Story TV Takes Viewers Back to the 1940s with ‘The Bose Network’, India’s First Hybrid AI Drama

Joy Sengupta leads the cast as Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, with an accomplished ensemble and award-winning creative talent bringing the sweeping historical thriller to life Story TV, India’s leading microdrama platform from Eloelo Group, will premiere The Bose Network at midnight on August 15.

Structured as a continuous chase rather than a conventional biopic, the historical thriller dramatises one of the most daring escapes in Indian history. Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose’s 1941 disappearance from British house arrest in Calcutta and the 9,000-kilometre journey across four countries, adopting four identities to raise India’s own army against the British Empire. The Bose Network is also India’s first microdrama series with an AI-integrated production pipeline. 1940s Calcutta, the Frontier Kabul, wartime Berlin, the interiors of two submarines and scores of other historical references were reconstructed in post-production using Eloelo’s AI expertise, bringing a period drama to the vertical screen at a scale the format has not previously attempted. Joy Sengupta, while reflecting on his portrayal of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, said, “Every Indian carries an image of Bose with them, the uniform, the spectacles, the voice on the radio. But growing up as a Bengali, especially with a father who was a die-hard Bose admirer, I grew up surrounded by Bose, his convictions, his actions, and the folklore around him. As an adult and as an actor, I also learnt to look beyond the folklore and understand the circumstances that shaped him and the context in which his choices were made.

Playing Bose, for me, was about finding the human within the story and bringing out the human side of the man behind the epic. Because that to me is the job of a true actor. I hope what remains on screen is not just an impersonation of an icon, but a man with his loneliness, his stubbornness, and his unwavering belief that India would be free in his lifetime.” The series spans the period from Bose’s escape from surveillance at his family home in January 1941 to the events of August 1945. From the escape through Gomoh, Peshawar and Kabul to his years in Berlin, from secret radio broadcasts and a submarine crossing to a government in exile and the final years in Asia. The Bose Network traces not just one man’s journey but the network he built to create it: the couriers, safe houses, sympathetic legations, radio operators, prisoners of war turned soldiers, and volunteers across four countries, who each moved him one stage further.

It moves through some of the most remarkable and least-explored chapters of his life. The Bose Network is written and directed by Lalit Marathe, one of the writers of Swades (2004), widely regarded as one of Hindi cinema’s most enduring patriotic dramas. “A period film is not built on research alone; it is also built on imagination. You are trying to recreate a Calcutta that no living person remembers. The glow of a streetlamp at two in the morning, the silence inside a house where everyone knows a man is about to leave. I have wanted to tell this story for years, and Story TV is the reason I finally could. They gave us the patience and craft of a feature film, while their AI-driven production pipeline allowed us to recreate the 1940s across four countries in a way that would have been almost impossible to achieve at this scale. For me, that opened up a whole new visual language for premium vertical storytelling. I have not been this excited about a project in a long time,” said Marathe. The Bose Network is based on the research of author and Bose scholar Chandrachur Ghose.

The series draws on archival material and documented accounts to reconstruct Bose’s movements, the decisions behind them, and the people who made them possible. Cinematography is helmed by Sudip Sengupta, whose credits span Life of Pi, Neerja, Ramprasad Ki Tehrvi, and Arjun Patiala. Jar Pictures, the Mumbai-based banner behind Killa (Crystal Bear winner, Berlinale) and Liar’s Dice, India’s official Oscar entry, is the executive producer of this series. All episodes will be available on the Story TV app from August 15, midnight in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu.