The curious case of the gold bangles

Subhas Chandra Bose’s marriage to his Austrian stenographer has long been mired in mystery and controversy. Ahead of his birth anniversary on January 23, Sankar Ray reveals how a bunch of bangles puts all doubts about the matrimony to rest.

Last year, some irate fans of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose had an unusual demand for West Bengal chief minister, Mamata Banerjee.

They were of the opinion that she must remove professor Sugato Bose, Gardiner Professor of History at Harvard University, from the post of chairman of the mentors’ group of Kolkata’s Presidency University. Bose has been the key figure in the group which is working towards academic excellence at the university.

The reason? Bose’s biographical narrative, His Majesty’s Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India’s Struggle against Empire. In the book, Bose accepts that Netaji married Emilie Schenkl, his English-knowing Austrian stenographer. Bose is the son of Netaji’s nephew, late Sisir Kumar Bose who was an eminent paediatrician, and helped Netaji in his great escape from internment on 19 January, 1941.

Netaji first met Schenkl in 1934 in Germany and they married three years later, in December 1937. Most members of the All India Forward Bloc, founded by Netaji in 1939 after his resignation from the Indian National Congress, deny that Bose ever married.

However, one look at Dr Anita Bose Pfaff, Schenkl’s only child, confirms her resemblance with the late Indian leader. If the marriage didn’t take place, is Dr Pfaff the product of Netaji’s amoral aberration? Is that palatable to the fanatics, some of whom are covert fellow travellers of the Sangh Parivar? True, the mystery would have been solved with a simple DNA test, but Dr Pfaff, a German citizen, cannot be forced to undergo it.

There are many others who challenge the veracity of Netaji’s marriage to Schenkl. One of them is petitioner Surojit Dasgupta, who, along with eight others, filed a PIL in 2005 contesting Netaji’s marriage to Schenkl. Their contention is that the English translation of a letter which Netaji wrote to his elder brother, Sarat Chandra Bose, is forged because Netaji wrote to his brother in English only. The letter is part of the seventh volume of the Collected Works of Netaji brought out by the Netaji Research Bureau, Kolkata. The PIL is pending in court. Dasgupta and his lawyers claim that the original letter remains untraced, and Dasgupta insists that a copy “exists somewhere”.

Amid so much controversy, a forgotten bunch of gold bangles may put all doubts to rest. It is believed that Netaji’s mother, Prabhabati Devi, had kept aside some bangles for her youngest son’s bride.

She eventually gave them to Bibhabati Bose, Sarat Chandra Bose’s wife, and instructed her to hand them over to Netaji’s wife after his marriage.

Back in 1981, as acting editor of the now-defunct weekly financial newspaper of New Delhi, Capital, I was going through the final proof of the edition at the printing press. There, I met PK Ghosh, an eminent professor of chemistry at the University College of Science and Technology, Calcutta. He was proofreading a university textbook when someone recalled an opinion piece written on the story of the gold bangles in a newspaper then.

Ghosh had an amicable personality and he began reminiscing about his days at the Cambridge University in England where he was doing his doctoral dissertation. “One day, Sarat Chandra, Bibhabati and their three children came to meet some Bengali students and asked us to take them around place,” said Ghosh.

He and his friends readily agreed. “That was when I saw Bibhabati wearing those gold bangles. One day, Saratbabu told us that they planned to go to Vienna alone. This decision heightened our curiosity,” he added.

Ghosh then said that the Bose family returned to the UK without the bangles. “We didn’t raise the issue because it was rather sensitive. But it clearly meant that they knew, or had come to know just then, that Emilie Schenkl was, indeed, Netaji’s wife,” said Ghosh.

In 2003, after the Justice Manoj Mukherjee Committee of Inquiry into Disappearance of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose was instituted, I got hold of the email address of Schenkl’s daughter, Dr Pfaff, who is a professor of economics at the University of Augsburg. I sent her an email, asking whether Ghosh’s story was true. In her reply, she wrote, “My uncle and aunt, Sarat Chandra and Bibhabati Bose did come to Vienna in 1948 with their children to meet me and my mother. My aunt gave my mother a set of eight gold bangles, which my mother wore thereafter.” Dr Pfaff, now 70, lives in Germany with her husband, Dr Martin Pfaff who is a former Green Party member of the Bundestag, the German parliament.

As Hegels put it, history is a slaughter house. But, people who deny that Netaji married Schenkl must remember that Bibhhabati Bose, who Netaji adored as much as his own mother, accepted the alliance without question.