Perhaps 'India,' Subhas Chandra Bose wrote to his mother in 1912, when he was only fifteen years old, 'is God's beloved land. He has been born in this great land in every age in the form of the Saviour for the enlightenment of the people, to rid this earth of sin and to establish righteousness and truth in every Indian heart. He has come into being in many countries in human form but not so many times in any other country - that is why I say, India, our motherland, is God's beloved land.' Near the end of a life devoted to the service of the motherland, Netaji wrote in his last message to Indians on 15 August 1945: '…never for a moment falter in your faith in India's destiny. There is no power on earth that can keep India enslaved. India shall be free and before long.'

The popular perception of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose is that of a warrior-hero and revolutionary leader who led a life of suffering and sacrifice, and, during the Second World War, waged a great armed struggle for the freedom of India. What is often forgotten is that the warrior paused between battles to reflect on and write about the fundamental political, economic and social issues facing India and the world during his lifetime. Despite being immersed in the tumult of the anti-colonial struggle, Subhas Chandra Bose delved back in his writings into India's long and complex history and looked forward to the socio-economic reconstruction of India once political independence was won. The ideas he put forward were not of either a wandering mystic oblivious of the earth or a doctrinaire revolutionist reared on imported copybook maxims. They were the products of a philosophical mind applied to careful analyses of specific historical situations and informed by direct and continuous revolutionary experience in different parts of the world of a kind unknown to any other leader of contemporary India. Distilled out of a twelve-volume set of his Collected Works, his Essential Writings is designed to provide a single-volume introduction to the thought of India's foremost militant nationalist.

Edited by: Sisir K. Bose
                 Sugata Bose

Published by: Netaji Research Bureau, Calcutta
                       Oxford University Press, Delhi
                       1998