Saugata Chakraborty

𝐖𝐡𝐲 𝐍𝐞𝐭𝐚𝐣𝐢?

I did not begin with Netaji.

I began with a question that refused to settle—at a deeply personal level.

Growing up, I had often heard my father speak of a fracture in our family. My grandfather and his younger brother had been disowned by their father, a domineering landlord. Much later, the brothers had reunited, but the wound lingered. The story was told as fact, but never quite resolved as memory.

In May 2021, while performing my father’s last rites, a question surfaced with unexpected force: Can the heir of a disowned son still pay homage to his forefathers?

It was not a question I could set aside.

I began to look into what remained—family papers, fragments of correspondence, and, more than anything, the lived recollections of those who had tried, at different points in time, to bring the surviving members of the estranged branches back together.

What I found was not resolution, but persistence. The past does not disappear simply because it has been set aside. It lingers—in silences, in rituals, in questions that return when one least expects them.

The eventual reunion of the family, when it happened, felt less like an outcome and more like an aside—almost incidental to another lingering doubt that did not belong only to my family.

It emerged through references—quiet at first, almost passing—to an investigation once reportedly conducted by the Intelligence Bureau into the alleged reappearance of Subhas Chandra Bose close to our ancestral home in Dinhata. That was the moment the question widened- from something inherited to something shared.

And that is where this story truly begins.

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