FOR most Southeast Asians of Generation X, Y and beyond, the name Subhas Chandra Bose evokes only the haziest recognition, if any at all. He and his regionally-based Indian National Army (INA) are perceived as a purely "Indian thing", a World War II (WWII) sideshow. For some, Bose was nothing more than a shameless collaborator with the invading Japanese.

Yet in the hearts of older Indians across Southeast Asia, this charismatic anti-colonial Indian nationalist leader lives on as an almost mythic hero. His was a voice that spoke eloquently to the estimated three million Indians scattered across Southeast Asia in the 1940s. By mid-1944, some 230,000 Indians in Malaya had sworn the oath of allegiance to the Provisional Government of Azad Hind (Free India) that Bose first declared at Singapore's Cathay Theatre on Oct 21, 1943. This book's title, A Gentleman's Word, refers to Bose's promise that he would fight till his dying breath for the freedom of India.

Author Nilanjana Sengupta hails from Kolkata (Calcutta), much like her Orissa-born subject Bose (1897-1945), a fellow Bengali. She has done Malayan history a service with this book, demonstrating convincingly that Bose was far more than an Indian freedom fighter, despite his favourite slogan, "Chalo Delhi!" ("Onward to Delhi!"). True, his primary objective was to free India from the British, to which end he saw the Japanese as his means. But his ideology was more complex than that, and targeted a wider, multi-ethnic audience.

Sengupta, an Indian expatriate recently arrived in Singapore with a masters in business administration in human resources (she headed corporate HR for Electrolux in Delhi), graduated from the college that Bose once studied at, the University of Calcutta's Presidency College. She says her book has also filled in knowledge gaps for Indians back home, where even Bose's fellow Bengalis are relatively unaware of his impact on Southeast Asia, despite their undoubted reverence for his memory in the solely Indian context.

As Sengupta tells it, Bose was a boundary-buster — a committed socialist cutting across not only the class divide, but also national and ethnic divides as well as the internal caste and creed divide fracturing fellow Indians, and even across the gender divide. In his promotion of these then still novel values of universal humanity, he blazed a path for the anti-colonial independence fighters, activists and politicians of this region, from Myanmar (where he influenced independence leader Aung San, assassinated father of Suu Kyi) to Singapore, says Sengupta.

Unlike India's other famous anti-colonial campaigner, Mahatma Gandhi, Bose favoured armed struggle — not non-violent civil protest — to achieve his goals. This too impacted on Asian minds, not only the Indians: Sengupta documents intriguing post-war links between the Malayan Communist Party (MCP), essentially Chinese, operatives and Malayan general labour unions often dominated by ex-INA Indians. These fuelled waves of militant strikes, before the MCP withdrew to the jungles to fight through the Malayan Emergency of 1948-1960.

Among the Malay independence fighters too, there were men like Abdullah Sani Raja Kechil, who adopted the pseudonym Ahmad Boestamam specifically in honour of Bose. As chief propagandist for the Kesatuan Melayu Muda (Malaya's first Malay political party), formed in 1938, and later as leader of the youth wing of the Malay Nationalist Party founded in 1945, Boestamam was a Bose wannabe. A flamboyant and aggressive demagogue, he donned military uniforms to appear at massive public rallies, shouting "Freedom through Blood!" Like Bose's, his approach was racially inclusive: he said that anyone loyal to the country and willing to call themselves "Melayu", could be accepted as part of independent Malaya. After his internment during the Emergency, Boestamam emerged to found the new socialist and secular Partai Rakyat.

Sengupta's central thesis is that Bose broke through even the boundaries of time. Despite his apparent death in a plane accident in August 1945 (disputed by some), he is still with us today, in spirit. The book helps us understand that Bose influenced not only his own generation, but also generations to come, including post-war leaders whose names are familiar to Malaysians and Singaporeans today.

Among these names, perhaps surprisingly, were former INA member L Krishnan, the fabled Malayan movie director of the 1950s for the Shaw Brothers and Cathay-Keris studios; former INA guerrilla lieutenant James Puthucheary, the leftist unionist, economist and later lawyer who for a time served the ruling People's Action Party that he helped to found in Singapore, before being arrested and exiled to Malaysia, where he died in 2000; former INA fighter, Malaysian lawyer John Aloysius Thivy, founder of the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC) party in 1946; and two Malaysian women — jewels of Bose's most prized creation, the INA's 1,000-strong all-female Rani of Jhansi Regiment (RJR), named after a 19th-century Indian anti-British freedom fighter heroine and martyr.

These two were Janaki Athi Nahappan (née Davar, and today Datin) — who came from a dairy-farming family outside Kuala Lumpur and was a MIC founder, social activist and former senator in the Malaysian Parliament — and Rasammah Bhupalan (née Navarednam, and today Datuk) of Ipoh, who later became founder-president of the Women Teachers' Union in Malaysia, a warrior for equal pay and a driving force behind the National Council of Women's Organisations. Both women underwent rigorous military training at the INA's Singapore camps, saw active service in Myanmar, and finally participated in a gruelling two-week retreat from Rangoon to Bangkok under the Allied Forces' air attack, in April to May 1945. Both are still alive and active in Malaysia today, despite being in their mid-eighties.

Bose's passionate oratory commonly provoked Indian women to strip off their jewellery and toss it to him as their donation to the INA. More extraordinary, many followed him to war, donning the unflattering INA-RJR trousered uniform and flouting their traditional Indian backgrounds. Most transmuted into feminist activists after this experience and continued the battle for social justice after WWII.

Sengupta's organisation of the book into topic-related chunks could be confusing for readers with no prior knowledge of Bose, WWII or Indian history, who may not fully grasp the chronology of the story — it would have benefited from a "Milestones" appendix listing major events in chronological sequence.

Readers will, however, revel in the evocative photos illustrating this meticulously researched book as it ambitiously paints a comprehensive portrait of Bose's imprint on the Southeast Asian canvas.

Other scholars have covered Bose and the INA, notably Professor Joyce Lebra of the University of Colorado, US (who also had some long-distance oversight of this book). Hence Sengupta's (necessary) reiteration of familiar material can be weary at times. But her standout strengths are first-hand contemporary interviews, a good eye for the anecdotal human vignettes that can enliven big-picture history, and her tracing of the lines of continuity in Bose's ideological legacy from the end of WWII to the modern era, outside of India. It beggars belief that she apparently completed the book within 10 months.

We will hear more from Sengupta, an enthusiastic and committed researcher. She is planning further studies of the INA veterans, and also of the nationalist struggle in Myanmar. As a visiting research fellow at Singapore's Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, she has clearly enjoyed the research process, declaring that, "The last year has been one of the best years of my life" and that today, "Malaysia feels like a second home to me".

A Gentleman's Word: The Legacy of Subhas Chandra Bose in Southeast Asia by Nilanjana Sengupta. Published by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore (2012). RM145 (hardback), RM95 (paperback). Available in all major bookstores and online.

Ilsa Sharp is an Australian writer, who was formerly a resident in Singapore/Malaysia for 30 years and is now based in Perth. Her other books include The E&O, Pearl of Penang (2008), on Penang's historic Eastern & Oriental Hotel, and Path of the Righteous Crane (2009), a biography of Perak's tin-miner billionaire Eu Tong Sen. This story appeared in The Edge on June 4, 2012.