Shyam Benegal directs Bose: The Forgotten Hero at a juncture in his career (the film was released on 13 May 2005 in India) when he has already garnered a lot of experience, maturity, critical acclaim and popular recognition for his trademark parallel films on Indian rural lives and its problems related to caste, gender and economy. Besides, he had behind him the experience of making successful documentaries in television series (for example, Yatra meaning ‘journey’, in 1986 and Bharat Ek Khoj, a TV adaptation of Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of India, in 1988), as well as a biopic on Mahatma Gandhi (The Making of the Mahatma, 1996) and a bio-documentary on Satyajit Ray (1985). All these experiences and directorial maturity helped him mould an ambitious project such as Bose with an astute clarity and measured eloquence of a veteran filmmaker. Bose as a historical biopic is a grand film that runs for nearly three-and-a-half hours and represents the important historical facts and events in three parts (Faith, Unity, Sacrifice) related to Subhas Chandra Bose’s magnificent attempts to undo British rule in India from 1940 till his controversial death in 1945. It is, perhaps, the first biopic that adapts on screen significant portions of Subhas Chandra Bose’s life and career and tries to reinstate his image in the popular imagination as a subversive hero of India’s freedom struggle against the British.

Before going to a detailed discussion of the film it is equally important to briefly discuss the critical discourses related to biopic adaptation studies. The popularity of biopic as a film genre can be found in every big or small film industry all over the world. But the emergence of a coherent constellation of theories to explain such an interdisciplinary (written biography/real-life accounts to film narrative) act is relatively recent and, therefore, the term ‘biopic adaptation studies’ appears quite novel and unique in itself. For several years, biopic adaptation studies and the critical field of adaptation studies in general has grappled with the problem of ‘fidelity criticism’, as the critics have always placed the principle of authenticity as the benchmark of a good film based on a famous person’s life.