Indian nationalist leader, who fought against the British in World War II. Born in Cuttack, Bengal, and educated at the universities of Calcutta and Cambridge, he left a career in the Indian civil service to fight for India's independence and was imprisoned a dozen times by the British. He shared leadership of India's youth and peasant societies with Jawaharlal Nehru and became president of the Indian National Congress in 1938. Bose was opposed, however, by Mohandas Gandhi, whose principle of nonviolence he did not accept, and was forced to resign the following year. In 1941, hoping to take advantage of the war to free India of British rule, Bose fled to Germany. From there he went to Malaya, where he set up (1943) a Provisional Government of Free India and, with Japanese help, organized the so-called Indian National Army. Bose led his troops against the British on the Burma-India frontier until 1945; he was killed in a plane crash while fleeing to Japan in August of that year.