Rash Behari Bose and His Japanese Supporters

The life of the ‘Other Bose’ involves an intriguing story, which complicates many of the general dichotomies of colonial history. Rash Behari Bose (1886–1945) was born in north-eastern Bengal in 1886. From his youth, he engaged in anti-British activities, on account of which he was forced to flee India in 1915. The Bengali independence fighter then escaped to pre-war Japan, befriended a group of influential Japanese Pan-Asianists, married into one of Tokyo's most progressive families, and continued his life as an activist into wartime. The case of Rash Behari Bose and his Japanese supporters constitutes a remarkable chapter in the developmental history of international cooperation among Asian peoples that preceded Japan's wartime Pan-Asianist rhetoric of the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’. The present article argues that such evidence of cross-border cooperation in the modern history of Asia, as embraced by Rash Behari Bose and his supporters in Japan, sheds light on the analysis of an anti-Western transnationalism in its embryonic form. Thus, the aim of this article is two-fold. First, it attempts to introduce the little-known figure of Rash Behari Bose. Second, by considering the function of Pan-Asianism in Bose's story, I will attempt to demonstrate the complexity of Pan-Asianism not usually addressed in the conventional reading of its role simply as a propagandistic tool of Japan's imperial expansion

BENGAL · China · East Asia · Political science · Prosperity · Sociology · Asian Studies and History · Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies · History · Law · Socioeconomic Development in Asia

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