PERIOD PERFECT: Khedekar (left) plays the enigmatic Bose in Benegal's (top) movie

As Benegal follows in Bose's footsteps between 1940 and 1945 for Netaji: The Last Hero, he confesses he is "walking on egg shells''. Whether it is Bose's marriage to Emily Schenkel or his plane crash in what was then Formosa, or his move from khadi to khaki, there is little in his life that is not complicated. But that is the challenge for Benegal. It is a challenge that is likely to cost producer Sahara Rs 20 crore and has already taken the filmmaker to Uzbekistan for three weeks, Ladakh for two weeks and Germany for another three weeks. Coming soon: a stint in Myanmar where the battle scenes will be shot. The action has seen Sachin Khedekar, the lead actor, moving across continents: in a U-boat from a museum in Kiel, Germany, to an afternoon in Presidency Jail, Kolkata.

Khedekar, best known for his TV work and for playing Tabu's horror of a husband in Astitva, is acting as Bose. He had to take English lessons from theatre actor Shernaz Patel, listen to hours of Bose's speeches and also read several books on him. For Khedekar, as for writer Atul Tiwari, it has been a learning experience. Says Tiwari, who co-wrote the screenplay with Benegal favourite Shama Zaidi: "Like most Indians, I knew little about Bose. But I thought I knew a lot.''

The film hopes to correct this, even though it may well end up as a hagiography. Benegal appears unruffled by that possibility: "I am telling it as an adventure story.'' Indeed, it is. Here is a man who escaped from a prison in Kolkata, crossed the North West Frontier Province, made his way to the Soviet Union, got into Germany on an Italian passport as Orlando Matzotta, left in a U-boat, went to the Baltic Sea, down the Cape of Good Hope, crossed to south-east Asia, landed in Indonesia, created a fighting force of 80,000 men and women and after World War II flew off-not to Japan but to Omsk, Siberia. There are disguises, there is war, there is soul-stirring rhetoric.

For Benegal, Bose's story is one he has lived with since childhood. An uncle, Ramesh Benegal, was part of the Indian National Army and was sent to Japan to train as a pilot at the Imperial Defence College. Benegal will be completing the film by the end of this year, in time for its release on Bose's birth anniversary on January 23. He knows there will be reaction-already, he says, he receives a barrage of e-mail every day. Some of it is useful, as Tiwari points out. "There is scholarship on the Indian leader around the world, especially now, since the KGB papers have been released. Even in Berlin, we came across a young scholar who has done a doctoral thesis on him," he says.

So what will Netaji the movie achieve? Show Bose as a passionate, driven human being? Or a naive politician who had a penchant for Fascism? Only Benegal knows. And even he is discovering new things every day.