The key to the story of the Rani of Jhansi Regiment and the Indian National Army is Subhas Chandra Bose. The life and career of this extraordinary revolutionary have been chronicled and analysed by historians in India, Southeast Asia, Germany, England, the United States, and Japan. His writings, speeches, essays, and plethora of letters have been compiled and edited in twelve volumes as Netaji Collected Works by Drs Sisir and Sugata Bose of the Netaji Research Bureau in what is now Kolkata. The entire corpus of work on Bose, some five hundred volumes, is so extensive that it constitutes a formidable Netajiana. Library shelves at many universities bear witness to this outpouring, which will no doubt continue for years to come. It is imperative to consider here his life and contribution in the context of Indian nationalism, and in particular his role in the history of the Indian National Army, and more specifically the Rani of Jhansi Regiment.

Subhas Chandra Bose was born on 23 January 1897 at Cuttack, Orissa, the ninth of fourteen children of Janakinath and Prabhavati Bose. His father was a lawyer, and the Kayastha Brahmin family was wealthy enough to educate all fourteen children well. Janakinath grew up in the atmosphere of nineteenth century liberal movements filtering into India through English reformist ideology.

Although both parents were concerned that their children be well educated, Subhas, as ninth child and sixth son of a brood of fourteen, suffered from a sense of deprivation of parental affection and attention. “The earliest recollection I have of myself is that I used to feel like a thoroughly insignificant being”, he wrote. He described his parents as distant, rather cold, and preoccupied with career and family affairs, not surprising in a family of that size. Psychologists suggest that it was Bose's low self-esteem as a child that engendered his deep need for an overarching mission to compensate for low self-worth.

For a well-born Bengali child of the late nineteenth century, learning English was one of the first requisites of life. At a school for European and Anglo-Indian boys run by the Baptist Mission, the young Subhas was also taught Latin and the Bible. The teachers were British. Indian languages — Sanskrit and Bengali — the language of the Bose family, were neglected.