In February 1933, a seriously ill and emaciated prisoner was carried out of an ambulance on a stretcher and put on a ship about to sail from Bombay to Europe. When the same man boarded a KLM flight in Calcutta for Europe in November 1937, he was the President-elect of the Indian National Congress.

The years 1933 to 1937 witnessed the transformation of a radical leader into a statesman. This volume brings together the letters, articles, and speeches from a fascinating, though somewhat unusual and relatively neglected, phase of the career of Subhas Chandra Bose. An extraordinarily wide array of topics and themes are touched upon and explored in his works of this period—imperialism, nationalism, fascism, communism, psychology, philosophy, spirituality, urban planning, travel, Gandhi, Ireland, love, and more.

SISIR KUMAR BOSE (1920–2000) founded the Netaji Research Bureau in 1957 and was its guiding spirit. A participant in the Indian freedom struggle, he was imprisoned by the British. After Independence he authored and edited biographies, memoirs, monographs, and research papers on Netaji’s life and times.

SUGATA BOSE is Gardiner Professor of History at Harvard University. He is the author of several books on economic, social, and political history, including A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire and His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle Against Empire.