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Sugata Bose

Sugata Bose (born 7 September 1956) is an Indian historian and politician who has taught and worked in the United States since the mid-1980s. His fields of study are South Asian and Indian Ocean history. Bose taught at Tufts University until 2001, when he accepted the Gardiner Chair of Oceanic History and Affairs at Harvard University.[1] Bose is also the director of the Netaji Research Bureau in Kolkata,[2] India, a research center and archives devoted to the life and work of Bose's great uncle, the Indian nationalist, Subhas Chandra Bose.[3] Bose is the author most recently of His Majesty's Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India's Struggle against Empire (2011) and A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (2006).

Sugata Bose
Bose in 2015
Born (1956-09-07) 7 September 1956 (age 68)
Kolkata, West Bengal, India
NationalityIndian
Alma materUniversity of Calcutta (B.A.)
University of Cambridge (PhD)
Occupation(s)Historian; Member of parliament from Jadavpur Constituency in West Bengal
EmployerHarvard University
Notable workA Hundred Horizons, His Majesty's Opponent
Political partyAll India Trinamool Congress
SpouseAyesha Jalal
Parent(s)Krishna Bose, Sisir Kumar Bose
Websitewww.sugatabose.com
Sugata Bose
Member of Parliament
for Jadavpur
In office
2014–2019
Preceded byKabir Suman
Succeeded byMimi Chakraborty

From 2014 to 2019, Bose has served as a Member of India's Parliament from the Jadavpur Constituency in West Bengal with his party affiliation in Mamata Banerjee-led All India Trinamool Congress (TMC).

Early life and family

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Sugata Bose was born in Calcutta, India. After studying at Presidency College, Kolkata, University of Calcutta Bose subsequently completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge before being named a research fellow of St. Catharine's College at Cambridge in 1981.[4]

The grandnephew of Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose[3] and grandson of nationalist Sarat Chandra Bose. His father was paediatrician and legslator Sisir Kumar Bose and his mother was educator and legislator Krishna Bose.[5] Bose's brother, Sumantra Bose, teaches at the London School of Economics; his sister, Sarmila Bose, is a researcher at Oxford University.[6]

Academic career

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After completing his PhD at Cambridge, Sugata Bose began his career as a professor of history and diplomacy at Tufts University.[7] In 2001 Bose was appointed to the Gardiner Chair of Oceanic History and Affairs at Harvard University, a position that had lain vacant for almost two decades, one which had been previously occupied by historians of the Western Hemisphere, but one for which Harvard specifically wanted a historian of South Asia.[1] From 2003 to 2010, Bose headed up the university's South Asia initiative as well as the graduate program in the history department.

Books

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In 2011 Bose published His Majesty's Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India's Struggle against Empire, a biography of his great uncle Subhas Bose. The biography, a trade book,[8] has been criticised in scholarly reviews for soft-pedaling or oversimplifying Subhas Chandra Bose's alliances with Italian Fascism, German National Socialism, and Japanese imperialism.[9][10] The book has also been criticised for its optimistic speculations on what Subhas Bose might have accomplished had he lived.[11] Some popular reviews have been more positive.[12][13][14][15]

In his earlier A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (2006), Bose attempts to challenge the thesis pioneered by Kirti N. Chaudhuri in Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750, Cambridge University Press, 1985, ISBN 9780521285421 and developed by Andre Wink and others, which holds that the world's first "global economy," the trans-Indian-ocean maritime economy—whose trade was assisted by the alternating winds and currents of the monsoons and which arose in the wake of the spread of Islam—was in turn undercut by European capitalism in the early 18th century.[16] Instead, Bose contends, in the main thesis of his book, an inter-regional economy of middle-level bazaar merchants and traders continued well into the late 1920s, existing between the dominant European capitalists at the top and the peasants and peddlers at the bottom.[16] This according to Bose, was not just the case in the market of goods and services, but also in the barter of ideas and culture.[16] Attempting to bolster the latter notion are sections in the book on Mohandas K. Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, and Bose's great uncle Subhas Chandra Bose.[16] A Hundred Horizons was praised by academic reviewers for explicating the transformations to networks which linked Indian Ocean societies, beyond the influence of colonial empires,[17] and for exploring "cosmopolitan notions of anticolonialism" throughout the Indian Ocean world.[18] However, Bose's delineation of that economy has been criticised for not going much beyond India and Indians,[19][20] for reducing the complex exchange between the British and India to a clash of Indian nationalism and British authoritarianism;[21] and for not providing sufficient warrant for the main thesis in the book.[22]

Bose is also the author and editor of books on the economic, social and political history of modern South Asia. Beginning his career with work on the economy of agrarian Bengal, Bose published two volumes on his research. Agrarian Bengal: Economy, Social Structure and Politics, 1919–1947, published in 1986, contextualised rural economic life within the wider currents of the global economy,[citation needed] while a 1993 contribution to the New Cambridge History of India, Peasant Labour and Colonial Capital: Rural Bengal since 1770, analysed two and a half centuries of regional economic and social change.[citation needed]

Political career

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Sugata Bose was a Trinamool Congress MP (2014–2019) at the 16th Lok Sabha, representing the Jadavpur constituency.[23]

Other activities

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In January 2012, Bose joined New Yorker editor David Remnick, former New York Times editor Joseph Lelyveld and journalist Peter Popham at the sixth Jaipur Literature Festival in a panel on the challenges of biographical writing.[24]

Bose has been active in researching, speaking, and publishing on Rabindranath Tagore, contributing to projects across different media. In 2007, Krishna and Sugata Bose co-edited Purabi: the East in its Feminine Gender, a book and CD of Tagore's poetry and music. Bose has produced a four-CD set of Tagore's songs written outside of India as Visva Yatri Rabindranath, and has lectured widely on Tagore in North America, Europe, and Asia.[25]

Beyond his work at Harvard and Tufts, Bose has helped steer two major projects advancing higher education in India. Since 2007, Bose has been a member of the Government of India's Nalanda Mentor Group, which seeks to establish an international university on the site of the ancient University of Nalanda in Bihar. Since 2011, Bose has served as chairman of the Presidency College Mentor Group, which seeks to revitalise the 194-year-old Kolkata college.[26] He also served on the Social Sciences jury for the Infosys Prize in 2009, and the Humanities jury in 2015 and 2016.[27]

Bibliography

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Books

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Chapters in books

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  • Bose, Sugata (2009). "Pondering poverty, fighting famines: towards a new history of economic ideas". In Kanbur, Ravi; Basu, Kaushik (eds.). Arguments for a better world: essays in honor of Amartya Sen. Volume II: Society, institutions and development. Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press. pp. 425–435. ISBN 9780199239979.

Notes

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  1. ^ a b Phillips, Lauren (1 April 2001). "Harvard hires Sugata Bose, Tufts' South Asian center founder". The Tufts Daily.
  2. ^ "Ex-Japan PM Shinzo Abe given Netaji Award 2022". economictimes.com. The Economic Times. Press Trust of India. 23 January 2022. Archived from the original on 23 January 2022. Retrieved 8 July 2022.
  3. ^ a b "India today needs legacy of Bose and Mahatma: Sugata Bose". The Hindu. Chennai, India. 26 July 2011.
  4. ^ "Sugata Bose Appointment to St Catharine's" (PDF).
  5. ^ "Pakistanis Who Married Indians from Across the Border | Reviewit.pk". 15 October 2018.
  6. ^ Anjali Puri, Lunch With BS: Sugata Bose, Business Standard, 4 March 2016.
  7. ^ Phillips 2001.
  8. ^ Zachariah 2012, p. 109: Quote: "Sugata Bose's biographical tribute to his great-uncle, the Indian nationalist politician Subhas Chandra Bose (1897–1945) is a gripping tale of a life of anti-colonial struggle and of a quiet, religiously oriented individual who spent much of his adult life in prison or in exile, tormented by his colonial overlords, becoming a politician, a warrior, and a legend and inspiration to some after his death. ... As a trade book, it also eschews some of the scholarly paraphernalia that enable a more critical engagement with its contents. Academic circles have long had in Leonard Gordon's Brothers against the Raj: A Biography of Indian Nationalists Sarat and Subhas Chandra Bose (1990) a careful and detailed account of the lives of Subhas Bose and his elder brother Sarat. Sugata Bose's book is not likely to replace Gordon's account."
  9. ^ Framke 2012, p. 365: Quote: "While one can only highly recommend this book as a fine introduction to readers interested in the history of the national independence movement in the first half of the 20th century, in regard to Bose's encounters and interactions with National Socialism and Fascism, the monograph does not provide important new insights. ... Not only this episode, but also several others are interpreted by Sugata Bose in a rather unambiguous way that strongly rejects all possible affinities of Subhas Chandra Bose towards Fascism and National Socialism. In doing so, the author in my understanding, presents a relatively simplistic account of a much complex nature of engagement which Bose nurtured with international and national ideological contexts."
  10. ^ Zachariah 2012, pp. 109–110: Quote: "The fact that he (Subhas Bose) considered himself a socialist, often expressed his displeasure or disagreement with aspects of the Italian or German dictatorships or with Japanese imperialism, and had Jewish friends in Germany and Austria, or that he wrote in his autobiography of the need for a "synthesis" between socialism and fascism, is not a substitute for a more nuanced intellectual history that engages seriously with what these ideologies were."
  11. ^ Wainwright 2013, p. 361: Quote: "Less certain are some of the author's speculations regarding how Bose's presence in India after the Allied victory might have affected the partition and political culture of the subcontinent."
  12. ^ Bhattacharya, Sabyasachi (2011). "Review". Biblio. Retrieved 30 October 2014.
  13. ^ Mukherjee, Rudrangshu (29 July 2011). "A Hero's Story". The Telegraph. Calcutta, India. Archived from the original on 15 October 2012. Retrieved 23 March 2014.
  14. ^ Malik, Ashok (5 August 2011). "Son of the Nation". The Hindustan Times. Archived from the original on 23 March 2014. Retrieved 23 March 2014.
  15. ^ Motadel, David (24 February 2012). "India's Enemy's Enemy". The Times Literary Supplement.
  16. ^ a b c d Campbell 2007.
  17. ^ Chatterjee, Kumkum (Winter 2008). "Review: A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire by Sugata Bose". Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 38 (3): 499–500. doi:10.1162/jinh.2008.38.3.499. JSTOR 20143696. S2CID 142930849.
  18. ^ Bertz 2007.
  19. ^ Campbell 2007, p. 1141a: Quote: "Thus Bose promises the reader an exposé of the continuity into the modern era of an ancient and sophisticated maritime system of long-distance exchange. ... If only that promise were upheld. Instead, we are treated to what increasingly, chapter by chapter, becomes a nationalist Indian version of Indian Ocean history. The key actors are all Indian and the only country in the region that counts is India."
  20. ^ Bertz 2007, p. 378: The method employed here is to sketch the histories of the "circular migrants" listed above, centring their encounters with the Indian Ocean as the backdrop. However, one can see the challenge in trying to hold these stories together within a single ambitious book. ... A surprisingly narrow aspect of the text is that its main actors are almost universally male and nearly all Indian.
  21. ^ Campbell 2007, p. 1141b: Quote:"Of far greater significance for Bose arc the British—and not for establishing the Pax Britannica in the region that permitted the expansion of the Indian trading network. Rather, Bose summons up a caricature of the unrelenting coloniser and oppressor against whose narrow racist and capitalist vision he pits the liberating universalism and profound antimaterialism of Indians."
  22. ^ Campbell 2007, p. 1141c: Quote: "In sum, this is a curious book. A historical and literary dance through the history of rising Indian nationalist sentiment against British imperial rule, it appears aimed more for domestic Indian nationalist consumption than for scholars of the Indian Ocean world. In it, Bose grossly underestimates the complexities of the British imperial presence, and the many divisions along ethnic, caste, religious, economic, and political lines that existed among Indians, at home and overseas. More importantly, his concern with the Indian nationalist cause leads Bose increasingly to lose sight of his initial thesis and the wider enduring rhythms of trans-Indian Ocean world exchange."
  23. ^ "Election results: Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose's grandnephew Sugata Bose wins from Bengal's Jadavpur". The Times of India.
  24. ^ "Objectivity & obsession with subject must for biographers". The Times of India. Archived from the original on 5 May 2013.
  25. ^ "Penang Story Lectures: presented by Dr. Sugata Bose". thinkcity.com. Think City. Retrieved 30 October 2014.
  26. ^ Dasgupta, Partha (16 July 2011). "Old boys to the rescue". India Today. Retrieved 30 October 2014.
  27. ^ "Infosys Prize - Jury 2016".

Cited Sources

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Further reading

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