Subhas Chandra Bose came to regard tyaga and amrita (renunciation and realization) as “two faces of the same medal” during his long stay in Mandalay Jail. “To attain hundred per cent and to sacrifice hundred per cent”, he proclaimed, had become a passion with him.

This volume opens with Bose’s prison letters written during the last year he spent in Burmese prisons in 1926–1927 (plus twenty earlier unpublished letters of 1925). Between 1928 and 1931 Subhas was in and out of prison, even as he emerged as the leader of students, youth and labour across India.

The volume closes with another set of his prison letters written from many different jails during the second phase of the civil disobedience movement in 1932.