RASH BEHARI BOSE AND HIS JAPANESE SUPPORTERS

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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.