Presidency Takes Back Rusticated Netaji

The college that expelled Netaji in 1916 has now decided to have him permanently ensconced.

It’s rare for a college to take back a rusticated student. But then, not every expelled student becomes a national icon. Ninety-four years after Kolkata’s Presidency College expelled Subhas Chandra Bose for assaulting a British teacher, the institution will now ‘bring back’ the national hero ‘with full glory and honour’. A bust of Bose will be installed next month in front of the college’s Netaji block that houses the sociology, Bengali and Hindi departments.

Bose, a brilliant student who took admission in Presidency after topping the matriculation examination from (then) Bengal province, was accused in 1916 of leading a group of angry students who assaulted Professor EF Oaten, a history teacher who in class passed racist remarks against ‘natives’. After Bose’s expulsion, Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee, Vice-Chancellor of Calcutta University, helped him get admission into Scottish Church College from where he graduated with honours in philosophy in 1918. He then went on to study at Cambridge.

“The proposal came from professor Samit Kar of the sociology department. The West Bengal State Marketing Board took it up and offered to install the bust in front of the block,” says Presidency Principal Sanjib Ghosh. Naren De, a leader of the Forward Bloc, a party that claims to be the inheritor of Netaji’s legacy, heads the state marketing board which has already commissioned a sculptor to make the bust.

Incidentally, it is pressure from the Forward Bloc, a junior partner in the CPM-led Left Front in Bengal, that made the state and the CPM change its stance on Bose. The CPM had dubbed the nationalist a traitor and a fascist. In 1997, Bose’s centenary year, the then Chief Minister Jyoti Basu admitted that their assessment was wrong and Bose was, in fact, a hero. This was echoed by his successor, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, while garlanding Netaji’s statue on 23 January, Bose’s 113th birth anniversary, this year. He now wants 23 January to be declared Patriots’ Day by the Centre.

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Jaideep Mazumdar