Subhas Chandra Bose came to regard tyaga and amrita (renunciation and realization) as “two faces of the same medal” during his long stay in Mandalay Jail. “To attain hundred per cent and to sacrifice hundred per cent”, he proclaimed, had become a passion with him.

This volume opens with Bose’s prison letters written during the last year he spent in Burmese prisons in 1926–1927 (plus twenty earlier unpublished letters of 1925). Between 1928 and 1931 Subhas was in and out of prison, even as he emerged as the leader of students, youth and labour across India.

The volume closes with another set of his prison letters written from many different jails during the second phase of the civil disobedience movement in 1932.

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.