Sugata Bose

Early life and family

Sugata Bose was born in Calcutta, India. After studying at Presidency College, Kolkata, 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.

The grandnephew of Indian nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose and grandson of nationalist Sarat Chandra Bose, Bose is the son of former Trinamool Congress parliamentarian Krishna Bose and paediatrician Sisir Kumar Bose. Bose's brother, Sumantra Bose, teaches at the London School of Economics; his sister, Sarmila Bose, is a researcher at Oxford University.

Academic career

After completing his Ph.D. at Cambridge, Sugata Bose began his career as a professor of history and diplomacy at Tufts University. In 2001 Bose was appointed to the Gardiner Chair of Oceanic History and Affairs, 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. From 2003 to 2010, Bose headed up the university's South Asia initiative as well as the graduate program in the history department.

Books

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, has been criticised in scholarly reviews for soft-peddling or oversimplifying Subhas Chandra Bose's alliances with Italian Fascism, German National Socialism, and Japanese imperialism. The book has also been criticised for its optimistic speculations on what Subhas Bose might have accomplished had he lived. Some popular reviews have been more positive.

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  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. 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. 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. 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. 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, and for exploring "cosmopolitan notions of anticolonialism" throughout the Indian Ocean world. However, Bose's delineation of that economy has been criticised for not going much beyond India and Indians, for reducing the complex exchange between the British and India to a clash of Indian nationalism and British tyranny; and for not providing sufficient warrant for the main thesis in the book.

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, 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.

Political career

Sugata Bose is a Trinamool Congress MP at the 16th Lok Sabha, representing the Jadavpur constituency.

Other activities

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.

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.

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.