Subhas: A Political Biography

In a society immured to its fallen state, any serious effort to awake it to the possibility of improvement demands leaders who should be demigods or prophets endowed with a capacity to work miracles. Demigods and prophets in the present-day are unavailable to work miracles. The redemption of India in the state of abasement demanded leaders who were either demo-Gods or warrior-redeemers. These leaders had to subject themselves to austerities of extreme severity in order to acquire moral authority necessary before they could get a hearing from their compatriots. If the leaders were avatars in human form, or at the very least, warrior-redeemers, they would have the capacity to individually carry the responsibility, and bear the cost of the endeavours, which in other circumstances, should have been shared collectively. What should have been a collective enterprise of the Indian people was often a responsibility borne by a few. These few were haunted by a call of duty which should have been answered by many. Extreme personal sacrifices were thus demanded of the relatively few great leaders of the freedom movement, and Subhas was haunted from his boyhood days by a sense of shame and guilt about the abasement of his people. Prolonged sufferings to which the imperial rulers subjected him changed him from a dreamy young man to a warrior-redeemer.