1. BIOGRAPHY
Sumantra Bose
Sumantra Bose was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India on 7 June 1968 to Sisir Kumar
Bose, a doctor, and Krishna Bose, a professor and writer.
2. He grew up in Calcutta, where he studied for twelve years at the St. Xavier’s Collegiate
School.
In the late 1980s, he went to the United States for higher studies. In May 1992, he graduated
from Amherst College, Massachusetts, with a summa cum laude (highest honours), and was
elected to the US’s national academic honours society, Phi Beta Kappa. Sumantra majored in
political science at Amherst, with informal minors in history and economics. His senior
honours thesis was awarded the Densmore Berry Collins Prize for the best thesis in political
science.
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4. In September 1992, Sumantra entered the PhD programme in political science at Columbia
University, New York. During his years as a graduate student at Columbia, Sumantra was
successively Faculty Fellow (1992-1994), President’s Fellow (1994-1995), and Lindt Fellow
(1997-1998). From 1995 to 1997, he held a Fellowship in International Peace and Security
awarded by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the MacArthur Foundation.
Sumantra earned M.A. (1994) and MPhil degrees at Columbia, and received the PhD in
political science in 1998. At Columbia, his primary field was Comparative Politics, and his
secondary field was Political Theory, with a third field in Research Methods.
5. In 1998-1999, Sumantra taught for a year as an assistant professor of political science at
Wellesley College, Massachusetts. In autumn 1999, he moved to London and joined the
London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) as The Ralf Dahrendorf Fellow in
Comparative Politics.
He had already lived in London and studied at LSE for a year as an undergraduate in its
Department of International Relations in 1990-1991, as a junior-year-abroad student from
Amherst College (the third of the four undergraduate years at Amherst). In 2001, he was
appointed as a permanent Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at LSE, exceptionally with lifetime
tenure on the basis of outstanding research and teaching performance. In 2003, he was
promoted to Reader (advanced Associate Professor) at LSE. In 2006, he was promoted to a
Chair (Full Professorship) in International and Comparative Politics at LSE. He held this
Chair for the next fourteen years, until autumn 2020. He is an Associate of LSE-IDEAS (the
LSE’s international affairs think-tank) and an Associate of the LSE’s India Observatory.
Sumantra Bose has published eight sole-authored books, details of which are on the
‘Publications’page. Three of his books have been published by Harvard University Press,
and one each by Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and Yale University
Press. His latest book, Kashmir at the Crossroads: Inside a 21st-Century Conflict, has been
published worldwide by Yale University Press in autumn 2021.
In addition, Sumantra Bose is the editor of his father Dr Sisir Kumar Bose’s (1920-2000)
early-life autobiography and memoir, Subhas and Sarat: An Intimate Memoir of the Bose
Brothers, published in 2016 by Aleph Book Company, Delhi. He is the translator (from the
original Bengali) of his mother Professor Krishna Bose’s (1930-2020) early-life
autobiography and memoir, Lost Addresses: A Memoir of India, 1934-1955, published in
2015 by Niyogi Books, Delhi. He is also the compiler and editor of a 550-page omnibus
volume of his mother Krishna Bose’s articles and essays published between 1951 and 2020:
Krishna Bose, Prabandha-Sangraha, 1951-2020 (Ananda Publishers, Kolkata, 2021, in
Bengali).
Sumantra Bose has for many years been a regular contributor of op-ed analyses and
commentary to top international media websites, particularly the BBC and also Al-Jazeera.
He has appeared as an expert commentator on the news and current affairs programmes of
many leading international media, including the BBC and CNN. He is frequently quoted by
major international media—between 2019 and 2021 he has been quoted on bbc.co.uk,
cnn.com, and in The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Atlantic and Time
magazine, among many outlets.
Sumantra Bose has over the past two decades given invited lectures and seminars at leading
universities, think-tanks and policy forums across the world, particularly in the United States,
Europe, the Middle East and South and South-East Asia.Sumantra’s research has been
supported by numerous major grants and fellowships, including from the Leverhulme Trust
and the Nuffield Foundation in the United Kingdom and the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur
Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, the United States Institute of Peace and the Social
Science Research Council in the United States.
For the past two decades, Sumantra has lived between London and Kolkata, and continues to
do so. He has a keen interest in the politics of India, his country, and the politics of West
Bengal, his home-state in India. He has been actively involved in five elections to the Lok
6. Sabha (the directly elected chamber of India’s national parliament) from West Bengal—in
1996, 1998, 1999, 2004 and 2014. In four of these five elections, the candidates he worked
for were elected to the Lok Sabha.
Sumantra’s father, Dr Sisir K. Bose, was one of India’s pioneering and most renowned
paediatricians.
7.
8. Sisir Bose graduated from Calcutta’s Medical College and received advanced training in
paediatrics in London (the Great Ormond Street children’s hospital), Sheffield, Bern
(Switzerland), Vienna, and at the Harvard Medical School and Boston children’s hospital in
the United States as a Rockefeller Fellow. In his youth, Sisir Bose—son of the famous
barrister and nationalist leader Sarat Chandra Bose and his wife Bivabati Bose, and nephew
of the legendary Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose—was a fearless fighter for India’s freedom
from colonial slavery and oppression. In December 1940 and January 1941, the young Sisir
helped Netaji plan his historic escape from India and in mid-January 1941, Sisir secretly
drove his uncle from the Bose family’s ancestral house (38/2 Elgin Road, Calcutta) to
Gomoh, a railhead in Bihar (now in Jharkhand) 200 miles from Calcutta. That was the
beginning of Subhas Chandra Bose’s journey to becoming India’s revered Netaji.
Sisir Bose participated in the ‘Quit India’ movement of August 1942, was severely injured in
police action in central Calcutta and then arrested in September 1942 and imprisoned in
Calcutta’s Presidency Jail, where he almost died from typhoid fever. He was home-interned
in Calcutta through 1943 and from end-1943 became part of Bengal’s revolutionary
underground working to support the Indian National Army’s imminent advance (1944) into
India’s north-east. He was arrested again in autumn 1944 and spent ten days in solitary
confinement in a dungeon cell of Delhi’s Red Fort, followed by three and a half months in
solitary confinement—in subhuman conditions and under severe torture—at the Lahore Fort.
He then spent seven and a half months in the Lyallpur (present-day Faisalabad, Pakistan) Jail
until his release in September 1945.
In 1957, Dr Sisir Bose established the Netaji Research Bureau (NRB) at the historic house on
Elgin Road (now Lala Lajpat Rai Sarani), Kolkata, which had been dedicated to the nation in
1946 as ‘Netaji Bhawan’ by his father, Sarat Chandra Bose—who had been his younger
brother Subhas’s closest confidant and most resolute supporter. Over the next four decades,
Sisir Bose built NRB into the only serious centre of research and documentation of Netaji’s
life and his struggle for India’s freedom as its Executive Director and General Secretary.
After his death on 30 September 2000, Sumantra’s mother, Krishna Bose, helmed Netaji
Research Bureau as Chairperson for twenty years, until her own death on 22 February 2020.
Today, Netaji Bhawan contains a state-of-the-art, world-class museum of Netaji’s life—
established by Dr Sisir Bose in 1961. The Netaji Museum attracts tens of thousands of
visitors every year from across India and the world, and Netaji Research Bureau is an
internationally renowned centre of programmes and activities related to Netaji and India’s
freedom struggle.
9. Krishna Bose, Sumantra’s mother, grew up in Calcutta but was of East Bengal (present-day
Bangladesh) family origins. Krishna’s father’s family were from the
Mymensingh/Kishoreganj area, and her mother’s family were from Dhaka and Narsingdi,
northeast of Dhaka, where her maternal grandfather was a landowner, philanthropist and
freedom fighter.
After obtaining an MA in English literature from Calcutta University and starting her
working life as a lecturer at Calcutta’s City College (South) for women, Krishna Chaudhuri
married Sisir Kumar Bose in December 1955. She became Head of Department of English
and then served as the College’s Principal from 1983 to 1990. Krishna became renowned as
an authority in her own right on Netaji’s life and struggles, and published numerous seminal
books and articles on that topic (mostly in Bengali).
10. Upon her retirement from academic life at the end of 1995, Krishna Bose joined politics and
was elected as Member of Parliament from the Jadavpur constituency of Greater Kolkata
three consecutive times—in 1996, 1998 and 1999.
She is remembered as an outstanding parliamentarian. From end-1999 to mid-2004, she was
the chairperson of the parliamentary standing committee on external (foreign) affairs, which
oversees India’s foreign policy, a role she discharged with great energy and distinction.
11. Since March 2020, Sumantra Bose has been the Executive Director and General Secretary of
the Netaji Research Bureau at Netaji Bhawan, 38/2 Lala Lajpat Rai Sarani, Kolkata, India.
