Book review: The legend of Bose finally laid to rest?
Deccan ChronicleOne of the panellists at the Kolkata launch of Laid to Rest suggested The Last Word would have been a more appropriate title for this passionately argued book which delves through masses of letters, reports and records in several countries. Another panellist at once said that in spite of Ashis Ray’s claim to provide final and irrefutable proof that Subhas Chandra Bose died in a plane crash in Taiwan on August 18, 1945, and was cremated on August 22 after which his ashes were stored in Tokyo’s Renkoji temple, there never will be a last word. A recent Internet posting claimed that the death certificate for “Chandra Bose” that Dr Taneyoshi Yoshimi, surgeon at the Nanmon branch of Taipei Army Hospital, issued was a “fake” produced 43 years later. One need look no further, Ray says, than the 1956 Shah Nawaz Khan Committee’s blunt majority assertion that Bose “met his death in an air crash, and that the ashes now at Renkoji temple, Tokyo, are his ashes.” Not that any of this is of much consequence any longer. “Only the usual thing happened: one man sowed and others reaped after him.” Ray’s is a labour of love.
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