All the while, the British kept an eye on him.
They had good reason to be suspicious.
'India's cry'
In 1931, Bose organized the first Indian Independence League in Japan, which aimed to attain the "independence of India by all possible means,"
according to a declassified CIA document.
He enlisted Indian students to help and V. C Lingam, a student from Singapore -- then Malaya -- who chose to study in Japan, recounts traveling to Vietnam, Bangkok and Singapore to recruit locals for the organization for the independence from British colonial rule,
according to the Japan Times.
"The league became bigger, and Bose became the leader of the movement throughout East Asia," Lingam told the Japan Times in 2007.
Two years later, Bose received funding to publish a journal called "The New Asia," which was distributed in English and Japanese.
Though that journal was banned in India and didn't mention Japanese aggression in China, Bose "urged the Japanese government to cooperate with the United States, China, and the Soviet Union in a move to eliminate British colonial control in Asia," according to Cemil Aydin, a historian at the University of North Carolina-Chapel.
For Bose, Britain was the ultimate enemy -- and a US-Japan conflict would only play in the country's favor.
In the lead up to World War II, relations between England and Japan had soured considerably. By 1933, Japan had quit the League of Nations, the international diplomatic group set up after World War I to find peaceful resolutions.
The strained relations removed any incentive for the Japanese government to limit Bose's political activities, according to McQuade.
In 1938, after Bose published "Indo no sakebi" (India's cry) -- which strongly denounced British rule in India -- British authorities classified him as a Japanese agent intent on spreading terrorist propaganda.
By then, there was no way Japan was handing him over.
Trouble on the horizon
Japan was hit especially hard by the Great Depression of the 1930s as agricultural and textile
prices fell.
Amid the economic downturn, some radicalized Pan-Asianists gained control of Japanese politics, and the idea that Japan could solve its economic problems through military conquests gradually gained currency.
During World War II, India's independence was an integral part of the Japanese military government's Pan-Asianist program. For example, in 1941 Major Iwaichi Fujiwara had established Fujiwara Kikan, a Japanese intelligence operations unit tasked with supporting independence movements in British India, Malaya and Netherlands East Indies.
But as Japan launched its ruthless campaign across the Asia-Pacific during World War II, many prominent Indian freedom fighters like Ananda Mohan Sahay and Raja Mahendra Pratdap grew wary of the country and its colonization of the rest of Asia.
Bose, on the other hand, never spoke up -- even after the country invaded China and the Korean peninsula, according to Takeshi Nakajima, author of "Bose of Nakamuraya: An Indian Revolutionary in Japan."
"Though Bose felt conflicted by the gap between what Japan said it wanted to achieve for Asia and the reality, his friendships with the Japanese and citizenship made it impossible for him to dissent," Nakajima said.
It wasn't long before other Indians began to see him as a Japanese puppet and a collaborator with Japan's militarist regime, argues Eri Hotta in her paper "Rash Behari Bose and his Japanese supporters."
Regardless of how others viewed him, Bose was convinced the Japanese military could be used to liberate India. He kept up his efforts to mobilize supporters in Japan and across Southeast Asia.
On
February 15, 1942, British commanders in Singapore surrendered the British Empire's forces, numbering more than 120,000 in Malaysia and Singapore, to the Japanese, in what became known as the largest military capitulation in British history.
It coincided with Japan's campaign to persuade Indian prisoners of war in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore to fight alongside the Japanese for the liberation of India. After the battle over Singapore, Fujiwara asked Indian military officer Mohan Singh to form an Indian army from the captured Indian soldiers there.
In June of that same year, Bose chaired the Indian Independence Conference in Bangkok, sponsored by Japan. There, he was appointed to lead the Indian National Army (INA) and the tens of thousands of Indian prisoners Singh had recruited to fight alongside the Japanese. They planned to conquer the British in India.
It was Bose's most high-profile role and one that seemed destined to ensure his name entered Indian folklore.
But it was not to be.
Today, another man named Bose is much more closely associated with the INA than Rash Behari.
Subhas Chandra Bose, a better-known nationalist in India, took over in 1943 after tensions arose between Singh and Behari Bose. Chandra Bose steadily built the Indian National Army's ranks, convincing a greater number of Indian prisoners of war to fight for independence, according to the CIA document.
As Chandra Bose became a popular figure in Japan, Behari Bose's health and presence at the forefront of the Indian independence movement started to fade.
Behari Bose died in 1945 just before India gained independence from British rule in 1947 -- a victory he'd worked his whole life to achieve.
In India, there is now
a tourism center dedicated to him in his birthplace. And in Japan, his legacy is immortalized in a well-loved curry dish at Nakamuraya, which Behari Bose is said to have popularized during his decades-long struggle for Indian independence.
Behari Bose laid the foundations of the Indian Independence League and the Indian National Army, according to Eston and Kawabe.
Right until the end, he stood by his conviction to change the status quo. And to this day, he remains one of India's unsung freedom fighters.
