BOMBAY CHAPTER: Mohile Parikh Centre for Contemporary Culture (MPC3), Bombay
March 26th , 2005
3.50 pm

VIENNA CHAPTER: Kuenstlerhaus, Vienna
May 22nd, 2005
6.00 pm

BERLIN CHAPTER: House of World Cultures, Berlin
August 13th, 2005
7.00 pm

Film
Wanted! A Patriot. The Way of Subhas Chandra Bose 1941-1945.

Director: Navina Sundaram
Germany 1971, 44min, BetaSP/16mm, German/engl. subtitles, production: NDR, Hamburg

Subhas Chandra Bose is one of the most striking figures in the Indian struggle for independence. In contrast to Mahatma Ghandi, he wanted to end the British Colonial rule by force of arms. Hence, he tried to ally with the Axis powers in the Second World War, though neither a fascist or a nazi. Navina Sundaram’s tv-documentary pictures the adventurous journey of Bose, concentrating on the period between March 1941 and February 1943, when the Indian freedom fighter operated in Berlin. Boses’s political work and activities in Nazi Germany are recaptured by contemporary witnesses: his confidential associate in the Free India Centre, A.C.N. Nambiar, the editor at Radio Azad Hind “Free India”, Balakrishna Sarma and Alexander Werth from the Special India department. A meeting of Indian and German ex-legionairies in Hamburg, 25 years after the end of the war, brings back memories of the Indian legion. Cavalry Captain Walter Harbich explains how former prisoners-of-war were trained to become “the best soldiers in the world”. Boses’s wife, the Austrian Emilie Schenkl, tells how in order to evade the Nazi conjugal law, the couple married according to Hindu rites.

Navina Sundaram (Delhi/Hamburg) grew up and studied in Delhi/India. Since 1970 she has worked as a political television editor-cum-reporter and as a foreign correspondent for North German Radio & Television in Ham-burg. In her capacity as filmmaker, roving correspondent, news-reporter, anchor woman, she worked for programmes including “Welt-spiegel”, “Gesichter Asiens”, “Panorama” and “Extra Drei”. She has also made a number of documentary films.

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