I picked up Anuj Dhar’s What Happened to Netaji? in 2016—the year India seemed to rediscover Bose in pop culture.
That was the year web series trailers and news tickers started buzzing with the Gumnami Baba theory, and the West Bengal government’s file declassifications briefly made “Netaji mystery” a prime-time subject again. For me, the book wasn’t just history—it was walking into a live argument.
Dhar, a journalist turned archival sleuth, structures his case like a prosecutor who doesn’t trust the jury’s attention span. First comes the demolition job: the official 1945 plane crash narrative, held up for decades, collapses under his citation of Taiwanese government records flatly denying any crash at the time and place claimed. Then the intrigue: Soviet archives, whispers of Bose in Siberia, and the possibility—though Dhar admits not the likelihood—of his death under Stalin.
But it’s the Gumnami Baba hypothesis that grips the imagination. Dhar marshals handwriting comparisons in English and Bengali, the personal effects—photos, spectacles, military mementos—and the testimonies of witnesses who had no obvious reason to lie. In Faizabad’s dim hermitage, a story emerges of a man who may have been hiding in plain sight until 1985, watching the country he helped shape from the shadows.
Dhar’s other throughline is institutional obstruction: the Shah Nawaz and Khosla Commissions of the ’50s and ’70s dismissed dissenting evidence, the Mukherjee Commission in 1999 came closest to overturning the official story only to have its verdict rejected by the government, and decade after decade, the full files stayed locked. He’s unsparing about Congress-era suppression, and he gives grudging credit to West Bengal’s 2015 partial disclosures.
Reading it in 2016, I felt the dual pull of the book’s power and its pitfalls. Dhar’s narrative is compulsively readable, driven by RTI-sourced documents and the thrill of archival detective work. Yet there’s also a conspiratorial timbre that makes the historian in me cautious—the tone that assumes hidden hands rather than asking if absence of evidence might also mean absence of fact.
Still, in the India of 2016—when Bose’s face was suddenly on posters again, when the trailer for Bose: Dead/Alive promised a swaggering retelling, when Srijit Mukherji’s Gumnaami was still a gleam in production gossip—this book felt like the kernel of the cultural moment. It was both a research dossier and a piece of performance, written to keep a mystery alive.
By the time I turned the last page, Dhar hadn’t “solved” the disappearance any more than anyone else had in seventy years. But he’d forced the question back into the public square, showing that history can be as much about what we refuse to accept as what we can prove.
And walking out into the noise of 2016’s India, I couldn’t help thinking that maybe the real endurance of Bose wasn’t just in whether he lived past 1945—but in how he keeps pulling us back into his story, demanding we look again.