What is the story about?
On the second basement floor of a building in Shinjuku, in the centre of Tokyo, a restaurant called Manna serves a chicken curry that has been on the menu,
in some form, for almost a century. Office workers come at lunch. Tourists queue outside on weekends. The dish is studied by Japanese food historians, written about in newspapers, and sold in supermarkets across the country as a ready meal under the Nakamuraya label. Very few of the people eating it know that the recipe was developed by a Bengali revolutionary who arrived in the city in 1915 with a death sentence on his head, and who chose to spend the rest of his life there. Also Read: Who Is Giampaolo Tomassetti, The Italian Painter Who Spent Twelve Years Painting The Mahabharata?
A Death Sentence In Delhi
Rash Behari Bose was born in 1886 in the village of Subaldaha in West Bengal. By 1912, he had organised the assassination attempt on Lord Hardinge, the British Viceroy of India, in what came to be known as the Delhi Conspiracy Case. The bomb wounded Hardinge but did not kill him. Bose escaped, was tied later to the Ghadar conspiracy in 1915, and faced certain hanging if caught. In June of that year, he boarded a ship at Calcutta under the assumed name of P.N. Thakur, a relative of Rabindranath Tagore, and disembarked at the port of Kobe in Japan. He would never return to India.
Refuge In The Basement Of A Bakery
In Tokyo, Bose was sheltered by the Pan-Asian leader Mitsuru Toyama. When the British eventually tracked him to Toyama's residence and the Japanese government issued an extradition order, Toyama arranged for Bose to be hidden in the basement of Nakamuraya, a bakery in Shinjuku founded in 1909 by Aizo and Kokko Soma. The Somas were not ordinary merchants. Their bakery was a salon of sorts, frequented by Japanese artists, intellectuals and politicians sympathetic to Asian independence movements. They hid Bose for several months, entrusting his care only to immediate family members.
It was during this period of confinement that he taught the household the recipe for Bengali chicken curry he had been carrying in his memory from home.
A Love Story Most History Books Have Forgotten
In 1918, after the British extradition order was withdrawn, Bose married the Somas' elder daughter, Toshiko, a talented young painter. The marriage scandalised Tokyo. Interracial unions, especially with political exiles, were considered a serious social transgression in 1910s Japan. Toshiko accepted the consequences without complaint, taking on the household responsibilities so her husband could continue his work for Indian independence. She bore two children. In 1925, at the age of twenty-eight, she died of tuberculosis. Bose threw himself into work and never remarried.
The Curry That Became A National Obsession
Two years after Toshiko's death, in 1927, Bose partnered with his father-in-law Aizo, to open a small Indian restaurant on the first floor of the Nakamuraya bakery. Bose personally supervised the spices, the technique, and the choice of accompaniments, refusing to compromise with the milder Japanese palate. The dish was called Indo-Karii, or pure Indian curry, and it took some time to find its audience. When it did, it became a phenomenon. The Tokyo newspapers christened it the taste of love and revolution, weaving together Bose's political exile and his unlikely marriage. Nakamuraya eventually became one of the first Japanese food companies to list on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The curry quickly outsold the bakery's signature custard buns.
A Last Wish In A Tokyo Hospital
Bose continued his work for Indian independence throughout the 1930s, founding the Indian Independence League in Bangkok in 1942 and handing over its leadership, including the Indian National Army, to Subhash Chandra Bose in 1943. By 1944, his lungs were failing. He spent his final months in a Tokyo hospital, listening to radio broadcasts of the INA's progress, hoping to hear news of liberation. When his doctor asked one afternoon if he had any appetite, Bose answered that he could not eat because the nurses would not bring him the food he most wanted. The food, of course, was the Indian curry from Nakamuraya. He died on the twenty-first of January 1945, two years before India became independent. The Japanese Emperor awarded him the Order of the Rising Sun posthumously.
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The flagship Nakamuraya restaurant still stands in its original Shinjuku location. The walls of its foyer carry vintage photographs of the Soma family and the Bengali revolutionary they sheltered. The recipe Bose developed has not significantly changed in ninety-eight years. The next time you read about an Indian freedom fighter India has forgotten, remember that Tokyo has not, and that the easiest way to meet him now is to sit down at a small basement restaurant in Shinjuku and order what is still listed on the menu as Indo-Karii. Bose left India to save it. He left Japan something he could not have known would outlast him, which is the only kind of legacy that ever truly does.
