KOLKATA: Asha Pachiasia has a problem with Gandhi. Sure, she said, the frail, cotton-robed independence leader - known as “the Mahatma” - did his part and then some, leading the non-violent rebellion that drove British colonial rulers from the Sub-continent in 1947. But as a hero and symbol of India’s freedom movement, Pachiasia said, Mohandas Gandhi leaves something to be desired.

“I don’t believe so much in Gandhi’s policy of just showing the other cheek,” said Pachiasia, 47, a Montessori teacher. “I think now Indians are more aware that we should have fought for our freedom. I see how the Americans celebrate the Fourth of July. Mentally, we are still in the chains of the British Raj.”

Pachiasia’s attitude helps explain her presence recently at a popular new movie on another, lesser-known icon of independence: Subhas Bose. A Cambridge-educated aristocrat who launched his political career in Kolkata, Bose rejected Gandhi’s pacifist ways in favour of violent revolution, forming a rebel army and joining forces with the Axis powers in World War II.

A controversial figure in the West because of his choice of allies, Bose is enjoying renewed interest and popularity in India. The film, “Bose: The Forgotten Hero,” is the latest in a series of books, magazine articles and other tributes.

Directed by veteran Indian filmmaker Shyam Benegal, the 3 1/2 hour, $5.5 million epic - an exceptionally costly film by Indian standards - focuses on Bose’s war years, when he made a daring escape to Nazi Germany via Afghanistan and later led his ragtag followers in quixotic battle against British forces in the jungles of Myanmar (Burma).

“It was a great adventure story,” Benegal said by telephone recently from Madrid. Bose “had this impossible dream.”

Public fascination with Bose in part reflects continuing questions about his disappearance and presumed death in a plane crash shortly after the Japanese surrender in 1945. Fueled by reports that he might have survived, the mystery has been the focus of several government inquiries, the latest of which is to report its findings soon.

But analysts say the biggest reason for Bose’s renewed popularity probably has more to do with India’s changing self-image, from an underdeveloped, aid-dependent champion of the Non-Aligned Movement to a rising economic power with nuclear weapons and an increasingly important role on the world stage.

In that context, the militant nationalist and revolutionary has become a more compelling symbol of India’s independence struggle than the ascetic and pacifist Gandhi, especially among the fast-growing middle class.

“People think that now that India is entering the globalized world in a more serious fashion, the conventional heroes who fought against imperialism in the conventional way, even if they have lost, their tragedy must also be articulated,” prominent sociologist Ashis Nandy said. Many Indians “feel saddled with this kind of idea of Indians who do not hate back.”

Gandhi, who was assassinated in 1948, is still revered as the saintly “father of the nation.” Generations have grown up on hagiographic portrayals such as Richard Attenborough’s “Gandhi,” the 1982 epic starring Ben Kingsley.

But Indians now are embracing a more muscular sort of nationalist hero. In 2002, audiences flocked to “The Legend of Bhagat Singh,” a historical drama about an Indian revolutionary who was hanged by the British in 1931 after detonating a bomb in the British-controlled national assembly.

Judging by appearances, Bose was a less swashbuckling figure. Plump and bespectacled, he was conversant in the works of Wordsworth and Hegel, spent several years at Cambridge, and breezed through the entrance exam to the prestigious, British-run Indian Civil Service. But the fires of nationalism burned fiercely in Bose, who rejected a cushy government post in favor of joining the pro-independence Indian National Congress.

He was a frequent guest in British jails and eventually broke bitterly with Gandhi over the Mahatma’s embrace of non-violence. “Bose wrote that ‘Gandhi wants to change human beings, and all I want to do is free India,’ “ Benegal said.

His movie picks up with Bose’s daring escape from British India soon after the outbreak of World War II, when Bose makes his way to Kabul disguised as a mute tribesman. He travels on to Berlin, where he lays the groundwork for an Indian national army composed of prisoners of war and deserters from the British Indian army.

Bose wrote admiringly of some aspects of European fascism, for which he has been criticized by leftist historians and communists in India. But he also made clear his distaste for Adolf Hitler’s theories of racial superiority.

With minimal support from the Japanese, Bose’s army was never more than an irritant on the battlefield. In the aftermath of the Japanese surrender, Bose flew to Taiwan, where he reportedly died in a plane crash on Aug. 18, 1945.

But Bose’s efforts were not in vain. As word of his army’s exploits spread in post-war India, he and his followers became enormously popular. An attempt by the British to prosecute Bose’s officers as traitors sparked nationwide protests and, by most accounts, hastened the British departure from India.

In Kolkata, Bose’s memory lives on at his spacious three-storey home, now a museum, where a steady stream of visitors gaze through a glass partition at his study, which is much as he left it in Jan 1941. Parked outside is the German-made Wanderer sedan in which he made his famous escape.

Although some Bose admirers have taken issue with aspects of Benegal’s film, most people here seem grateful that their hometown hero is finally being recognized.

“These children, they’re so much into other things,” said Pachiasia, the teacher, who brought her teenage daughter to see the film. “They should have that patriotic feeling.” —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service