming the heir
to a life immortal.”^36 It is this spirit of sac ri fice that has ensured Netaji’s
transcendence beyond the mere trifle of corporeal death.
Subhas knew that his life had a mission: the freedom of India from
bondage. He had cast off all the constraints of colonial subjecthood
very early in his life. When he took the momentous decision to resign
from the Indian Civil Service at the age of twenty- four, he was already
done with the British raj in India. Throughout his long years of incar-
ceration and exile, he was essentially a free man, in the sense that he
had rejected submission to the British. That is why he found the slave
mentality among some of his countrymen so galling. Having himself
refused to owe allegiance to a foreign bu reau cracy in 1921, he em-
barked on a mighty crusade in 1941 to subvert the loyalty of Indians to
the armed ser vices of the British Empire and to replace it with a new
dedication to the cause of India’s freedom. Despite the INA’s military
failure, he was remarkably successful—if one mea sures his success by