Sugata Bose
Sugata Bose (born 7 September 1956) is an Indian historian and politician who has taught and worked in the United States since the mid-1980s. His fields of study are South Asian and Indian Ocean history. Bose taught at Tufts University until 2001, when he accepted the Gardiner Chair of Oceanic History and Affairs at Harvard University. Bose is also the director of the Netaji Research Bureau in Kolkata, India, a research center and archives devoted to the life and work of Bose's great uncle, the Indian nationalist, Subhas Chandra Bose. Bose is the author most recently of His Majesty's Opponent: Subhas Chandra Bose and India's Struggle against Empire (2011) and A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (2006). From 2014 to 2019, Bose has served as a Member of India's Parliament from the Jadavpur Constituency in West Bengal with his party affiliation in Mamata Banerjee-led All India Trinamool Congress (TMC). Early life and family Sugata Bose was born in Calcutta, India. After studying at Presidency College, Kolkata, University of Calcutta 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. His father was paediatrician and legslator Sisir Kumar Bose and his mother was educator and legislator Krishna 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 PhD 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 at Harvard University, 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-pedaling 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 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