Nehru & Bose: parallel lives by Rudrangshu Mukherjee penguin books; Price: Rs.599; Pages 256 Critics and laymen who complain the history of India in the 20th century is overly dominated by the towering personalities of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and his offspring, are not unjustified in voicing dissatisfaction. Several scholarly and informative biographies have been written about Nehru, independent India™s first prime minister, his daughter Indira Gandhi, free India™s longest serving prime minister and her son Rajiv who succeeded her. But other stalwarts of the freedom movement notably Chakravarti Rajagopalachari, Vallabhbhai Patel, Rajendra Prasad, Subhas Chandra Bose, and Lal Bahadur Shastri have not attracted the attention of professional historians with (English) language proficiency, scholarly discipline and capability to sift trivia from substance. This lacuna vis- -vis Subhas Chandra Bose (1897-1945), one of the most romantic and dashing leaders of the Congress party and uncompromising champion of India™s liberation from British imperialism, has been handsomely filled by this eminently readable comparative biography of Nehru and Bose. Free-flowing, balanced and rich with insight and the revealing anecdote, this volume tracks the career progression of two individuals of broadly alike upper-middle class backgrounds (both sired by successful lawyers), who developed a deep friendship sharing a common radical ideology, while rising high in the inner councils of the Congress party, as under the leadership of Gandhiji it planned and plotted to end British rule. Although Nehru™s privileged home schooling by English tutors in the parental mansion (which inter alia offered a swimming pool and tennis court) followed by Harrow and Cambridge is the stuff of legend and folklore, the information deficit about Bose™s background, is made good by Oxford-educated historian Rudrangshu Mukherjee (Awadh in Revolt, 1857-1858; The 1857 Kanpur Massacres; Penguin Gandhi Reader), former editor of The Telegraph, Calcutta and currently first vice chancellor of the mint-new Ashoka University, Gurgaon. Like Motilal Nehru in Allahabad, Janakinath Bose, a successful Cuttack (Orissa)-based lawyer also ensured that his son received œthe best education the English could offer, albeit in India. Subhas studied at the Protestant European School and seven years later at Ravenshaw Collegiate School, Cuttack where he learned to read and write Bengali and discovered Swami Vivekananda and Ramakrishna Paramhansa. Unlike the fashionably upper crust Nehru eight years his elder, who scraped through his exams in Harrow and Cambridge which awarded him a second-class degree in the natural sciences in 1910, Bose was a brilliant student and topped the matriculation examination conducted by Calcutta University. In 1913, he was admitted into Presidency College, where typically, he got into trouble for allegedly assaulting an English professor of history who had œmanhandled some of his batchmates. Although it™s doubtful he was directly involved in the assault, Bose was expelled from Presidency and forced to return to Cuttack œwhere there were no words of recrimination from his family, and he immersed himself in social work. A year later, he was re-admitted into Calcutta University and read philosophy at the Scottish Church College, graduating with a first class degree. In…
