HH

M. N.
Roy
ii M. N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism
Pathfinders
Series Editor: Dilip M. Menon

Department of History, University of Delhi
This series explores the intellectual history of South Asia through the
lives and ideas of significant individuals within a historical context.
These ‘pathfinders’ are seen to represent a break with existing traditions,
canons and inherited histories. In fact, even the idea of South Asia with its
constituent regions and linguistic and religious divisions maybe thrown
into crisis as we explore the idea of territory as generated by thought.
It is not cartographic limits that determine thinking but the imagining
of elective affinities across space, time and borders. These thinkers are
necessarily cosmopolitan and engage with a miscegenation of ideas
that recasts existing notions of schools of thinking, of the archive for a
history of ideas, and indeed of the very notion of national and regional
limits to intellectual activity. The books in this series try to think beyond
the limited frameworks of colonialism and nationalism for the modern
period and more generally of histories of societies that are told through
the prism of the state, its institutions and ideologies.
These slim volumes written by leading scholars are intended for the
intelligent layperson and expert alike, and written in an accessible,
lively and authoritative prose. Through telling the lives of celebrated
names and lesser known ones in context, this series will expand the
repertoire of ideas and individuals that have shaped the history and
culture of South Asia.
Also in the Series
Javed Majeed
Muhammad Iqbal: Islam, Aesthetics and Postcolonialism
ISBN: 978-0-415-44578-8
Lakshmi Subramanian
Veena Dhanammal: The Making of a Legend
ISBN: 978-0-415-44611-2
M. N. Roy
Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism
Kris Manjapra
LONDON NEW YORK NEW DELHI

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A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-415-44603-7
For
Theodor Bergmann
and
Sibnarayan Ray
Contents
List of Illustrations viii

List of Acronyms ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction xiii
1. The Swadeshi Avant-Garde 1
2. Marxist New Time 31
3. The Transformations of M. N. Roy 63
4. Criticism and Incarceration 98
5. Interstitial Politics 111
6. Radical Humanism 152
Epilogue 168
References and Select Bibliography 170
Index 195
List of Illustrations
1.1 Roy as a Swadeshi revolutionary in 1910. 2

2.1 Roy as Father Martin during his journey
to California in 1915. 38
3.1 Roy in Weimar Germany, c. 1923. 68
3.2 Roy, Member of the Comintern Presidium,
Soviet Envoy to China, c. 1926. 69
6.1 Roy in 1953. 153
List of Acronyms
ACLU American Civil Liberties Union

AICC All India Congress Committee
AITUC All India Trade Union Congress
CCF The Congress for Cultural Freedom
CIA Central Intelligence Agency (USA)
CID Criminal Investigation Department of the
Bengal Presidency
CPGB Communist Party of Great Britain
CPI Communist Party of India
Comintern The Office of the Communist International
CSP Congress Socialist Party
KPD Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Communist
Party of Germany)
KPD-O Kommunistische Partei-Opposition (German
Communist Party Opposition [Right Group])
IFL Indian Federation of Labour
INA Indian National Army (Azad Hind Fauj)
INC Indian National Congress
INKOPP Internationale Nachrichten der Kommunistischen
Opposition
Inprecor International Press Correspondence
Inprekorr Internationale Presse Korrespondenz
RH Radical Humanist magazine
WES Western Bureau of the Communist International
WPP Workers and Peasants Party
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank all those who helped me deepen my understanding of

M. N. Roy and sharpen my view of the historical context. In this regard,
I think especially of the scholars in Cambridge, Massachusetts: Sugata
Bose, Ayesha Jalal, David Blackbourn, Peter Gordon, Daniel Mulholland,
Neilesh Bose and Robert Fannion. Thanks to Sujit Raman for a seminal
discussion many years ago. I wish to thank my colleagues in the History
Department at Tufts University for their collegiality. Jeanne Penvenne
helped me find a foothold quickly in my new institution. Elsewhere in
the United States, I thank the members of the UCLA Mellon Postdoctoral
Program in the Humanities, especially Françoise Lionnet, Shu-mei Shih,
Sonali Pahwa and Sarah Valentine, as well as Mridu Rai at Yale University.
Both UCLA and Yale providing me venues to present my work and
obtain most beneficial feedback. I am grateful to Sanjay Subrahmanyam,
Sudipta Kaviraj, Akhil Gupta and Aamir Mufti for our exchanges during
my postdoctoral year. And thanks especially to Suzanne Marchand
for her inspiring scholarship and friendly support.
In Europe, I offer my sincerest thanks to Theodor Bergmann in
Stuttgart, who shared his memories of M. N. Roy with me, and helped me
imagine the Weimar context. Thanks to Ravi Ahuja, Harald Fischer-Tiné,
Benjamin Zachariah, Jürgen Lütt, Joachim Oesterheld, Hans Piazza, Mario
Kessler, Gita Dharampal-Frick and the South Asia Institute at Heidelberg
University. Javed Majeed’s comments on a chapter of this work were very
helpful to me. Astrid Eckert, who straddles the academic world between
United States and Germany, offered me invaluable encouragement.
Heidemarie Dengl at the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin and
Mieke Ijzermans at the Institute for Social History in Amsterdam, have
a special place in my memory for their tremendous kindness. And my
visit to Moscow would not have been so illuminating without the help
of Alexander Watlin.
This project only obtained its wings after a meeting with the most
eminent and gracious scholar, Sibnarayan Ray, whom I first met in
Kolkata. I am grateful for his willingness to share his vast knowledge,
his interpretive finesse, and his largesse with me. Sibnarayan Ray’s
meticulous work on the oeuvre of M. N. Roy provided me a most firm
xii M. N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism
foundation to begin my own explorations. Our long conversations

in Kolkata and Shantiniketan were a reminder that scholarship is a
wonderful inter-generational endeavour.
In India, I send my most respectful thanks to Amlan Datta, Samaren
Roy and R. M. Pal for giving of their time and sharing their reminiscences.
Amlan Datta’s philosophical acumen and keen sense for history were
particularly stimulating. Subhas Chakraborty of Presidency College,
Kolkata, offered kindness, direction, and a wealth of historical knowledge.
And Uma Dasgupta and Martin Kämpchen were and continue to be role
models in many ways. I wish to thank the staff at the Indian National
Library in Kolkata and the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in
Delhi for their unflagging assistance. And thanks also to Aditya Nigam
for helping me navigate research in Delhi.
This book would not have come to fruition without the guidance,
encouragement and vision of Dilip Menon. It is an honour to have
written a book under his editorship. At Routledge India, special thanks
to Nilanjan Sarkar and Rimina Mohapatra for their expertise and
advocacy. Thanks to Kanai Paul at Renaissance Publishers for permission
to use images.
And finally, a heartfelt thanks to my friends and family for sustaining
me, especially Saugato Datta, Lucia Volk, Jeanile Manjapra, Thomas
Brennan, Monika Golembiewski, James Savage, Julianna LeMieux and
Abby Collins.
Introduction
Manabendranath Roy was an intermediary between many worlds.

Writing his intellectual biography involves situating him beyond the
regnant binaries of the ‘local’ versus ‘global’, or ‘subaltern knowledge’
versus ‘Western episteme’, in order to shed light on the historical
significance of an interstitial thinker.1 The case is strange indeed. As one
of the premier international communists of the colonial world in the
1920s, he was an anti-colonial icon for a brief period in his life. In 1915,
he scoured South East Asia for ammunition and funds as a lieutenant in
one of the most powerful anti-colonial insurgency networks of Bengal.2
By 1920, he had reached Moscow as a delegate to the Second Congress
of the Communist International. His 1920 ‘supplementary theses on the
colonial question’ are included in official communist publications as an
addendum to Lenin’s own official writings on the subject, and the theses
stimulated African, American, Indonesian and Egyptian rejoinders,
among others.
Roy helped found the Mexican Communist Party and was a leading
Comintern envoy to the revolutionary attempts in Germany in 1923
and China in 1926–27. He was briefly a member of the Institute for
Social Research in Frankfurt (the Frankfurt School), collaborated
with Max Horkheimer in 1930, and sought to establish a Frankfurt
School of India in the 1940s. When M. N. Roy was imprisoned in India
in 1931, an international campaign for his release drew the support of
Jawaharlal Nehru, Albert Einstein and American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU) founder, Roger Baldwin. Upon his release from prison, he was, for a
time, seriously considered for the post of president of the Indian National
Congress, and went on to form the Indian Federation of Labour (IFL), one
of the most important Indian trade union organisations of the war years.
Roy’s ideas contributed to the formation of the Congress Socialist Party,
resonated with the contemporaneous All-Indian Progressive Writers’
Association movement and influenced Jawaharlal Nehru. They also
bore fruit in the perspectives of intellectuals outside India, such as the
French–Caribbean poet, Aimé Césaire, or the German–Jewish political
philosopher, August Thalheimer.3 Roy was named vice–president of the
International Humanist League in Amsterdam in 1952.
But if M. N. Roy was such a star in the mid-century internationalist
firmament: writing a treatise alongside Lenin; plotting communist
xiv M. N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism
revolutions across continents; and collaborating closely with some of

the most iconic intellectuals of Europe and India, then why do so few
people know his name today? After all, in Indonesia, Tan Malaka, the
leading Marxist cosmopolitan, inspired a whole genre of literature
dedicated to fictive accounts of his life, known as the Tan Malaka novel;4
in South America, anti-colonial communist intellectuals such as Martí
and Mariátegui are invoked with canonical reverence. In the French-
speaking world, world-travelling intellectuals associated with the left,
such as Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon or Albert Memmi, are recognised as
forefathers of postcolonialism. Elsewhere, in Asia, the young Marxist
internationalists of the 1920s, such as Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping and
Ho Chi Minh became the leaders of postcolonial nation-states. Roy, as an
anti-colonial cosmopolitan thinker of tremendous clout in mid-century,
has been so lost to the historical record that this recently spurred a
French documentary filmmaker to retrace Roy’s travels across the globe.5
This book argues that the forgetting of M. N. Roy, his place as an Indian
cosmopolitan icon manqué, in fact constitutes an important element of
his historical meaning.
Indian anti-colonial nationalists of the mid-century saw M. N. Roy
as a Europhile who had spent long years outside of India, and who,
upon return, refused to ascribe to accepted regimens of nationalist or
internationalist identity. Roy’s unpopularity stemmed from his strident
attack on enshrined heroes and the pieties of international communism
and mainstream Indian anti-colonialism, at the regional, national and
international levels. He had come to be seen as a pariah figure already
after his break with the increasingly orthodox Comintern in 1928.
After 1939, following his open support for the British war effort against
Fascism and Nazism, Roy set himself outside the bounds of mainstream
Congress politics. In the midst of the Quit India Movement of 1942 , Roy
argued that the victory of Hitler would be a far worse scenario than the
temporary continuation of British rule in India. He viciously attacked the
most prominent Congress leaders such as Nehru and Gandhi for their
‘Quit India’ politics in the context of the Second World War. Rhetoric
was razor sharp and the stakes were high in the war years. Roy was
labelled a ‘British spy’ and a ‘traitor’ by mainstream politicians, and
was even thought to have gone mad by others.6 And so, even while he
was still alive, the forgetting of M. N. Roy in the realm of Indian high
politics had already begun.
That forgetting of M. N. Roy is now almost complete. Sudipta Kaviraj
has remarked that what is most interesting about Roy was his ‘remarkable
failure’ as one who had all the makings of a major Indian leader, but
Introduction xv
who fell, media res, into obscurity. Philip Spratt, in the 1940s, spoke of
a ‘conspiracy to ignore a man who should be among the foremost in
public life’.7 But Roy seemed to have pursued one foredoomed cause
after the next, and with combustible ferocity. He worked unreasonably
hard at such abortive ventures, and seemed only to redouble his efforts
the more obscure and unpopular they became. Kaviraj credited this
failure to Roy’s apparent ‘heteronomy’:8 ‘Roy … saw Marxist theory as
a set of conclusions which were to be transferred to another society…’,
thus presenting Roy as endemically out of touch with the actuality of
India.9 I propose instead that it was Roy’s role as an intermediary between
worlds, while not centred in any, that paradoxically contributed both
to his forgetting as a political figure, and to the power and widespread
influence of his ideas.
Frame Making and Frame Breaking

I locate the roots of M. N. Roy’s intellectual biography in the context
of responses to the colonial framing of time and history.10 The British
colonial project resolved Christian notions about redemption in history
(eschatology) within a secular discourse about progress in history.11 As
both England and France began an era of colonisation and ‘improvement’
with evangelical zeal at the end of the eighteenth century, anti-colonial
thinkers responded with attempts to drastically rupture the time frame
of imperialism.12
I argue that exegesis — the interpretation and criticism of religious
texts — as well as ascesis — practices of bodily discipline for cultivating
spiritual force — constituted two major modes for creating new ‘orders of
time’, or chronosophies, in nineteenth-century Bengal.13 These two forms
of anti-colonial practice, one centred on reading and criticising texts,
the other on cultivating spiritual force (shakti) within the depth of the
self, help explain why M. N. Roy, from the start, encountered Marxist
texts as a coherent canon calling for criticism, and why he immediately
locked on to narratives of explosive subjectivity and temporal rupture
in his readings and applications of Marx.
By the 1890s, anti-colonial struggle was already an increasingly inter-
national endeavour in which activists envisioned alternative world
orders from the one imposed by British imperial rule.14 Nineteenth-
century anti-colonial discourses about universal time culminated
in the thought of what I call the ‘Swadeshi avant-garde’ — a group of
philosophers and artists who wrote in the context of the Swadeshi
xvi M. N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism
Movement (1903–1917), the most severe insurgency in India since the

rebellion of 1857.15 As opposed to being marked by inward-looking,
territorial worldviews, Swadeshi avant-garde thinkers were remarkable
for their international imagination, their anticipations of a ‘new
time’ that would break into the present, and the deterritorial web of
their political activism. Religious sentiment played an important role
in creating the avant-gardist world map and the sense of universal
time used by anti-colonial activists on their world travels. M. N. Roy
was steeped in the discourses of comparative religion and modernist
reconstructions of Hindu dharma that arose in nineteenth-century
Bengal and culminated in the thought of the Swadeshi avant-garde.
This had the effect, not of turning him inward, but rather of propelling
him abroad. This biography calls for a shift in attention away from
territorial horizons of India to its deterritorial networks of thought
and travel, since a whole world of shuttling travellers, cosmopolitan
thinkers, interstitial social spaces and zones of intellectual fusion are
often obscured by standard, territory-fixed narratives.
Roy’s intellectual and social position as a travelling intermediary
comes into view as the narrative turns to consider the fifteen years
Roy spent abroad. Berlin, a city in political disarray after the war, and
bursting with new intellectual and artistic movements, became Roy’s
base of activity in the 1920s. His experimentations in political phil-
osophy during the decade led him into contact with Futurism, German
Expressionism and Hegelian Marxism, as well as Freudian psychoanalysis.
Most importantly, the fusion of Roy’s interpretive horizons with that
of a fringe group of communists associated with the famed Spartakus
Bund — the German Communist Party Opposition — created a powerful
amalgam of Swadeshi–Marxism in Roy’s writings. Central to my
argument is the rift that developed within early communism between
the Bolshevik ascendancy on one hand, and the members of the German
Spartakus Bund closely associated with the thought of Rosa Luxemburg,
who represented an authoritative alternate school of radical Marxism on
the other. International communism was not a homogenous movement,
but an unequal field of contestation in which the Soviet state eventually
established its incontrovertible orthodoxy. In the period of the purges
and the centralisation of the communist movement after 1928, Roy was
easily marginalised within the ranks of left internationalists and labelled
a traitor and ‘renegade’.
Roy returned to India in the 1930s and made a significant impact on
the theory and practice of the trade union movement with his advocacy
Introduction xvii
of ‘united front’ politics. But during six years of imprisonment beginning

in 1931, on charges of conspiracy against the Empire, Roy’s work also took
a new tack with its turn towards cultural critique. His writings on sexual
politics from the prison cell constituted his entrée into Marxist cultural
criticism from a standpoint beyond class analysis. This culminated in
his voluminous writings about ‘Indian fascism’ in the 1940s, in which
he argued that ‘the world is in the midst of a civil war’ between those
advocating cultural regimentation, reactionary returns to the past, and
autarchic notions of national identity, and those standing for cultural
liberalisation, revolutionary anticipations of the future, and cross-cutting
worldwide solidarities. Roy did not advocate a vision of strong and heroic
postcolonial autonomy, but of a mediated autonomy, in which freedom
would arrive within the framework of a South Asian federative union of
member nations, and within a transnational federation of democratic
governments worldwide. But this federative vision tended to be erased
in the context of the Quit India Movement and the perceived political
exigencies of mainstream Indian nationalists during the war years, and
Roy quickly became a non-player on the Indian nationalist scene.
The final phase of his thought (from 1946 to 1954), what he himself
termed ‘Radical Humanism’, tells us something about the life cycle of
utopianism. Roy attempted to distil and preserve the key elements
of his postcolonial hope in the context of the unwanted human dev-
astation brought by Partition, as well as the varying degrees of ‘covert
and overt’ authoritarianism in the postcolonial states after 1947.16 While
avant-garde anticipations of the future were once seen as revolutionary
tools for rupturing the linear succession of historical time, by the late
1940s, hope was no longer a revolutionary tool but more a dispensation
of ‘new time’ to be preserved and protected from the events of the day.
The restorative, therapeutic quality of post-war humanism seemed to
be at work on a global scale, and Roy joined a transnational community
of scholars who insisted on universalistic keywords — ‘man’, ‘humanity’,
‘reason’, ‘peace’ — not because they were proponents of ‘grand theory
narratives’, but because they struggled to articulate and maintain hope
in a period of trauma and vulnerability.
Studying the ideas of M. N. Roy sheds light on the nexus of intellectual
discourses he stood between. We glimpse a global horizon of modernism
in political philosophy that already connected the Swadeshi avant-
garde with Central European avant-garde movements even before Roy
travelled abroad. We encounter a global ecumene of communism in the
1920s, as well as a transnational discourse on humanism in the 1950s.
Indian anti-colonialism, then, looks increasingly like a philosophical
xviii M. N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism
discourse about value, truth and the social good that always called forth
connection and comparison with philosophical debates and political
struggles abroad, more than a means-end project of political calculus
centred solely within Indian territory.17
It is useful to trace how a figure such as M. N. Roy has been cast in
existing literature. He has become something of a cameo figure in South
Asian history-writing, briefly brought on stage to speak about the fag
end of Indian thraldom to the West, representing a form of cultural
indeterminacy that was supposedly reminiscent of nineteenth-century
proto-nationalism, not en route to Indian autonomy.18 David Kopf, scholar
extraordinaire of the ‘Bengal Renaissance’, wrote in 1969, ‘from Derozio
to M. N. Roy, there has been a highly articulate intellectual tradition
of extreme Westernisation and accompanying cultural alienation’.19
Curiously, a tendency exists within postcolonial studies to picture
M. N. Roy, one of the first Marxist theoreticians of India and among the
most brilliant, as heteronomous, xenophilic and Eurocentric, and as a
Bengali bhadralok determined by that social position. Dipesh Chakrabarty
remarked in his Provincializing Europe that M. N. Roy was entrapped
in the ideologies attendant to global capital, unable to break into the
temporalities and imaginary beyond Western epistemic domination.
‘A long series of illustrious members of this social group [the Bengali
bhadralok] — from Raja Rammohan Roy… to Manabendranath Roy, who
argued with Lenin in the Comintern — warmly embraced the themes
of rationalism, science, equality and human rights that the European
Enlightenment promulgated’.20 If an efficacious Indian anti-colonialism
is understood as the construction of an inner realm of Indian selfhood
against an outer realm of colonial heteronomy, as Partha Chatterjee
powerfully theorised in The Nation and its Fragments, then Roy’s thought
must be considered inefficacious and out of synch with the long march
of Indian anti-colonialism. The ‘inner domain of national culture’,
Chatterjee pointed out, had to be wrested from the colonial public sphere
by a return to indigenous aesthetic discourses, family life, vernacular
languages and popular and peasant culture. This inner domain, the
argument goes, the source of cultural autonomy, was a necessary
ingredient for mature anti-colonial praxis. If anti-colonialism consists
in ‘symbolic contestations within a field of power’, Chatterjee argued,
then it is only those cultural–symbolic acts which challenged or
denied Western cultural hegemony that provided the momentum for a
successful twentieth-century Indian anti-colonialism.21
But, these important arguments by Chatterjee and Chakrabarty assume
a dichotomous field of symbols and power/knowledge split between the
Introduction xix
authentic local and the heteronomous global. More recently, Andrew

Sartori has proposed a way out of this dichotomisation. Contestations
with colonial power/knowledge do not account for the form of Roy’s
thought. Rather, Sartori maintains that the determinative effect of global
capital helps explain why ‘parochial cosmopolitans’ such as M. N. Roy
arose, not only in Bengal, but also in Japan, Germany and elsewhere in
the twentieth century. Roy’s turn towards the ‘inwardness’ of humanism
at the end of his life was already pre-programmed by the fact that global
capitalism created the conditions for the possibility of Roy’s worldview
based on abstract notions of ‘the human’, as also on the reformulation
of liberation in terms of the interiority of the bourgeois self.22
While these post-structuralist and neo-Marxian approaches to intel-
lectual history offer their own important insights, I take a different,
hermeneutic departure here, in order to explain global intellectual
conjuncture while not losing sight of idiomatic particularity. M. N. Roy’s
thought, like that of colonial thinkers more generally, is best under-
stood not within the framework of base and superstructure, however
defined, but within the contexts of multiple, contingent, socially-located
conversations. In a series of charged conversation zones set across the
world, Roy was both the recipient and formulator of meaning. The
intermediate ‘third space’ of conversations and the play of agency and
structure it engendered provide the parameters within which to study
the ideas of M. N. Roy.23
I suggest that Roy is actually representative of some important
general features of early twentieth-century Indian anti-colonialism.
He is important not for his exceptionality, but for how he serves as a
heightened case of a family relation of anti-colonial cosmopolitanism.
Indian intellectuals participated simultaneously in regional, trans-
regional and global public spheres of debates, and their writings evi-
dence this polyphony. I approach M. N. Roy, not as a stock character
in the repertoire of responses to ‘the West’ or to ‘global capital’, but
as a traveller and intermediary beyond the British–India axis, and a
collaborator with groups abroad who were marginalised within that
rather problematic and ambiguous category called ‘the West’.
Fractures in the ‘West’ must be critically mined for their historical
consequences. The international imagination of Indians was not
contained within the British-India colonial axis. In fact, in the context
of anti-colonialism, travels that thwarted the colonial pair-bond played
a most important role. M. N. Roy’s intellectual pursuits surpassed the
imperial axis connecting India to Britain, taking him to the United
States of America, Mexico, Germany, the Soviet Union and China along
xx M. N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism
with other locales along the way. There were many termini in Roy’s
travels, both physical and imaginary, resulting in a complex stitching of
meanings. The geopolitical tensions between nation-states such as the
United States, Britain, Germany, Japan and Russia created interstitial
spaces within which Indian anti-colonial thinkers could deploy their
own projects. The factions and fragments within European and American
states, and within global movements that became increasingly linked
to European statecraft, such as Soviet communism, produced both
possibilities for and constraints on the Indian anti-colonial struggle.
The study of cosmopolitan intermediaries, interpreters and intersti-
tial thinkers has received much attention in recent works on South Asian
intellectual history. Kapil Raj has convincingly pointed to the need
for the study of mediators of knowledge within colonial zones of ex-
change.24 Javed Majeed has suggestively investigated the role of travel
and circulations on Indian intellectuals, while Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s
studies of ‘conceptual contaminations’ in the early modern period
also enlighten this theme.25 Leela Gandhi’s work on the implications
of inter-cultural friendship provides another avenue for productively
studying intermediaries and their interstitial spaces of thought and life.26
And Sugata Bose’s study of the travelling imagination of Rabindranath
Tagore and Subhas Chandra Bose showed how articulations of ‘different
universalisms’ informed many anti-colonial pursuits.27 Studying new
archives that illuminate the history of in-between figures provides
an important groundwork for better understanding how the play of
territoriality and deterritoriality has defined the history of ideas in the
modern period.
This work seeks to shift the study of South Asian cultural and intel-
lectual history from the opposition between two mutually exclusive
concepts, autonomy versus heteronomy, to the interplay between two
co-existing pursuits, autonomy and solidarity, within the context of
modernity.
It is with regard to the interplay between projects of autonomy
and solidarity — their way of constructively building on each other —
that I introduce the theme of cosmopolitanism. The term is open to
many glosses, and so I must specify my usage here. Forms of cosmo-
politanism, especially since the mid nineteenth century, often arose as
internationalist projects of politically subordinated groups, and tended
to express a strong aspirational dimension to change or destroy the
existing world order, instead of preserving or affirming it. Another
form of cosmopolitanism, on the other hand, was often conceived by
Introduction xxi
the political elites of European nation-states as the state of benign peace

within a commonwealth or concert of similarly advanced and civilised
nations. From the Seven Years’ War onwards, European legal theorists
and philosophers wrote increasingly on themes of cosmopolitanism
and internationalism, on the need for internationally recognised laws
governing commerce, the high seas, the rights of exiles and refugees, and
the protocols to resolve territorial disputes. These deliberations tended
to peak precisely in those years of greatest inter-state conflict, whether
in the 1790s with the French Revolution, or the 1810s in the aftermath
of Napoleon, or the 1830s with the rise of new European competition
for imperial markets.
The ethical discourse of cosmopolitanism among subordinated
communities, whether inside Europe or in the colonial world, and the
internationalist political and institutional pursuits that accompanied
it, were qualitatively different from the projects advanced by the
elites of European nation-states. The anticipatory quality of colonial
cosmopolitanism, seeking both autonomy and solidarity, was a hugely
important motor for anti-colonial struggle.
Besides the philosophical aspect of cosmopolitanism, Roy also demon-
strated its experiential side. In this book, I depict Manabendranath
Roy as an anti-colonial cosmopolitan thinker, given the way he was
absorbed into multiple cultural and social horizons, and how he carried
forward the impress of his past encounters almost as physiological
traces informing and affecting his reactions to new circumstances. Such
cosmopolitanism might indeed be seen as a feature of colonial thinkers
at large, with the study of Roy offering a heightened case-study. Anti-
colonial intellectuals were interested both in defining the boundaries
of the nation and of national selfhood, and also in creating bonds of
sympathy with foreign groups worldwide in the pursuit of broader
political and ethical goals.
Quentin Skinner made the argument for the need to study the
‘illocutionary force’ of ideas. He envisioned authorial intent as consti-
tuting a response to a rich intellectual context of debate and discussion.28
My addendum to Skinner in this work maintains that travelling inter-
mediaries such as M. N. Roy must be set in multiple, incongruous contexts
and intellectual traditions. Roy’s philosophical claims developed as
attempts to resolve problems within his disparate contexts, as also to
build bridges and create amalgams between them. In this intellectual
biography, close attention is paid to the friction of social experiences, as
xxii M. N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism
well as the breakdown of Roy’s intellectual tools in moments of crisis. I

consider the way thinking approximated a form of mental labour carried
out with and against the resistance of historical events.
The diverse array of sources engaged in this book include archival
materials from Russia, Germany, Britain, France, the Netherlands,
the United States and India. Published and unpublished letter cor-
respondence, press clippings and surveillance files provide views
on the transnational field of Roy’s thought and life. Of course, I also
include a comprehensive reading of Roy’s work with special attention
to reorientations, crises and revisions, in order to understand the
movement of his thought over the course of his life.
That figures such as Roy who upset accepted notions of national,
international or cultural belonging tended to acquire a marginal status
not only in Indian politics, but also within the historical narrative, does
not mean that they should be understood primarily as victims of history,
exiles from home, or as displaced votaries of melancholia. I resist the
titillation of a narrative of exile that would represent Roy as someone
alone, unprecedented, abandoned or exiled. M. N. Roy’s thought was a
peculiar expression of a family relation, or perhaps, the nexus between
multiple family relations. Roy was not, as Nehru feelingly once wrote,
‘a lonely figure, deserted by everybody’.29 Not only did he have a chosen
family of transnational dimensions comprised of like-minded thinkers,
but his philosophical vision strongly resonated with many Indian
thinkers generally considered more central to the South Asian historical
narrative. Roy belonged to multiple social and intellectual emplotments
from his position in the interstices, and in that sense, was defined by an
excess of interconnection, not a condition of political loneliness.
Notes
1. The figure of the ‘interstitial thinker’ has received in-depth discussion by a number
of scholars. See especially Dilip Menon. (forthcoming). ‘A Local Cosmopolitan:
“Kesari” Balakrishna Pillai and the Invention of Europe for a Modern Kerala’, in
Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra (eds.), Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and
the Global Circulation of Ideas. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Also see the seminal
work of Homi Bhabha. 1994. Location of Culture. London: Routledge, p. 3.
2. The Jugantar group. See Sibnarayan Ray. 1987b. Selected Works of M. N. Roy, vol. 1:
p. 13.
3. See introduction by Robin Kelley to Aimé Césaire. 2000. Discourse on Colonialism,
trans. Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Introduction xxiii
4. James Siegel. 1997. Fetish, Recognition, Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University

Press, p. 167. M. N. Roy does appear, under the alias of ‘Professor Verma’, in
Mulk Raj Anand. 1941. The Sword and the Sickle. London: J. Cape.
5. See Vladimir Leon’s 2006 Film. M. N. Roy: Le Brahmane du Comintern. Paris: L’Institut
National de L’ Audiovisuel.
6. Roy himself commented on this view, saying in a speech from 1946, ‘You simply
disregarded my ideas, took up a tolerant attitude: the man seems to have gone a
little out of his mind…’ See M. N. Roy. 1946b. New Orientations: Lectures Delivered at
the Political Study Camp held at Dehra Dun from May 8–18, 1946. Calcutta: Renaissance
Publisher, p. 6.
7. Philip Spratt, foreword to Ray, New Orientation, pp. vii–viii.
8. Sudipta Kaviraj. 1986. ‘The Heteronomous Radicalism of M. N. Roy’, in Thomas
Pantham and Kenneth L. Deutsch (eds), Political Thought in Modern India. 1987.
pp. 209–31.
9. Kaviraj, ‘Heteronomous Radicalism’, p. 224.
10. On the notion of ‘cognitive framing’ see George Lakoff. 1987. Women, Fire, and
Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, pp. 9–10.
11. The distinction between theoretical liberalism and political liberalism is drawn by
George Lakoff. 1946. Moral Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 19–22.
12. Sudipta Kaviraj (1995) has a number of brilliant chapters on the nineteenth
century contestations of time in The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra
Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India. See chapters 3
and 4.
13. Krzysztof Pomian introduces the idea of ‘chronosophy’. See L’ordre du Temps.
1984. Paris: Gallimard, p. 26.
14. On early twentieth-century debates about ‘world orders’ and Western hegemony,
see Cemil Aydin. 2007. The Politics of anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order
in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought. New York: Columbia University Press.
15. In invoking a ‘Swadeshi avant-garde’, I reference the convincing interpretation
offered by Partha Mitter of an Indian avant-garde in art in the early twentieth
century. See Partha Mitter. 2007. Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the
Avant-Grade, 1922–1947. London: Reaktion Books.
16. Ayesha Jalal. 1995. Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia: A Comparative
Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 38–62.
17. This overemphasis appears in the work of Manu Goswami. 2004. Production India:
From Colonial Economy to National Space. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
p. 201 and Sumathi Ramaswamy. 2001. ‘Maps and Mother Goddesses in Modern
India’, Imago Mundi, 53(1): 97–114.
18. Ashis Nandy used psychoanalysis to describe Indian anti-colonialism as a process
of ‘working through’ colonialism in the development of a strong, autonomous
anti-colonial ego. See Ashis Nandy. 1983. Intimate Enemy, New Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
19. David Kopf. 1969. British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of
Indian Modernization, 1733–1835. Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 253.
xxiv M. N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism
20. Dipesh Chakrabarty. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical
Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 4.
21. Partha Chatterjee.1993. Nation and its Fragments, Princeton: Princeton University
Press, p. 13.
22. Andrew Sartori. 2008. Bengal and Global Concept History: Culturalism in the Age of
Capital. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 255.
23. Hans-Georg Gadamer. 1993. Truth and Method. New York: Continuum, p. 105.
24. Kapil Raj. 2006. Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of
Knowledge in South Asia. Delhi: Permanent Black, pp. 19–21, 109–10, provides
an imaginative discussion of intellectuals as ‘intermediaries’ and ‘mediating
agents’. Also see Chris Bayly on ‘dubashes’ and translators in C. A. Bayly. 1996.
Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India,
1780–1870. New York: Cambridge University Press, p. 46.
25. On ‘conceptual contamination’ see Sanjay Subrahmanyam. 2005. Mughals and
Franks, Delhi: Oxford University Press, p. 12; See Javed Majeed’s invocation of
the ‘necessarily fragile, mixed self’ in Javed Majeed. 2007. Autobiography, Travel
and Postnational Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
p. 161.
26. Leela Gandhi. 2006. Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle
Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship. Durham: Duke University Press,
pp. 19–23; Seema Alavi. 2008. Islam and Healing. New York: Palgrave Macmillan;
Harish Trivedi. 1993. Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India. Calcutta:
Papyrus; Sara Suleri. 1989. Meatless Days. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
27. Sugata Bose. 2006. A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire.
Cambridge: Howard University Press.
28. Quentin Skinner. 1974. ‘Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and
Action’, Political Theory, 2(3): 277–303. See also James Tully (ed.). 1988. Meaning and
Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
29. Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography, 1962. p. 268.
1
The Swadeshi Avant-Garde
M. N. Roy’s Memoirs (1964) can be read as a piece of expressionist art.1

It recounts repeated breakages of time flow, in which new ideas and
new time intrude. Roy repeatedly ‘discovers new meaning’, announces
‘lands of hope’ to which he travelled in pursuit of the nationalist cause,
and reports his ‘rebirths’ along the way.2 The path of anti-colonial
struggle and self-discovery through foreign worlds did not create a
Bildungsroman of stadial change reaching ultimate culmination, but
rather a discontinuous and fragmentary narrative of pregnant expect-
ancy and unforeseen crisis events. Roy narrates his autobiography as a
continual explosive encounter with the new, not unlike classic works of
Central European literary Expressionism, such as Ernst Bloch’s The
Spirit of Utopia (1918) or Hugo Ball’s Flight Out of Time (1927).3 These
features of Roy’s autobiography — the focus on temporal rupture and on
the encounter with the foreign — were standard to the Bengali avant-
garde milieu in which he grew up.
Manabendranath Roy (1887–1954), born Narendranath Bhattacharya
to a Brahmin family in the West Bengal village of Kseput, grew up in the
context of increasingly radical anti-colonial politics. By the late nine-
teenth century, radical resistance movements against the British began
to be organised in Calcutta. First came the enhancement of European
dominance in... the Calcutta Corporation with the Amendment Act of 1899,
passed to ‘give the Europeans a general and adequate security’ in matters
of commerce and industry.4 Then the partition of Bengal, first proposed
by Viceroy Curzon in 1903 and enacted in 1905, divided Bengal between a
Western Hindu and an Eastern Muslim province in the interest of a ‘diminu-
tion of the power of Bengali political agitation’.5 A violent insurgency
of unprecedented proportions, the Swadeshi Movement, arose, lasting
from 1903 till 1917. It marked a new era of politics and thought with
implications for decades to come.6
From his youth, Roy was closely associated with some of the most
powerful figures of radical Swadeshi politics and thought. He studied at
the new Bengal Technical College with the young Swadeshi educationalist,
2 M. N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism
Benoy Kumar Sarkar, disciple of Satish Chandra Mukherjee.7 It is likely

that, as a young man, Roy undertook social work and trade union
organisation in villages alongside Swadeshi labour activists. He was
mentored by Barindrakumar Ghosh, the revolutionary leader and brother
of Sri Aurobindo. Roy soon became a lieutenant to perhaps the greatest
Bengali Swadeshi insurgent, Jatin Mukherjee.8 For a number of years,
Roy plotted heists of armouries and gun shops (‘dacoities’), constructed
bombs and attempted to assassinate British colonial officials.9 From 1903
to 1915, between the ages of sixteen and twenty-eight, Roy was active
in the Calcutta revolutionary underground.
The young M. N. Roy, like many of the madhyabitta (middle-class)
high-caste Hindu youth of his day, also pursued the ascesis of dharma.
Illustration 1.1 Roy as a Swadeshi revolutionary in 1910.

Source: Sibnarayan Ray, In Freedom’s Quest: Life of M. N. Roy, vol. 4, Part 2.
Used with permission.
The Swadeshi Avant-Garde 3
Practising yoga, abstaining from sexual activity and reading the

Gita formed central features of the daily discipline of the Swadeshi
revolutionaries.10 The anti-colonial nationalist struggle in these years
was often framed in religious terms. Swadeshi radicals believed them-
selves to be involved in pracesta (righteous striving).11 They wanted to
attain swaswata Bharat (eternal India).12 They viewed the possible loss
of their lives for the cause of national freedom as an aspect of sadhana
(the spiritual journey).13 Yet, far from simply representing the deploy-
ment of ‘religion’ in the pursuit of political ends, spiritual sensibilities
reflected both the increasingly deterritorial social experience of the
time, as well as the desire to break out of the dominant colonial framing
of universal time and global space.
‘Deterritoriality’, as a term of art, received inconsistent glosses by
Deleuze and Guattari, the very theorists who coined it.14 My reading of
‘deterritoriality’ follows from their discussion in A Thousand Plateaus
(1987), in which the ‘deterritorial body’ is defined as a system of ‘waves
and intensities’ co-produced along with the formation of bounded
political forms.15 Under the conditions of a global and interconnected
economy of unprecedented scale since the seventeenth century, terri-
torial entities of the modern era are localisable in bounded space and
often take the form of nation-states, while deterritorial ‘bodies’ are
fields of waves or vectors always on the way to somewhere else, circu-
lating across state borders and in supranational communities of value
and belonging. But the ‘de–’ in ‘deterritorial’ is not privative. It does
not suggest that which is antithetical to bounded national space.
Deterritoriality and territoriality play together in a dialectic in the
modern era, suggest Deleuze and Guattari. ‘The territorial assemblage’,
they point out, ‘implies a decoding and is inseparable from its own
deterritorialisation’.16 This has led scholars to speak of modern processes
of ‘de/reterritorialisation’.17
In the specific example of anti-colonial nationalism, the co-production
of territorial politics, aimed at achieving a free Indian nation-state, and
deterritorial politics, aimed at forging transnational communities of
affiliation and solidarity, has received scholarly attention.18 By invoking
the deterritorial register of anti-colonial politics here, I seek to chal-
lenge the priority granted to ‘home politics’ and to territorial aspiration
in the study of anti-colonial nationalism.19 In fact, the nationalist system
lived through the political missions and interpretive actions of globally
dispersed actors as they travelled. And the objectives and anticipations
of deterritorial anti-colonial nationalism often exceeded territorial
frames. The inhabitation of medial spaces and interstices by Indian
anti-colonial activists, travelling beyond boundaries and seeking fusions

with foreign worlds, had its own ontological status, and was not simply
en route to territorial form.
By the 1890s, in the prime colonial cosmopolis of Calcutta, it was
common for individuals from diverse classes to have had some experi-
ence of foreign travel, or to know someone with stories of life abroad —
whether he or she be coolie, lascar, free labourer, hajj pilgrim, student
or bhadralok tourist. Beginning in the 1830s Calcutta was a hub port for
the travel of indentured labour out of and into India.20 The circulatory
travel of Bengali elites going to Britain rose from the late 1860s onwards,
especially with the rise of Indians in the colonial administration and
with the increasing place of Indian professionals in the legal and higher
education systems, positions that assigned great status to accreditation
in the imperial metropolis.21 From 1840s onwards, expanding greatly
after the opening of the Suez Canal, Calcutta also became one of the major
cities for the hajj pilgrimage by ship to Mecca, Medina and Karbala.22
By the late nineteenth century, the polysemy of the term ‘nation’ in
Bengali discourse, which in the writings of a nationalist author such
as Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay could refer to ‘all the races of India’,
or to ‘the Hindus’, or to the ‘the Bengalis’,23 could also refer to a notion
of a ‘greater India’ comprising the home population and the diaspora.
An article in the Calcutta Modern Review of 1907, for example, blatantly
declared: ‘hundreds of well-to-do families, Hindu in every sense of the
word, [are] found in regions as distant as South America and Oceania. It
is they who in their humble way form what I call Greater India outside
the limits of our motherland’.24 Meanwhile, the celebrated Bengali editor,
Ramananda Chatterjee, began publishing his journal Prabasi in 1897,
whose title (Prabasi can be awkwardly translated into English as ‘those
Bengalis living away from home’) addressed a greater Bengali community
living both inside and outside the territorial bounds of Bengal.
A new kind of political thought crystallised in the context of deter-
ritorialisation at the turn of the century in Bengal, of which M. N. Roy’s
writings are an expression. What may be termed the ‘Swadeshi avant-
garde’ emphasised deterritorial notions of space and new notions of
time. When Manabendranath Roy travelled abroad in 1915, initially in
search of ammunition and funds to support the Swadeshi movement,
first to ports in southeast Asia, then on to the United States and Mexico
and then on to Germany and Russia, he had already embarked on an
avant-garde project of travel, aimed not at reconfirming the extent
routes of Indian voyage through the empire, but at remaking the map
of the world through the agency of travel itself.
The Swadeshi Movement

Partha Chatterjee has advanced the penetrating argument that the
anti-colonial era began with the turn towards an inner domain of
cultural autonomy and the rejection of Western modes, a process whose
roots stretch back at least to the 1860s, with the rise in stature of the
tantric saint Ramakrishna, and the gradual acceptance of his mystical
message by urban elites. 25 The partition of 1905 was less a cause than an
occasion for the expression of long-simmering anti-colonial discontent.
Secret societies in the Calcutta and Dacca undergrounds constructed
bombs and hurled them at colonial officers. These samiti conducted
raids of government munition depots, and destabilised the municipal
corporations through acts of banditry. Meanwhile Swadeshi indus-
tries and storefronts were established, in which foreign goods were
boycotted and locally manufactured goods sold. Urban Bengalis began
wearing homespun fabrics.26 Rabindranath Tagore and Aswini Kumar
Datta started campaigns for village education, as Kshitimohan Sen and
Dinesh Chandra Sen recorded the Baul folk songs of the countryside
to teach city dwellers about the riches of authentic Bengali village
culture. The Dawn Society under Satish Chandra Mukherji pioneered
programmes for ‘national education’ in opposition to Viceroy Curzon’s
project, begun in 1899, to reassert the ‘central authority and govern-
ment control’ over Calcutta University.27 Meanwhile, Aurobindo Ghosh
and Taraknath Palit headed the Swadeshi universities established in
1906, the Bengal National College and the Bengal Technical College.28
And this rise of nationalist educational institutions attained culmin-
ation in 1914 with the founding of the University Science College by
Ashutosh Mukherjee and P. C. Ray.29 In the midst of these trends,
Mohandas Gandhi commented in 1909 that Swadeshi marked the ‘real
awakening’ of Indian anti-colonial nationalism.30 So powerful was the
onset, and so resonant with a global eruption of anti-colonial activity,
that the British government unleashed the largest counter-insurgency
measures since 1857 to meet the threats.31
But, I claim here that the Swadeshi movement cannot be properly
configured within the dichotomous schemes of the inner versus outer,
the local versus global, the spiritual versus secular or the indigenous
versus the Western. Swadeshi thought went beyond ‘territorial
nativism’.32 The fusion of temporalities that gave birth to twentieth-
century political radicalism in Bengal and in India was not born from
an ‘inner national domain’ alone, but arose from a re-framing of the
globe and the place of Indian consciousness within global tempor-

alities. Swadeshi avant-gardism was coded with a travelling imagination,
often expressed in a register attuned to metaphysics and spirituality.
Swadeshi thinkers saw their struggle as contemporaneous with other
nationalist struggles worldwide, and they also envisioned the distant
actions of Indian anti-colonial radicals abroad, in places such as London,
Paris, New York and San Francisco, as simultaneous and connected with
their own actions in Calcutta, Dacca, Lahore, Madras or Bombay.
Anti-colonial nationalism, and the Indian nation itself, was envisioned
by Swadeshi thinkers as a deterritorial entity. This global system lived
through the political missions and interpretive actions of its members
as they travelled.33 I suggest here that in order to begin unravelling the
life-path and the intellectual project of the far-travelling Swadeshi
thinker, Manabendranath Roy, anti-colonial nationalism should not be
defined in terms of the ‘longing for cartographic form’ or the search
for the ‘inner boundaries of freedom’ alone.34 Apart from the modernist
pursuit of form, there was also at work an equally modernist longing
for the transgression of boundaries, and for alternative universal
communities.
The Swadeshi movement took place in the context of growing
identification by Indians with a world-wide belt of insurgencies in the
first years of the twentieth century to oppose European and American
imperial power: in coastal China, Japan, Egypt, the Ottoman empire,
in Poland and Czechoslovakia, in German Southwest Africa and the
Philippines.35 Swadeshi radicals believed their projects to be associated
with the rise of French and Russian radicalism in the 1880s, and with
Czech, Irish and Chinese radicalism in the 1900s.36 By September 1908,
thirty-seven Calcutta revolutionaries were committed for trial due
to their insurgent activity. Meanwhile, similar uprisings were taking
place in Dacca, Bombay, Madras and Lahore. In May 1907, Lajpat Rai and
Ajit Singh of Punjab were deported from India to London on sedition
charges. In July 1908, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, revolutionary leader in
Bombay, was sentenced to transportation in Burma where he re-
mained until 1914. Aurobindo Ghosh was likewise tried and imprisoned
at Uttarpara in 1909. In these years, a large number of prominent anti-
colonial leaders departed for Europe and the United States to avoid
sedition charges, including Bipin Chandra Pal, Ram Bhaj Dutt, Hardayal
and G. S. Khaparda.
A number of major conspiracy cases were opened over the course
of the decade.37 The combination of deportations, imprisonments and
detentions, and the 1909 promise by British authorities to reunify
Bengal, brought one phase of Swadeshi insurgency to an end by 1910.

But the political vectors of the Swadeshi uprising were pointing to-
wards the world as revolutionaries only redoubled their travels across
the globe in the coming period, following paths that led to Tokyo
and Nanking, to Vancouver, San Francisco and New York, and to the
anarchist milieu in Paris. Swadeshi temporalities were promiscuous,
continually crossing with foreign discourses and political movements.
Anti-colonialism developed into an animated constellation, and not a
radial hub-and-spoke system, in which all travel routes lead to the home
country of territorial India.
Swadeshi thinkers imagined the political body of India to have
worldwide dimensions. The idea of antarjatik (international) educa-
tion was a central element of the syllabi at the new Swadeshi colleges
established in Calcutta in 1906. For example, students at the Bengal
National College and the Bengal Technical College were required to study
either French or German, and by 1915, hearing German spoken in the
student coffeehouse on College Street was not uncommon. For students of
political science, the curriculum prescribed the study of English, French,
German, Swiss, American, Japanese and Turkish societies. The history
track included the study of ‘Japan, China and America 1850–1900’, as well
as ‘the historical characters of Washington, Bismarck, Mazzini, Garibaldi,
Meiji Emperor Mutsuhito, Napoleon, Frederick the Great, Chengiz Khan
and Abraham Lincoln’. 38 The national education movement normalised
a sense that India’s experience had affinities throughout the world.
Recalling Bipin Pal’s terminology in the Soul of India (1911), the curricula
aimed to induct students into the ‘cult of nationality as of humanity’,
since ‘the nation [rests] eternally in Humanity’.39
Furthermore, the international imagination operated through an
articulated plotting of global comparisons for India’s anti-colonial
struggle. There was a pattern to how parallels were drawn in the Swadeshi
avant-garde worldview. The temporal regime of British imperialism
asserted that India would gradually improve, and would become like
Britain within the domain of empire, obtaining modern consciousness
after passing through a gradient of apprenticeship. In opposition to this
developmentalist temporal scheme, Swadeshi intellectuals collected
evidence of revolutionary temporalities of revolutionary rupture and
punctual change occurring throughout the world. Calcutta news-
papers and journals often featured articles on the revolutionary crises
in China and the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, in Japan during the Russo-
Japanese war of 1905, and in the case of the Suffragists in England and
Ireland.40 Swadeshi radicals lived in a temporality of expectancy, in
which the eruption of a ‘new time’ into the present would occur through
insurgent action.41 And yet the eruption of this mystical time would not
place Indians in a solipsistic state, set apart from the world, but would
reveal India as ensconced in ‘the lap of Humanity’.42
The Swadeshi avant-garde’s patently deterritorial character was
itself a form of radical resistance to the way the colonial order had
framed time and history.43 One Swadeshi radical from the Punjab,
Hardayal, articulated the new anti-colonial framing of ‘Indianness’
current in the Swadeshi years, writing in an article for the Calcutta
Swadeshi press in 1913:
The twentieth century will witness a mighty revolution in India and the
world. The Time-Spirit will ring out the old and ring in the new in all civilised
countries. The nineteenth century has been the period of destruction,
criticism and preparation to a large extent. The twentieth century will
be the era of construction and fulfillment in many respects. India is not
isolated from the world.44
These key features of Swadeshi avant-gardism — the focus on the advent

of ‘the new’ and the imagination of Indians as part of the world —
were reiterated throughout the period. In 1917, at the instance of
the Russian Revolution, Ramananda Chatterjee, editor of the Modern
Review, wrote:
When the popular aspirations of a country lead to an earthquake, its tremors
travel far beyond its borders. They can be felt … all over the world … We
might not be independent like the Russians and Germans but we certainly
constitute a part of this world … we are not isolated from the rest; the
thoughts, emotions, aspirations and success of every country affects us. Our
rightful aspirations need to be fulfilled.45
These kaleidoscopic mirrors in which Swadeshi avant-gardists saw

their own struggle refracted throughout the world suggests that their
sense of identity — their construction of selfhood — was configured in
a way that was not solely based on territory, homeland and ideas about
indigenous culture.
Anti-Colonial Networks
‘On the outbreak of the First World War in 1914’, wrote M. N. Roy in his
Memoirs, ‘Indian revolutionaries in exile looked towards Germany as the
land of hope, and rushed there full of great expectation’.46 In April 1915,
Roy travelled to Dutch Indonesia as the Swadeshi insurgent deputised
to organise the delivery of weapons from German consuls.47 Roy made

three trips back and forth between Jakarta and Calcutta, attempting to
orchestrate the clandestine shipment of a large trove of ‘30,000 rifles
with 400 rounds of ammunition’.48 Ultimately, the inconstant German
consul in Java stepped back from the plans and recommended that
M. N. Roy travel to Berlin itself in order to plead for support. Given
the Swadeshi worldview at the time, such global tours of duty were
not outlandish propositions. In 1906, Hemchandra Kanungo travelled
from Calcutta to Paris and back in order to learn bomb-making tech-
niques from Russian anarchist groups.49 Taraknath Das left Calcutta in
1903 as a Swadeshi radical, and became a leading organiser of Indian
communities in Vancouver and San Francisco. Bhupendranath Datta
and Abinash Bhattacharya left Calcutta in 1908 and eventually made
their way to Berlin as diasporic revolutionaries, returning years later to
write books on the theme of India’s freedom struggle abroad.50
At the intersection of events in 1915, M. N. Roy, twenty-eight years
old, embarked on his journey to Berlin, a destination he would even-
tually reach with fateful consequences some five years later. With a
forged French-Indian passport provided by the German Embassy in
Peking, and travelling under the alias of an Indian Christian priest
named ‘Father Martin’, he boarded a German gunboat to Shanghai, and
eventually found himself on a Japanese trans-Pacific luxury liner to
San Francisco. Cushioned by German funds and by the subterfuge of an
invented persona, Roy left territorial India, as many Swadeshi moder-
nists had before him, for the promise of the foreign as experienced
within the global deterritorial body of India.51
We must return to the nineteenth century in order to bring into
view the intellectual underpinnings that made such world-travelling
imaginations possible. Was the salient feature of the Swadeshi years in
fact the birth of a strong, insurgent Indian selfhood, or rather the in-
vention of avant-garde selves that continually sought to incorporate the
foreign and to blur and contaminate the category of Indianness? If the
latter, then our understanding of anti-colonialism must be revised. At
stake was not solely a process of inventing cultural or spatial closure,
but rather a dialectic between the assertion of autonomy on one hand,
and the pursuit of mediation and global solidarities on the other.52
Schemes of Colonial Universal Time

Imperialism erected its own ‘temporal architecture’ — its own underly-
ing notion of universal time and historical succession.53 The Swadeshi
modernist imagination can be seen as arising out of critiques of

this temporal order of colonial universalism. Two major influences,
Rammohan Roy (1774–1833) with his style of scriptural exegesis, and
Vivekanada (1863–1902) with his reconstruction of Hindu ascesis
and dharmic practice, provided two powerful influences on Swadeshi
modernist thinkers. The intellectual giants of Swadeshi, individuals
such as Aurobindo Ghosh, Satish Chandra Mukherjee, Bipin Chandra Pal
and Rabindranath Tagore, fused these nineteenth-century discourses
and passed them down to a younger generation of chronic world
travellers, of which M. N. Roy was a major representative.
In discussing the framing of universal time introduced by the
British colonisation of India beginning in the late eighteenth century,
it may well seem strange to begin with a discussion of the German
philosopher, G. W. F. Hegel. After all, British liberal philosophers of
the nineteenth century supposedly defined themselves against the
‘Idealism’ of the German titan. And yet, especially in terms of the
way they thought of universal time, the scions of liberal philosophy,
J. S. Mill, Henry Maine, Matthew Arnold, Herbert Spencer, all com-
mented on Hegel, and by the end of the liberal nineteenth century,
Hegelian thought was perhaps the most influential force in British
philosophy departments.54 Hegel meditated upon the Neuzeit (new
time) of European secular universalism that arose with the ‘imperial
meridian’, as the French and British states embarked on unprecedented
projects of modernisation and colonisation.55 Hegel, greatly inspired
by the French Revolution and a close reader of Scottish Enlightenment
and British liberal thinkers, captured most brilliantly the framing of
colonial universal time.56 Krzyztof Pomian once commented, ‘it is in
the works of Hegel that a chronosophy founded on the idea of progress
received its canonical form’. 57
It should not be surprising to note that Hegel began as a young
theologian, and his earliest writings were concerned with reinter-
preting Christian salvation history, especially the notion of kairos, the
‘fullness of time’, that arose when God came to earth in the form of
Christ, according to Christian theology.58 This was the confessional
starting point of Hegel’s later discussion of the functioning of uni-
versal time as the transition from potentiality to actualisation. In
some ways, one might claim that Hegel disclosed a Christian historicist
sensibility within the apparently purely political or economic pro-
gramme of liberalism. Through the experience of the French Revolution
and the political bombshell of the Declaration of the Rights of Man,
Hegel’s thought moved away from theology towards political philosophy.
He developed a narrative of the World Spirit journeying through

mediation and negativity, but gradually attaining self-recognition and
kairos, in the form of the European state.59 It was in the European state
that freedom could finally be obtained, wrote Hegel, since freedom ‘is
the individual subjective will realising that its will is actually that of the
universal will’.60 Such a realisation was uniquely available to citizens
of European states. Hegel called this the attainment of the ‘concrete
universal’ in history, and the culmination of universal time.
Yet the problem of how the non-European, non-Christian cultures
of the world would be incorporated into this universal time of the
World Spirit remained. Hegel introduced a gradient of consciousness
to resolve this problem, one that stretched from what he judged as the
low-level sentience of Asians, to the alert, active mental capacities
of Europeans. This certainly fed on a longer tradition of identifying
hierarchies among human civilisations in European thought.61 On the
other hand, this does not mean that there were not other traditions
native to European that contested such a hierarchical view, assert-
ing either admiration for or conservative aloofness towards cultures
outside Europe.62
Whereas late eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment dis-
course tended to present Europe as orderly and mannerly and Asia as
licentious and rude, in Hegel’s rephrasing, Europe had a plenitude of
consciousness and Asia only a presentiment of it.63 Europeans were
awake and capable of self-recognition, meanwhile Asians were deficient,
insentient and slumbering. For Hegel, the Asian mind was ‘vegetal’.
In the section on India in his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Indian
spirituality is the religion of ‘flowers and animals’ where the ‘passivity
and impotence of contemplative individuality pass into destructive
being-for-itself’.64
Hegel’s gradient of consciousness, placing Asians at the far pole
teetering on the vegetal, resonated with the rise of British Utilitarian
scholarship on India at the time, and influenced Karl Marx’s writings
later on. In Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History of 1822, his
conception of the Orient seems to refer to James Mill’s History of British
India, published just two years earlier. The Utilitarians, following their
intellectual patron, Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), believed that Indian
society could be salvaged only by concerted governmental measures in
the realms of jurisprudence, property rights and education.65
In his History of British India, Mill made the case for drastic measures,
emphasising the sheer depravity of Indian and Chinese minds. ‘[The
Chinese and Indians] are to nearly an equal degree tainted with the
vices of insincerity; dissembling, treacherous, mendacious, to an excess

which surpasses even the usual measure of uncultivated society’. Mill
further declared:
Both are disposed to excessive exaggeration with regard to everything
relating to themselves. Both are cowardly and unfeeling. Both are in the
highest degree conceited of themselves, and full of affected contempt for
others. Both are, in the physical sense, disgustingly unclean in their persons
and their houses.66
The approach to colonialism that Mill prescribed coincided, unsur-

prisingly, with the rise of evangelicalism in India.67 Utilitarianism
assumed a ‘world-levelling, unificatory epistemology’ that was,
ironically, deeply based on assumptions of hierarchy and temporal
plenitude inherent in Christian universalism.68 A hierarchisation of
global space and human consciousnesses was carried out in the name
of a ‘world-levelling’ ideal. Just as the British Utilitarians envisaged a
universal temporality of modern, industrious, productive time that even-
tually would overcome the peculiar backward temporal flows of India,
Christian missionaries believed they were interrupting the backward
and profane Indian rituals and religions and raising Indians to a rec-
ognition of the one true God. The missionaries enunciated in confes-
sional terms what British Utilitarians said in secular ones. ‘That Britain
is capable of becoming an extensive blessing to India is admitted by all
who are thoroughly acquainted with the circumstances… That this arises
chiefly from her being able to impart a knowledge of the scriptures and
a love to vital godliness, is also admitted’, wrote the Friend of India, the
journal of the Serampore missionaries, in its inaugural edition of 1818.69
The colonial project was imbued with an evangelical impulse.
Brahmo Exegesis
But from the inception of colonial universalism, Indians sought to
break its frame of temporality by using religious discourse to create
alternative framings of universal time. There were many trajectories
for doing this, drawing on various ‘great traditions’ indigenous to
South Asia. Brahmoism, the most influential Bengali intellectual
movement of the nineteenth century, established by the cosmopolitan
thinker Rammohan Roy (1774–1833), focused on excavating, through
textual criticism and scriptural exegesis, a common universal time
at the heart of all religious traditions across cultures in the pursuit
of a more inclusive universalism. Rammohan sought to disclose a

deep-lying unitary principle at the core of all religious traditions,
thereby disproving colonial assertions about plenitude available only
within a European order of time. Rammohan suffered the aspersion
of both Christian missionaries and Brahmin traditionalists, as well
as lawsuits lodged against him by his own family due to his contro-
versial claims.70
Born into an elite Brahmin family of the service gentry to the
Mughal court, Rammohan Roy was educated in a madrasah, and wrote
voluminously in Persian. Assuming the canonicity of religious trad-
itions, he made his arguments via an exegesis of the Christian New
Testament, the Vedas and the Qu’ran. And his assertions of a common
monotheistic principle at the core of each of these canons allowed him
to make the argument for their fundamental equivalence in terms of
their proximity to ultimate truth. In 1804, Rammohan published the
Persian text Tuhfatul Muwahhiddin, ‘To the Believers in One God’. His
central concept, ‘the monotheistic principle of God’, derived primarily
from the Islamic notion of tauhid (the existence of one God).71
There was a universal inner temporality, asserted Rammohan,
deriving from the ‘nature of the species’ that was the common essence
of all mankind.
It is quite evident that all [men] are living here equally enjoying the blessings
of heaven, as the light of the stars, the pleasure of the season of spring,
the fall of rain … as well as [suffering] from the same inconveniences and
pain, darkness and severity of cold and mental disease and narrowness of
circumstances … without any distinction in being the follower of a particular
religion.72
He proposed that all humans, regardless of religion, existed on an equal

plane since they all experienced joy with the ‘blessings of heaven’ and
suffered from the trials of material existence. Rammohan continued, ‘… in
China, in Tartary, in Europe and in all other countries, where so many
sects exist, all believe the object whom they adore to be the Author and
Governor of the Universe; consequently, they must also acknowledge
according to their own faith, that this our worship is their own’.73
This claim that, according to each group’s ‘own faith’, the monotheist
principle could be uncovered became one of the signature assertions
of Rammohan’s writings, and of Brahmo exegesis. The Brahmo Samaj,
started by Rammohan in 1828, made scriptural exegesis into a practice
of inter-faith translation. This foreshadows the way that M. N. Roy, a
century later, would look upon the exegesis of the Marxist canon as a
way of disclosing the commonality at the heart of European and Asian
sociological experience.
Rammohan used the practice of scriptural exegesis as a form of intel-
lectual anti-colonial resistance. Insistence on the canonicity of diverse
religious traditions was a chief element of his work, whereby Rammohan
aimed to destroy the gradation of human consciousness inherent
in colonial universalism. The Bible itself was an Asian book, written in
Asian languages with a fundamentally ‘Asiatic’ notion of God, he wrote.
If one closely reads the Bible, he noted, one sees that ‘in addressing God,
the third person and also the second are constantly used in immediate
sequence, and that this variation is considered a rhetorical trope in
Hebrew and Arabic, as well as in almost all the Asiatic languages…’74
This prefigured a long succession of Brahmo exegetes in the nine-
teenth century who wrote on the theme of the ‘oriental Christ’. Keshab
Chandra Sen, the inheritor of the Brahmo mantle from Rammohan,
would assert the Asian origins of Jesus in his famous sermon ‘Jesus Christ,
Europe and Asia’ of March 1866. And in 1869, Pratap Chandra Mazumdar
wrote his book Oriental Christ, which interpreted Jesus’ actions such
as bathing, praying, healing and feasting as deriving from a common
fund of Asiatic culture and spirituality. Brahmos offered cosmopolitan
interfaith readings of religious canons through textual practices that
disclosed a universal time that cut through cultural difference.
These arguments attracted European thinkers, and spurred them
to counter-cultural critiques of European exceptionalism. In 1869, the
French official, Louis Jacolliot, published his La Bible de l’Inde: vie de
Iezeus Cristna, a book that Nietzsche would later refer to in his Laws of
Manu, as Suzanne Marchand has recently shown.75 Jacolliot had been
in Calcutta since 1865, and had no doubt been greatly influenced by
Brahmo exegesis. Likewise, Rammohan’s exposition of the Vedas was
read by the Transcendentalists of New England, as shown in Henry David
Thoreau’s correspondences.76 Pratap Chandra Mazumdar, a leading
Brahmo exegete, took a celebrated tour through the United States in
1874, lecturing at Harvard and fifty Unitarian chapels.77
Breaking the frame of the gradient of human consciousness
imagined within colonial universalism, Keshab asked in his famous
sermon of 1883, ‘Asia’s Message to Europe’: ‘Is there one astronomy
for the East and another for the West? Are there different anatomies
in different climes and ages? Is there an Asiatic optics as distinguished
from European optics? Is there such a thing as Jewish zoology and
Mahometan geometry?… It is God’s science, the eternal verity of things’.78
Brahmo textual practices were characterised throughout the nineteenth

century by this sort of levelling exegesis aimed at envisioning an
inclusive common temporality for all peoples worldwide.
Dharmic Asceticism
In contrast to Rammohan’s universalising exegesis, a different form of
frame-breaking arose in the meditations on Hindu dharma throughout
the nineteenth century, which envisioned the eruption out of colonial
universalism of an alternative and autonomous universal time. As
opposed to proposing an ‘inner realm’ of Hindu authenticity as op-
posed to an ‘outer realm’ of Western culture and power, nineteenth-
century discourse on dharma proposed an alternative world of Hindu
universal time at work in both the ‘canonical’ texts of the Vedanta, as
well as in folk traditions. This provided another source for the rise of
Swadeshi avant-gardism by the turn of the century. It is worthwhile
pointing out at the start that even if we might heuristically separ-
ate Brahmo exegesis and dharmic ascesis as two strategies for refram-
ing time in nineteenth-century colonial Bengal, we must also be aware
of their continual interplay. In fact, both traditions were imbricated in
each other as scholars of Hindu dharma relied on the idea of a single,
unified Hindu ‘canon’ of ‘high texts’ on which exegetical criticism could
be applied.79
The notion of Sanatanadharma, or the ‘Hindu eternal order of things’,
became one of the most important keyterms in the writings of Bengali
Hindu intellectuals in the mid nineteenth century. Radhakant Deb, a
critic of Rammohan Roy, established his Dharma Sabha in 1830 as an
alternative to Roy’s Brahmo Samaj. One of the aims of Deb’s group was
to insist, not on the fundamental identity of all religious traditions
worldwide, as had Rammohan, but on the difference between the
teachings of the Hindu canon and other bodies of scripture. Hinduism,
proponents claimed, was unlike the historical religions of Christianity
and Islam, founded by a prophet at a specific moment in the past.
Rather, the dharma that Hindus observed was an eternal order outside
the historical progression, and religious aspirants could erupt into that
eternal plane through acts of individual ascesis, without the need to
locate salvation (mukti) in a larger eschatological process of redemption
through history.80 Writers on Hindu dharma emphasised that salvation
in Hinduism, that is, eruption out of the imminent realm of historical
succession into the transcendent realm of the eternal present, was
always available to the aspirant (sadhak) through the labour of spiritual

practice, without the need to rely on the historical succession itself
as did religions such as Christianity, Islam and even some schools of
Buddhism, which variously envisioned salvation as part of a historical
culmination that would occur at some point in the future.
In the years after the rebellion of 1857, this notion of sanatana dharma
or swaswata dharma (eternal dharma), as a wholly different order of uni-
versal time not based on the assumption of an eschatology, or progress
through history, received increasing focus among Bengali Hindu
writers.81 Writings on dharma played a major role in the late works
of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, as well as Dayananda Saraswati and
Keshab Chandra Sen. But Ramakrishna Paramahansa, the influential
Hindu tantric saint, was the most powerful exponent of dharmic prac-
tice for the Bengali middle-classes. He began his twelve years of isolated
ascetic pursuit (sadhana) in 1856. For the urban madhyabitta classes he
would emerge as the most influential expositor of an eruptive universal
time that could destroy the frame of colonial universalism, not at some
point in the future, but in the eternal present of perpetual now-times
available to all ascetic aspirants.82 Vivekananda, who became the
most significant interpreter and exponent of Ramakrishna’s message,
spoke of the coming of Ramakrishna as marking the advent of a new
order of time, in which the permanence of the eternal realm, and the
ever-present possibility of breaking out of the temporality of colonial
universalism, finally became apparent not only to Bengali Hindus, but
to people worldwide:
The time was ripe, it was necessary that such a man [Ramakrishna] should
be born, and he came… the fulfilment of the Indian sages, the sage for the
time, one whose teaching is just now, in the present time, most beneficial.
And mark the divine power working behind the man. The son of a poor
priest, born in an out-of-the-way village, unknown and unthought of, today
is worshipped literally by thousands in Europe and America, and tomorrow
will be worshipped by thousands more.83
Ramakrishna’s message of dharma arrived in a moment of kairos. When

the ‘time was ripe’, as Vivekananda put it. But while Ramakrishna rep-
resented the culmination of a historical progression as ‘the fulfilment of
the sages’, his message paradoxically aimed to free individuals from the
historical progression. In Vivekananda’s interpretation, Ramakrishna
made tangible, accessible and popular the dynamic of eruption out of
quotidian time that was once only available to the sages and world-
renouncers. Vivekananda presented Ramakrishna as nothing less than
a Hindu messiah, in that he first distributed knowledge of salvation

more broadly than it had been before, but second, in that he showed
that salvation lay not in fulfilment or culmination within the historical
succession, but in the power of each individual, through acts of discipline
and worship, to harness dharmic eternal time and rupture the linear
temporal order.
Ascetic spiritual practice on the part of individual Hindu aspirants
was required to achieve this goal of blasting apart the frame of colonial
universalism, taught Vivekananda. The notion of world-revising spiritual
force erupting out of individual subjecthoods became a central trope
of the Swadeshi avant-garde. Ramakrishna spoke of spirituality as an
erotic experience marked by ‘anxious desire’ (vyakulata) for universal
union.84 Meanwhile, Bankimchandra wrote of the discipline called for
to pursue dharma in his Dharmatattva (1888). ‘For the development of
body culture (anushilan) three things are necessary: 1) time 2) energy
(shakti) 3) determination’. Bankim went on to explain that the religious
seeker, the sadhak, must avoid unworthy activities so as to preserve the
time of good vocation in life. Time was cleaved between the quotidian
and the dharmic. By ‘engaging in the profane, the time of spiritual culture
is spontaneously lost’.85 Anushilan, or bodily discipline, was to create an
autonomous time-experience from out of the colonial everyday.
While proponents of Brahmo exegesis focused on texts, gurus of
dharmic asceticism in the last half of the nineteenth century, focused
on the apparatus of the body and the self as a tool for breaking the
timeframe of colonial universalism. The channelling of atmashakti,
or spiritual force, would lead to the eruption of a wholly new order of
reality. Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) became the great expositor of
politicised dharmic practice. He codified and formalised Ramakrishna’s
teachings into a set of systematised texts.86 His intent was to give ‘an
authoritative pronouncement of Hinduism in all its phases’.87 Perhaps
the most important recurrent theme of Vivekananda’s teaching was
that of exploding spiritual force, channelled through the body.
The body was the conduit for both spiritual energy (shakti) and
political change. Vivekananda was fascinated by the notion of exertion,
and with the body as a working organism. ‘When a man goes into deep
sleep he enters a plane beneath consciousness. He works the body all
the time, he breathes; he moves the body, perhaps, in his sleep, without
any accompanying feeling of ego’.88 He continued, ‘one of the greatest
lessons I have learned in my life is to pay as much attention to the means
of work as to its end… We also read this in the Gita and learn that we
have to work, constantly work with all our power; to put the whole mind
in the work, whatever it be, that we are doing’.89
Vivekananda’s vision centred around the cultivation and channelling
of shakti, or the spiritual force, associated with worship of the mother
goddess Kali.90 Such dharmic practice generated autonomy since, ‘… the
character of that man who has control over his motives and organs is
unchangeably established. He controls his own inner forces, and nothing
can draw them out against his will’.91 But this autonomy was also socially
distributive. The energy that was produced within the yogic genius
(a figure of great fascination in the nineteenth century) had universal
implications. ‘The highest men are calm, silent and unknown. They
are the men who really know the power of thought; they are sure that,
even if they go into a cave and close the door and simply think five
true thoughts and then pass away, these five thoughts of theirs will live
through eternity’.92 Vivekanada insisted, however, that those who think
‘eternal thoughts’ should not recede from the world, but should return
to their people and bring about social and political change. Vivekananda
did just this, of course, as he set up the Ramakrishna Mission, travelled to
London, Paris and through the United States as a spokesman for modern
Hinduism, just as he also stoked revolutionary unrest in Bengal.93
The genius, or mahamanab, according to Vivekananda, was capable of
confecting and socially distributing a new universal time. ‘Such a centre
is the real man, the almighty, the omniscient, and he draws the whole
universe towards him… The men of mighty will [that] the world has
produced have all been tremendous workers — gigantic souls, with wills
powerful enough to overturn worlds, wills they got by persistent work,
through ages and ages’.94 The great sage could unleash ‘the power … inside
every man’, that would ‘cause these giants [the British] to wake up’.95
And locating the power of salvation in the very body of individual
aspirants also meant that new times could erupt throughout the world,
wherever aspirants travelled. Vivekananda viewed mystical Hindu
yogis as world-travelling engines of spiritual eruption for the good of
the nation. For example, he himself went on two celebrated missions
to Europe and America.96 The notion of a mystic transferal of charisma,
even over great distances, between the genius-saint and the people
became a common trope in Swadeshi modernist thought, picked up,
for example, in Benoy Kumar Sarkar’s 1922 assertion that it was up to
India’s travelling scientists, scholars and artists to ‘assimilate the new
achievements of mankind in aesthetics as in the utilitarian sciences
and arts… [as] one of the chief means of acquiring strength in order that
the Orient may push forward the creative urge of life…’97
The modernist practitioner of dharma, such as Vivekananda, did
not envision an eschatological history of redemption coming to Man,
but more decentralised occurrences of energetic eruptions among a
multitude of saints spreading throughout the world.98 The universal
time of dharmic practice would not come about in the moment of
messianic fulfilment at some point in the future, but through the
agency of individual aspirants in myriad, globally distributed now-
times. This new time, created by dharmic practice, was not thought of
as a particularity, as the etching out of an indigenous or ritual inner
spirituality against the universality of secular Western public time.99
The very fact of positing egress to a whole new order of time was
based on the idea of an alternative universalism that was just as much
‘everywhere’ as European Christianity’s Messianic history. Vivekananda,
for example, went to some lengths to argue that the temporalities of
Buddhism, Islam and Christianity did not contain the same plenitude
as did Hinduism.100 ‘The Monistic Vedanta is the simplest form in which
you can put truth. To teach Dualism was a tremendous mistake made
in India and elsewhere…’101 Dharmic ascesis asserted the autonomy and
priority of Hindu universal time over other universalisms, especially
the colonial variety. His claim for distinction was intended to assert an
alternative universalism in the context of anti-colonial struggle.
My point in following these arguments is to show that the asser-
tion of difference made by proponents of dharmic asceticism was not
based on creating a space of interiority, or inwardness marked off
from secular, political or public outer time-space. Rather the new mod-
ernist teachings about dharma, which bore the mark of hermeneutic
engagement with European scholars especially in terms of asserting
the canonicity of the Vedanta, involved creating an alternative en-
globement of time for Indian (Hindu) subjectivities. Precisely because
it was universally at work, dharma provided a horizon within which
some Indians could choose routes of world travel and make sense of
their travels differently than if they presumed the timeframe of colonial
universalism. The universalism of dharma was inherently opposed to
notions of historical determination and the idea of stadial progress,
as it was based on the perpetual potential for freedom channelled
through the apparatus of the individual aspirant’s body and selfhood.
In the Swadeshi period and beyond, this dharmic temporality was
employed in ways that privileged the world as the appropriate milieu
for the spiritual aspirant and that insisted on radical contingency — that
the historical progression could be broken at any time, and that world-
travelling sadhak perpetually had the potential of rupturing the course
of history by their unexpected experiences abroad. Benoy Kumar Sarkar,
who was M. N. Roy’s teacher at the Bengal Technical University in 1907,
spoke about the need for Swadeshi activists to ‘digest (hajam kara) the
atmosphere of the world’, and then to transfer this novelty to their
people by writing about and publishing on their experiences.102 For
the Swadeshi avant-gardist, the discipline of writing was an important
element of dharmic asceticism.103 For youth such as M. N. Roy, dharmic
practice became tied up with a cult of mobile eruptive subjectivity,
foreign experimentation and authorship.
Swadeshi thinkers envisioned new communities of universal belonging
outside colonial universalism. Chittaranjan Das and Rabindranath Tagore
imagined a Greater India associated with a ‘Pan-Asian’ cultural realm
stretching from India through Southeast and East Asia. In the writings
of Muslim Swadeshi-Khilafat writers, such as Maulana Abdul Hamid
Khan Bhashani and Kazi Nazrul Islam, eruptive subjectivities were
seen to populate the Islamic ecumene stretching from India to Central
Asia and the Middle East.104 And another group of Swadeshi thinkers,
central among them Aurobindo Ghosh, Benoy Kumar Sarkar and his
student M. N. Roy, posited a universal realm connecting Indians with
the young economic juggernauts, such as Japan, Italy, America, Russia
and Germany. Eventually, M. N. Roy would insist that the ‘workers and
labourers of the world’ constituted a universal community that was
ushering in a new time for all of humanity. What the ‘holy man’ was
to dharmic aspirants of the late nineteenth century, the peasantry would
become to M. N. Roy in his post-war Marxist writings. The peasant
would become the collective genius through which a new revolutionary
energy and a new time would be distributed throughout the world.
The Swadeshi Avant-Garde

Despite the historical tensions between the two branches of Bengali
responses to colonial universalism considered above, Brahmo exegesis
and dharmic asceticism, these styles of interpretation fused in the
Swadeshi years at the turn of the century. Swadeshi avant-garde
thought focused, on the one hand, on excavating a hidden com-
monality underlying forms of cultural difference. On the other hand,
practicing a new, self-conscious dharmic ascesis, Swadeshi thinkers
also set out to imagine autonomous new universal communities that

erupted out of the temporal linearity of colonial universalism. Needless
to say, religious notions could be employed with a number of contrasting
intentions. The nineteenth-century reconstructions of canonical forms
of Hindu spirituality, whether in Brahmo or Shakta varieties, could
be use to make exclusionary claims, or could be employed to bring an
affective sensibility to projects of bridging difference and purposefully
travelling the world.
How did this specifically take shape in Swadeshi avant-garde
thought? Aurobindo Ghosh’s writings were perhaps some of the earliest
expressions. Recently returned from Cambridge where he excelled
in his studies and graduated at the top of his class, (and having been
embarrassingly rejected from the prestigious Indian Civil Service be-
cause of a failed horse-riding test), Aurobindo wrote a classic precursor
to Swadeshi new thinking, New Lamps for Old (1893). It bore the marks
of both the monistic and the energistic as Aurobindo argued for an
alternative universalism. The author emphasised that the existential
pursuit of new meanings for the modern Indian self, ones that placed
Indians in an international context, went hand-in-hand with the political
pursuit of struggle against British imperialism. Instead of ‘eking out
[a] scanty wardrobe with the cast-off rags and threadbare leavings
of [the] English masters’,105 Indians had to transcend the intellectual
niche that imperialism prescribed for them and associate themselves
with the world. Ghosh linked India to other national cultures where
humanistic universalism had been expressed: Athens, Rome and post-
revolutionary France.106 Aurobindo emphasised in 1893 that French
politics, erupting in the early years of the Third Republic into bouts
of anarchism and social rebellion, offered a mirror for current-day
Indian anti-colonialism. Both political cultures, he claimed, aspired to
nationalism and universalism simultaneously. This linking of the inner
with the outer, and the national with the international, was more than a
rhetorical strategy. It arose from the logic of the Swadeshi deterritorial
imagination.
Leaving territorial India did not entail going into the utterly
foreign; for, in distant places, Swadeshi intellectuals believed they saw
reflections, or anticipations, of their own experiences. Even earlier
in the nineteenth century, Calcutta intellectuals hailed the annexation of
Venice by united Italy in 1866, and mourned the defeat of France in
the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, maintaining that these events had an
immediate bearing on Bengal’s own experience.107 The world map that

Swadeshi intellectuals travelled through in the early twentieth century
was informed by these earlier contestations of the centre-periphery,
developmentalist framework of colonial universalism.
Another major exponent of Swadeshi avant-gardism was Bipin
Chandra Pal, a thinker influenced, as so many of these figures were, by
the multiple contexts of Brahmo thought, the teachings of Vivekananda,
but also Vaishnav devotionalism and nineteenth-century Positivism.108
Pal and Aurobindo Ghosh were the editors of the most influential
Swadeshi newspaper, the Bande Mataram, in 1907. Bipin Chandra Pal
situated universalism at the core of revolutionary nationalist politics
in his haunting and evocative rumination, The Soul of India (1911), when
he wrote, ‘The Cult of the Mother among us is by no means a political
cult… It is related to our highest conceptions of Humanity… The true
Cult of the Mother is, therefore, with us as much a Cult of Nationality
as of Humanity’.109 This idea of the ‘cult of the humanity’ emanated
from the Positivist notion of the ‘Religion of Humanity’ formulated by
Auguste Comte, which had a great reception in Calcutta particularly
from the 1880s onwards.110
The ‘cult’ of the Mother, Pal stated, was tantamount to the cult
of humanity-wide universalism. And for Pal, this cult would best be
achieved through the practice of dharma. The intellectual inspirations
of Swadeshi, from Ramakrishna and Vivekananda to Aurobindo and
Bipin Chandra Pal, all emphasised that anti-colonialism involved the
transcendence of the spatio-temporal regimen of colonial rule through
involvement in a global terrain. By the 1890s nationalists saw the world,
however conceived, as the appropriate theatre for the cultivation of
autonomous atmashakti or spiritual force, as well as the realm in which
to discover an underlying global unitary principle. In other words, the
world was the preferred object of desire of Swadeshi modernists. In 1912,
Benoy Kumar Sarkar coined the term ‘viswa–shakti’ or ‘world–force’,
to describe the transformative influences that awaited Indians if they
would make a discipline of travelling abroad.111 Benoy Kumar Sarkar,
like so many Swadeshi avant-garde thinkers, situated Indian subjectivity
within a global frame. ‘The more India advances Swadeshi, i.e., the
indigenous industry movement, the more will she have to depend on
places abroad’.112
Rabindranath Tagore, in his life as well as his writing, offers another
example of Swadeshi avant-garde’s deterrritorial imagination. In his
writings, Bharat Mata (Mother India) is pictured as itinerant, not as fixed
in place.113 Speaking of Mother India not as a static geopolitical entity,

but as a ‘fugitive’, a global traveller continually crossing to foreign
shores, Tagore wrote in 1918:
Darkly you swept on, Eternal Fugitive, round whose bodiless rush
stagnant space frets into eddying bubbles of light.
Is your heart lost for the Lover calling you across his immeasurable
loneliness?
Is the aching urgency of your haste the sole reason why your tangled tresses
break into stormy riot and pearls of fire roll along
Your path as from a broken necklace?
[…]
Leave the hoard on the shore and sail over the unfathomed dark towards
limitless light.
It was growing dark when I asked her, ‘What strange land have I come to?’114
What characterised the Swadeshi avant-garde was the pursuit of new

universal time, not enclosure within territorial frames. Swadeshi
thinkers were less concerned with maintaining boundaries of cultural
form, and more with rupturing the timeframe and geographic mapping
of colonial universalism. In the pursuit of a retemporalisation of the
world, the contingent outcomes of experiment, exploration and inven-
tion, in opposition to notions of historical determination, ensured that
the ramifications of Swadeshi avant-gardism were multifarious, bridging
and amalgamating the distant and familiar.
This is the framework we need to properly understand M. N. Roy’s
life and work as he travelled away from India in 1915, into the deter-
ritorial system of Indian anti-colonialism in the midst of the First
World War. Physical distance from Indian territory did not curtail
intimate involvement in the energies of the Indian freedom struggle.
Roy remained obsessively concerned with India — he would write about
its economy, society and politics by Mexico City day and Berlin night.
There was an alternative map to the world, a compact of solidarity and
of shared consciousness, that fused India to zones abroad.
Notes
1. The memoirs first appeared as serialised articles in issues of Independent India
beginning in 1952.
2. Germany was originally a ‘land of hope’ for Swadeshi activists because of its
promise to provide arms for insurgency movement. Roy recalled ‘finding new
meaning’ while reading Marx’s texts at the New York Public Library in 1916.
And he reports multiple ‘rebirths’, in Mexico, in Germany and in Russia. See
M. N. Roy. 1964. Memoirs. Bombay: Allied Publishers, pp. 3, 31, 81, 213, 217.
3. Hugo Ball was a leader of the Dada Movement, which peaked between
1916 and 1923.
4. Quote of Viceroy Curzon reproduced in Rajat Ray. 1979. Urban Roots of Indian
Nationalism: Pressure Groups and Conflict of Interest in Calcutta City Politics. Delhi:
Vikas Publishers, p. 60.
5. As stated by Lord Apthill, a chief administrator in Calcutta, in 1903.
6. This periodisation follows Leonard Gordon, Bengal: The Nationalist Movement,
and not Sumit Sarkar’s 1905–08 periodisation in Sumit Sarkar. 1973. The Swadeshi
Movement, in Bengal, 1903–1908. Delhi: People’s Publishing House.
7. Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement, p. 248. Roy was a student of Bengal Technical
College. See Sibnarayan Ray. 1998. In Freedom’s Quest: A Study of the Life and Works
of M. N. Roy. Calcutta: Minerva, vol. 1: p. 19.
8. Ray, In Freedom’s Quest, p. 29ff.
9. According to Bhupendra Kumar Datta, a contemporary acquaintance of Roy,
interviewed by Samaren Ray, in Sibnarayan Ray (ed.), Philosopher-Revolutionary.
1984, p. 41.
10. J. C. Ker. 1973 (1917). Political Trouble in India, 1907–1917. Calcutta: Superintendent
Government Printing.
11. Hemchandra Kanungo. 1928. Banglay Biplab Pracesta. Calcutta: Kamala Book
Depot.
12. Dineshranjan Das. 1924, Kallol. vol. 3: p. 791.
13. Abinash Bhattacharya. 1979. Iyorope Bharatiya Biplaber Sadhana. Calcutta: Popular
Library.
14. Compare, for example, Anti-Oedipus, translated by Robert Hurley, 1977: pp. 9–15,
with A Thousand Plateaus, translated by Brian Massumi, 1987: pp. 156–57.
15. Gillies Deleuze and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, p. 149.
16. Ibid., p. 336.
17. Ibid., pp. 149–66. See important applications of this concept to history by Gray
Wilder in Gray Wilder. 2005. The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude & Colonial
Humanism between the Two World Wars. Chicago: University of Chicago Press;
Rebecca Karl. 2002. Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth
Century. Durham: Duke University Press.
18. Benedict Anderson. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread
of Nationalism. London: Verso, pp. 16–35.
19. Chris Bayly has provided a brilliant narrative of global conjunctures in
the modern era in C. A. Bayly. 2004. The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914:
Global Connections and Comparisons. Malden: Blackwell.
20. David Northrup. 1995. Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 65–67. Labour outflows peaked in the 1840s
and 1860s but remained high throughout the late nineteenth century. See Bayly,
Birth of the Modern World, p. 133.
21. P. N. Mathur. 1977. The Civil Service of India. Jodhpur: Prabhat Prakashan,
pp. 91–95. Entry into the covenanted Civil Service required travel to Britain to
sit in the exams.
22. Michael Low. 2008. ‘British Empire and the Hajj: Pilgrims, Plagues, and Pan-
Islam under British Surveillance, 1865–1908’, in International Journal of Middle
East Studies, (2008) 40(2): 269–90.
23. Tapan Raychaudhuri. 1988. ‘Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’, in Europe Recon-
sidered: Perceptions of the West in Nineteenth Century Bengal. Delhi: Oxford University
Press, p. 135.
24. Bhai Parmanand. 1912. ‘Greater India’, Modern Review, February, 11(2): p. 152.
25. Partha Chatterjee asserted that the ‘departure’ of Indian anti-colonialism
occurred with the separation between an ‘inner domain’ of national culture
from the outer domain of the colonial state. See Partha Chatterjee. 1993. The
Nation and Its Fragments. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 6, 32–45.
26. Chris Bayly. 1986. ‘The Origins of Swadeshi (home industry): Cloth and Indian
Society, 1700–1930’, in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities
in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 285–321;
Lisa Trivedi, ‘A National Public in the Colonial World: Swadeshi Goods and
the Making of the Indian Nation’, in Dane Kennedy and Durba Ghosh (eds.),
Decentering Empire, 2006: 150–75.
27. See quote of Curzon in Suresh Chandra Ghosh. 2005. ‘The Genesis of Curzon’s
University Reform: 1899–1905’, Minerva, 26 (4): 470. Curzon’s committee drafted
the Indian Universities Act of 1904, aimed at strengthening the powers of the
government over higher education.
28. Haridas and Uma Mukherjee. 1957. The Origins of the National Education Movement
1905–1910. Calcutta: Jadavpur University, p. 48.
29. Editorial. 1943. ‘University College of Science, Calcutta’, in Science and Culture,
9(1): 19.
30. M. K. Gandhi. 1997. Hind Swaraj and Other Writings. Anthony Parel (ed.), Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, p. 19.
31. Between 1908 and 1910, an onslaught of repressive measures were instituted
including the Arms Act, the Explosive Substances Act, the Seditious Meetings Act,
the Conspiracy Law, and the Press Act. See Ker, Political Trouble, p. 3. In August
1908, thirty Calcutta revolutionaries were committed for trial and a further seven
the following month. The following year saw the Nasik Conspiracy case and the
Howrah–Sibpur Gang case in 1910. Nirode Kumar Barooah. 2004. Chatto: The Life
and Times of an Anti-Imperialist in Europe. New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
p. 50. The combination of deportations, imprisonment and detentions for trial
brought one phase of Swadeshi insurgency to an end. The counter-insurgency
measures of the British focused on all the theatres of revolutionary activity
throughout India, not just Calcutta. In May 1907, Lajpat Rai and Ajit Singh
of the Punjab were deported from India to London on sedition charges. In
July 1908, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, revolutionary leader in Bombay, was sentenced to
transportation in Burma where he remained until 1914. Following his sentencing,
a number of prominent Indian agitators departed for London to avoid sedition
charges, including Bipin Pal, Ram Bhaj Dutt, Hardayal and G. S. Khaparda. See
Ker, Political Trouble, p. 174.
32. Manu Goswami’s term. Manu Goswami. 2004. Producing India: From Colonial
Economy to National Space. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 242–76.
33. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 149–66.
34. Provocatively theorised by Sumathi Ramaswamy. 2002. ‘Visualizing India’s
Geo-body’, Contributions to Indian Sociology, 36(1): 151–89; Thongchai Winichakul.
1994. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of the Nation. Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press. Manu Goswami, Producing India, p. 243.
35. Some important events in this period include the Boxer uprising, 1898 to 1901, the
anti-American insurgency in the Philippines, 1898 to 1901, the Russo–Japanese
War of 1905, the Dinshawai incident and the outbursts of nationalist sentiment
in Egypt in 1906, the Boxer rebellion between 1898 and 1901, the building of the
Hijaz railway in 1900.
36. On connections between Indian and Czech revolutionaries in New York around
1908 see Bhupendranath Datta.1958. Biplaber Padacinha. Calcutta, p. 1; On con-
nections between Indians and Irish nationalists in the early twentieth century,
see Harald Fischer–Tiné. 2006. ‘Indian Nationalism and the “world forces”’,
Journal of Global History, 1(2): 325–44. Contacts with Chinese nationalists, especially
Sun Yat-Sen, are explored by Cemil Aydin.2007. The Politics of Anti-Westernism
in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought. New York:
Columbia University Press, p. 152.
37. The Nasik and the Howrah–Sibpur cases. See Ker, Political Trouble, pp. 3, 174.
38. Mukherjee and Mukherjee. The Origins of the National Education Movement
1905–1910, pp. 47–64.
39. Bipin Chandra Pal. 1958 (1911). The Soul of India. Calcutta: Choudhury &
Choudhury, p. 138.
40. See for example, ‘Japan and India’ in Bande Mataram, 18 January 2007, a nationalist
newspaper edited by Aurobindo Ghosh and Bipin Chandra Pal. See article on
Ireland in 13 March 1907 issue, ‘Boycotting in Ireland’. Also, ‘Awakening of
China’, 4 April 1907, and ‘Seventy-six Suffragists Arrested’, 8 April 1907.
41. Discussions of ‘new time’ in European thought from the eighteenth century
onwards are addressed in Koselleck. Reinhart Koselleck. 2002. ‘The Eighteenth
Century as the Beginning of Modernity’, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing,
History, Spacing, Concepts, trans. Todd Presner. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, p. 165ff.
42. Pal, The Soul of India, p. 138.
43. On colonial liberalism and territoriality see Uday Mehta. 1999. Liberalism and
Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, p. 132. Also see Matthew Edney. 2000. Mapping an Empire:
The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765–1843. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, pp. 9–15; Goswami, Producing India, pp. 31–71 on the national
territorialisation of India in the 1870s and 1880s; Also Partha Chatterjee on the
notion of India as Bharat in Puranic history writing and the difference between
the concept of a cultural world, and a territory, ‘The Nation and its Pasts’, Nation
and its Fragments, pp. 73–94.
44. Har Dayal. 1913. ‘India and the World Movement’, Modern Review, February,
13(2): 185.
45. Ramananda Chatterjee, ‘Russiai sadharantantra pratishthai amader ananda’

(Our Joy at the Establishment of People’s Rule in Russia), Prabasi 1917, quoted
in Rajarshi Dasgupta. 2003. Marxism and the Middle Class Intelligentsia: Culture and
Politics in Bengal 1920s–1950s. Ph.D. Dissertation, Oxford University Press, p. 24.
46. M. N. Roy’s, Memoirs, p. 11.
47. Sedition Committee Report, 1973 [originally published in 1918]: 121.
48. Ibid.: 121, 122.
49. Sarkar, The Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, 1903–1908, p. 59.
50. Bhupendranath Datta. 1983. Bharater Dvitiya Swadhinatar Samgram: Aprakasita
Rajnitik Itihas. Abinash Bhattacharya. 1979. Iyorope Bharatiya Biplaber Sadhana.
51. The expression is taken from the title of Vincente Rafael’s excellent book on
travelling Filipino anti-colonial nationalists. Vincente Rafael. 2005. The Promise
of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Transalation in the Spanish Phillippines.
Durham: Duke University Press.
52. Benoy Kumar Sarkar famously called his multivolume series of travel books in
the 1920s. Benoy Kumar Sarkar. 1926. Duniyar Abhaowa. Calcutta: Raychaudhari.
53. Krzyszt of Pomian. 1984. Ordre du temps. Paris: Gallimard, p. 219.
54. On the reception of Hegel in Britain, beginning in the 1830s, and focusing mostly
on his biblical criticism and his theory of history, see Kirk Willis. 1988. ‘The
Introduction and Critical Reception of Hegelian Thought in Britain 1830–1900’
in Victorian Studies, 32 (1): 85–111.
55. Reinhart Koselleck. 2002. ‘Remarks on the Revolutionary Calendar and Neue
Zeit’, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History. Spacing Concepts, trans.
Todd Presner. Stanford: Stanford University Press. pp. 154–69; C. A. Bayly. 1989.
Imperial Meridian: The British Empire and the World. London: Longman, pp. 100–32.
Sankar Muthu has suggestively called for the need to ‘pluralise’ our view of the
Enlightenment. Sankar Muthu. 2003. Enlightenment against Empire. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, pp. 259–63.
56. Dipesh Chakrabarty provides an insightful discussion of Hegel’s notion of time
in ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for “Indian” Pasts?’,
Representations. 1992. 37(1): pp. 1–26.
57. Pomian, L’order du temps, p. 131.
58. G. W. F. Hegel. 1961. ‘The Positivity of the Christian Religion’ (1795–96), in
T. M. Knox (trans. and ed.), On Christianity: Early Theological Writings. New York:
Harper, p. 67ff.; See Paul Tillich. 1926. Kairos: Ideen zur Geisteslage und Gegenwart.
Darmstadt: Otto Reichl Verlag.
59. G. W. F. Hegel. 1977 (1807). Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, p. 493.
60. G. W. F. Hegel. 1952 (1821). Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox. London: Oxford
Univeristy Press, p. 48.
61. Walter Mignolo. 1995. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and
Colonization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
62. See, for example, see the excellent account of deist views of Chinese religions
in Peter Harrison. 1990. ‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 61–72.
63. The interconnection between liberalism and colonialism is explored in detail

by Uday Singh Mehta. 1999. Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth–Century
British Liberal Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 8.
64. Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 420.
65. Chris Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, p. 86; Javed Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings:
James Mills’ The History of British India and Orientalism. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, p. 7.
66. James Mill. 1820. History of British India. London: Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, p. 137.
67. Elmer H. Cutts, ‘The Background of Macaulay’s Minutes’, American Historical
Review (Oct. 1952–July 1953) 58(4): 104.
68. Ernest Gellner. 1985. Relativism and the Social Sciences. New York: Cambridge
University Press, p. 76; Majeed, Ungoverned Imaginings, p. 137.
69. Friend of India. 1818. May, 1(1): 1.
70. Sibnath Sastri. 1911. A History of the Brahmo Samaj. Calcutta: R. Chatterji.
71. Richard Maxwell Eaton. 1993. The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760.
Berkeley: University of California, pp. 293–97. Richard Maxwell Eaton. 1974. Sufis
of Bijapur, 1300–1700: Social Roles of Sufis in Medieval India. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, pp. 45–69. Sikhism and Islam were two major forces in the
expansion of exegetical and written textual practices in the pre-colonial era.
Also see Romila Thapar. 2000. ‘The Oral and the Written in Early India’, Cultural
Pasts: Essays in Early Indian History. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, p. 203.
72. Rammohan Roy. 1906 rpt (1804). ‘A Present to the Believers in One God’, in
The English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy with an English Translation of “Tuhfatul
Muwahhiddin”, (ed. and trans.) Jogendra Chunder Ghose, p. 948ff.
73. Rammohan Roy. 1906 rpt (c.1820). ‘Religious Instructions founded on Sacred
Authorities’ The English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy with an English Translation of
“Tuhfatul Muwahhiddin”, p. 135ff.
74. Rammohan Roy. 1906 rpt (1822). ‘Final Appeal to the Christian Public’ in:
The English Works of Raja Rammohun Roy with an English Translation of “Tuhfatul
Muwahhiddin”, p. 748ff.
75. Suzanne Marchand. (Forthcoming). ‘On Orientalism and Iconoclasm’, in Sugata
Bose and Kris Manjapra (eds.), Cosmopolitan Thought Zones of South Asia. London:
Palgrave Macmillan Press.
76. William Bysshe Stein. 1967. Two Brahman Sources of Emerson and Thoreau pp. x, xi.
77. David Kopf. 1969. British Orientalism and the Bengal Renaissance: The Dynamics of
Indian Modernization, 1773–1835. Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 19.
78. Keshab Chandra Sen. 1954. Lectures in India. London: Cassell.
79. Rammohan Roy recorded his interest in the teachings of tantra gurus such as
Pandit Sivaprasad Misrand and Hariharananda Tirthaswami. Sibnath Sastri. 1911.
A History of the Brahmo Samaj, p. 16. In the 1870s, Keshab Chandra Sen, the doyen
of the Brahmo Samaj, became a major publiciser and supporter of Ramakrishna
Paramahansa. See Jeffrey Kripal. 1995. Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in
the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna. Chicago: Chicago University Press, p. 205.
Dharma and the Brahmo movement grew so interconnectedly by the 1890s
that Brahmos became increasingly uncomfortable. Bimalendu Majumdar. 1900.
Professor Max Muller on Ramakrishna and the World on the Keshub Chunder Sen.
Calcutta: Lawrence Printing Works.
80. By the end of the nineteenth century, teachers such as Ramakrishna, Vivekananda,
Keshab Chandra Sen and Swami Dayananda comprised a broad group of pro-
ponents of Advaita Vedanta, the teaching of mystic universalism based on
the Vedas and Upanishads. Aurobindo Ghosh represents one culmination of
these nineteenth-century developments. See Aurobindo Ghosh. ‘Nationalism
is the Work of God’, in Stephen Hay (ed.). 1988. Sources of Indian Tradition. New
York: Columbia University Press, vol. 2: p. 151ff.
81. Wilhelm Halbfass. 1981. Indien und Europa: Perspektiven ihrer geistigen Begenung.
Basel: Schwabe, p. 396.
82. Kripal, Kali’s Child, p. 90.
83. Swami Vivekananda. 1970. The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda. Calcutta:
Advaita Ashrama, vol. 3: p. 267ff.
84. Kripal, Kali’s Child, pp. 92–102.
85. Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay. 2004. ‘Dharmatattva’, in Sahitya Samagra.
Calcutta: Tuli-Kalam, p. 599.
86. Halbfass, Indien und Europa, pp. 256–79. Halbfass discusses the historical pro-
cesses whereby a doxa of Hinduism was developed over the nineteenth century
in hermeneutic conversation with European forms. See Raychaudhuri, Europe
Reconsidered, pp. 150–55.
87. Preface to First Edition of The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, 1970: p. ii.
88. Vivekananda, ‘Raja–Yoga’, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, vol. 1:
p. 180.
89. Vivekananda, ‘Work and its Secret’, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda,
vol. 3: p. 3.
90. Vivekananda, ‘Karma-Yoga’, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda,
vol. 1: p. 39.
91. Ibid., p. 53.
92. Vivekananda, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, vol. 1: p. 104.
93. Vivekananda’s speech at the World Congress of Religions in Chicago in The World
Congress of Religion: The Addresses and Papers, 1894. See an interesting discussion
of the interrelation between ‘innerworldliness’ and involvement in the world
in Carolyn Bynum.1992. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the
Human Body in Medieval Religion. New York: Zone Books, pp. 66–69.
94. Vivekananda, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, vol. 1: p. 28. Emphasis in
original.
95. Ibid., p. 29.
96. Vivekananda made tours in 1893 and 1899.
97. Sarkar, Futurism of Young Asia, 1922: 125.
98. This energistic conception also defines Vivekananda’s interpretation of
Christianity’s rise. ‘And the [Jewish] race was forced to concentrate all its
energies upon Jerusalem and Judaism. But all power when once gathered
cannot remained collected… this concentrated energy amongst the Jewish race
found its expression at the next period, in the rise of Christianity’. Vivekananda,
‘Christ, the Messenger’, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, vol. 4: p. 139.
99. Partha Chatterjee advanced this argument in The Nation and its Fragments, p. 6.
100. He spoke of Islam as fundamentally war-like, and of Buddhism as a ‘degrading’
influence on ancient Hinduism. Also, Christianity had been corrupted by ma-
terialism. See Vivekananda, ‘My Plan of Campaign’, The Complete Works of
Swami Vivekananda, vol. 3: p. 217.
101. Vivekananda, ‘The Freedom of the Soul’, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda,
vol. 2: p. 199.
102. Benoy Kumar Sarkar. 1932. Parajita Jarmani. Calcutta: Oriental Book Agency, p. 39.
103. Ibid., p. 11.
104. Abul Kalam Azad’s Khilafat journal Al-Hilal was being published from Calcutta
in the Swadeshi years. Kazi Nazrul Islam’s journal, Dhumketu, begun in 1922,
spoke of the eruption of peasant protest out of the imperial order.
105. Aurobindo Ghosh. 1974 (1893). New Lamps for Old, Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo
Ashram, pp. 37–39.
106. Ibid., p. 39.
107. Geraldine Forbes. 1975. Positivism in Bengal, Calcutta: Minerva, p. 70.
108. Vaishnav devotionalism was also a major thread in Bankim’s later works,
and developed alongside his contemplation of the political importance of
shakto devotion to the mother goddess. See Tapan Raychaudhuri, Europe
Reconsidered, pp. 104, 154; See Sudipta Kaviraj. 1995. The Unhappy Conscious-
ness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Dis-
course in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, p. 77.
109. Bipin Chandra Pal, The Soul of India, p. 193.
110. Gorbes, Positivism in Bengal, p. 70.
111. Benoy Kumar Sarkar. 1912. The Science of History and the Hope of Mankind.
London: Longmans Green and Co.
112. Benoy Kumar Sarkar. 1927. ‘Empire Development and World-Economy: A Study
in the New Foundations of National Economy for India’, Journal of the Bengal
National Chamber of Commerce, vol. 2. p. 7.
113. Scholars have tended to emphasise the corporality, and thus, territoriality of
Bharat. Manu Goswami. 2004. Production India, p. 201; Sumathi Ramaswamy.
2001. ‘Maps and Mother Goddesses in Modern India’, Imago Mundi, 53(1):
pp. 97–114.
114. Rabindranath Tagore. 1918. ‘The Fugitive’, translation of Palataka, reproduced
in Collected Poems and Plays of Rabindranath Tagore, 1936: p. 327ff.
2
Marxist New Time
M. N. Roy is often presented either as the arch-pedagogue of communism

in India or as a man who gingered the Communist International with
a view from the East. Yet this misses the characteristic arena of his
intellectual activity in the interstices between worlds. Why did Roy,
who started off in the Swadeshi modernist milieu, become a communist
in the first place? How, specifically, did his deterritorial nationalism
come into conversation with communism? If Roy did not simply adopt
a fixed set of ideas called ‘communism’ but invented a unique path-
way within communist discourse as a thinker from the colonial world,
then what was significant about that pathway? To answer these ques-
tions we must pursue a panoramic approach, seeing how structures and
historical periods gave occasion to M. N. Roy as the foremost expositor
of early Indian communism in the 1920s. But we must balance this
with a microscopic view as well, that follows the play of ideas within
his individual life experience, stretching from his arrival in the United
States in 1916 to his reinvention as an elite communist cadre five years
later in Tashkent.
Stops in the Journey

In June 1916, Roy arrived in San Francisco after abandoning the chase for
German funds and armaments through East Asia, and made his way to
the home of an old friend from Calcutta and member of the deterritorial
anti-colonial nationalist network, Dhanagopal Mukherjee in Palo Alto.1
Mukherjee, the younger brother of a leading Calcutta revolutionary,
Jadugopal Mukherjee and comrade of M. N. Roy, had left Calcutta in 1908
as a Swadeshi radical youth answering the call of the national education
movement to seek schooling at the best institutions abroad.2 He began
studies in engineering at Tokyo University, before soon deciding to travel
across the Pacific to California. Dhanagopal completed a degree in history
at Stanford by 1914, and set down strong roots in Palo Alto, befriending
the president of the university, David Starr Jordan, and falling in
love with Ethel Rae Dugan, another Stanford graduate.3 Dhanagopal
suggested to the then Narendranath Bhattacharya that he change his

name to M. N. Roy, a more ambiguous and enigmatic name, not dir-
ectly related to any specific caste.4 Narendranath adopted his new name
on 16 June 1916. Through Dhanagopal Mukherjee’s girlfriend, Roy met
a young graduate, Evelyn Trent, and the two soon fell in love and got
married. Trent, a young West Coast progressivist, contributed to Roy’s
early Marxist education and played an important role in the early Indian
communist movement before their divorce in 1926.5 In addition to this
Roy met David Starr Jordan, the inaugural president of the university,
an ichthyologist and well-known pacifist, also a former vice-president
of the American Anti-Imperialist League.6 By the time Roy came to
know him, Jordan had already been displaced from the position of
university president and given the titular role of chancellor because of
his controversial political views. Jordan had denounced American ex-
pansionism in the Spanish–American War of 1898, and in the context
of the rampant anti-immigration debates in California at the time, he
argued that race mixture would only strengthen the American people.7
In 1909, Jordan served as Chief Director of the World Peace Foundation
and in 1911 he travelled to Japan to give lectures protesting Japanese
militarism in Korea. As the United States’ concern about the civil war in
Mexico increased in the years before the First World War, Jordan made
a number of contacts among Mexican political leaders, some of them
with agendas for radical social change. He befriended General Salvador
Alvarado, the governor of Yucatan, and praised his anti-haciendos
campaigns and his concern for the education of land labourers.8 The
Stanford president represented one of the most eminent voices of
American pacifism in these years. He, like Woodrow Wilson before
the sinking of the Lusitania, maintained that America should not enter
the Great War. After Wilson was forced to retract this policy at the
beginning of his second term, Jordan openly praised him, and hailed
the Wilsonian view that a new kind of diplomacy and new international
institutions were needed to ensure that the Great War would end war
for good. However, Jordan was ultimately more radical than Wilson.
In the 1920s, Jordan joined other liberal internationalists such as H. N.
Brailsford and H. G. Wells in the call for a world government, criticising
the League of Nations as a mere combination of antagonist governments
instead of a ‘league of men’.9
After his meetings with Jordan, Roy reflected upon the violent turn
taken by the Swadeshi revolutionary movement. Roy recalled, ‘I came
in touch with new people and new ideas’, and this ‘marked a turning
Marxist New Time 33
point in my life … I resisted the temptation of arming myself with pistol,

which could be purchased in the next shop… The idea of revolution,
associated with the heroic deeds of individuals armed with pistols or
bombs, was fading in my mind’. Roy, twenty-nine years old at the time,
had grown disillusioned with ‘the austere ruthlessness of revolutionary
terrorism’.10
After his brush with American pacifism and its limitations at Stanford,
Roy travelled onward to New York in early 1917 to link up with the
Indian diasporic anti-colonial network. Here in the New York Public
Library, Roy began reading Marx’s works, long available in Calcutta
libraries, with new intensity. They took on ‘a new meaning’ for him.11
New York was a major hub for publications, meetings and alliances of
Indian anti-colonial radicals, overseen by the celebrated nationalist
leader Lajpat Rai who came there from London in 1914. The contradic-
tions inherent in liberal internationalism were starkly drawn for Roy
in 1917, as Wilson enunciated the rudiments of the Fourteen Points,
officially promulgated on 8 January 1918. During that same time,
American authorities were also beginning the concerted suppression
of Indian anti-colonialism in cities such as New York and San Francisco.
Now, as a wartime ally of Britain, Wilson authorised a number of ac-
commodations with British imperialism. In Wilson’s 14 June Flag Day
speech, delivered only months after the American Declaration of
War, he impugned anti-colonial activities, suggesting that India’s best
interest lay in peaceful acceptance of the imperial relationship.12 Soon
after, in June 1917 Roy would be forced to flee New York for Mexico City
in order to escape imprisonment by American authorities.13
Critique of Wilsonianism
The irony of the Fourteen Points was clear. What use was there in
speaking of a ‘league of men’, asked Roy in an open letter sent to
Woodrow Wilson, when that category contained the silent acceptance
of European domination of the world? He perceived that the problem
at hand entailed a systematic deficiency in the foundational terms of
Western liberalism. ‘It is not in Europe but in the debilitated countries
of Asia and Africa that the germs of war in modern times are hatched by
the imperialist greed of the European nations… The panacea that can
cure the evils of the world is the complete liberation of all dominated
peoples and countries, not only in Europe but also in Asia and Africa’.14
Woodrow Wilson was not a proponent of anti-colonialism. His concern
was with what he termed ‘small nations’, intentionally differentiating
them from ‘colonies’. While the concluding covenant of the Fourteen

Points asserted ‘political independence and territorial integrity to great
and small states alike’, point number six introduced a crucial equivo-
cation. ‘A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment
of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle
that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of
the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable
claims of the government whose title is to be determined’(emphasis
mine).15 Colonial universalism assumed a gradient of consciousness
in which Europeans and Americans occupied a superior position. An
intentional double-standard was inserted into the language of the
Wilsonian blueprint for peace, in which certain imperial governments
were assumed to have ‘equitable claims’ to their colonial territories.
The Treaty of Versailles was sure to attract anti-colonial activists
from the colonial world, but they did not come with naïve hopes.16
Lajpat Rai in February 1918, just one month after the Fourteen Points
were declared, spoke skeptically of Wilson’s ‘New Internationalism’.
‘The brotherhood of man and the brotherhood of nations can only
be established on a platform of mutual respect and goodwill… None
are justified in despising others. God has not given you a charter, be-
cause you are white people, to go and exploit the people of Asia and
Africa’, Rai announced during a speech in New York.17
M. N. Roy’s two earliest traceable publications, the open letter to
Wilson quoted above and a tract he wrote from Mexico City in 1918
entitled, India: Her Past, Present and Future, together constitute a critical
treatise on Wilsonianism.18 Far from praising the President, but also
not carelessly lashing out against him, Roy offered a thoughtful
textual criticism of the logic of Wilson’s internationalism. When Roy
remarked that he had grown tired of the pistol and gun, it also seems
he had grown increasingly enamoured of the pen as an instrument of
anti-colonial politics.
In India: Her Past, Present and Future, Roy pointed to the illusion of
Wilsonian benevolence. ‘Some Indian leaders believed that through
calling on the goodwill and conscience of England’s allies, the oppressed
Indians would gain something from this war… To date, these patriotic
Indians have been persecuted and treated humiliatingly by England’s
allies although they are pleading for a very natural cause’.19 He asserted
that India must not wait upon the recognition of Western Powers, and
that even the pursuit of such recognition was demeaning. ‘India will be
free sooner or later, not through the kindness of the English rulers, but
through her own energy’.20 In conclusion, Roy returned to the Wilsonian
Marxist New Time 35
themes of humanity and justice, using the terms of Wilson’s idealism

against itself. India would become a true servant of humanity, but only
once the whole edifice of European domination fell. The aims of a true
universal humanism would only come through the violent destruc-
tion of Europe’s intransigent exploitative relationship to the world.
‘The aim of this conflict will be the final termination of the arrogant
rule of one part of humanity over another’.21 Before European liberals
could speak of humanity, they first had to decolonise their own under-
standing of that term.
At the time many Indian anti-colonial writers focused on India’s
civilisational grandeur — Eastern spiritual riches versus Western ma-
terialism and violence — Roy favoured destroying the assumption of
civilisational difference altogether.22 M. N. Roy’s project, at this time
dealing with a set of American political treatises, was informed by a
Brahmo intentionality. ‘[Our goal] will be achieved by assuring true
liberty for the whole world, putting an end to Europe’s superiority
complex’.23
Climbing the Ladder of the World

Struggling to square his insights into the impasse of Western liberal
pacifism with his growing conviction that the efforts to revolutionise
India through violence alone had turned into an opera bouffe of global
proportions, Roy left New York for Mexico City to escape persecution,
but also to observe social revolution first-hand. Roy recalled, ‘Neigh-
bouring Mexico, in a state of permanent revolution appeared to be the
land of promise. I could not proceed further, I would settle down there
and at last take active part in a revolution’.24 It was, what Roy later called,
‘the new scene of my being and becoming’.25
Roy arrived in Mexico City in 1917 with a letter of introduction from
David Starr Jordan, in the midst of Mexico’s civil war. A group of Indian
anti-colonial radicals also congregated in Mexico City, but by this time
Roy was seeking a way to exit the old circuit of Indian network anti-
colonialism, as it still futilely pursued German funds to purchase and
ship armaments to India.26 In a relationship of mutual manipulation,
Indians knew they were being used by the Germans for imperial war aims,
but they also hoped they could exploit German connections in turn.
In Mexico, Roy found the perfect storm for revolution — an unmade
metropolis after the fall of the Porfirian dictatorship in 1911, followed
by a succession of unstable governments. Francisco Madero was the
coup leader, but stepped down in 1913 in the face of American threats
of invasion. The country fell into civil war. General Venustiano Carranza
of Spanish–Mexican descent and an elite background became the
presumptive head of government in 1915 and was in the process of
consolidating his control by establishing a constituent assembly. The
Queretaro Constitution was passed and took steps to limit the power of
the landed aristocracy. But Carranza was opposed by Pancho Villa in
the northern States and by Zapata in the environs of Mexico City, who
both attempted to orchestrate revolutions of the indigenous population
against the elites.27
With the entry of the Americans into the Great War, Mexico City
became the most important outpost for German operatives in attempts to
destabilise the United States from the south. This represented what Fritz
Fischer famously called the German foreign policy of ‘revolutionising’
the colonial domains of its European enemies.28 German imperial power
sought to instrumentalise anti-Western nationalist groups to undercut
and confound the Entente. Mexico City became the new satellite base for
German intrigue in the Americas.29 The fateful Zimmermann Telegram,
wired from Berlin to Mexico City via Washington in January 1917, in-
structed the German ambassador to forge a military alliance with the
Mexican government in advance of the resumption of unrestricted
submarine warfare. The interception and deciphering of the telegram
contributed greatly to the United States’ decision to enter the war.30
In Mexico, Roy found himself ensconced within a community of
Germans, and not by accident. He was sought out by the same German
ambassadors involved in earlier efforts to funnel funds and weapons
from consulates in Peking, Shanghai and Jakarta to India two years
earlier.31 At the same time, the Mexican literati were impressed by Roy’s
Wilsonian critiques, and the editor of El Pueblo invited him to write on
questions of imperialism. By translating his essays with the help of a
tutor, Roy began learning Spanish.32 He made his way into the radical
expatriate community of British and American war protesters and
anti-imperialists that stayed at the Hotel Geneva, and he was known
there as the ‘melancholy philosopher from India’.33 But the German
connections were the strongest bonds for Roy. Germany was like a
totem of anti-Westernism in the war years, and German officials were
willing magnates of the anti-colonial flotsam and jetsam of the earth.34
Roy met an elderly professor of Japanese philology, Dr Gramatsky,
and began studying German and reading Goethe with him.35 He would
later develop near-native fluency in the language, eventually taking
up prestigious editorships of German-language communist journals in
his Berlin years.36
Marxist New Time 37
German officialdom in Mexico City provided the caulking that

brought Roy into touch with Mexican President Carranza. Carranza held
openly anti-American views, and this made for quick friendship with
M. N. Roy, only boosting his status in the radical fringe communities.37
In this anti-Western underground, social interactions and alliances
seemed to take place more as Dionysian contaminations and chance
infatuations, than as Apollonian elective affinities.
Through his involvement with imperial German emissaries and
thanks to his intellectual acumen, Roy made friends in the Carranza
government. He met the eminent leader of the Mexican socialist
movement, Plutarco Elias Calles, later to become President of Mexico
after Carranza’s demise. In this period, between 1917 and 1918, Roy
lived in the ambiguous intermediary position between anti-colonial
nationalism and socialism, in which the difference between groups and
ideologies was ambiguous. The first meeting of the Socialist Party of
Mexico convened in December 1918. Roy played a role in the proceed-
ings, along with other non-Mexicans, such as American communists
Charles Philips, John Reed, Carleton Beals and Irwin Granwich.38
He was elected the general secretary of the Mexican Socialist Party
largely, it seems, because he was close to Carranza and to the German
officials. Plutarco Calles hoped to benefit from those connections.39
When the socialists aligned themselves with Moscow, M. N. Roy and
Charles Shipman were elected as the chief representatives. Bertram
Wolfe, an American radical socialist in Mexico at the time, commented
on the irony that an ‘assimilated Jew and an Indian Brahmin’ should
represent early Mexican socialism.40 And yet given the internal power
games between Calles and Carranza, as well as the larger context of
metropolitan Mexican culture that identified itself as cosmopolitan
and avant-garde, two foreign jewels were fitting accents for Mexican
socialist modernism.41
In September 1919, Mikhail Borodin, born Mikhail Markovich
Gruzenberg, chief Soviet envoy to the Americas, visited Mexico and met
M. N. Roy.42 Finding him to be of remarkable talent, Borodin deputised
Roy to attend the Second Congress of the Communist International in
Petrograd as the Mexican representative. As was part of the ritual in
communist culture, the elder Borodin inducted the younger Roy into
communist ideology just as Lenin had done so with Trotsky in 1902, in
the course of ‘long walks and talks’.43 Borodin wrote letters to friends
in Europe to prepare a network of support in Europe to ensure the
easy transit of Roy and Evelyn Trent to Berlin, and then Moscow.44
Living in interstitial zones, reacting against the futile attempts at
armed struggle against British imperialism, and enjoying the experi-

ences of transculturation, Roy was becoming a social mestizo and a
polyglot by learning new languages, adapting new tastes and new
self-stylisations.
As images of Roy from the 1915 to 1920 period attest, he doffed and
donned a number of new personas, becoming a man for many occa-
sions. According to one contemporary report, Roy in Mexico ‘claimed
to be an Indian prince and to have originally escaped from India under
sentence of death’.45 Roy offered a very different recollection of his
self-fashioning in this Mexico period: ‘still a vegetarian, I learned the
European way of eating at table and dressing, so as not to feel awkward
in strange company’.46 Proud of his chameleon-like abilities in any case
he wrote: ‘later on, in Europe, communist friends taunted me as more
European than the natives, when I criticised their bourgeois habits and
Illustration 2.1 Roy as Father Martin during his journey

to California in 1915.
Marxist New Time 39
prejudices’.47 He did not shy away from new performances. By the time
he reached Berlin in 1921, he already had a number of pseudonyms
racked up, from M. N. Roy, to Father Martin, to Mr White, to Richard,
to Roberto to Buddy.48 Roy’s anti-colonial practice as an intermediary
between worlds did not consist in asserting a strong insurgent self, but
in playing with the flexibility of the self.49
Borodin left Mexico for Europe in early 1919, and M. N. Roy, with
his wife and colleague, Evelyn Trent, left soon after. They travelled,
unsurprisingly, under pseudonyms across the Atlantic on a Spanish
transatlantic liner, the Alfonso XIII.50 After stopping in Zurich, they
arrived in Berlin in March 1920. Upon their arrival, well-supplied with
Soviet funds, they checked into a corner room of the Hotel Fürstenhof
on Potsdamer Platz with a perfect vantage point on the Kapp Putsch as it
broke onto the streets and threatened to dismantle the Weimar Republic.
Yet again, Roy arrived just in time for revolution. He spent the next four
months observing the singularly tumultuous social dynamics of Berlin, as
well as making first acquaintances with the leaders of Berlin communism
before travelling to Moscow for the Second Comintern Congress.
The Weimar Milieu

Berlin communist culture was astoundingly erudite. Communist
presses published educational pamphlets on Marxist theory called
Elementarbücher, and sold them at a low cost to teach workers about
the writings of Marx, as well as offer interpretations of the German
classics, such as Goethe and Schiller.51 And education was mixed with
leisure as communist workers’ groups, such as the Naturverein, went on
expeditions in the woods on the weekends to hear lectures on various
political and cultural topics in forest cabins. The Volksbühne, the largest
stage in the city, provided ‘art for the people’ with its cheap-ticket plays
by the likes of Toller, Shaw, Barlach and Hauptmann.52 Communist
education usually took place in rented schoolrooms on weekends and
evenings, or in the backrooms of pubs.53 Roy found this all enthralling,
and savoured the emphasis on intellectual revolution and political action
for changing consciousness — so different from the blind struggle for
armaments and the gun-running he remembered from the last years of
the Swadeshi movement. This environment was different too, Roy would
soon discover, from the climate of state communism in Moscow.
The literati of the Berlin communist world tended to collect in
the salons of publishing house doyens, such as Eduard Fuchs and
Willi Münzenberg.54 Fuchs was a publisher, a member of the original

Spartakus Bund, and he wrote books on the social history of art and
taste. In 1923, he was one of the founders of the Institut für Sozialforschung
in Frankfurt. Known as Sittenfuchs for his book on the class history of
social customs, he collected around him a group of communist intel-
lectuals committed to Marxism as a philosophical enterprise and edu-
cational project. These were individuals such as Franz Mehring, August
Thalheimer and Karl Korsch. Roy soon found inroads into the ‘Old Guard’
precincts of the Berlin Spartakists and became a ‘regular attendant’ of
the Karl Korsch circle.55
Roy was invited to discussions at Fuchs’ home in early 1920, and it
was there that he first met August Thalheimer, the leader of the German
Communist Party. Thalheimer would become a close friend and Roy’s
most important conversation partner.56 Indeed, the first months in Berlin
were characterised by a spreading social web of contacts in German
communism and Social Democracy. Roy recalled meeting socialist icons
such as Karl Kautsky, Rudolf Hilferding and the grand old man of the
Social Democratic Party, Eduard Bernstein.57
Scholarship has been slow to recognise the particular cultural and
intellectual force fields of German communism in Berlin that had the
greatest impact on M. N. Roy, after the Swadeshi avant-garde milieu.58
Moscow was never Roy’s ‘holy land’, despite the fact that historiog-
raphy has consistently situated him in the habitat of the fledgling
Soviet state. Instead, Roy’s second intellectual home after fin-de-siècle
Calcutta was the fractured, amorphous, intellectual landscape of Berlin
of the 1920s.
Marx’s Curse
There were many vicissitudes to Marx’s thinking about the East, largely
due to the general unimportance of Asia to his larger philosophical
and political project.59 Marx approved of what he believed to be the
introduction of commerce and social reform to the East via colonialism.
He insisted in a way typical of mid-century European liberalism, and
reminiscent of Hegel and James Mill, that Asia could be raised from
out of its vegetal state through European colonialism. Marx wrote in
1847, ‘we know that the Spanish found the East Indies at the same level
of development as did the English, and that the Indians have never-
theless continued to live for centuries in the same manner, i.e. they
have eaten, drunk and vegetated… The workers there are already
Marxist New Time 41
migrating and through aligning with other peoples are becoming for
the first time accessible to civilisation’.60 By the early 1850s, as a London
correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune on colonial matters,
Marx began expressing views that grew out of Hegel’s thought, but
based themselves on the latest British colonial scholarship. Inspired by
the works of demography, geography and political economy by Robert
Malthus and Richard Jones, both of whom had taught at Haileybury, the
college of the East India Company, and by George Campbell and Henry
Maine on law and society in Indian ‘village communities’, Marx cobbled
together his notion of the ‘Asiatic Mode of Production’. Richard Jones in
his lectures from the 1850s argued that vast swathes of land in temperate
environments required large-scale irrigation works which could only
be provided by an Oriental despot.61 Marx adopted this view: ‘Climate
and the territorial conditions’, he claimed, ‘especially the vast tracts of
desert constituted artificial irrigation by canals and waterworks [are] the
basis of Oriental agriculture’.62 The works of Henry Maine, by contrast,
focused on local, instead of infrastructural, phenomena of Indian socio-
economic structure. He identified Indian society with the locale of the
village and the institution of the family.63 Marx, in his Grundrisse of 1857,
merged these two views:
The small communities may vegetate independently side by side, and
within each the individual labours independently with his family on the
land allotted to him… Furthermore, the commonality within the tribal body
may tend to appear either as a representation of its unity through the head
of the tribal kinship group, or a relationship between the heads of families.
Hence, either a more despotic or a more democratic form of the community.
The communal conditions for real appropriation through labour, such as
irrigation systems (very important among the Asian peoples), means of
communication, and so on, will then appear as the work of the higher unity —
the despotic government which is poised above the lesser communities.64
Marx’s notion of the Asiatic Mode of Production, then, claimed that

Asian societies exhibited a primitive form of democratic communism,
without private property, on the micro level, and environmentally-
necessitated despotism on the macro level. Put otherwise, when one
zoomed in on Indian society one saw the low-level consciousness of
primitive village society, and when one zoomed out, one saw despotism,
a backward and stagnating form of governance. This system ensured
the endless stasis of Asian society.
In Marx’s writings, as had been the case in Hegel’s as well, passiv-
ity was seen as the ‘principle of being’ of the Orient.65 The Orient lay
outside history, it was not yet a real space, and the heroic European
bourgeoisie had not only brought capital to Eastern shores, but had
brought History itself. As David Harvey commented, Oriental space was
‘a passive recipient of a teleological historical process that [started]
from the centre (Europe) and [flowed] outward to fill the entire globe’.66
By picturing the peoples of the East as caught within the Asiatic Mode
of Production, Marx positioned them on a gradient of humanity, and
were said to be unable to realise the fulfilment of universal time that
only industrial European society had attained. On the other hand, we
must also note, as Gareth Stedman Jones has stressed, that Marx’s own
views on the world outside Europe were not static, and that by the time
of his late writings, an enthusiasm for social revolution in the East had
developed.67 Nevertheless, given the fact that a gradient of humanity
was located within that portion of Marx’s corpus most read and inter-
preted, it would have to be in spite of Marx’s writings that Marxists later
developed anti-colonial theories and politics in the early twentieth
century. M. N. Roy, as he entered the Communist fold, found the
Eurocentric assumptions of colonial epistemology alive and well.
One recent scholar has suggested that Lenin ‘opened up a space in
which it became possible to “think” colonial nationalism’.68 Indeed, this
view is difficult to disentangle from Soviet hagiography. It is certainly
true that Lenin introduced an important reconceptualisation of colonial
space with regards to the metropolis, and that his views about colonial
freedom struggle were in place at least from 1907.69 As he said at the
First Congress of the Communist Third International in March 1919:
‘The liberation of the colonies is only thinkable along with the liberation
of the workers in the metropolis … just as capitalist Europe has drawn
the backward parts of the earth into the capitalist maelstrom, so too
will socialist Europe come to the assistance of the colonies with its
technology, its organization and its intellectual [geistige] influence…’70
Lenin aimed his comments against Woodrow Wilson and his contem-
poraneous enunciation of national ‘self-determination’.71 Still, Lenin
insisted on the need for a relationship of tutelage between European
communists and Asian anti-colonial movements. Furthermore, he held
that the historical trajectory of India in the 1920s was fundamentally
different from that of Europe. The Indian masses did not possess class
consciousness, and only the Westernised Indian bourgeoisie were
radicalised. Hence this colonial bourgeoisie had to be courted and
co-opted by European communists in order to attain the final goal of
socialist revolution.
Marxist New Time 43
Lenin outlined these ideas and policy suggestions in his twelve-

point ‘Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Question’ presented
at the Second Congress of the Communist International in June 1920.
‘The East’, he wrote, ‘has definitely taken the Western path’.72 The
indigenous elites who, because of their access to Western education,
had learned to crave the national ideal, were the de facto revolutionary
force in the colonies, Lenin maintained. As opposed to Rosa Luxemburg
who emphasised the role of mass action, Lenin focused his attention
on the colonial bourgeois classes. Although without proper socialist
goals, these indigenous elites could be instrumentalised for com-
munist revolution.73 Lenin insisted on the need of an avant-garde of
European communist operatives who would win over and direct anti-
colonial nationalism towards socialist ends.74 The view was doggedly
defended by Lenin’s devotees Dimitri Manuilski and Stalin in coming
years, although dissenters such as Trotsky as well as the German com-
munists, especially August Thalheimer, believed that the colonial
bourgeoisie should be side-stepped in favour of direct mass action.75 Yet,
despite the Comintern’s claim of being ‘international’, it remained in fact
quite Eurocentric. And the ‘colonial question’, as it was called, received
all too little attention in Comintern meetings in the early 1920s.76
Roy’s ‘Supplementary Theses on the National and Colonial Questions’,
presented alongside Lenin’s at the Congress of 1920, opposed Lenin’s
views with the eruptive universal time of Swadeshi modernism. It
represented Roy’s attempt to launch an anti-colonial exegetical struggle
from within the canon of Marxism, just as much as it was a policy
assertion to fight British imperialism. In his theses, Roy insisted that
revolution was imminent in India, and that the Indian peasants were
the force that would bring about rupture through their bodily action.
Thus, the historical process of social change in India did not imitate the
example of Europe, but had its own innate dynamic of total renewal.
‘The supposition that, owing to economic and industrial backward-
ness, the peoples in the colonies are bound to go through the stage of
bourgeois democracy is wrong’, wrote Roy in his theses.77 Roy opposed
Lenin’s colonial time with his own notion of an eruptive collective
subjecthood of the peasants. Instead of reading Roy as caught in a
‘misunderstanding’ of the concept of the ‘proletariat’ as Marxist
scholars in Russia and India have tended to claim, in which he
believed ‘the most oppressed, ill-treated and unfortunate strata of the
population were synonymous with the proletariat’, these supposed
‘misunderstandings’ were evidence of a wilful reinterpretation on
Roy’s part, a fusing of Marxist concepts with Swadeshi styles.78
Roy insisted that the demands of freedom transcended political

manoeuvre, and required the development of a new consciousness.
Whereas in the Swadeshi milieu, it had been the shaktiyogin (the
ascetic seeker channelling shakti force) who possessed radical socially
distributive agency, Roy transposed that agency in his communist
writings of the 1920s onto the revolutionary masses. One of Roy’s most
influential brochures, which was quickly integrated into the official
speeches of important political leaders such as Chittaranjan Das in
India, declared, ‘our task is to develop in the minds of the masses this
consciousness of their own power, to awaken their interest and develop
their indomitable will to conquer freedom. They will do the rest’.79 Roy
insisted on the pre-existing agency of the masses, and that unleashing
this agency would surpass the political goal of national independence,
and usher in a new time.
In Roy’s early Berlin thought, the peasantry represented an agency
of energetic eruption. ‘The Moplah rising and the agrarian disturbances
in northern India: these incidents show that the peasantry, which is
being driven into a revolutionary channel by poverty, has not been wait-
ing for any spiritual stimulation in order to begin the fight for their
interests’.80 In writings that riled the Moscow leadership from the very
start, Roy believed, in a Luxemburgist fashion, that revolution really
would move from the bottom of society upwards.81
Contrary to the consensus of many writers and historians, it was
certainly not the case that after Roy left India he became estranged
from the Indian political scene, dissipated by his years abroad.82
Although conceptually contaminated to fruitful ends, Roy remained
preoccupied with the pursuit of Indian anti-colonialism, and was
closely tied in to the imaginative horizon of the cultural and historical
background of Swadeshi modernism.83 In the 1920s, he was a leading
figure among cosmopolitan nationalists who saw national liberation and
internationalism as a unified project. And upon return to India in the
1930s, despite being absent from the political scene during five years
of imprisonment by the British Indian government, Roy’s influence
grew among Indian thinkers on the left. In the interwar period, just
as in the Swadeshi period of the early twentieth century, his sense of
Indian belonging was neither depleted nor put in question by travel or
transnational connections. Roy’s early readings of Marxism dredged a
path to criticise Marxist Eurocentric assumptions from within, using
the textual practices he honed in his treatises on Wilsonianism during
his first years in the United States.
Marxist New Time 45
Indian Communist Party at Tashkent

Roy’s decade in Berlin in the Weimar years was interspersed with tours
of duty throughout Europe, frequent trips to Moscow, and a number of
prolonged stays in the Central and East Asia. After the Second Congress
of the Communist International in July 1921, Roy was deputised to
found the Communist Party of India. He travelled to Tashkent from
Moscow in the fall of 1920 to attain that goal. Tashkent had been a
base for the German–British round of the Great Game during the
First World War, as well as the Russian–British bouts that preceded
it.84 Once a city renowned for its double rows of trees along major
boulevards, all the canopies and trunks had been cut down for fuel in
1919 because of the civil war.85 Between the demise of Russian Turkistan
and the establishment of Uzbekistan in 1924, Tashkent was a city in the
midst of ambiguous political turf. It seemed Roy had a propensity for
searching out such environments. Here in Tashkent, Roy wrote his
first major book, India in Transition, which became a classic of Indian
communist literature.
These were the threshing fields of Mahendra Pratap Mehta,
Mohammed Barakatullah and Obeidullah Sindhi, who together estab-
lished the ‘Provisional Government of India’ in Kabul in 1915, with its
own federal cabinet avant la lettre complete with a minister of the
interior (M. Obeidullah), a war minister (M. Basheer) and a foreign
secretary (M. P. T. Pillai).86 In October 1920, the Indian Communist Party
was founded in Tashkent. At the Indusky Doma, the India House on
Lavmentev Road, most of the major figures who worked with M. N. Roy
were veterans of the global Indian anti-colonial network.87 Obeidullah
and Barakatullah were leaders of the transnational Khilafat movement
linking Indian Muslim political activism with events in the Ottoman
lands. M. P. T. Acharya, a Tamil radical, came to Tashkent from Madras,
and travelled through Swadeshi and Khilafat channels to London,
Constantinople and Kabul to reach the destination.88 Bam Roy and Abani
Mukherjee, Swadeshi radicals from Calcutta, made a similar global tour
to Tashkent during the war years.89
The Khilafat network proved particularly important in peop-
ling the space of emerging Indian communism. In the intermediary
cities through which muhajjirin travelled, young Indian Muslim youth
with strong anti-British sentiment were recruited as communist
emissaries.90 Tashkent was a major city on the overland pilgrimage
route from India to the Ottoman and Arab lands, and M. N. Roy’s
objective was to convert these travellers to the communist cause. About

80 per cent of the young men who served as the main colporteurs of
communist literature to India, such as Shaukat Usmani, were Muslim.
By March 1921, there were about 110 Indians studying with Roy at
Indusky Dom.91 And out of the Khilafat Movement came some of the
most significant Indian communist intellectuals, such as Mushir Hosain
Kidwai, Obeidullah Sindhi, Feroz-ud-Din Mansoor, Mir Abdul Majid
and Fazal Ilahi Qurban.92 The Ghadar Movement led by Sikh revolution-
aries was another source of Indian radicals for the fledging com-
munist ecumene.93
The Tashkent School, while nominally a Soviet institution, was far
from a priority for the leaders in Moscow, and was left generally un-
regulated and under-provisioned. M. N. Roy, who established himself
as the school’s director, wrote letters of complaint about the lack of
necessary equipment and uniforms, the poor quality of the food, and
the poor state of the library.94 In May 1921, the school closed down
and the operations were relocated to Moscow, where Roy was enlisted
as Soviet instructor on Marxism and colonialism at the new Com-
munist University for the Toilers of the East.95 He did not enjoy stay-
ing in the power centre of Moscow, and soon moved back to fallen
imperial capital of Berlin, still reeling with political instability and
social unrest.96
Communist New Time

In the same era as the rise of the Swadeshi avant-garde, Europeans were
also engaged in their own avant-gardist experiments in aesthetics and
politics. In Germany, this took shape with movements in artistic, literary
and philosophical Expressionism.97 A founding myth of communism,
as it broke away from the Social Democrats in 1917, asserted that
while the Second International subscribed to a progressive, develop-
mentalist framing of temporal flow, the communist Third Inter-
national envisioned a temporality of rupture. The Bolsheviks, when
declaring the advent of Soviet Russia in October 1917, said that a ‘leap
from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom’ had taken place.98
In November 1919, Kurt Eisner declared a short-lived Bavarian Soviet
Republic centred in Munich.99 But outside the realm of political action,
youthful German philosophers, such as Ernst Bloch, summoned a mood
of pregnant expectation for impending eruptions within the realm of
culture and ideas. Bloch wrote in his 1918 Geist der Utopie of the need
Marxist New Time 47
to envision the future as the ‘not-yet’ (Noch Nicht), and as the ‘wholly-
other’ (Ganz Andere) from the present. He wanted historical breakage
instead of chronological continuity:
It must be noted that of essential importance is the future, the trope of the
unknown, within which alone we enter, in which alone, newfangled and
deep, the functions of hope are sparked without the empty reprisal of
Anamnesis — it is no different from an expanded darkness, as a darkness that
gives birth from its womb, and increases its latent potential.100
Bloch had a different view of the future than Marxist philosophers

of an earlier generation, such as Karl Kautsky, who spoke of the role
of the utopian imagination. In his Thomas More and his Utopia (1890),
Kautsky, informed by his neo-Kantian context, proposed that utopia was
a regulative idea alone, a theoretical summum bonum used to measure
the need for progress in the present. The dualism between ‘what is’ and
‘what ought to be’ was assumed. Bloch wrote something of a response
to Kautsky in Thomas Münzer als Theologe der Revolution in 1921.101 Here,
utopia is not a regulative idea, but had its own ontological status as a
force born from within the present, breaking it apart.102 Bloch would
eventually abandon the word ‘utopia’, calling it abstract and idealist,
and instead speak of a ‘processive-concrete utopia’ and ‘concrete
anticipation’ that sought to activate the ‘not yet realised objective-
real possibilities in the world’. 103 This notion of time punctuated by
rupture — the time of the new breaking out of the old and parturition
— was the central temporal dynamic championed by the communist
world and by artistic movements, such as futurism and expressionism
of the same period.
In Germany, after 1923, a reaction against expressionism began to set
in, as the political and economic stabilisation of the Weimar Republic
introduced a ‘new sobriety’ to art and philosophy.104 In Russia, futurist
poets such as Alexander Blok and Vladimir Mayakovski proclaimed
that the Soviet notion of time had no precedent, and that technology
and industry materialised the forms of the future.105 Lenin’s death in
1924 marked a downturn in the giddy optimism, and a new programme
of ‘socialist realism’ was formally promulgated by the Soviet Union in
1934. But at the peak of the movement in the early 1920s, Mayakovski
celebrated the new Third International by already calling for the advent
of the ‘fourth revolution’:
Making heads start by its explosions of thought,
Booming away with its artillery of the heart,
There rises from the depth of time

A different revolution,
The fourth revolution
Of the spirit.106
In Italy, Filippo Marinetti, the Egyptian-born, Sorbonne education, Italian

artist and intellectual, wrote his famous Futurist Manifesto in 1909,
which served as a major inspiration to Russian and German artists.107
He founded the Italian Futurist Party, and wrote often on the theme
of creative destruction. The future could only be built on the rubble of
the past, he exclaimed. ‘This is a gay manner of fertilising the earth!
Because the Earth, believe me, will soon be pregnant. She will grow big —
until she bursts! — From a sublime start to illuminating explosions’.108
Italian futurism expanded through the 1920s, as it was intertwined
with the rise of fascism. The Italian Fascist Party also proposed the
eruption of a new time that would destroy the mundane linear succes-
sion of history. This fascist new time would allow for the regeneration
of a national people and renewal of its great civilisation. Both fascism
and communism, while having divergent historical implications, none-
theless were early twentieth century political movements sharing a
similar avant-gardist view of temporal rupture.
The styles of thought associated with Italian futurism and German
expressionism bore a resemblance to Swadeshi avant-gardism, espe-
cially in terms of the topoi of eruptive change and destructive preg-
nancy. A global modernist thought zone concerned with the eruption
of new time out of the mundane present developed not genealogically,
but conjuncturally in the early twentieth century. M. N. Roy’s India in
Transition was published simultaneously in four language from Berlin
in 1922, right at the peak of the German Expressionist, Italian futurist,
and Russian futurist movements.109
Transition in India
The terms ‘future’ and ‘revolution’ were keywords of Roy’s first
major communist text entitled, India in Transition (1922). The book
would become a classic of colonial Marxist literature. It developed the
Swadeshi-inspired narrative of eruptive new time, but through Marxist
concepts. Roy wrote in an optative or anticipatory mode, eliding how
things would be with the way things are. He insisted, as did Ernst
Bloch and other Expressionist communist thinkers, that envisioning
the future was inseparably tied up with actualising it. By doing this,
Marxist New Time 49
M. N. Roy challenged the line of colonial difference that ran through

European Marxist thought. Indian agricultural workers were already
a ‘land proletariat, in every sense of the word’ in Roy’s writing. Along
with this, Roy insisted that ‘feudalism as a hereditary element in social
economics had already been irretrievably undermined’ in India, as
early at the late eighteenth century. ‘The Land had been freed from
feudal fetters’.110 Given the news of agrarian revolts in 1920, Roy insisted
that class consciousness among peasants had already developed and
that revolt was on the way. In addition, the urban proletariat, ‘a recent
group to develop in India’, would lead this revolt. ‘The first stage of
the proletariat struggle [in India], which was marked by a mad wave
of spontaneous strikes, followed invariably by riots and disturbances,
seems to have terminated by the end of the last year. Since then, the
proletarian movement has apparently entered the period of organisa-
tion and preparation for continuing the struggle with renewed vigour
in the near future’.111
Roy’s major claim in India in Transition of 1922, the argument from
which the title derived, was that a wholly different future was already
blasting apart the chronosophy of colonial universalism. ‘To [the
‘extreme nationalists’] it is not so much a transition, but a revivalist
period, through which India is passing. Because they think that the
Indian people are struggling to liberate themselves … not to begin a
new life with a new vision, but to revive the old. But the past is doomed
by history, one of whose most important chapters is the present
transition’.112 India would be born anew, and the eruption would tran-
scend the mundane chronological continuity of past and present.
Through the revolutionary agency of ‘the progressive forces latent
in the Indian society’, inherent in the ‘masses of India … the future of
the Indian nation is going to be shaped’.113
These pronouncements provided grist for the subsequent common
view that Roy wilfully disregarded the specificities of Indian culture and
social realities, or that he exuberantly imposed European categories
where they did not belong.114 And yet, this misses the avant-gardist
and optative mode of Roy’s work — his claims were intended to speak
of the ‘what ought to be’ as the ‘what is’. By speaking of a future India
as if it had already come, an ‘eruptive new time’ could be interjected
into the present. Like Walter Benjamin who insisted that writing his-
tory should not simply involve recalling facts as with the ‘counting of
beads in a rosary’, but should critically reconstruct the past in the light
of current-day revolutionary potential, so too Roy, in 1921, wrote that
Indians did not need history in order to know ‘exactly how many sacks
of kishmish the great Aurangzeb had consumed in his illustrious life’.115
The past was rather a great skein in which new patterns useful for
blasting out of the present moment were selected by the ‘searchlight
of Historical Materialism’.116
Avant-gardism in Indian thought was a growing movement in the
early 1920s. In fact, Roy’s former teacher at the Bengal Technical
College, Benoy Kumar Sarkar, published his Futurism of Young India
from Berlin in 1922. In it, Sarkar emphasised that the temporalities of
Indian progress aimed not at the local liberation of the Indian polity,
but at the attainment of a whole new universal temporality for the
world. ‘There must be a psychological revolution in Eur-America… The
futurists of Young Asia are looking forward to the spiritual re-birth of
the world’.117 A new world order entailed a new order of time. There
was a growing interest in dreams and visions of the future in Bengali
literary modernism in the 1920s. Nripendrakrishna Chattopadhyay, in
a 1924 article in the Calcutta-based avant-garde literary journal, Kallol,
wrote of the Soviet gift for ‘luxuriating in dreams’ (swapna bilasi) in
poetry and politics.118 Dineshranjan Das said it was necessary to erect
a ‘dream India’ (swapna Bharat) through literary creation that would
inevitably dismantle the oppression in ‘actual India’ (bastab Bharat) and
help give rise to ‘eternal India’ (swaswata Bharat).119 There was a longer
history of this political use of ‘imaginary histories’ in Bengali thought.120
Bhudev Mukhopadhyay, in his History of India as seen through Dreams
(Swapnalabdha bharater itihas) of 1862, provided the archetype for this
emphasis on dreams and hope in social and political thought, just
as similar themes were expounded in the novels of Bankimchandra
Chattopadhyay.121 Bhudev, writing in mid nineteenth-century Bengal,
proposed a utopian history of hope that looked to the past with an
optative intent.122
The critical anticipatory starting point of Roy’s India in Transition,
with its utopian narrative, sought to disclose a strong class-conscious
peasantry already present in Indian history in the interest of radically
changing the present social order. M. N. Roy would go on to write a
series of ‘dream histories’ of India, including his Revolution and Counter-
revolution in China (1930), Historical Role of Islam (1939), and Reason,
Romanticism and Revolution (1952). In each case, the return to the past is
carried out as a project to redeem the shards of revolutionary time as
called forth by the revolutionary needs of the present. Just as the ‘ought’
Marxist New Time 51
had ontological status and could infuse and transform the ‘is’, so too the
past, if deployed properly by the practitioner of historical materialism,
could also play a revolutionary function.
Much later, Roy recalled of Transition, the book that earned him
entrance into the highest precincts of the Communist International,
‘You may be interested to know that I wrote India in Transition in 1922,
which was celebrated by the accepted authorities of the time, includ-
ing Lenin, as the first Marxist interpretation of Indian history. By that
time I had not read anything of Marx. What I mean to say is that my
Marxism was derived from my own philosophical convictions’.123 Far
from an artefact of Roy’s appropriation of codes or modules of Marxist
thought or Western ‘conclusions’ to Indian problems, the conceptual
brilliance of India in Transition derives from the impressive powers of
bridging and amalgamating Russian, German and Bengali discourses
about temporal progression and eruptive change within a global context
of post-war avant-gardism.
Marxist Canon, Indian Exegete

The writings of Marx and his major interpreters were not merely
occasional or dispersed treatises of political philosophy for M. N. Roy.
Rather, he saw them collectively as comprising a canon. The canonicity
of Marxism as a coherent body of authoritative texts was a framework
Roy imposed on the dispersed and scattered writings and debates he
encountered within the early communist world, and he carried this
framework over from the Swadeshi milieu. Roy approached Marxism as
an exegete approaches a canon of scripture not because of something
necessary or innate to ‘Marxism’, but because of Roy’s historically ef-
fected style of interpretation greatly informed by the Brahmo tradition.
He maintained that the economic logic of dialectical materialism was a
universal principle that inhered in all human societies. Human societies
were equal and translatable to one another on sociological grounds.
For M. N. Roy, there was a common deep rationality to all social unrest
worldwide. ‘The present situation in India is not unique in history. It is a
stage of social development marked by a sudden and rapid introduction
of modern means of production, resulting in a dislocation of the status
quo, economic as well as territorial, of the population’.124
Roy proposed that the 1857 Rebellion and the protest against the
Bengal partition in 1905, while episodes of nationalist struggles, also
represented the class interests of social elites. He portrayed the late

nineteenth century as one of financial aggrandisement by the Indian
business classes. Yet the Swadeshi uprising marked the ‘swelling by
the lower strata of middle-class intellectuals’, and the development of
a ‘declassed’ group of radicals.
Roy’s discussion of Indian society was not only aimed at under-
standing Indian society futuristically, but was also en route to the project
of challenging Eurocentric assumptions of the West’s civilisational
exceptionalism, or Asia’s supposed endemic social stagnancy. This
view of a native, eruptive agency found in India’s peasants was seen
as heterodox among European communists. Yet, it also became a great
inspiration to non-European colonial intellectuals.125 From 1921 onwards,
Roy assumed the role in the Comintern of a master exegete of Marxism
on topics relating to the colonial world. He read the Marxist canon to
criticise, reinterpret and renovate claims about the social revolution
outside Europe.
Roy observed at the 1921 Congress of the Communist International,
‘when we debate the conditions of world economy and the crisis of con-
temporary capitalism, we should not limit ourselves to Europe and
America’.126 Two years later, he was arguing the same point, only now
with added exasperation: ‘Comrades! The question of the Orient should
have been discussed many times already. It should have arisen in relation
to debates about the offensives of capital … and when the question is
finally brought up there is always so little time remaining that it is
practically impossible to coherently discuss it’.127 In 1925 he published
his article ‘Europe is not the World’ in Inprecor, the major journal of the
Communist International, in which he again admonished: ‘It should
not be forgotten that, to be effective, our unity should not be European
unity, but truly international unity — world unity’.128 These same years
saw Roy’s meteoric rise within the Comintern organisation. The early
communist world offered a space for such exegetical criticism.
Swadeshi’s Future, Gandhi’s Past

Manabendranath Roy clearly saw communism as a way of renewing
and vindicating the deterritoriality and insurgent temporalities of the
Swadeshi avant-garde. ‘All hold that a “New India”, — “Young India”
is in the process of birth’, he wrote at the introduction of India in
Transition.129 Roy explicitly likened Swadeshi radicals to Bolshevik
revolutionaries — both groups had launched their first revolutionary
Marxist New Time 53
assaults in 1905. Furthermore, Roy associated the liberally-oriented

Swarajya Party, established by C. R. Das and Motilal Nehru in 1922,
with the reformist Russian Cadets who refused to accept the exigency
of revolution:
Lenin compared the Cadets with worms born out of the decayed carcass of
[the] Revolution of 1905 … Lenin said that the Party of the Cadets was the
growth on the dead body of the Revolution of 1905. Similarly, the Swaraj
Party rose out of the ruins of a great movement which did not reach such a
definite revolutionary climax as the Russian Revolution of 1905, but which
was undoubtedly the nearest approach to a revolutionary crisis in India.130
The ‘great movement’ that Roy did not name, that ‘nearest approach to
a revolutionary crisis in India’, was the Swadeshi movement in which he
had played an important role. The fact that he did not actually mention
the name ‘Swadeshi’ directly, rather employing a circumlocution,
suggests the trauma that followed in the aftermath of the exhausted
Swadeshi movement after 1917.
In Roy’s lifelong attempt to come to terms with the great failure of
his original revolutionary experiences as a Calcutta youth, he preserved
a sense of the magnitude and singularity of the Swadeshi moment by
contrasting it with Gandhism and mainstream nationalist politics that
had already begun to champion territorial closure by the early 1920s.
For Roy, the desire for a territorial Indian nation, like the states of
Western Europe, represented a rot of the imagination — ‘worms’ that
festered in the ‘ruins of a great movement’. In Roy’s 1920s writings,
‘Gandhism’ and the Swarajya leaders after they distanced them-
selves from communism, represented movements that sought to
betray the deterritorial dimensions of Swadeshi insurrection, and
the radical eruption of a new universalism.131 Comparing Gandhi with
Lenin, Roy said that while Bolshevism ‘forged ahead, breaking one
link after another of the mighty chain of time-honoured servitude’,
Gandhism ‘gropes in the dark, spinning out ethical and religious
dogmas’.132 Gandhi, for Roy, was the quintessence of the anti-colonial
leader who lacked a ‘programme’. Gandhi could not ‘countenance the
spirit which spells revolution’, and substituted ‘spiritual patriotism’
for true revolutionary thought.133 Roy saw in Gandhi’s politics a threat
to the deterritorial body of India, especially given Gandhi’s radically
local and territorialising politics, in which one dwelled amidst khaddar,
charkha, village imaginaries and swadeshi goods.134
It was Gandhi’s critical reinterpretation of ‘swadeshi’ in the move-
ment’s fag-end years that reframed the term as relating to patriotic
physical labour, such as cotton spinning, and the cultivation of a ter-

ritorialised nation–body. Of course, Gandhi was himself a deterritorial
politician in terms of his view of the Indian nation as including its
worldwide diaspora. The very origins of his politics lay especially in
efforts to protect the right of Indian indentured and free labour
in South Africa, but also worldwide.135 But, in the realm of culture his
was certainly a territorialising imagination. Even for Indians abroad,
Gandhi insisted on the intimate practice of Indian body culture, and the
preservation of Indian cultural continence against Western influence.
It was the cultural body of India that Gandhi primarily sought to
territorialise and to make autonomous, even as the Indian population
body was scattered across the globe.136
Already in Hind Swaraj of 1910, Gandhi had many critical words for
the deterritoriality of Bengal radicalism. ‘The sons of India were found
wanting, its civilisation has been placed in jeopardy’, Gandhi wrote. ‘But
its strength is to be seen in its ability to survive the shock’.137 He protested
against what he saw as the heteronomy of Bengali Swadeshi movement,
with its recourse to violence, an ill of ‘Western’ civilisation, and its tend-
ency to posit the equivalence between the Indian struggle, and that of
the Italian, French and Irish revolutionaries.138 Gandhi critically reinter-
preted the term ‘swadeshi’ to refer specifically to practices of body
hygiene and home industry that helped define the boundaries of Indian
cultural autonomy vis-à-vis the West. This was a very different notion
of ‘swadeshi’ from the deterritorial horizons of Bengali Swadeshi avant-
garde thought. Swaraj is achieved, maintained Gandhi, ‘when we learn
to rule ourselves’.139 In Gandhi’s powerful articulations of a new path of
political and ethical struggle in the 1920s, the Indian nation–body as a
cultural entity, both in India and in diaspora, was asked to shore up its
boundaries and purify itself — to reterritorialise itself — by returning to
inherited customs, village-scapes and locally made swadeshi goods. This
represented a clear shift, almost an inversion, in the significance of the
original term, and heralded the move of the mainstream Congress in-
creasingly away from the deterritorial imaginaries of the pre-War years
to an increasing preoccupation with the continence of national form.
As opposed to Gandhi’s way of defining the boundaries of cultural
autonomy, M. N. Roy, like other Swadeshi thinkers such as C. R. Das,
Subhas Chandra Bose and Rabindranath Tagore, vigorously opposed
his view with the call for a politics of boundary transgression not
boundary assertion, and of solidarity building not ascetic solipsism.
Roy’s writings of the 1920s continually spoke of ‘a new India’ that lay
Marxist New Time 55
beyond the horizon. ‘The nationalist movement is the expression of that

striving [for indispensable changes] … its basic task is to build a modern
India on the ruins of the old’.140 Furthermore, this new India would be
‘constitutionally’ different from the one that presently existed.
What is revolution? A very wrong notion about it obtains in Indian nation-
alist circles… The forces that go into the making of the new epoch are origin-
ally conceived and go on gathering strength within the framework of the
old that eventually must burst if the germs of the new contained therein
are to fully fructify. This process is to be noticed throughout all the physical
existence. Revolution, therefore, is in the very nature of things; it is quite
constitutional.141
Roy here adopted an obstetric language to describe the workings of

revolutionary time, in which the novum would germinate, fructify and
ultimately erupt from the old structure of the world. Such change was
not merely political, Roy insisted, it was structural and constitutional as
well. ‘The organism of society, subjugated and exploited for centuries,
is surcharged with inflammable materials which once ignited by a
revolutionary leadership, will shatter the chain of slavery’.142
In Roy’s attempt to assert the inadequacy of contemporary Indian
politics in the homeland in the 1920s, he suggested that the Gandhian
nationalist ideology lacked an understanding of the fundamentally
global, universal and futuristic dimensions of India’s path to inde-
pendence. India would be freed not as an exceptional territory–body,
but as a particular expression of the universal struggle of the workers
and peasants. If Gandhi mined the symbolic resources of place and
home, Roy heralded Swadeshi globalism and a modernist commitment to
‘new time’ and to the ‘Not-Yet’, not as farce but as actualised history.
Notes
1. Sibnarayan Ray. 1998. In Freedom’s Quest: A Study of the Life and works of M. N. Roy.
Calcutta: Minerva, vol. 1: p. 47.
2. Dhanagopal was the younger brother of Jadugopal Mukherjee. A number of articles
in the Modern Review (Calcutta) from 1907 to 1911 argued for the benefits of
sending Indian students to Japan and America for studies. For example: Nihal
Singh, ‘A message that Japan gave me’, Modern Review February 1909, and also
Har Dayal, ‘India in America’, Modern Review July 1911, 10(1): 1–11.
3. N. Innaiah. 1995. Evelyn Trent alias Shanti Devi: Founder Member of the Exile Indian
Communist Party. Hyderabad: Booklinks Corp, p. 9. See Dhanagopal Mukerji’s
autobiography. Dhan Gopal Mukerjee (Dhanagopal Mukherjee). 1923. Caste and
Outcaste. New York: E. P. Dutton & Company. I thank Dilip Menon for pointing
out to me that Dhanagopal Mukherjee went on to become a celebrated author in

the United States, and won the prestigious John Newbery Medal for children’s
fiction in 1928.
4. M. N. Roy. M. N. Roy’s Memoirs. Bombay: Allied Publishers, p. 22.
5. Innaiah, Evelyn Trent alias Shanti Devi, p. 9.
6. See David Starr Jordan. 1922. The Days of a Man. Yonkers-on-Hudson: World
Book Company vol. 2: p. 445. On Dhanagopal Mukherjee see Ray, In Freedom’s
Quest, vol. 1: pp. 46–49.
7. Edward McNall Burns.1953. David Starr Jordan: Prophet of Freedom, Stanford:
Stanford University Press, p. 217.
8. M. N. Roy’s Memoirs, pp. 43–44.
9. H. G. Wells. 1929. The Outline of History. Garden City: Doubleday, p. 579ff. The cul-
mination of history would result in ‘man’s coming of age’, and so would follow
the ‘unification of the world into one community of knowledge and will’.
10. M. N. Roy. 1953d. ‘In the Land of Revolutions’, Radical Humanist, 8 March, vol. 17:
p. 114.
11. Roy, M. N. Roy’s Memoirs, pp. 28, 29.
12. Woodrow Wilson, ‘Flag-Day Address’, 14 June 1917. Reproduced in Woodrow
Wilson. 1918. In Our First Year of War. New York: Harper & Bros., p. 64.
13. Roy Memoirs, p. 43; Ker. 1973 (1917). Political Trouble in India 1907–1917. Calcutta:
Superintendent Government Printing, p. 259.
14. Roy, ‘Open Letter to His Excellency Woodrow Wilson’, reproduced in Sibnarayan
Ray. 1987b (1917). Selected Works of M. N. Roy. Delhi: Oxford University Press,
vol. 1: pp. 67–83.
15. Woodrow Wilson. 2005. ‘Fourteen Points’, in Ronald Pestritto (ed.), Woodrow
Wilson: The Essential Political Writings. Lanham: Lexington Books, p. 262.
16. Erez Manela makes this point too. For this reason, Wilson held that colonies
should be administered by the small nations, but also that the resources of the
colonies should be made available to all members of the League. Ray Stannard
Baker. 1927. Woodrow Wilson: Life and Letters. Garden City: Doubleday, vol.1: p. 10.
17. Lajpat Rai, ‘New Internationalism’, Speech at the International Dinner organised
by the People’s Council of America, 16 February 1918. Reproduced in Lajpat Rai.
2003. The Collected Works of Lajpat Rai, B. R. Nanda (ed.). New Delhi: Manohar,
vol. 7: p. 23.
18. ‘Open Letter to His Excellency Woodrow Wilson’ (1917) and India, Her Past, Present
and Future [originally published in 1918] in Ray (ed.), Selected Works, vol. 1:
pp. 64ff. M. N. Roy spoke of articles he published in the Swadeshi press before
leaving Calcutta, but these have not survived.
19. Ibid., p. 148.
20. Ibid., p. 153.
21. Ibid., p. 153.
22. On civilisational discourse in Indian anti-colonialism, see Ashis Nandy. 1987.
‘Outside the Imperium: Gandhi’s Critique of the West’, in Traditions, Tyranny,
Utopias, Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 127–62.
23. Roy, India: Her Past, Present and Future, 1918: 153.
Marxist New Time 57
24. M. N. Roy. 1953b. ‘In the Land of Liberty’, Radical Humanist, 15 February
vol. 17: p. 80.
25. Ibid., p. 127.
26. There were at least four other prominent Indians anti-colonial activists in
Mexico City at this time. See Bertram David Wolfe. 1981. A Life in Two Centuries.
New York: Stein and Day, p. 317; Friedrich Katz. 1981. The Secret War in Mexico:
Europe, the United States, and the Mexican Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, p. 424.
27. Roy, Radical Humanist, 15 March 1953, 17: 127.
28. Fritz Fischer. 1962. Griff nach der Weltmacht: die Kriegzielpolitik des Kaiserlichen
Deutschland 1914–1918. Dusseldorf: Droste, pp. 109–31.
29. Katz, The Secret War in Mexico, p. 415. Mexico became the headquarters of the
German secret service in North America after the United States entered the war
in 1917.
30. Deutscher Reichstag. 1919–20. Untersuchungsausschuss über die Weltkriegsveran
twortlichkeit. Berlin: Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft Fur Politik und Geschichte,
p. 355.
31. The Germans attempted to ship a large trove of guns from the coast of Mexico
to Peking in 1915. See German Foreign Office Archive, Berlin (AA).1915. 21079-2,
11 February, p. 167.
32. M. N. Roy. 1918. La India, Su Pasado, Su Presente y Su Porvenir. Reproduced in
Sibnarayan Ray (ed.), Selected Works of M. N. Roy, vol. 1, pp. 89–158.
33. M. N. Roy. 1953a. ‘The City of the Sleeping Woman’, Radical Humanist, 22 March.
vol. 17: p. 138.
34. Kris Manjapra. 2006. ‘The Illusions of Encounter: Muslim “minds” and Hindu
revolutionaries’, Journal of Global History, 1(3): pp. 363–82.
35. Roy, Memoirs, p. 81.
36. Roy wrote essays directly in German by the mid-1920s, and his English writings,
even after return to India, were occasionally marked by ‘Germanisms’. In a
letter from 1939, he wrote that he ‘made many experiences in prison’ and in
a letter to Ellen Gottschalk from prison in 1935, he wrote that his work ‘is not
interbroken’. See M. N. Roy, ‘Letter from M. N. Roy to Gandhi’, Independent India,
18 November 1939, vol. 3: pp. 341–43. In his late years, friends remember that
Roy spoke German with his wife at home. Oral history interview with R. M. Pal,
19 January 2005.
37. Charles Shipman. 1993. It had to be Revolution. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
p. 76.
38. Theodore Draper, Roots of American Communism, 1957: 11; Charles Shipman, It Had
to be Revolution, p. 119; Carleton Beals. 1938. Glass Houses: Ten Years of Free-lancing.
Philadelphia: Lippincott Company, pp. 43–51.
39. Friedrich Katz, The Secret War in Mexico, pp. 423–24.
40. Wolfe, A Life in Two Centuries, p. 285.
41. On the Mexican construction of modernist identity see Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo.
1996. Mexico at the World’s Fair: Crafting a Modern Nation. Berkeley: University of
California Press, pp. 28–47.
42. Ray, In Freedom’s Quest, vol 1: pp. 50–54.

43. Isaac Deutscher. 2003 (1954). The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879–1921. New York:
44. Roy, M. N. Roy’s Memoirs, p. 217; See Borodin to Wijnkoop, International Social
History Museum, Amsterdam (IISG), ‘Letter of Introduction by Borodin’, Fond
581, Nr. 62, dated 1919.
45. Beals, Glass Houses, p. 43.
46. Roy, M. N. Roy’s Memoirs, p. 19.
48. Roy, M. N. Roy’s Memoirs, p. 18; ‘Buddy’ comes up often in secret correspondence.
See Evelyn Trent to Henk Sneevliet, 7 July 1924, IISG: Sneevliet Papers, 362.
49. On self-performance and self-fashioning see Thomas Greene. 1968. ‘The
Flexibility of the Self in Renaissance Literature’, in Peter Demetz (ed.), The
Disciplines of Criticism, pp. 241–64; Stephen Greenblatt on play, Stephen Greenblatt.
1984. Renaissance Self-fashioning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 193ff.;
Marjorie Garber. 1992. Vested Interests. New York: Routledge, pp. 21–40.
51. Henry Maximilian Pachter. 1982. Weimar Etudes. New York: Columbia University
Press, p. 89ff; Wolfgang Abendroth. 1978. Sozialgeschichte der europäischen
Arbeiterbewegung. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, pp. 1–75; Theodor Bergmann. 2001.
Gegen den Strom: Die Geschichte der Kommunistischen-Partei-Opposition. Hamburg:
VSA-Verlag, pp. 14–17.
52. Cecil Davies. 2000. The Volksbühne Movement: A History. Amsterdam: Harwood
Academic, pp. 80–96, 99–113.
53. See Abelshauer et al. 1985. Deutsche Sozialgeschichte 1914–1945: ein historiches
Lesebeuch. Munich: C. H. Beck, pp. 327–47.
54. Ulrich Weitz. 1991. Salonkultur und Proletariat: Eduard Fuchs. Stuggart: Stoffler &
Schutz, pp. 409–13.
55. Pachter, Weimar Etudes, p. 54.
56. Bergmann, Die Thalheimers, p. 215.
59. See introductory comments by Shlomo Avineri to Karl Marx. Karl Marx et al.
1968. Karl Marx on Colonization and Modernization. Garden City: Doubleday, p. 5. ‘Yet
time and again (Marx) warns his disciples not to overlook the basically European
horizons of his discussions of historical development’.
60. Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, edited by Institute for Marxism-Leminism, 1972, 1: 637.
61. Richard Jones wrote: ‘The history of the eastern powers, as we can read or see,
shows an almost constant effort on the part of then active rulers to force these
physical barriers against the excesses of their exaction’. See Richard Jones.
1859. Literary Remains, Consisting of Lectures and Tracts on Political Economy, of the
Late Rev. Richard Jones, William Whewell (ed.). London: J. Murray, p. 123. On
Marx’s reading of Jones and Malthus, see Perry Anderson. 1979. Lineages of the
Absolutist state. London: Verso, pp. 471–73. See Marian Sawer. 1977. Marxism and
the Question of the Asiatic Mode of Production. The Hague: Nijhoff, pp. 47–48.
Marxist New Time 59
62. Article by Marx, 25 June 1853, New York Daily Tribune, reproduced in Avineri (ed.),
Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization, p. 84.
63. Henry Summer Maine. 1966. Lectures on the Early History of Institutions, 7th ed.,
New York: Kennikat Press, p. 39.
64. ‘Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations’, Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie
1857–1858, 1939: 70–1.
65. Sanjay Seth. 1995. Marxist Theory and Colonial Politics: The Case of Colonial India.
New Delhi: Sage Publications, p. 33.
66. David Harvey. 2000. Spaces of Hope, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 65.
67. See Gareth Stedman Jones. 2007. ‘Radicalism and the extra-European World’, in
Duncan Bell, (ed.), Victorian Visions of Global Order, pp. 7–12.
68. Seth, Marxist Theory, p. 67; See Sobhanlal Datta Gupta. 1980. Comintern India
and the Colonial Question. Calcutta: Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, p. 12,
‘Lenin … opened up an almost hitherto unknown perspective to the question of
application of Marxism to colonies…’
69. Sobhanlal Datta Gupta, Comintern India, pp. 7–12.
70. Communist International. 1919. Bibliothek der kommunistischen Internationale I.
Manifest, Richtlinien, Beschlüsse des ersten Kongresses. Hamburg: Hoym, p. 11.
71. Statement by Lenin: ‘Das Programm Wilsons bezweckt im besten Fall nur eine
Änderung des Firmenschildes der Kolonialsklaverei’, (Wilson’s programme
intends to bring about at most a change in company sign for colonial slavery).
Bibliothek der Komintern, 13.
72. Lenin, Democracy and Narodism in China. Reproduced in Collected Works, 1927, 18:
163–69.
73. Communist International. 1920. Lenin’s speech, Theses and Statutes of the Third
International: Adopted by the Second Congress 1920. Moscow: Publishing Office of
the Communist International, p. 20.
74. Thesis eleven reads: ‘(All) Communist parties must assist the bourgeois-
democratic liberation movement in these countries, and that the duty of
rendering the most active assistance rests primarily with the workers of the
country the backward nation is colonially or financially dependent on’.
75. See the comments by Manuilski at the Fifth Congress, Protokoll des V. Weltkongresses
der Kommunistischen Internationale, 1924, 2: 620: ‘… die Richtigkeit der auf dem 2.
Internationalen Kongress gefassten Richtlinien ist durch den gesamten
Entwicklungsgang in Europe und den Kolonien bestätigt’ (The correctness of
the guidelines formulated at the Second International Congress is confirmed by
the whole course of development in Europe and the colonies…).
76. Henk Sneevliet, another member present at the Second Communist Inter-
national also commented on the lack of interest among the delegates, ‘… I have
the impression that, with a few exceptions, even this Congress of the Com-
munist International has not fully understood the significance of the oriental
question’. In Second Congress of the Communist International, 1977: 170–71. See also
Tony Saich. 1991. The Origins of the First United Front in China: The Role of Sneevliet
(alias Maring). Leiden: E. J. Brill, p. 14.
77. M. N. Roy, ‘Oriental Draft of Supplementary Theses’. Reproduced in Ray (ed.),
Selected Works of M. N. Roy, vol. 1: p. 168.
78. This standard view of Roy’s supposed misunderstanding is articulated in

Gupta, Comintern India and the Colonial Question, p. 29. On the other hand, Charles
McLane locates M. N. Roy within the heteroglossia of debates about com-
munist colonial policy, and does not posit the framework of orthodoxy and
misunderstanding. See Charles McLane. 1966. Soviet Strategies in Southeast Asia.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 22.
79. M. N. Roy. 1971b. What Do We Want?. Bombay: Nachiketa Publications reprinted
in Ray (ed.), Selected Works, vol. 1: p. 531.
80. M. N. Roy. 1922. Vanguard, ‘Our Immediate Task’, 1 March vol. 1: p. 4.
81. On Gandhi’s strategy of marking a new form of anti-colonial politics through
the repudiation of undisciplined direct action, see Shahid Amin. 1995. Event,
Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922–1992. Berkeley: University of California
Press, pp. 13,14.
82. Roy has traditionally been portrayed as a political figure who fell out of touch
with the political realities of India. The view was partially the result of writings
against him by Indian Communists after his break from the Comintern.
83. The phrase is from Sanjay Subrahmanyam. 2005. Explorations in Connected History.
Moghuls and Franks, Delhi: Oxford University Press, p. 12.
84. F. M. Bailey. 1946. Mission to Tashkent. London: Travel Book Club.
85. Ibid.
86. Report on Raja Kumar Mahendra Pratap. AA: 21078–4, 1915; Sohan Singh Josh.
1978. Hindustan Gadar Party, New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, p. 234.
Also see the evocative fictional account of frontier communism and Indian
revolutionaries in Mulk Raj Anand. 1942. The Sword and the Sickle. London:
J. Cape, pp. 8–79.
87. A. C. Bose. 2002. Indian Revolutionaries Abroad, Delhi: Northern Book Centre, p. 204.
88. See ‘Notes on Acharya’, Zentrum Moderner Orient, Krüger Nachlass (ZMO):
File 138, 4 January 1968.
89. ‘Protokol über Gründung der KP Indien in Tashkent 1920’, Russian States Archive
of Social and Political History, Moscow (RGASPI): Fond 495, Opus. 68, File 4.
90. ‘Communism in India’, OIOC, L/PJ/12/48, 2 November 1923, p. 163; Muzaffar
Ahmad. 1962. Communist Party in India and its Formation Abroad. Calcutta: National
Book Agency.
91. Other original members who came out of the Khilafat movement were
Muhammad Ali, Muhammad Shafiq and Amin Farooq. RGASPI: Fond 495, Opus
68, File 36.
92. Ahmad, Communist Party in India and its Formation Abroad. Also see a con-
temporaneous British surveillance report, ‘Communism in India’, Oriental and
India Office Collection (OIOC): L/PJ/12/48, 2 November 1923, p. 163; Ayesha Jalal.
2000. Self and Sovereignty: Individual and Community in South Asian Islam since 1850.
New York: Routledge, p. 239ff.
93. Ghadar leaders were in communication with M. N. Roy particularly after his
return to Berlin in 1921. See OIOC: L/PJ/12/178, report from 25 April 1922.
94. Gangadhar Adhikari. 1971. Documents of the History of the Communist Party of India.
Delhi: People’s Publishing House, vol. 1: pp. 230–33. Also see ‘Protokol über
Organisation der Kursen’, RGASPI: Fond 495, Opus 68, File 20.
Marxist New Time 61
95. Bhupendranath Datta. 1983. Bharater Dvitiya Swadhinatar Samgram: Aprakasita

rajnitik itihas, Calcutta: Navbharat Publishing, p. 484.
96. On the notion of ‘non-places’ see Marc Augé. 1995. Non-places, trans. John House.
London: Verso.
97. While typically a term referring to art, Peter Gordon has considered form of
‘Philosophical Expressionism’ that arose during the Weimar period. See Peter
Gordon. 2003. Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
98. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed, p. 250.
99. Eisner was assassinated in February 1919. The leaders of the more estab-
lished and well-organised group of German communists, Karl Liebknecht and
Rosa Luxemburg, had been assassinated about one month earlier in Berlin.
100. Ernst Bloch. 1918. Geist der Utopie. Munich: Dunker & Humblot, p. 253.
101. On ‘Modern Jewish messianism’, see Anson Rabinbach. 1997. In the Shadow of
Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and Enlightenment, Weimar
and Now; 14. Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 30.
102. On Weimar discussions of temporality, see the study by Rüdiger Graf. 2008.
Die Zukunft der Weimarer Republik. Munich: Aldenbourg.
103. Ernst Bloch.1986. Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice et al. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, vol. 2: p. 623.
104. Anton Kaes et al. (eds.). 1994. Weimar Republic Sourcebook, Berkeley: University
of California Press, pp. 474–76.
105. Bengt Jangfeldt. 1976. Majakovskij and Futurism: 1917–1921. Stockholm:
Almqvist & Wiksell International.
106. Mayakovksy’s ‘The Fourth International’, written in 1922, is reproduced in
Victor Terras, Vladimir Mayakovsky, p. 40.
107. Berghaus. 1996. Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist
Reaction, 1909–1944. Providence: Berghahn Books, p. 18.
108. Marinetti, Scritti francesi, quoted in Günther Berghaus, Futurism and Politics,
p. 21.
109. Juliette Stapanian. 1986. Mayakovsky’s Cubo-Futurist Vision. Houston: Rice
University Press, p. 7.
110. Roy, India in Transition, reproduced in Sibnarayan Ray (ed.), Selected Works,
vol. 1: p. 225.
111. Ibid., p. 218.
112. Ibid., p. 185.
113. Ibid., p. 186.
114. Muzaffar Ahmed, The Communist Party.
115. Walter Benjamin. 2003 rpt (1940). ‘On the Concept of History’, Addendum
A in: Marcus Bullock et al. (eds.), Walter Benjamin Selected Writings, p. 397; Roy,
India in Transition, p. 186; Sudipta Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness, p. 125.
116. Roy, India in Transition, p.187.
117. Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Futurism of Young Asia, p. 22.
118. Nripendrankrishna Chattopadhyay. 1924. ‘Russahitya o tarun bangali’, Kallol,
vol. 3: p. 59ff.
119. Dineshranjan Das. 1925. ‘Rolland o tarun Bangla’, Kallol, vol. 4: p. 789ff. Note
the resonance with the notion of swaswatadharma discussed in chapter one.
120. Kaviraj, Unhappy Consciousness, pp. 124–26.

121. Tapan Raychaudhuri. 2002. Europe Reconsidered: Perceptions of the West in
Nineteenth Century Bengal. Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 27–104; See Sudipta
Kaviraj’s discussion of writing ‘imaginary history’ in Bengal, The Unhappy
Consciousness, p. 109.
122. Bhudev Mukhopadhyay. 1862. Swapnalabdha bharater itihas. Calcutta: n.p. ‘Our
name is hope. I have met the dawn’, he wrote at the conclusion to his work.
123. Roy to Sushil Dey, 5 July 1946 , Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML):
List 70, ‘Correspondences’, Sushil Dey file.
124. Roy, India in Transition, p. 118.
125. Claude McKay. 1922. ‘Report on the Negro Question’ in: International Press
Correspondence, vol. 3, 5 January 1923, pp. 16–17. Also see, Bill Mullen. 2003. ‘Du
Bois, Dark Princess, and the Afro-Asian International’, Positions, 11(1): 217–39.
126. Communist International. 1921. Protokol des III. Kongresses der Kommunistischen
Internationale. Hamburg: Verlag der Kommunistichen Internationale, p. 120.
127. Protokoll des IV. Weltkongresses der Kommunistichen Internationale, 2: 297.
128. M. N. Roy. 1924b. ‘Europe is not the World’, Inprecor, 31 December, 4(90): 1045–46.
The statement was picked up by Zinoviev during the famous Fifth ECCI meeting
in 1925. ‘Germany is not the whole of Europe … Europe is not the world’. See
quote in E. H. Carr. 1964. Socialism in One Country. New York: Macmillan Carr,
vol. 3: p. 289.
129. Roy, India in Transition, p. 185.
130. M. N. Roy. 1924–25. ‘Who Will Lead’, Inprecor, 9(11): 55–65.
131. Originally, Roy was a proponent of the Swaraj Party and courted its major
leader, Chittaranjan Das.
132. M. N. Roy. 1924c. ‘Mahatma and Bolshevism’ in Vanguard, 15 October, 5 (2),
reproduced in Sibnarayan Ray, Selected Works of M. N. Roy, vol. 2, pp. 311–16.
133. M. N. Roy. 1922. ‘The Political Situation’, Vanguard, 15 October, vol. 1: p. 7.
M. N. Roy. 1923c. ‘The Uses of Patriotism’, Vanguard, 1 June, vol. 2: p. 8.
134. M. K. Gandhi to Rabindranath Tagore, 1 June 1921, in S. Bhattacharya (ed.).
1997. The Mahatma and the Poet: Letters and Debates between Gandhi and Tagore,
1915–1941. Delhi: National Book Trust India, pp. 63–69.
135. Peter Van der Veer. 1995. Nation and Migration: The Politics of Space in the
South Asian Diaspora. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, p. 5.
136. Gandhi’s Young India (1919–32) was filled with articles about the experiences
of diasporic Indian populations, as well as the habitual sense that the Indian
diaspora belonged to the Indian national struggle. See Claude Markovits. 2004.
The Un-Gandhian Gandhi. London: Anthem Press.
137. M. K. Gandhi. 1997. Hind Swaraj and Other Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge
138. Ibid., pp. 49–50.
139. Ibid., p. 74.
140. Roy, ‘Lessons of the Lahore Congress’, quoted in Ray, In Freedom’s Quest,
vol. 3: p. 376.
141. M. N. Roy. 1924a. ‘Appeal to the nationalists’, 15 December, Vanguard, vol. 5,
Supplement. Reproduced in Sibnarayan Ray, Selected Works of M. N. Roy, vol. 2,
p. 316–24.
142. Roy, ‘Appeal to the Nationalists’.
3
The Transformations of M. N. Roy
Territorial and deterritorial notions of anti-colonial liberation converged

in Roy’s thinking. Resonating with claims quite standard in the Swadeshi
milieu, Roy wrote in 1919, ‘the struggle for Indian independence is not
a local affair, having for its end and purpose the creation of another
egoistic nationalism; the liberty of the Indian people is a factor in world
politics, for India is the keystone of British Imperialism which constitutes
the greatest and most powerful enemy of the Social and Economic
Revolution that exists today’.1 What distinguished Roy from other
Swadeshi modernist intellectuals, however, was the extent to which
he took the notion of India’s deterritoriality. If Indian independence
really was not a ‘local affair’, and if the body of India really extended
into global space, then an appropriate Indian anti-colonial politics could
focus on upsetting imperialism in any particular location worldwide.
This radical notion of solidarity that aimed at a radical identification —
not just affiliation — with other liberation projects worldwide was a
distinguishing feature of Roy’s thought.
Roy began to articulate a politics of solidarity and mediation across
the bounds of identity that arose from his lived experience of travel,
transculturation and in-betweenness. Solidarity was something
continually to be reconstructed, something that belonged to the ‘new
time’ breaking into the present.2 The plenitude of international soli-
darity belonged to the future and was anticipated, not fully realised.
M. N. Roy can be heard from his first days in the Comintern demanding
the end to prejudices about gradients of humanity among members
of the International.
German Fringe Communism

Roy’s interactions in Europe were more subtle than a mere transaction
between an ‘indigenous’ Swadeshi avant-gardism and a ‘Western’
Marxism. Roy was not mediating between two fixed nodes of the East
and the West, nor between ‘Indian’ knowledge and ‘Western’ episteme.
Rather there were fractures and circuits within global zones of
interaction creating intellectual fusions and amalgam forms. As Roy’s

thought developed in the 1920s, he came to associate specifically with
German fringe communists who had been the original leaders of the
Spartakus Bund, instead of with the dominant group of the Bolsheviks.
In the 1920s these German fringe communists tended to celebrate the
recently deceased Rosa Luxemburg instead of Vladimir Lenin, and they
saw themselves as inheritors of theoretical discussions about Marxism
from outside the Bolshevik camp. I wish to differentiate my argument
here from a classic post-World War II polemic, most ardently articulated
by John Plamenatz, that Marxism was a progressive philosophy when
still in its ‘original’ German context, before the theory was ‘taken over
by a revolutionary party in the most backward of the great European
countries’.3 Rather, I will argue that the way Marxism was thought of
in different cultural locations — whether enfranchised within a power-
ful state or on the margins of state power — made a difference in the
illocutionary force of the theory articulated. It is not German Marxism,
in toto, that I speak about here, as if it were a undifferentiated entity,
but rather a specific group of German and Polish intellectuals who
constituted a fringe group within German communism and within
Weimar society.4
A significant number of prominent Polish Jewish intellectuals
counted among this group, including Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogiches
and Karl Radek. Other German-Jewish intellectuals included August
Thalheimer, Jakob Walcher, Rosie Wolfstein and Heinz Möller.5 They in-
fluenced mainstream communist discourse in its early years through
the transmission belt of the Berlin Communist Party, but they soon
faced the suppression of the Soviet centre beginning in earnest already
in 1924. German Marxism provided an important channel for cultural
outsiders to affect the mainstream at the start of the communist experi-
ment, but such groups were soon peripheralised and vilified. M. N. Roy’s
fortunes in the Communist International were tied up with the fate of
this fringe group.
There were two major features of German communist thought that
formed a countervailing tradition to Bolshevism during the early Com-
intern, before the era of regimentation and authoritarianism set in
under Stalin. The first was the importance assigned to soldarity-building
and worker education by the German Sparakists. The second was their
critique of rule by a party elite, and the call for radical democracy. What
I call German fringe communism grew out of the politics of the German
Spartakus Bund, as well as the philosophical tendency to read Marx as
The Transformations of M. N. Roy 65
part of the Continental philosophical tradition. This foreshadowed the

discovery and publication of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in
1929.6 In the very period of the October Revolution, Luxemburg hailed
Lenin’s achievement while also trenchantly criticising the violence
of land redistribution and the role of the small Bolshevik vanguard
in making decisions. Luxemburg wrote, ‘when the proletariat seizes
power…it must exercise a dictatorship, but a dictatorship of the class, not
of a party or of a clique — and dictatorship of the class means: in full view
of the broadest public, with the most active, uninhibited participation
of the popular masses in an unlimited democracy’.7
Rosa Luxemburg laid the basis for a distinctive trajectory of 1920s
communism. Her ability to provide an alternative communist route
outside of Leninism was already seen as somewhat of a danger to the
establishment of the Communist International in 1917, and her name was
omitted from the 1918 Column of the Revolution that commemorated
the intellectual leaders and precursors of communism just outside
the Red Square. Luxemburg insisted on the work of building solidarity
versus a politics of centrally-planned insurgency. She insisted that
bonds of empathy had to be built through communicative action among
disparate groups of the labouring and working classes, peasants and
industrial workers alike.8 Revolution had to swell up from below,
and from the building of bridges between groups — the proletariat, the
peasants, the artisans, and the colonised. The proletariat must be won
over to ‘listen to the voices and appreciate the situation’ of the ‘broadest
circle of non-organized groups’.9 Luxemburg maintained that the work
of transcending identitarian divides would take place through discussion
and education, and not through the catharsis of group violence.
Luxemburg, of Polish Jewish decent, arrived in Berlin in 1898 and
immediately entered the leading circles of the socialist Left, arguing
against what many radicals viewed as Eduard Bernstein’s revisionist
politics of compromise. She helped found the Polish Social Democratic
Party two years earlier along with other leading figures, Julian
Marchlewski (Karski) and Leo Jogiches. Editor of the important
Leipziger Volkszeitung with Franz Mehring by 1901, her writings already
demonstrated a fascination with the psychology of the working class,
and with questions of consciousness. Her emphasis on the pursuit
of solidarity required a theory of how to convert minds and create a
revolutionary consensus.10
The context of German neo-Kantianism in the late nineteenth century
with its focus on cognition — how structures of mind determine the
knowledge of the world — provided the field in which Luxemburg’s

concerns developed. Neo-Kantianism also brought a renewed interest
in practical reason and social rationality.11 Yet this led to a response
among young intellectuals, concerned not with the deduction of static
universal principles of action, but with the central trope of social
change in history. Presaging the return of Hegelian Marxism by the
late 1920s, young thinkers such as Karl Korsch, Georg Lukács, Ernst
Bloch and August Thalheimer in the years after the Russian Revolution
proposed that changing the world really did involve interpreting it
anew — entailing mental operations that could not be achieved by
insurgent political strategy alone. They meditated on Marx’s eleventh
Thesis on Feuerbach: ‘philosophers have only interpreted the world, in
various ways; the point, however, is to change it’.12 Thinkers increasingly
responded to this injunction by probing the ways that interpretation
and social actuality were intrinsically linked and inseparable. German
communists were fundamentally interested in the role of subjective
mental processes in bringing about revolutionary social change.
Karl Korsch’s Marx and Philosophy (1923) inquired into the cognitive
process whereby revolutionary consciousness was produced. 13 Rethink-
ing the relationship between consciousness and objective reality was
crucial to his work. Korsch argued that ideas do not exist in dualism
with reality. Consciousness and objective conditions co-create each
other. This was particularly the case when it came to social conditions.
Revolutionary praxis should not focus on changing material conditions
through political economy or strategy alone, which he called a
vulgarisation of Marxism. Instead, a praxis was needed that changed
consciousness. The work of changing minds was a necessary dimension
of the process by which social reality would be fully transformed.
Georg Lukács’ famous History and Consciousness, published in 1923
soon after Korsch’s work appeared, made a resonant argument. Lukács,
a Hungarian thinker, had studied with the neo-Kantian philosopher
Heinrich Rickert in Heidelberg, and his History and Class Consciousness
can partly be read as a Marxist critique of neo-Kantianism through
recourse to Hegel. In Lukács’ rendition, Marx’s thought represents the
salvaging of the revolutionary aspects of Hegel’s philosophy from the
reactionary ‘exploitation’ of the young Hegelians who were ‘reverting
back to Kant’.14 ‘This movement exploited Hegel’s obscurities and inner
uncertainties in order to eradicate the revolutionary elements from his
method’, Lukács continued.
While Korsch proposed the intrinsic link between revolutionary

consciousness and social change, Lukács was concerned with the role
of consciousness in history. Marx argued for the world-historical sig-
nificance of proletarian consciousness. The journey of the proletariat
from the status of class-in-itself to class-for-itself was humanity’s
journey. Lukács took this further. He argued that the proletariat was the
sole revolutionary class because it alone was able to grasp the totality of
human social experience through time. As both the subject and object
of history, by coming to awareness of its own condition, by attaining the
highest degree of self-consciousness, it grasped the human condition
at large leading to a humanisation of the world.15 And through this
ultimate recognition the historical progression came to fulfilment. In
other words, the proletariat did not win social freedom only for itself,
in a merely subjective mode; rather, it obtained objective freedom for
human society as a totality. The transformation of the world entailed
first and foremost a change in states of mind.16
Whereas in Moscow, the world political centre of communism,
political protocols were established and institutions erected, German
communists were suspicious and antagonistic towards the Weimar
State. The abortive final attempt at a German communist revolution in
Thuringia in October 1923 followed after a series of previous abortive
revolutionary uprisings.17 A section of German communists thus
positioned themselves as members of a fringe tradition providing
a critical perspective on Bolshevik political muscularity. Of course,
philosophical divides and party politics did not all cleave the same
way. Lukács, who, although Hungarian, participated in German Marxist
discourse, became a champion of the Stalinist regime. Korsch, on the
other hand, was expelled from the Comintern for his insubordination
in 1926, and a large number of individuals among the German fringe,
many of them German Jews, were ‘excommunicated’ from the Communist
International in 1928. August Thalheimer was another intellectual leader
of one group of those expelled.
August Thalheimer, as an intellectual of the German fringe, valued
the work of education and developing consciousness over the pursuit
of means–ends political calculation. The intimate friendship between
Thalheimer and M. N. Roy would have significant effects on both
men’s thought, especially as Thalheimer had long been interested in
the comparative study of European and Asian societies.18 Thalheimer,
leader of the German Communist Party until 1923, also a German
Illustration 3.1 Roy in Weimar Germany, c. 1923.

Source: Author’s private collection.
Jewish intellectual and perhaps the greatest champion of Luxemburg’s

thought throughout the 1920s, was uncomfortable with the positivist
assumptions of Bolshevism. Revolution should not be envisioned as a
social algebra that would necessarily occur at a predictable time and
place once all historical conditions had been satisfied.19 Thalheimer
applied this further to an argument about how Marxism should be
taught to the peoples of Asia. In his Introduction to Dialectical Materialism
originally delivered as a lecture series at the Sun Yat Sen University in
Moscow from 1924–28 and then published as a book, Thalheimer argued
for the gradual development of revolutionary consciousness.
The Chinese and Indians could return to their own traditions, to
Taoism, Buddhism and Sanskrit philosophies, and find the needed
sparks for a revolutionary conversion of consciousness. These trad-
itions too maintained that ‘everything was unfinished, but developing,
and going to be changed’ and that ‘things always develop out of their
Illustration 3.2 Roy, Member of the Comintern Presidium, Soviet Envoy

to China, c. 1926.
Source: Author’s private collection.
opposite’.20 Marxism was the modern expression that ‘incorporated

and developed the results of two thousand years of natural and
social science’.21 Thalheimer’s approach involved first discussing the
materialist philosophies of India and China in an appreciative tone,
and then slowly showing how these modes of thought were improved
upon and completed by Marx. He attempted to show that Marx, in fact,
belonged to the native philosophical traditions of India and China, that
his thought was not foreign to, but a natural outgrowth of, the logic
already native to Eastern philosophical traditions. Yet, Thalheimer
concluded his lectures with the clear admonition: ‘dialectical materialism
is on a much higher level than the primitive materialism [of China and
India]. It has incorporated and developed the results of two thousand
years of natural and social science. We cannot turn back; our prospect
must be ahead’.22
Indian Communists and the Comintern

M. N. Roy’s intellectual encounters in the crucible of Weimar Germany
in the 1920s must be situated specifically within the circle of the
German communist fringe. These German conversations most inspired
and affected Roy, not the debates at the Moscow centre. To bring this
specificity to light, we must give up the telescope that pictures a nebula
of communism gathered around the Soviet star, and take out a finer
lens to explore the fissures and critical distinctions of the communist
ecumene. Roy’s closest associates and interlocutors in the early years
of the Comintern were figures on the fringe. In 1920, Thalheimer, as
member of the colonial committee, helped choose Roy as the chief Indian
communist, and since then the two remained very close. Roy published
his journal, the Vanguard, through Thalheimer’s Rote Fahne press, and
he initially received funding through Thalheimer.23 Roy founded the
Indian Labour Bureau in January 1923 in Berlin with Thalheimer’s
assistance. Acquaintances reported that both of them could often be
observed during social gatherings nestled in the corner of meeting
halls engaged in hushed conversation.24 Thalheimer even named his
son after Roy.25 Occasionally, M. N. Roy frequented the Karl Korsch
circle and conversed with Lukács, discussing topics such as the art of
Rabindranath Tagore.26 And through his connection with Felix Weil and
Eduard Fuchs, Roy gained affiliation to the Frankfurt School of Social
Inquiry in 1930, during which time he wrote his major historical work,
Revolution and Counter-revolution in China.27 The communist ecumene was
a perfect place for Indian deterritorial politics to unfold in ways that
supported, but also transcended, ideas about cultural autonomy and
national difference.
In terms of the different camps of early Indian communism, on
one hand there was Roy’s group situated between Berlin and Moscow,
including students and envoys trained at Tashkent as well as colleagues
inspired by his radical Swadeshi-inspired Marxism. On the other hand,
another group of Indian communists in Berlin was organised around
Vivendranath Chattopadhyay and Bhupendranath Datta. Chattopadhyay
was a veteran of the London and Paris Indian anti-colonial hubs during
the previous two decades, and brother of the celebrated Indian poet and
Congress member, Sarojini Naidu. Bhupendranath Datta was a Swadeshi
revolutionary from Calcutta, and younger brother of Vivekananda.
Bhupendranath left in 1908 to travel through the global Indian anti-
colonial network, to New York, Chicago and eventually Berlin during the
First World War.28 There was also the Indian section of the Communist
Party of Great Britain led by Clemens and Rajani Palme Dutt, Shapurji
Saklatvala, as well as a number of British communist envoys to India
such as Charles Ashley and Philip Spratt. And, finally, there were the
early communist leaders in major Indian cities: S. A. Dange in Bombay,
Singaravelu Chettiar in Madras, Ghulam Hussain in Lahore, Muzaffar
Ahmed and Nazrul Islam in Bengal.
These different groups represented contrasting opinions about the
meaning of Indian communism and its relation to nationalist struggle,
especially before the consolidation of international communism under
Stalin beginning in 1924 onwards. Roy’s work came increasingly in line
with that of German fringe communism especially after the China crisis
of 1927. Up until that time, he took a radical Swadeshi-inspired stance
attacking the Indian Congress, the Swarajya Party and Gandhian polit-
ics as bourgeois obstacles to true Indian social revolution. After 1927, he
adopted a much different perspective in his writings, now arguing for
collaborative ‘united front’ politics. The ‘masses of India’ were the sole
bearers of an eruptive agency in Roy’s view up until 1927, not the ‘Indian
bourgeoisie’. But after 1927, Roy transferred the locus of revolutionary
agency again, this time to an even broader group — the Indian peasants,
proletariat and petty bourgeoisie.29 This ongoing march of imagining
an increasingly more general collective agency for the channelling of
eruptive universal time was matched by Roy’s move away from violent
politics towards a more educational, Luxemburgist, humanist project
by the late 1920s. Partly a response to failed revolutionary attempts,
but more importantly representing an engagement with different
philosophical principles specific to the German communist fringe, Roy
began thinking of social change differently by the late 1920s thanks to
the fusion of horizons he was experiencing in Berlin.
Vivendranath Chattopadhyay’s group, following Lenin’s colonial
thesis, asserted from the start that the Indian bourgeoisie would lead the
revolution in colonial lands. Chattopadhyay’s group proposed a national
consortium of diverse anti-colonial parties in India led by the Congress
that would both force the end of colonial rule and bring about social
revolution.30 In addition to the Berlin Indian communists, leaders on the
ground in India in the early 1920s, such as S. A. Dange, argued for the
possibility of combining communist radicalism with Gandhian politics.
In fact, the fusion of Gandhian non-violence with a communist social
agenda represented a perfected acculturation of communism to India,
Dange maintained. ‘Gandhism suffers from too much and unwarranted
faith in the natural goodness of human nature, while Bolshevism suffers

from too much neglect of human interests and sentiments’, said Dange.31
But the two projects were ultimately compatible. ‘Gandhism aims at
curing Society of modern industrialisation and modern civilisation. At
the same time, Bolshevism is working with the same view in Russia and
in European Society’.32 But this collaborationist policy did not last into
the late 1920s, as Indian communists were increasingly subordinated to
the more militant ‘ultra-leftist’ stance announced at the Sixth Congress
of the Comintern in 1928. After that point, and lasting until 1935, the
official communist stance entailed opposition to ‘bourgeois’ nationalist
parties such as the Congress.
The relationship between M. N. Roy, who was rooted from the start
in the German fringe, and Indian communists linked with the Moscow
centre, was chiasmatic. Roy’s group began with a radical ‘anti-bourgeois’
stance and moved towards collaborationist ‘united front’ politics during
the 1920s, while Indians more closely associated with Soviet politics,
the group that would be institutionalised as the Indian Communist
Party, moved from the collaborationist stance to a more entrenched
oppositional approach by 1928. The disagreements between Roy and
Moscow-centred communism were dynamic but persistent.
Throughout the 1920s, there was significant competition and
ideological differences between the Roy and Chattopadhyaya groups. Roy
was in touch with groups situated in India, and he directed a number of
envoys who shuttled back and forth between India and Central Europe.33
Roy built up networks with leaders in India, but vied for pride of place
as the master interpreter of Indian communism. He even approached
the dadas (senior comrades) of the Bengali revolutionary underground
for their support. One of Roy’s first orders of business was to reestablish
contact with the former leaders of the Calcutta and Dacca of Swadeshi
movement. However, as he rose in stature in Berlin and Moscow in the
1920s, those in Bengal sensed that he had changed — he even changed his
name after all. Rumours spread of his supposed misuse of Soviet funds,
and his high-handed approach to his former Swadeshi colleagues.34 When
Roy wrote to the old leaders of the Swadeshi underground, Pulin Das,
Upendranath Bhattacharya, Sachin Sanyal, Bipin Ganguly — many of
whom had spent difficult years in jail after the Rowlatt Act — he received
slow reply.35 The period from 1919 onwards also represented a new rise in
revolutionary politics in Bengal and India, and these Swadeshi veterans
still sought to resuscitate the older politics of insurgency against the
British, not necessarily the new ideology of communism.36 Roy’s letters
to the old Calcutta base were quickly filled with tension. ‘I wonder if
you consider me still entitled to call you “friends”. Well, having failed
to get any reply from you about our political goals, I decided it wise to
keep quiet and work in my own way’.37 And yet even broken friendships
were a kind of bond. Despite their suspicion of Roy’s changes in bearing
and demeanour, and the seeming gulf of experience that separated
them, Pulin Das, Jogesh Chandra Chatterjee, and others in the Calcutta
underground, eventually agreed to collaborate with Roy’s Berlin group.38
British imperialism interrupted these global relays, however, through
massive imprisonment of communist operatives in 1924 and 1925.39
Imperial Vertigo
In the 1920s the British Empire was still in its phase of what one historian
called ‘superpower’ status.40 However, this period of triumphant Empire
was coming to an end, as attested to by the intensification of imperial
paranoia, as surveillance officers chased Indians across the globe,
particularly to counter the communist and the ‘Pan-Islamic’ threats.41
The 1914–32 period was a peak era of British counter-insurgency.
It was one in which battles within Europe gave way to the threat of
anti-imperialist contagions spreading through the colonies. In this
period came the revolt in Egypt (1919) leading to flag independence in
1922, the Somaliland uprising (1919), the Iraq revolt in 1920, the Irish
Civil War (1921–24), the Khilafat movement (1917–24), Gandhi’s first civil
disobedience movement (1919–21), the Moplah Uprising in Southern
India (1921) and the Palestine uprising (1929) to name just some of the
major sites of unrest within the British Empire. New transportation
and information technologies, especially the use of air power both in
bombing missions and in logistics supply, gave the British new powers
of coercion.42 In addition, the rhetoric of ‘trusteeship’ after the Paris
Peace Conference allowed the empire increased legitimacy at home,
as well as among other coloniser nations.
But despite its apparent strength, British officials were worried
in the 1920s. The contagions of communist ideology and propaganda
were viewed with alarm.43 British intelligence determined in 1923 that
‘the importance of Berlin as a centre of Indian intrigue [had] increased
considerably’.44 The city was of such concern for two main reasons: first,
it had a porous boundary to the East, with envoys from Moscow using
the city as the Western Europe base of operations. And second, Berlin
attracted a large number of Indian students because of the reputation
of the German university system.45 The simultaneous presence of com-

munists and Indian students in the mixing zone of Berlin was seen as a
threat to imperial stability.
The first meeting of the Anti-Imperialist League, organised by
communists in Berlin and held in Brussels in February 1927, brought
together many leaders of anti-colonial movements worldwide, in-
cluding Jawaharlal Nehru along with famous European anti-colonial
sympathisers, including Albert Einstein and Henri Barbusse.46 It was
supposed to have taken place in Berlin, but was banned due to British
pressure on the German state. M. N. Roy was involved in organising the
League meeting, which served as the archetype for the Asian Relations
Conference of 1947 and the Bandung Conference of 1954.47 While
M. N. Roy and Ho Chi Minh were slotted to attend, they were both sent
to China in late 1926 as envoys to the Chinese communists during the
civil war.48
Already in 1922, with the number of Indian students in Germany
rising, the British Government began to raise concerns about the re-
volutionary leanings of the colonial community in Berlin. And since
December 1922, there were discussions taking place at the highest level of
the India Office, and involving the Chief of Special Branch for Intelligence
in India, Charles Tegart, about finding ways to have Roy expelled from
Berlin.49 In 1923, the British explicitly requested the extradition of
M. N. Roy of the German government, and black-listed twenty other
Indian revolutionaries who lived in the city, including Vivendranath
Chattopadhyaya and Bhupendranath Datta, as well as M. N. Roy’s wife,
Evelyn Trent.50 In India, the Cawnpore conspiracy trial of 1924 locked up
four main communist leaders and temporarily arrested the development
of a communist party on Indian soil.51 By October 1924, British concern
over the Berlin hub of Indian anti-colonialism reached its crescendo
as the government successfully delegated the Weimar government to
destroy the anti-colonial bases in Berlin.52 If the Germans cooperated in
stamping out the anti-colonial offices, the British promised them access
to Indian markets.53 In October of the same year, the French Ministry of
Foreign Affairs also promised the British embassy in Paris that Roy, who
had just fled there, would be expelled from Paris, and that his journal,
The Vanguard would be suppressed.54 Frustrated, Roy wrote to his friend
Henk Sneevliet in Amsterdam:
Now, I don’t know where to go. They will not tolerate me here for long
(in Berlin). The same influence operates here perhaps with more effect. It
seems that there is no room for me in Europe. It is so annoying. We built
up a very good centre in France… it was precisely for this that the English
were determined to break it up… Damn it all. If it keeps on this way, I will
do something rash.55
The subsequent assault on Indian political activities in Berlin in late

1924, with M. N. Roy and Bhupendranath Datta fleeing the city, and
Virendranath Chattopadhyaya falling into inactivity and depression,
caused anti-colonial energies to temporarily scatter throughout Europe
before returning to Berlin two years later.56 In 1928 the British unleashed
their largest offensive against communism to date in the Meerut
Conspiracy Case. More than thirty communist leaders were put behind
bars.57 Yet even in 1933, after many prisoners were released, the director
of the Indian Intelligence Bureau wrote, ‘the star of Communism has
risen and waned … we are now entering a third cycle wherein Communist
emissaries, wiser by the experience of their comrades of yesterday,
will work in India with sharper tools and greater circumspection…’58
Suppression begot only more anxiety and paranoia on the part of the
British colonial administration.
In 1924, Roy was sentenced in absentia to twelve years in prison in
the Cawnpore Conspiracy Case. This was the same year in which he
attained the vertiginous heights of the Communist International, was
elected to the Comintern Executive in Moscow and made a candidate
member of the Presidium. He soon was named a full member of the
Presidium, the high command of the Communist International, as well as
to two other supreme organisations, the Secretariat and the Orgbureau —
posts otherwise reserved for Europeans.59 Roy was appointed to the
editorial staff of the Communist International, while he also joined the
British Commission and the Agrarian Commission, and assumed the chair-
manship of the Chinese Commission and the Eastern Commission.60
These positions afforded him access to unmatched status within an
alternative cultural-symbolic order from that of British colonialism, and
in 1924 the British correspondingly labelled him the ‘arch-conspirator’
against the British Empire.61
But the acclaim did not entail security. During these years, Roy was
‘hunted by the police’.62 From Berlin to Paris to Amsterdam, Roy and his
wife, Evelyn, fled from one city to another. They were both arrested in
Paris in January 1925, and while Evelyn was released, Roy was expelled
from France. Evelyn Trent remembered the almost daemonic fixation
of M. N. Roy on the Indian cause. ‘I have given my whole self to India’,
wrote Trent, ‘because I must if we were to live together, that being
[Roy’s] whole life’.63 The relationship between Roy and Evelyn became
increasingly strained.64 Evelyn wrote to Sneevliet that she was ‘weary of

being hunted from place to place, country to country, of having to hide
and always to be rewarded by a thick fog of suspicion and fear’.65 Fleeing
Berlin with Roy in 1924, and now threatened with a second imprisonment
in Paris, Evelyn asked in a farewell letter to Roy:
... did you ever stop to think what it meant to a person of my type to leave
home, family, friends, environment, country and traditions, to sail out upon
an utterly unknown sea with only faith in one man to steer my course and
chart the compass? Then to be deprived of that — nothing was left.66
In 1926, she eventually decided to return home to the United States.

Many have remarked that Roy never spoke directly of Evelyn Trent
again. Her name does not even appear in his Memoirs. Yet, during his
six-year imprisonment in India, between 1931 and 1936, Evelyn Trent,
now settled again in California, helped organise a campaign for Roy’s
release, and sent reading materials, magazines and books to him.67
World Comparisons
Roy wrote at a Stakhanovian pace in these years, and would continue to
do so throughout his life. In the early years of the Comintern, he rose
to such high ranks partly because he was an intermediary between
intellectual camps, and bridged them in novel ways. Roy was now a
‘gray-suited Marxist’, and known as one of Stalin’s ‘young men’.68 It
was precisely Roy’s cosmopolitan creativity and his ability to don new
personas that comprised part of his avant-garde politics. It represented
an alternative approach to anti-colonial liberation played out through
mediations and crossings of cultural domains, as opposed to the
insistence on indigenous cultural forms.
Roy proposed a different spatialisation of the world, in which the
‘vertical lines’ of ‘sects, races, castes, religions’ in both India and Europe
would give way to a clear-sighted appreciation of the way the world
was ‘split horizontally into great classes, those owning the means
of production (including land), distribution (trade) and exchange
(banking and usury); and those living on wages. The more prominent
the horizontal line becomes, the less becomes the significance of the
vertical lines’.69
The globe was ruled by an underlying ‘horizontal’ universal time.
Roy compared ‘India, Ireland and Egypt’ and saw them all engaged in
a contemporaneous effort of freedom-struggle against British rule.70

Like many Indian intellectuals of the 1920s, he equated the conditions
in India with those in the Soviet Union: ‘Nor is India a solitary instance.
Russia in broad outlines belonged to the same category … it was left
for the proletariat to carry through the bourgeois revolution — to lead
the peasantry in the final struggle against the landed aristocracy’.71
Throughout the 1920s, Roy continually suggested new equivalences:
of Indian revolutionaries with Americans before their Independence,72
with Chartists of England in the early nineteenth century,73 with the
Bolsheviks, with the Germans after the war, and with the Chinese during
the civil war of 1926–27.
Of particular interest to Roy in the early 1920s were the events
occurring in Germany in the years of civil instability. He read the unrest
of his German context as sharing a common temporality with Indian
anti-colonialism. Especially in 1923, the year the German communists
organised the largest and most ambitious attempt to orchestrate
revolution, Germans and Indians were linked as comrades. ‘The mass-
strike and demonstration in Berlin on July 4th was but another symptom
of the conflict that rends world today, the conflict of class against class,
which grows every day sharper as the contrast between rich and poor
increases, as the exploitation of man by man continues.’ 74 Roy observed
Heinrich Brandler and August Thalheimer at close quarters as they
planned the revolutionary attempt in Berlin and Thuringia in October
1923.75 The events in Berlin were a particular expression of the same
general ‘conflict’ that also existed in India. Given the French occupation
of the Ruhr in 1923, Roy likened the workers of Germany to the posi-
tion of a colonised people, asserting that the ‘[German] workers are
throwing up a new challenge to French Imperialism.’76 The temporality
of German worker radicalisation in the Ruhr was perceived by Roy as
equivalent to that of rising protest against British rule in India. In 1923,
as Roy hailed the potential for growing unrest in the Western Germany,
his concerns were also with the Indian peasant at Chauri Chaura who
faced death sentences for their violent uprising the previous year. In
an open letter to the British Labour Party, Roy implored its members to
prevent the executions, or suffer the retribution of the British workers
and proletariat who stood in solidarity with the ‘toilers and labourers’
of the world.77 Two years later, China became the country of anticipated
revolution within the communist world. And it became Roy’s most
favoured site to search for revolutionary equivalencies with India.78
Crisis and Crossing

By 1926 the influence of Roy’s involvement in the communism of the
German fringe was becoming apparent. A temporary aphasia developed
in his writings between the advocacy of eruptive insurgency that marked
his early Marxist views, and a contrasting argument for the tempered
politics of critique, education, and solidarity that came to mark his
thought from the late 1920s onwards.
The project of forging the united front with the Social Democrats was
developed by groups of the German fringe after 1921 as a moderating
alternative to the growing inveterate Soviet insistence on revolutionary
insurgency, especially in the context of Stalin’s rise to power after Lenin’s
death.79 The Fifth Congress of 1924 asserted a policy of ‘Russification’ of
the communist movement. German leaders with ties to the Spartakus
Bund were reprimanded for their ‘opportunistic’ Marxist interpre-
tations. Moscow leaders insisted that attempts to build a broad solidarity
with groups outside the party could lead to collaboration with socialists
and ‘socio-fascists’, thus compromising the communist movement.
Stalin upped the ante by speaking of ‘socio-fascism’ as the new threat
to communism, insisting that the Social Democrats were the greatest
enemy due to their supposed complicity with the capitalist order. The
Social Democratic Party was the major party in power in Germany in
the Weimar years. A militant communist programme was inaugurated
to extirpate party moderates who sought collaboration with the SDP.80
In contrast to the insistence on muscular party discipline and
militancy by the Moscow centre, August Thalheimer became the major
spokesman for a politics of collaboration with all groups on the German
left, including the Social Democrats, in a broad anti-fascist ‘united
front’.81 He insisted that, especially given the rise of Nazism, the German
Communist Party had to work towards the ‘sympathy of the majority
of the working classes’ at large.82 Through the practical experience
of cooperation between political parties, consciousness of a broader
solidarity that traversed party lines would be built up. ‘Revolution from
below’ would be a slow process, but offered the only true safeguard
against the spectre of Nazi rise.83
The theoretical agon between German communists associated with
the Spartakus Bund and the Bolshevik orthodoxy created fractures
within the Communist International from early on. The Moscow
metropole charged Thalheimer and his colleague Heinrich Brandler
with insubordination for their united front initiatives, removed
them from their posts as leaders of the German Communist Party,

and summoned them to Moscow for the auto da fe before the internal
Comintern court. Thalheimer and Brandler, erstwhile members of the
old Spartakus Bund, and leaders of the German Communist Party from
1920 to 1923, were placed in ‘honourable exile’ — forced stay in Moscow
from 1924 to 1928 — as punishment for their heretical views. After 1925,
the Soviets installed a group of young, and supposedly untainted, party
members as the new leaders of the German Communist Party.84 Stalin
advanced his ‘blank sheet’ policy that leaders in Germany had to be free
from any taint of the German Spartakus Old Guard.85
Already by 1926, before the climacteric of Roy’s experience in China,
the influence of the German communist fringe on his thought was
already beginning to show through. He adopted a united front line in his
Future of Indian Politics, published in October, before leaving for Shanghai
in January 1927 as an envoy to the anticipated Chinese communist
revolution. ‘The People’s fight for freedom must be led by the party of
the people — a party organisation which will be broad enough for all
the forces of national revolution. The proletariat will be in it, but it will
not be a proletarian party, nominally or essentially. In this party the
proletariat will stand side by side with the petty bourgeois and peasant
masses, as the most advanced democratic class.’ 86 Roy was no longer
thinking solely in terms of insurgency, but contemplating the pos-
sibilities of building solidarity in the Indian context.87 The ambiguity in
his writings from this year points to the conceptual crossings Roy had
embarked on. His expedition to China as a Soviet envoy in Canton and
Shanghai during the 1927 civil war would seal his transition to a new
political approach.
Trusting in Roy’s commitment to the violent revolutionary up-
heaval in Asian societies, Stalin sent Roy to Canton in January 1927 with
a group of Comintern leaders.88 In the context of a great chess game
between the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang under
Chiang Kai-Shek, Mikhail Borodin, the chief communist envoy in
China, already active in Shanghai for four years, viewed the nationalist
Kuomintang Party as the most important organ for revolution. Borodin
proposed that the communists should assist the Kuomintang to con-
solidate power, with the expectation that it would maintain allegiance
to the Communist International.
Roy on the other hand, in articles written for the Moscow press and in
addresses in Shanghai, insisted on the insurgent agency of the Chinese
peasants, not the nationalist bourgeoisie. Roy opposed Borodin’s plan
to woo the Kuomintang, and instead proposed that the revolutionary

stirrings among peasant groups in southern China should be supported
in the first instance. If the Swadeshi revolution in Bengal, or the German
uprising in Thuringia, had not managed to unleash revolutionary force
to spontaneously change the social order, then the peasants in China
would make amends for this, Roy seemed to think. Roy repeated the
claim that the basis of revolution would be ‘agrarian revolution’ on
multiple occasions during this period. Rural self-government should
be established after the destruction of the feudal lords.89 ‘The petty-
bourgeois Left (of the Kuomintang), on to whose wagon Comrade
Borodin wants to harness the Communist Party, has neither the daring,
nor simply the desire to start an agrarian revolution’.90 By April 1927,
the antagonism between Roy and his erstwhile mentor from the Mexico
days burst into open conflict. ‘I do not intend to explain in detail here
the advantageousness of a radical agrarian reform to both the petty
bourgeoisie and the peasantry’, Roy exclaimed during a speech to the
Chinese communists.91 It was, at root, a contest between Borodin’s
views about the weak agency of the Asian peasantry and the need to
ally with the Chinese Kuomintang ‘bourgeoisie’, and Roy’s insistence
on the peasants’ eruptive and heroic world-transcending agency.
There was a certain indiscretion inherent in both perspectives — a certain
assumption that revolution could be engineered by temporary envoys
of the Comintern. Both Borodin’s and Roy’s attempts to ‘scientifically’
orchestrate upheaval in China failed to have any effect. In fact, some
Chinese communists viewed them both with disdain. Mao recalled that
Borodin ‘stood a little to the right’, and Roy ‘stood a little to the left’,
but they both ‘only stood’.92
At least in one mundane sense, Mao’s evaluation was not accurate. In
fact, Roy travelled quite extensively through villages around Canton and
Hankow (Wuhan), trying to rally peasants with pamphlets, translating
speeches through the use of an interpreter.93 He also made contact with
the Sikh community in Hankow, and distributed anti-British literature
in Shanghai among the sizeable number of British India troops stationed
there. An ‘Indian Brigade’ travelled to Shanghai with support from
members of the Indian National Congress.94 Roy’s internationalism did
not mean that he was rootless, exiled or distanced from the Indian anti-
colonial struggle. The sheer fact that he embarked on Indian propaganda
work while in China, in addition to his travels through villages, shows
that his actions were interwoven with questions of Indian politics.
Nevertheless, neither Borodin’s nor Roy’s strategy led to a communist

revolution in China. The ascendant Kuomintang soon asserted its
opposition to the Soviet Union and succeeded in suppressing the
communist party of China. The so-called ‘right’ group of the Kuomintang
under Chiang Kai-Shek commenced a violent campaign against the
communists. In the months subsequent to Roy’s departure from China
in July 1927, the Chinese communists were routed by Kuomintang forces.
A Soviet myth developed of an ‘abortive revolution’ in China caused by
Kuomintang ‘betrayal’, and this complemented the other myth of the
failed communist revolution in Germany in 1923. Roy’s third attempt at
unleashing revolution failed miserably. In this context, he decisively, or
perhaps desperately, turned towards the German fringe upon his return
to Europe to find a path out of failure.
Transformation of Thought
No longer declaring the indigenous radical agency of the peasantry
after the China fiasco but asserting the need to build consciousness
and solidarity among the large coalition of actors, Roy reflected upon
the limitations of his pre-China thought. The Chinese campaign, he
reflected, had become ‘a purely peasant movement… but they were
certainly not fighting for Communism’.95 On a clear note of self-criticism,
Roy remarked, ‘the revolution… could not succeed until it embraced the
urban areas also. In other words, the peasants could not free themselves
exclusively by their own action, however powerful that might be… And
the peasantry could not carry the revolution to the cities. That should
have been known beforehand. However, it was proved by experience’.96
Roy concluded in a self-searching tone, throwing the crossings in his
thinking into relief: ‘the utopian experiment of making a proletarian
revolution with village paupers had already gone too far’. 97
Roy now felt, after his return from China, that mass consciousness
had to be cultivated through the ongoing work of building social solidarity
and that outright violent revolution was no longer a worthwhile pursuit.
This viewpoint took on practical, strategic expression in 1927, when Roy
sent his ‘Assembly Letter’ to the communist groups in Bengal, outlining
his suggestion for a change of programme. Roy now prescribed the
formation of Workers and Peasants Parties (WPP) in India, which would
be legal organisations, clandestinely run under communist patronage.
These parties would have as their goal the development of a united
front from below, linking workers, peasants and the petty bourgeoisie,
thus creating a broader franchise for future social revolution. ‘[The

Workers and Peasants Party] should be the rallying ground of the
exploited social elements (proletariat, peasantry and petty-bourgeois)
which must unite themselves in a revolutionary struggle against foreign
imperialism and native reaction’. 98 Roy included the ‘petty bourgeoisie’
in the list of those who could enter into a community of collective action
with the peasants and workers. ‘The social elements ready to fight for
this programme are not all necessarily communists and never will be
communists; but organized in the WPP they will be under the influence of
the proletariat and be led by the communist party without subscribing to
the programme of socialism’, he continued, effectively breaking with his
earlier view by broadening the definition of the revolutionary classes.99
Roy’s position as an intermediary between intellectual positions meant
that Roy often broke the frame of his own way of thinking.
But the most brazen proclamation of his turn away from revolutionary
voluntarism to a politics of coalition came with Roy’s ‘Draft Resolution
on the Indian Question’ presented in July 1928. This document, with its
so-called ‘decolonisation thesis’ would provide the official grounds for
Roy’s expulsion from the Comintern. The fundamental issue at hand
was Roy’s new outspoken support for the more moderate stance of the
German opposition against the Soviet juggernaut.
Now transferring revolutionary will to an even broader group — no
longer the Swadeshi revolutionary, no longer the peasant masses — Roy
spoke of a consortium of ‘oppressed groups’ whose solidarity had to be
built up. He wrote that violent attempts to instigate revolution were
foolhardy. Following the logic of dialectical materialism, Roy insisted
that the expansion of global capital was ineluctable, but it would
also produce, in time, the seeds of its own demise and the possibility
of transcendence to a higher order of social organisation. Change
would come through altered structures not through abrupt acts of
individual agency. ‘The compromise between imperialism and the
native bourgeoisie does not weaken the struggle for national freedom.
On the contrary, it enters a revolutionary stage’, Roy wrote. In classic
Luxemburgist fashion, Roy asserted that a new order of redoubled
native capitalist exploitation would lead disparate groups to grow in
solidarity with one another: the proletariat exploited in the cities, the
peasants exploited on the land, the artisans facing the destruction of the
handicrafts industry, the ‘teachers, students, employees, small traders’
looking for relief.100 He made the telling remark that ‘the revolution will
reach the final victory through successive stages of development’, and
not through an ecstatic moment of eruption. Roy’s ‘decolonisation thesis’

had implications for anti-colonial national struggle. In effect, he now
asserted that British imperialism was on its last legs and would naturally
end without the need for violent revolution. The eruption of the future
into the present would come only by cultivating the consciousness of
the broad camp of exploited groups in India to recognise the universality
of their struggle.
By advocating revolutionary democratic freedom for all the oppressed classes;
by putting forward demands to safeguard and further the interests of the
peasants and petty bourgeois masses; and by placing itself in the forefront
of the entire national revolutionary struggle the proletariat will conquer the
leadership of the national revolution.101
A united front party should be created step by step through acts of

solidarity, led by the proletariat. Roy now placed great emphasis on
trade unions for educating workers and building the consciousness of
solidarity. ‘The millions and millions of transport workers, plantation
coolies and handicraft workers are not yet organized… The Communist
party must explain this [the proletariat’s historic role] to the proletariat
in popular literature, public meetings, trade union, clubs, etc.’102 This
turn towards education and building consciousness had an immediate
impact on his activities in the years after return from China.
The Communist Party in Germany was organised into local Ortsgruppe
in which workers would gather to hear lectures, attend rallies, go on
hikes, and generally build a sense of solidarity.103 On weekends, lecturers
were held for party members where attendees could hear talks such
as ‘Sun Yat Sen, Gandhi or Lenin’ or ‘Imperialism’, for example.104
The German Communist Party Opposition circle (KPD-O), one of the
many fringe groups that protested Bolshevik radicalism, had its own
dedicated experts on colonial topics who gave weekend lectures to
local groups from 1928 to 1931. M. N. Roy presented regularly on
imperialism and anti-colonialism in India and China for this group to
German audiences.105 Furthermore, he joined August Thalheimer as
the co-editor of the Opposition’s journal, Internationalen Nachrichten der
kommunistischen Opposition, and commissioned articles to cultivate new
consciousness.106 And this same united front stance, derived from an
amalgam of experiences in China and Germany, would inform the most
significant features of his politics once he returned to India.
By 1929, Roy came to the conclusion that the pursuit of united front
politics in India had to take place through the vehicle of the Indian
National Congress, and not in opposition to it. This stance differed

drastically from that of the official Indian Communist Party at the
time, which was locked into direct opposition to the Congress after the
Sixth Comintern Conference of 1928 when Stalin declared the end of
collaborative politics and the start of an era of communist retrench-
ment worldwide ‘communism in one country’.
Revolution and Counter-Revolution

These intellectual crossings occasioned by Roy’s place as an intermediary
provided the material for his Weimar masterpiece, Revolution und
Konterrevolution in China, written in German at the Frankfurt School and
published in 1930. The text became a classic of communist literature
among Central European communists in its time, but was only translated
into English in 1946. It was both a treatise on Marxist historiography
of Asian societies, as well as a ‘dream history’ with futuristic intent.107
If revolutions were dependent upon a change of consciousness, Roy
proposed, revolutions of the mind already had a long history in Asian
cultures. This element of the argument was reminiscent of August
Thalheimer’s Dialectical Materialism (1924). Here Roy insisted that
changing consciousness was not only attainable through adoption of
European or Marxist philosophy. Revolution was an endemic aspect
of Asian societies and was brought about not through violent struggle,
but through the outcomes of philosophical and ethical debates.
Far more than just an account of the ‘failed’ Chinese communist re-
volution of 1926–27, Revolution also exhibited a new approach to political
praxis that defined all of Roy’s subsequent work. Roy wrote as an affiliate
of the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt. Eduard Fuchs, one of the
Institute’s founders wrote to Marx Horkheimer in its inaugural year
of 1924 that the Institute’s research should also deal with the study of
‘the national independence movements of the Irish, Turks, Egyptians,
Indians, etc…’108 Roy’s temporary position as an affiliate of the Frankfurt
School represented a contribution towards that goal. He wrote much of
the manuscript in a Berlin office provided by Felix Weil, another founder
of the Institute. But he visited Frankfurt occasionally during 1929 and
met and corresponded with Max Horkheimer.109
Roy’s Revolution und Konterrevolution in China marked an important
milestone in his preoccupation with Marxist theory. It asserted that
ideas and debate have a determinative effect on the material world.
In this respect, his thought coincided with the broader shift within
mid-century Marxism from debates about political manoeuvre, to

works of cultural critique. Revolution und Konterrevolution provided the
opening for the next two decades of Roy’s writings.
In the work, Roy proposed that contrary to the picture of China
produced by the Orientalist assumption of Marxist scholarship, such as
the writing of contemporary Frankfurt School member, Karl Wittfogel,
there was no such ‘Asiatic Mode of Production’ existent in China as
Marx had asserted.110 But Roy’s critique of Eurocentric assumptions
followed different lines from his early 1920s oeuvre. It is not that Chinese
society was filled with an eruptive energy that would rip apart the old
in a violent revolution. Rather, the focus was now on the lively ethical
debates and class-based ideological battles native to Asian societies, and
the contingency of their outcomes.
Roy began his book by asserting that the course of Chinese history was
contingent upon the contest between ideologies during specific moments
of social crisis in its past. According to Roy, in the time of Confucius,
Chinese society experienced a crisis of production due to the lack of
sufficient means for production, such as livestock. This commenced an
ancient period of class-war in China giving rise to a war among opposed
ideologies. Confucius supposedly represented the class-interests of the
dominant classes, while Lao Tse spoke for the exploited’.111 Lao-Tse’s
followers, especially Yang and Mu, were successful organisers of social
movements. Yet, due to the strong charismatic personality of the
Confucian leader Menzius, the proponents of social revolution lost the
contingent war of ideology.112
According to Marx’s Asiatic Mode of Production, Chinese society
had never developed the concept of private property, and for this
reason, China missed the train of history and progress. And current
Marxist thinking on the ‘Asiatic Mode of Production’ as promulgated
by the prominent scholar, Karl Wittfogel, revised and extended this
view with the assertion that Oriental stagnation was due to the impact
of infelicitous environmental conditions, especially an ‘unmasterable
geographic terrain’ and large semi-arid climatic zones.113 The crucial
point to take from Roy’s rehearsal of a mythic history of failed revolu-
tion in ancient China was an argument for possibility as opposed to
determination. The outcome of the battles between warring ideologies
was unpredictable and not determinable by socio-economic or
environmental conditions.
Roy sardonically commented on this mainstream deterministic view
of an Asian time different from the capitalist time of progress: ‘The
Communist Manifesto had proclaimed that human history was to begin

with the triumph of the proletarian revolution. Until then, there was
only “pre-history”, man having, through the ages, lived in the bondage
of class-ridden society’.114 Given the intellectual dynamism of ancient
Chinese society, long before the encounter with Europe, Roy argued that
there had long been history outside the West. Perhaps he saw himself
as the Lao Tse of India — an ethical philosopher embarked on a mission
to convert minds.
Renegade
In the era of ‘Bolshevisation’ and Comintern centralisation, what
opponents called ‘Russification’, there was increasingly less space for
debate and discussion within the Comintern, and dissenting views
came to be seen first as ‘opportunistic’ and then later as renegade.
From Lenin’s passing in 1924 up until 1928, communism underwent a
transition from a worldwide institution of ecumenism to one of increased
authoritarianism. Early communism was a mélange of diverse opinions
and charged debate precisely because the consolidation of Soviet state
power had yet to fully emerge.
The group that formed Roy’s social and intellectual circle in
Berlin since his first days in the city in 1920, the circle around August
Thalheimer and Heinrich Brandler, officially organised themselves into
the ‘German Communist Party — Opposition’ (KPD-O) in 1928. They
were ousted from the Comintern officially in July 1928, and labelled
‘Luxemburgists’. Roy was expelled along with them in that same year
after the Sixth Comintern Congress. The disgrace experienced by Roy in
1928 grew out of his intellectual crossings of 1927. ‘Roy, by contributing
to the Brandler press and by supporting the Brandler organization,
has placed himself outside the ranks of the Communist International’,
the Comintern condemnation pronounced.115 Fringe thinkers of all
types, thinkers who did not ascribe to the Comintern orthodoxy, were
increasingly seen with suspicion and expelled. Stalin used the pre-
text of disciplining and centralising communist activities, and the pur-
suit of ‘socialism in one country’, to eliminate and purge threats to
Soviet authority.116
Roy, during this period, began publishing articles on the need for
a communist path out of authoritarianism in Gegen den Strom [Against
the Current], the most influential communist opposition journal of
the 1930s, edited by August Thalheimer.117 The journal decried Roy’s
expulsion from the Comintern as a ‘scandal of the first order’.118 ‘Roy

has belonged to the Communist International since its founding’, said
the announcement. ‘Here again we have a comedy of expulsion carried
out by the Comintern’. Soon afterwards, Roy wrote a major twelve-
part treatise critiquing the Communist International published over
two years, entitled ‘The Crisis of the Communist International’.119 With
it, Roy became one of the most vocal and acerbic critics of the Soviet
Union in Europe from within the communist fold. ‘The reason [for the
weakness of the communist movement] is a lack of leadership. The
current leadership of the communist international is weak, untalented
and has little authority’.120 Roy argued that the ‘ultraleft’ line of the Soviet
Union had led to a ‘despairing politics of putsch-like sectarianism, and
a deviation from Marxism towards anarchism’.121
On May Day 1929, the German Communist Party under Soviet
directives organised another revolutionary attempt. Roy lambasted the
move as inopportune and intemperate, especially when a united front
politics with the Social Democrats was most needed.122 He criticised the
failed structure of Soviet politics, which had almost totally deformed
the culture of internationalism to one of long-distance puppetry
by Stalin’s iron hand.123 The way to rejuvenate the international
movement, Roy wrote in 1929, was the necessary ‘integration of non-
Russian perspectives’. ‘In fact, we have experienced over the past two
years the elimination of the very best forces of the revolution through
indiscriminate expulsions…’124 The only option was disaggregation
and decentralising of power. ‘The reigns of power must no longer be
held by a Russian monopoly alone… The coming forward involves the
development of independent sites of leadership in various sections of
the international … which will lead to the breaking up of the official
apparatus’.125 The crisis of the International became ‘crass’ in 1928,
observed Roy, when Stalin carried out a ‘violent surgery’ on almost
all leading segments of the International, using the excuse of the fight
against ‘Right deviationism’ and ‘Luxemburgism’.126 In his article of July
1930, sarcastically entitled ‘Stalin triumphs’, Roy called the Comintern a
mere notional organisation, now caught up in Stalin’s personal rule.127
For this outspokenness, Roy was paid back with one of state com-
munism’s favourite terms in this era: ‘renegade’. By the end of 1930,
he was labelled a ‘traitor’.128 Kuusinen indicted him for his united front
stance, saying that as a member of the ‘Brandler renegade press he was
urging co-operation with the Swarajists’.129 He was thus chastised and
condemned in the main Comintern journal, Inprecor, by the likes of
Safaroff, Eugen Varga and Piatnitksy, as a ‘bourgeois liberal’ and a ‘lackey

of imperialism’ not only for his criticism of the Soviet Union, but for his
insistence that political strategy should include collaboration from inside
the Indian National Congress.130 As with the excommunication from a
church, it was officially decreed by Moscow that Roy should no longer
be referred to as ‘comrade’, and there were immediate ramifications in
India, as Indian communists began speaking of ‘ex-comrade Roy’.131
Responses of Indians
Beginning in 1928, with his ouster from the Comintern, Roy became
a figure of derision within the official Indian Communist Party, while
also finding praise among a broad group of Indian thinkers inspired
by Marxism but outside the regimen of the party, such as Jawaharlal
Nehru and Jayaprakash Narayan. In 1926 while in Moscow, Motilal
and Jawaharlal Nehru met with Roy.132 Roy made a strong impression
especially on the young Nehru and earned his respect.133 Jayaprakash
Narayan likewise recorded his deep admiration for Roy’s writings as a
student in the United States since 1922.134 Narayan recalled, ‘naturally,
[Roy] had a great hand in moulding my thought and leading me to
Communism, which was still a revolutionary doctrine. That Roy was a
colleague of Lenin and was a big personality in the Communist Inter-
national, made him in my young eyes a hero and a great Indian … In the
States I was drawn towards him as a disciple to the master’.135 Gangadhar
Adhikari, who went on to become one of the most influential theorists
of the Indian Communist Party, came to Berlin as a chemistry student
in 1925 and received mentorship from Roy. He broke with Roy in the
context of his 1928 ‘excommunication’.136
Shapurji Saklatvala, on the other hand, an Indian member of the
Communist Party of Great Britain, said of Roy, ‘I have been telling
the communist international repeatedly that M. N. Roy is an agent of the
English government, but the leaders have refused to listen to me.
Thankfully Roy was expelled from the International in 1929…’137 A forty-
two-page anti-Roy pamphlet prepared by the Communist Party of India
in 1932 amounted to an extensive syllabus of errors. It declared Roy a
representative of the ‘bourgeois intelligentsia’, whose ‘treachery was not
accidental’ but represented an intensification of class warfare in India.138
He had a ‘bourgeois programme’, desiring to ‘fight for small demands
only’, and proposing that the natural death of British imperialism
would be followed by the rise of a reactionary Indian bourgeoisie — all
heretical views.
Rajani Palme Dutt, a leading theorist of the Communist Party of Great

Britain and a specialist in Indian matters had been a great admirer of Roy
until his expulsion. After the 1928 Congress, and his official expulsion in
November 1929, Dutt repudiated the Indian renegade. Writing to Bengali
communist leader Muzaffar Ahmad, Dutt recorded, ‘Roy was severely
criticised for his theory of “decolonisation”… After the Congress, Roy
visited me in Brussels. He was furious with the criticism he had received …
I informed him that the criticism and line of the sixth Congress to be
correct … I wish to have no further dealings with him. This was the last
time that I saw Roy, with whom I had previously worked closely’.139
A major attacker of M. N. Roy was Saumyendranath Tagore, a Bengali
student and nephew of Rabindranath Tagore, closely associated with
Saklatvala. Saumyendranath travelled to the Lenin School in Moscow
in 1928, and launched a number of diatribes against M. N. Roy, calling him
a failed theorist and a betrayer of the Indian communist movement.140
The ‘expulsion of renegades and traitors of the sort of M. N. Roy has
led to the improvement in the Indian section’, Tagore commented.141
After 1928, virulent criticism of Roy became a standard feature of the
Comintern colonial politics as well as of the Indian Communist Party.
The taboo of M. N. Roy stemmed precisely from the fact that he inter-
fered with the cultural–symbolic regime of Soviet communism, and
fashioned himself as an intermediary, not fully assimilable into the
Soviet order of power and knowledge. His close affiliation with German
fringe communism meant that his intellectual trajectory in the 1920s
formed a chiasm with those Indians who remained linked to shifts in
the Bolshevik programme. Eventually, with the rise of Stalin, there was
precious little room for debate. If Roy had sought egress from the prison
of British colonial liberalism, he found that communist discourse of
the late 1920s had transformed itself into a new kind of conceptual and
cultural prison.
Notes
1. Roy, ‘Hunger and Revolution in India’, in Sibnarayan Ray (ed.). 1987a. Selected
Works of M. N. Roy, vol. 1: p.158.
2. See Ernst Bloch on the ‘not yet’. Ernst Bloch. 1986. The Principle of Hope, trans.
Neville Plaice et al. Oxford: Oxford University Press, vol. 1: pp. 306–13.
3. John Petrov Plamenatz. 1954. German Marxism and Russian Communism. London:
Longmans Green, p. xxiii.
4. Intellectual histories based on assertions of trans-historical civilisational or
cultural qualities were very common in the 1950s. See also Hans Kohn. 1960. The
Mind of Germany, New York: Scribner.
5. Theodor Bergman. 1987. ‘Gegen den Strom: die Geschichte der Kommunistischer-
Partei-Opposition.
6. Alexandre Kojève. 1969. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the
Phenomenology of Spirit. New York: Basic Books, Mark Poster. 1975. Existential
Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
7. Rosa Luxemburg. 1922. Die Russische Revolution, Eine kritische Würdigung aus
dem Nachlass vom Rosa Luxemburg. Verlag: Gesselchaft und Erziehung, p. 77.
See discussion in Paul Frölich. 1972. Rosa Luxemburg: Her Life and Work, 1928:
253–83.
8. See, for example Rosa Luxemburg. 1906. Massenstreik, Partei und Gewerkschaften.
Hamburg: E. Dubber, p. 137, where she carried out an analysis of recent mass
action in Russia and concluded that successful revolution would take place
only when various labouring groups, each with their own specific experience
of ‘suffering’, could find mutual recognition of each other’s plight.
9. Luxemburg, Massenstreik, Partis und Gewerkschaften, p. 144.
10. J. P. Nettl. 1966. Rosa Luxemburg, London: Oxford University Press, pp. 130–87.
11. Klaus Christian Köhnke. 1991. The Rise of Neo-Kantianism. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, p. 151ff, provides a discussion of the ascent of neo-Kantianism
in Germany from the 1860s onwards. The rise partly stemmed from scholars such
as Friedrich Albert Lange returning to Kant in order to find the philosophical
ground for a new ethics, in the context of the ‘Social Question’ of that period.
12. This same comment would become a focus of meditation for Althusser. See Louis
Althusser. 1969. For Marx. New York: Pantheon, p. 28.
13. Karl Korsch, ‘Indiens Erwachen’ in International Institute of Social History,
Amsterdam (IISG): Korsch Papers 62. On Roy’s participation in the Korsch circle in
Berlin, see Henry Maximilian Pachter. 1982. Weimar Etudes, New York: Columbia
University Press, p. 54; On Korsch’s ties to Luxemburgism, especially in terms
of the insistence on the ‘spontaneity’ of revolution, and the de-emphasis of
party organisation see Otto Langels. 1984. Die Ultralinke Opposition der KPD in der
Weimarer Republik. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, pp. 37–45.
14. Georg Lukács. 1971. ‘What is Orthodox Marxism?’, 1984. in History and Class
Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, p. 17.
15. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, pp. 165–72.
16. Anson Rabinbach. 1997. In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals between
Apocalypse and Enlightenment, Weimar and Now; 14. Berkeley: University of
California Press, p. 63.
17. In Munich, Hamburg and Leipzig and in other cities.
18. He wrote his dissertation of 1908 in linguistics on the language of ‘Micronesia’
and showed a sustained interest in questions of cognition and language in
cross-cultural perspectives. See August Thalheimer. 1908. Beitrag zur Kenntnis
der pronominal personalia und possessiva der Sprachen Mikronesien. Stuttgart.
See Jürgen Kaestner. 1982. Die politische Theorie August Thalheimers. Frankfurt:
Campus-Verlag, p. 17.
19. Hermann Weber. 1969. Die Wandlung des deutschen Kommunismus; die Stalinisierung
der KPD in der Weimarer Republik. Frankfurt an Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt,
p. 89.
20. August Thalheimer. 1935. Introduction to Dialectical Materialism, trans. George
Simpson and George Weltner. New York: Covici Friede, p. 11.
21. Ibid., p. 239.
22. Ibid., p. 239.
23. A commission composed of August Thalheimer, Borodin, James Bell, Troyanski
and Rakosi, established Roy as the chief Indian representative to the Comintern.
See Bhupendranath Datta. 1983. Bharater Dvitiya Swadhinatar Samgram: Aprakasita
rajnitik itihas. Calcutta: Nababharat Publishing, p. 285. Jens Becker. 1923. Heinrich
Brandler, p. 192; Purabi Roy et al. Indo-Russian Relations, 1997: p. 144.
24. Reminiscence of Claire Thalheimer in oral history interview with Ray, In Freedom’s
Quest, vol. 3: p. 38n.
25. Interview with Dr Theodor Bergmann, 3 October 2004, Stuttgart.
26. Georg Lukács’s review of Tagore’s Gora, ‘Tagore’s Gandhi Novel’, published in
the Rote Fahne newspaper, 1922, reprinted in Reviews and Articles, 1983.
27. On the fact that the Institut für Sozialforschung published the original German
edition of Roy’s 1930 Revolution und Konterrevolution in China, see Ellen Gottschalk
to Max Horkheimer, 30 April 1956, Frankfurt University, Horkheimer Archive:
III-11-298-301.
28. Peel to CID, ‘Memorandum on Bhupendranath Datta’, OIOC: L/PJ/12/221,
10 July 1924.
29. Roy, ‘Draft Resolution on the Indian Question’ (1928) reprinted in Ray (ed.),
Selected Works of M. N. Roy, vol. 3: pp. 77–112.
30. John Haithcox. 1971. Communism and Nationalism in India: M. N. Roy and Comintern
Policy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 31.
31. S. A. Dange, Lenin and Gandhi (originally published in 1921) reproduced in Bani
Deshpande (ed.), Selected Writings of S.A. Dange, 1974: p. 96.
32. Dange, Lenin and Gandhi, p. 73.
33. The main envoys were Usmani, Nalini Gupta, Jotindranath Mitra. See OIOC:
L/PJ/1/117.
34. Muzaffar Ahmad. 1962. The Communist Party of India and its Formation Abroad.
Calcutta: National Book Agency, pp. 88, 89.
35. On the jail experience of the Swadeshi fighters, see Barindrakumar Ghosh. 1922.
The Tale of My Exile. Pondicherry: Arya Office.
36. David Laushey. 1975. Bengal Terrorism and the Marxist Left. Calcutta: Firma
Mukhopadhyay, p. 21.
37. See letter by M. N. Roy to ‘Friends’, OIOC: L/PJ/12/47.
38. ‘Indian Communist Party’, OIOC: L/PJ/12/14.
39. A total of 183 persons were imprisoned under the Bengal Criminal Law
Amendment Act of 1925. See Laushey, Bengal Terrorism and the Marxist
Left, p. 29.
40. Anthony Clayton. 1986. The British Empire as a Superpower, 1919–39. Hampshire:
Macmillan.
41. See Charles William Gwynn. 1934. Imperial Policing. London: Macmillan Martin
Thomas, Empires of Intelligence, 2008: 73–106. See a fictional account of the
malarkey of surveillance penned by Somerset Maugham, who served as a British
intelligence officer during First World War, Ashenden: Or the British Agent, 1928.
42. Italy bombed its colonies in 1911. In 1915, the British bombed Arab towns in
Egypt, Iran, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Bombing was ‘perfected’ in the Iraqi
rebellions of 1920. See Sven Lindqvist. 2000. A History of Bombing. New York:
New Press.
43. David Petrie. 1972 rpt (1927). Communism in India. Calcutta: Editions Indian.
44. Anonymous, ‘Indian Communists’, Reports from 21 November 1922 to 10 May
1923 in: Zentrum Moderner Orient, Krüger Nachlass Annex, Berlin (ZMO-A):
Item 41.
45. The Indian Information Bureau was set up by Vivendranath Chattopadhyay and
A. C. Nambiar in Berlin during the 1920s to facilitate the enrolment of Indians
in German universities. See ‘Indian Information Bureau and Chattopadhyaya’,
15 May 1930, OIOC: L/PJ/12/223, pp. 79–81; Compare with Chinese and Japanese
excitement for German education in this same time. Thomas Harnisch. 1999.
Chinesische Studenten in Deutschland. Hamburg: Institut Fur Asienkunde, p. 155;
Christian Spang et al.(eds). 2006. Japanese–German Relations, London: Routledge,
pp. 131–33.
46. Contemporary report on conference proceedings was published as Das
Flammenzeichen vom Palais Egmont, 1927, pp. 55–61.
47. See ‘Intelligence Report of I. P. I’, 31 January 1927, OIOC: L/PJ/12/226, p. 3.
48. On Roy’s involvement with the planning of the League against Imperialism see
‘IAH: Liga gegen Imperialism’, 1927, RGASPI: Fond 536, Opus 2, File 20. Roy is
referred to by his alias, ‘Robert’, in this file.
49. See Letter to Hose. OIOC: L/PJ/12/55, p. 6.
50. India Office List of Indians living abroad who should not be granted passports,
8 July 22 1923, OIOC: L/PJ/12/69.
51. Those charged in the case were M. N. Roy, Nalini Gupta, Muzaffar Ahmad,
Shaukat Usmani, S. A. Dange, Ghulam Hussain, R. C. L. Sharma, and Singaravelu
Chettiar. Only four were imprisoned, since Roy and Sharma were not residing
in the jurisdiction of the British, Hussain became a witness for the State, and
Singaravelu fell ill. See Laushey, Bengal Terrorism and the Marxist Left, p. 89.
52. Letter of Joseph Addison to J. Ramsay MacDonald, 16 October 24, OIOC: L/
PH/12/223, pp. 6, 7.
53. See the comments by Baron von Richthofer in German surveillance files.
‘Aus politischen Gründen, insbesondere im Interesse unserer auf Wiederzulassung
Deutscher nach Indien gerichteten Bestrebungen, empfiehlt es sich dringend,
dem Anschein entgegenzutreten…’ (On the basis of our political interests,
especially our interests in the readmission of German ambitions in India, it is
recommended that we give the impression (of cooperating) without delay…) See
Richthofen report, 17 October 1924, Bundesarchiv, Berlin: ‘Reichskommissariat
für Überwachung der öffentlichen Ordnung’, R1507/67299/650, pp. 11–12.
Meanwhile in India, von Collenberg was also busy trying to obtain new
permissions for German traders. In an interview for the Industrie und Handels
Zeitung of May 1925, no. 1, pp. 245–46, the German consul general of India said
that Germany’s trade aims must take pride of place.
54. Ministry of Foreign Affairs to Embassy of Great Britain, 10 October 1924, OIOC:
L/PJ/12/99, p. 14.
55. Roy to Sneevliet, 6 February 1925, Berlin, IISG: Sneevliet Files.
56. This was ordered by Ministry of Foreign Affairs on 11 December 1924. See Hose
to the Undersecretary of State, Foreign Affairs, United Kingdom, 4 May 1925,
OIOC: L/PJ/12/99, p. 43. The Berlin centre was re-established in 1929, especially
due to the efforts of Virendranath Chattopadhyaya and A. -C. Nambiar. ‘Indian
Information Bureau and Chattopadhyay’, 15 May 1930, OIOC: L/PJ/12/223,
pp. 79–81.
57. Laushey, Bengal Terrorism and the Marxist Left.
58. Horace Williamson. 1933. Communism in India, Calcutta: Editions India, p. 19.
59. Ray, In Freedom’s Quest, vol. 2: p. 93.
60. Haithcox, Communism and Nationalism, p. 62.
61. Petrie. 1972. rpt (1927) Communism in India, 67.
62. M. N. Roy to J. Horner, Berlin, 11 September 1923, IISG, Sneevliet 362.
63. Trent to Sneevlieg, 17 August 1925, IISG: Sneevliet Files 362.
64. That an affair broke the relationship between M. N. Roy and Evelyn Trent is
suggested in the following passage from her letter to Henk Sneevliet: ‘So painful
was the shock and disillusionment of the last two weeks I spent in Europe …
I am trying so very hard to understand how it could ever be possible for the
man I worshipped so, and whom I thought loved me very greatly, to so betray
every finer thought and feeling without a scruple, apparently without even a
regret… What is it that he could toss all, all that I tried to be to him, so lightly and
scornfully away,… and for what? For really nothing — for a momentary whim,
an imprudence, of this I am sure’. Evelyn Trent to Henk Sneevliet, 17 August
1925, IISG: Sneevliet Files 362.
65. Evelyn Trent to Henk Sneevliet, 13 March 1927, IISG, Sneevliet Files 362.
66. Evelyn Trent to M. N. Roy, 25 December 1926, IISG, Sneevliet 362.
68. M. N. Roy. 1964. M. N. Roy’s Memoirs. Bombay: Allied Publishers, p. 532.
69. Roy, Vanguard, 1 May 1923, 2: 6.
70. Inprecor, 1924, 8(4): 123–27.
71. Inprecor, November 1924, 8(6): 83–93.
72. M. N. Roy. 1925. ‘Foundation of Democracy: The American Experience’, Masses
of India, September, vol. 1: p. 9.
73. Also see Santi Devi (a.k.a. Evelyn Trent) published a long serial article on ‘Some
Historical Parallels: Chartism and the Nationalist Struggle in India’, in which the
comparability of the progression of history in Indian and British politics was
argued. See Vanguard, 15 March 1923.
74. Ibid.
75. M. N. Roy. 1923b. ‘ Revolution versus Reaction in Germany’, Vanguard, 12

January, vol. 2: p. 4.
76. M. N. Roy. 1923b. ‘Struggle of the German Proletariat’, Vanguard, 15 July, vol.
2: p. 11.
77. See Roy to British Labour Party, Zurich, Switzerland, 1 February 1923.
West Bengal State Archives: File No. 100/23, p. 45. My thanks to Subhas
Chakrabarty for showing this file to me.
78. For example, at the League Against Imperialism conference held in Feburary
1926 in Brussels, anti-colonial nationalists from Egypt, South Africa, Senegal and
India all spoke of Chinese communists as the leaders of a worldwide revolution
of ‘colonial and semi-colonial lands’. Das Flammenzeichen vom Palais Egmont, 1927,
pp. 55–61.
79. See August Thalheimer, Einheitsfront gegen Faschismus, Bremen: 1932a. Jürgen
Kaestner. 1982. Die politische Theorie August Thalheimers. Frankfurt: Campus,
pp. 53–55. E. H. Carr. 1954. The Interregnum. London: St. Martin’s Press, vol. 3:
pp. 293–308. Carr explores the astounding rhetoric of 1920s communism, in which
coining new mottos or slogans and labelling enemies with newfangled epithets
brought about the continual thrust and parry between competing groups.
‘Bolshevisation’ became a keyword in 1925, and was presented as the proper
strategy against ‘ Trotskyism’, but also against ‘Socio-fascism’. Uncatalogued
document in the Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg (FZH): ‘Skizze
der Geschichte der Einheitsfront in Deutschland’. See Wolfgang Abendroth,
Ein Leben in der Arbeiterbewegung, 1976: 43.
80. The policy of battling ‘socio-fascism’, and of declaring the Social Democratic
Party as the mortal enemy of communists became modus operandi after 1925.
Historians have commented on the ill-fated results of this policy in terms
of disabling resistance to the rise of the Nazis. See Hermann Weber. 1963.
Der deutsche Kommunismus. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, pp. 187–91.
81. Kaestner, Die politische Theorie August Thalheimers, pp. 53–68.
82. August Thalheimer, ‘Das Kampffeld’, Rote Fahne, vol. 5: p. 373.
83. Thalheimer, Inprekorr, vol. 2: p. 194.
84. The new leaders were Ruth Fischer, Arkadij Maslow and Heinz Neumann.
85. E. H. Carr, Socialism in One Country, 1958, 3: 295.
86. My emphasis; M. N. Roy. 1927. The Future of Indian Politics. London: R. Bishop,
p. 86.
87. My interpretation runs counter to the standard understanding of the signific-
ance of this text, particularly in Indian Marxist literature. Gangadhar Adhikari
identified the importance of Future of Indian Politics to lie in its supposed
incorrect assertion that the Indian bourgeoisie would betray the nationalist
movement. See Gangadhar Adhikari. 1971. Documents of the History of the
Communist Party of India, vol. III-B. Delhi: People’s Publishing, 1979: 33, 79.
But this view does not allow us to explain how Roy was expelled from the
Comintern the following year on precisely the opposite charges, that is, he was
too enthusiastic to work with the Swarajist Congress. See Jane Degras. 1956.
The Communist International: Documents, 1919–1943, vol. 3: p. 28. In fact, this text
represented a less militant stance, given that Roy wanted to differentiate a

‘petty bourgeoisie’ from a treacherous ‘bourgeoisie’, and claim that the latter,
and not just the workers alone, would work towards social revolution.
88. Sibnarayan Ray’s discussion of the circumstances of Roy’s travel to China is
the most authoritative account available. In Freedom’s Quest, vol. 2: pp. 259–318.
Haithcox, Communism and Nationalism in India, pp. 64–68.
89. Robert C. North and Xenia J. Eudin. 1963. M. N. Roy’s Mission to China: The
Communist-Kuomintang Split of 1927. Berkeley: University of California Press,
p. 66.
90. M. N. Roy, ‘The Base and the Social Forces of the Revolution’, speech to the CCP
leadership, 13–15 April 1927, included in Kitaiskaia revoluiotsiia. See Ray (ed.),
Selected Works of M. N. Roy, vol. 2: p. 610.
91. Roy’s second speech at the Fifth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party,
3 May 1927, Ray (ed.), Selected Works of M. N. Roy, vol. 2: p. 643.
92. Edgar Snow. 1937. Red Star Over China, London: Gollancz, p. 161.
93. North and Eudin, M. N. Roy’s Mission to China, p. 67.
94. ‘Statement Exhibiting the Moral and Material Program and Condition of India
During the Year 1926, 1927’, OIOC: L/PJ/12/62.
95. From the new comments added to the 1946 edition of M. N. Roy. 1973 (1946)
Revolution and Counter-revolution in China.Westport: Hyperion Press, p. 639.
96. Ibid., p. 641.
97. Ibid., p. 643.
98. Roy, ‘Assembly Letter’ (1927), in Ray (ed.), Selected Works of M. N. Roy, vol. 2:
pp. 300–25.
99. The ‘Assembly Letter’ was infamous because it was intercepted by the British
authorities and became a central exhibit in the Meerut Conspiracy Case of
1929–33 that resulted in the arrest of many Indian communists, as well as the
long-term imprisonment of M. N. Roy himself. See Overstreet and Windmiller,
Communism in India, pp. 104–05; A Workers and Peasants Party was already
established in Bengal in 1925, independent of Roy, and under the leadership of
Kazi Nazrul Islam, Muzaffar Ahmad and Nalini Gupta. Laushey, Bengal Terrorism
and the Marxist Left, p. 90.
100. M. N. Roy, ‘Draft Resolution on the Indian Question’, Ray (ed.), Selected Works,
vol. 3: p. 95.
101. Ibid., p. 97.
102. Ibid., p. 107.
103. ‘Listen und Kurse Angabe über indische Studenten, 1924–28, KUTV’, RGASPI:
Fond 532, Opus 1, File 375, p. 173.
104. Willi Münzenberg. 1931. Solidarität: Zehn Jahre Internationale Arbeiterhilfe,
1921–1931. Berlin: Neuer Deutscher Verlag, p. 100. These are examples from the
weekend course held for an Ortsgruppe in Essen in 1930.
105. Theodor Bergmann. 1987. Gegen den Strom: die Geschichte der Kommunistischen
Partei Opposition. Hamburg: VSA Verlag, p. 173.
106. Hans Piazza, ‘M. N. Roy’, in Theodor Bergmann and Mario Kessler (eds.).
2000. Ketzer in Kommunismus: 23 biographische Essays. Hamburg: VSA-Verlag,
p. 176.
107. Sudipta Kaviraj. 1995. ‘Imaginary History’, in, The Unhappy Consciousness:
Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationlist Discourse in India.
Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 124–26; Interview with Dr Theodor
Bergmann, 3 October 2004, Stuttgart.
108. See Fuchs to Horkheimer, 12 February 1924, quoted in Ulrich Weitz. 1991.
Salonkultur und Proletariat. Stuttgart: Stoffler & Schutz, p. 413.
109. The association of M. N. Roy with the Frankfurt School is particularly inter-
esting given the general lack of discussion among Frankfurt School scholars of
colonial domination. On the absence of discussion of colonial questions among
Frankfurt School thinkers, see Keya Ganguly. 2002. ‘Adorno, Authenticity,
Critique’ in: Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus (eds), Marxism, Modernity,
and Postcolonial Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 240–57.
110. Karl August Wittfogel. 1926. Das Erwachende China. Wien: Agis; Wirtschaft und
Gesellschaft Chinas, 1931: vii–ix; and Karl Wittfogel. 1957. Oriental Despotism.
New Haven: Yale University Press, all make a diametrically opposite argument
to that of Roy, insisting that Asian backwardness and lack of revolutionary
potential could be traced to its climatic and environmental conditions.
111. M. N. Roy. 1930. Revolution und Konterrevolution in China. Berlin: Soziologische
Verlagsanstalt, p. 30.
112. Ibid., p. 41.
113. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism, p. 129.
114. M. N. Roy. 1981. New Humanism: A Manifesto, Calcutta: Renaissance Publishers,
pp. 2–3.
115. Inprecor, 13 December 1929.
116. Carr, Socialism in One Country, p. 3. See chapter 31. Carr systematically explores
the impact of the 1925 policies on communist parties worldwide, especially
the German, French, British and Italian.
117. Overstreet and Windmiller, Communism in India, p. 142.
118. ‘Genossen Roy ausgeschlossen’, Gegen den Strom, 2(36): 681.
119. These were spread over two years, published under the pseudonym ‘Richard’,
and appeared in volume one and two of Gegen den Strom, 1929–30.
120. Roy, ‘Die Krisis der Kommunistischen Internationale’, Gegen den Strom, 2(39): 8.
121. Ibid., p. 7.
122. S. M. Ganguly. 1984. Leftism in India: M. N. Roy and Indian Politics, 1920–1948.
Calcutta: Minerva, p. 98.
123. Isaac Deutscher. 1959. The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky, 1929–1940. New York:
124. Roy, ‘Die Krisis’, Gegen den Strom, 2(40): 9.
125. Ibid., p. 9.
126. Ibid., p. 7.
127. Roy, ‘Stalin triumphiert’, Gegen den Strom, 3(30): 46.
128. The same was true for Jay Lovestone in the United States and many others.
See Theodore Draper. 1957. The Roots of American Communism, Communism in
American Life, New York: Viking Press, p. 7.
129. Jane Degras, commenting on March 1929 ECCI Manifesto, Jane Degras. 1956.
The Communist International, 1919–1943: Documents. London: Oxford University
Press. vol. 3: p. 21.
130. Roy collates epithets used against him in the communist press, M. N. Roy. 1938c.
Our Differences. Calcutta: Saraswaty Library, p. 27.
131. Adhikari, Documents of the Indian Communist Party, p. 79; It was noted that the
accused at the Meerut Conspiracy Case in 1928 spoke of ‘ex-comrade Roy’, see
Williamson, Communism in India, p. 163.
132. Jawaharlal Nehru. 1962. Autobiography, With Musings on Recent Events in India.
Bombay: Allied Publishers, p. 161.
133. Ibid., p. 154.
134. Jayaprakash Narayan, Socialism to Sarvodaya, 1956. See also letter written to Roy
by Manuel Gomez (alias Charles Philips) from the USA, presenting Jayaprakash
Narayan as a promising student interested in Roy’s work. Purabi Ray et al.
(eds.), Indo-Russian Relations, 1999: 227–36. See discussion in Sibnarayan Ray
(ed.), In Freedom’s Quest, vol. 2: pp. 299–300; See Bhola Singh. 1985. The Political
Ideas of M. N. Roy and Jayaprakash Narayan: A Comparative Study. New Delhi: Ashish
Publishing House, pp. 49–51.
135. J. P. Narayan on M. N. Roy, The Radical Humanist, March 1978, 41:12: p. 8; Also
see Narayan, Socialism to Sarvodaya, p. 10.
136. ‘Gangadhar Adhikari’, Humboldt Universität Archiv, Phil. Fak. 637. On his
association with Roy see Haithcox, Communism and Nationalism in India:
M. N. Roy and Comintern Policy, p. 175.
137. See ‘Memorandum on V. Chattopadhyaya’, by Peel, January 1929, OIOC: L/
PJ/12/280, 29–36.
138. ‘An Anti-Roy Pamphlet’, 1932, in P. C. Joshi Archives, Jawaharlal Nehru
University.
139. Muzaffar Ahmad.1970. Myself and the Communist Party of India, 1920–1929. Calcutta:
National Book Agency, pp. 479–80.
140. Saumyendranath Tagore. 1944. Historical Development of Communist Movement
in India. Calcutta: Red Front, p. 10; Ray (ed.), In Freedom’s Quest, vol. 2: p. 323;
Saumyendranath Tagore, Against the Stream, 1975, 1: xiii.
141. Roy, ‘Probleme der indischen Revolution’, Gegen den Strom, 3(4): 37.
4
Criticism and Incarceration
By the middle of 1930, Roy decided to return to India, after having

considered an invitation by the communists in New York to join them
there.1 Given the rising intimidation campaigns carried out against the
Left by the Nazi party in Berlin, Roy knew Germany was not a good
place for an excommunicated member of the Communist International.2
Stalin’s proroguing of the Comintern in 1929 and the commencement of
his purges had begun transforming the Communist International into
a militant international order. In this context, Roy chose Bombay as
his destination, the major centre of Indian labour unrest. Despite being
almost assured of imprisonment by the British if he returned to India,
Roy felt it was a ‘stage that must be gone through’ in order to remain
involved in Marxist theory and praxis outside the official communist
organisation.3
More than half a million workers participated in over 200 strikes
in India between 1928 and 1931.4 India seemed to be blowing up with
social unrest, with the South Indian Railway strike, the Jamshedpur steel
strike and the numerous Bombay textile mill strikes of 1928 and 1929.5
Gandhi soon inaugurated his civil disobedience campaign with the
Salt March in hopes of disciplining and harnessing labour and peasant
uprisings to press for constitutional reform. The period from 1928 to 1937
also witnessed the rise of the left within the Congress. Jawaharlal
Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose stridently expressed their support of
labour internationalism, Tagore published his Letters from Russia (1930),
students in Calcutta began yearly celebrations of May Day, Lenin Day,
and November Day on the streets.6
Roy’s ‘return’ to India in this context is not to be understood as
the repatriation of an exile. Rather, given how global and porous
the boundaries of the political body of India were throughout this
period, the idea of taking up political action in India after a long stay
abroad was common practice among some of the most eminent Indian
anti-colonial figures of the era, including M. K. Gandhi, Lajpat Rai,
Mohammad Obeidullah, Mohammad Barakatullah and Subhas Chandra
Bose. The irony is that M. N. Roy spent most of this 1930–37 in a colonial
Criticism and Incarceration 99
prison. Yet, the political party he started in India during his brief
stint of activity in Bombay played an important role in Indian politics
during this time, especially in the trade union movement. Meanwhile,
a difference developed between the writings he smuggled out of
prison to guide his political organisation, and those essays he authored
in his prison journals, which addressed themes of sexual politics and
cultural criticism.
The continuity of Roy’s political action between Berlin and Bombay
is striking. After his expulsion from the Communist International in
1929, and with his new transition to united front Luxemburgist politics
following the debacle in China, Roy returned to Berlin and established
the ‘Group of Oppositional Indian Communists’ as a affiliate organisation
to the Communist Party of Germany — Opposition (KPD-O).7 An official
headquarter for the Indian Communist Party was set up in this same
period in London, led by Rajani and Clemens Dutt.8 Roy’s Berlin group,
by contrast, affiliated itself with the Indian National Congress, becoming
one of the two ‘German Branches’ of the Congress in 1929.9 With a num-
ber of Indian students working closely along with him, particularly
Tayab Shaikh, Anadi Bhaduri, Sundar Kabadi and Brajesh Singh, Roy
began setting up an organisation to protest the Comintern’s stance of
‘ultra-leftism’ in India by advocating pro-Congress trade unionism. The
leaders of the Communist Opposition in Germany, especially August
Thalheimer, were similarly arguing the need to break out of the ‘egg
shell’ of communist militancy, and to build strategic alliances with the
Social Democrats, especially in the face of the rising Nazi threat.10
In May 1930, Roy’s group in Berlin picketed the 1930 meeting of the
executive committee of the Socialist Labour International, drawing at-
tention to the Socialists’ unwillingness to condemn British imperialism.11
Roy wrote an ‘Open Letter’ of protest addressed to the Socialist Inter-
national meeting. But sensing that Berlin was not the proper stage
for political activity, Roy sent his young deputies, Tayab Shaikh and
Anadi Bhaduri, ahead to Bombay in June 1930, to prepare the ground-
work for a Communist Opposition party in India. Arriving in August,
the two gathered a core group of supporters, especially C. Y. Chitnis,
Maniben Kara, Charles Mascarenhas, A. N. Shetty, M. R. Shetty and
V. B. Karnik. The group called itself the Committee of Action for Inde-
pendence of India.12
Meanwhile the Nazis secured a major success in the German
federal elections on 14 September 1930. And at the end of October,
Roy embarked by ship for Bombay on a forged German passport, and
arrived in December 1930.13 In the coming months, he met a number

of the leading political leaders of the time, including Bhulabhai Desai,
B. R. Ambedkar, N. M. Joshi and Yusuf Meherally.14 Meanwhile, the
majority of his colleagues in the Communist Party of German Opposition,
many of whom were Jewish, relocated to Paris by 1933.
Roy had discussions with the most eminent young leaders of the
Congress left, Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose, at the Karachi
Congress of March 1933 where he contributed to drafting the ‘Funda-
mental Rights Resolution’ on social justice passed at the Congress that
year.15 His main organiser, Tayab Shaikh, began editing a journal of
the Roy group, The Masses, meanwhile Charles Mascarenhas started a
second affiliated journal, Independent India. Pointing to the transnational
public sphere that Roy inhabited, his articles in The Masses were also
sent to Berlin for publication in INKOPP (Internationale Nachrichten der
Kommunistischen Opposition), a journal he had co-edited before his re-
turn to India. It was not long before a small political party developed,
making swift progress in organising trade union activity in Bombay.
By December 1930, M. R. Shetty, a member of the Roy Group, had become
the leader of the Bombay Dockworkers Union. And at the conference
of the All India Trade Union Congress that met in July 1931, members of
Roy’s party secured three executive positions in the organisation, ending
the communist hold on that trade union.16
But Roy would not see these developments as a free man. On 21 July
1931, he was woken up from sleep at 5:00 a.m. by the Deputy Com-
missioner of Police and his raid party. Police had been tracking Roy’s
movements for some time, and Roy was not going out of his way to hide
from them. Roy had written to his lover, Ellen Gottschalk, who was still
in Berlin, ‘I am taking risks these days, but it feels so exciting… We are
turning out a large quantity of literature, mostly in Indian languages, in
spite of very very strict censorship’.17 Roy had also spent a few months
in rural Uttar Pradesh, working with the non-payment of rent cam-
paigns that arose there.18 Hiding from the police would have entailed
political inefficacy.
Roy’s trial commenced the following month, August, and
Jawaharlal Nehru was a member of Roy’s Defence Committee. Roy was
tried on charges first submitted during the Cawnpore trial of 1924 of
‘conspiracy to deprive the King Emperor of the sovereignty of British
India’.19 He petitioned to have a trial by jury, but the Allahabad High
Court dismissed the petition, claiming that the opinion of laymen
should not handicap the expert view of judges. Taking place in a closed
courtroom, an unusual measure, the trial resulted in the sentence of
twelve years imprisonment in January 1932. In his own words, ‘the blow
was unexpectedly heavy’.20
Roy’s imprisonment gave birth to an international campaign for his
release. Coordinated from Paris by Ellen Gottschalk, a member of the
Communist Party Opposition, letters of protest were sent to the British
India Office by Roger Baldwin of the ACLU, as well as Fenner Brockway
and James Maxton, members of the Independent Labour Party of
Britain.21 Even Albert Einstein, from Princeton, wrote to the American
ambassador in Washington on Roy’s behalf since he had known him from
Berlin anti-colonial circles.22 The Workers’ Age of New York published
an article about the conditions of his imprisonment in April 1932.23 The
Arbeiterpolitik, originally a Berlin labour journal, but recently located to
Paris, published a report on his imprisonment around the same time.24
The Roy Group

During his six-year imprisonment, Roy continued to send letters to his
Indian group outside of prison, relying on sympathetic wardens, jailers
and other inmates to smuggle out his missives.25 In Calcutta, Bombay,
Ahmedabad and Ernakulam, inspired by M. N. Roy, activists made
significant strides in trade unionism, and also in the creation of the
Congress Socialist Party. The Congress Socialist Party, which traces its
roots to meetings between prisoners at the Nasik jail in 1933, was officially
inaugurated in 1934.26 An early meeting of the Congress Socialist Party
in Calcutta in 1934 centred around a critical discussion of M. N. Roy’s
letter from prison insisting that the group should only establish itself
informally, as a working left consensus inside the Congress Party.27 The
decision of the CSP to form itself as a distinct political organisation would
lead to a showdown with Roy after his release in 1937.
In the meantime, members of the Royist group comprised some
of the most important members of the early Congress Socialist Party.
Charles Mascarenhas of Goa, Rajani Mukherjee of Bengal and A. K. Pillai,
a Kerala Congressman, were inaugural members particularly close to
Roy.28 Maniben Kara, one of the most influential members of the early
Roy Group, became leader of Union of Bombay Municipal workers in
September 1932.29 In 1936, she became president of the All India Trade
Union Congress (AITUC). Meanwhile Jayaprakash Narayan, perhaps
the most important leader of the CSP, also relied heavily on M. N. Roy’s
theoretical and strategic writings. But the leaders among Roy’s Group,
especially V. B. Karnik, Tayab Shaikh and Maniben Kara, also sought
out the perspectives of August Thalheimer, who wrote programmatic

letters to them on techniques of united front politics from Paris in
the early 1930s.30 As opposed to the rise of a monolithic ‘communist
internationalism’ in this period, it was precisely the fractures within
communism, and especially the resistance of Opposition Communists
against the Soviet hegemony from the late 1920s onwards, that fuelled
left political movements.31
Prison Writings
Roy’s prison notebooks, the nine volumes of writings that remained
within his journals in jail, were composed of philosophical contem-
plations. Roy wrote about 3,750 pages while in prison — a testament
to the importance of writing in defying the oppression of the prison
cell. The original prison manuscripts of M. N. Roy are today preserved
at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in New Delhi. These were
written between 11 November 1931 (when the first notebook is dated)
and 26 November 1936 (when Roy left jail) in four prisons: Cawnpore,
Bareilly, Almora and Dehra Dun, all towns in Uttar Pradesh. Significant
portions of Roy’s prison writings are dedicated to theoretical medita-
tions on historical materialism, as well as philosophical implications
of new discoveries in theoretical physics, an interest Roy shared with
August Thalheimer in Berlin.32
M. N. Roy’s writing during six years of rather strenuous Class B
imprisonment was broken up into notebooks granted at the warden’s
discretion, and his letters to his European colleagues, recently relocated
to Paris after the rise of the Nazis, bore the blotches of prison censor’s
red ink.33 Any information Roy provided about his physical health was
cancelled out before mailing. The darkness of the prison cell, and the slow
physical destruction brought about by long-term colonial imprisonment
had a powerful effect on Roy’s constitution. Over the course of his six
years in prison, his medical report shows that he suffered from cardiac
dilatation, digestive disturbances, rheumatic pain in the shoulder joint,
pyorrhea (inflammation of the teeth/gums), pains in the pectoral region,
pain in the waist, and that he had three teeth pulled (unnecessarily)
because a dentist could not be requisitioned in time.34 Roy was a body
in pain.35 He was provided with medical care, but only after long periods
of waiting. His request to be transferred to a prison in a cooler climate
was granted but only after years of petition.
Jawaharlal Nehru kept abreast of Roy’s condition in prison, and

was appalled at his treatment. He wrote, in 1936, to the Chief Minister
of U.P., Govind Ballabh Pant, ‘Even if his release cannot be hastened,
he ought at least to be examined thoroughly by competent outside
doctors. He is being kept, and he has been there a long time now, in
the female ward of the Dehra Gaol. You know well what an awful hole
this is. I could not survive this place for many weeks’.36 Roy reached the
nadir of his mental state in early 1935. On 20 January 1935 he wrote to
Ellen: ‘I presume you are expecting some report about my work. Lately,
not much was done. I have been feeling rather out of sorts — mentally’.
The following months were the darkest period of his prison life, and
suicidal thoughts began creeping in. ‘My patience is getting exhausted.
Nothing can stand endless strain. I might not be able to keep my record
of a well-behaved prisoner intact; though, if I did anything too angry
to protest against his grossly unfair treatment, that would not be
misbehaving either morally or legally’.37 In June, he wrote ever more
grimly: ‘In another month, I shall complete five years of this life; and it
is practically certain that the end will be still several months off. I am
still of the opinion that death is no worse than more than five years of
living death. But these are temptations which weaken one’s resolve’.38
In July, he continued with even more despair: ‘On the whole, I feel
miserable and depressed, worse than ever during the last four years.
Therefore, I am more confirmed than ever in my opinion that death
would be preferable to more than five years (at a stretch) of this life. I
hope it would not be necessary to make the choice actually’.39 And by
October, only one month before his planned release, the oppression
of the imperial jail — the subtle, quiet violence that punished through
silencing and depriving — had almost defeated Roy’s spirit: ‘I am tired of
this world. It appears to be doomed to destruction or a possible rebirth
after protracted period of torture and torment’.40
Yet, there was a counterpoint at work during these same six years.
In the prison space of privation, of all places, Roy said he became an
‘Epicurean’.41 ‘To seek happiness is the object of life. Epicurus taught
that every pleasure is good, every pain is evil. Every pleasure is good
because it results from knowledge; pain is evil, because it is caused by
ignorance’.42 This avowal led Roy to shift his attention to the problems
of sexual politics. In the prison context of minimal allocations for daily
life, he began to think more maximally about the requirements of
individual freedom.
Cultural Criticism
The writings of M. N. Roy that remained within the prison cell, locked
away in his prison notebooks until his release, launched a cultural
critique of mainstream Indian nationalism by drawing attention to
the relationship between nationalist politics and sexual oppression.
Roy made reference not only to Freud’s notion of repression, but also
to Clara Zetkin and Alexandra Kollontai’s way of connecting Marxist
revolution with the end of male domination and women’s sexual liber-
ation.43 In Roy’s prison writings on sexual politics, he advocated a rad-
ically different approach from that of the great Indian psychoanalyst of
Calcutta, Girindrasekhar Bose (1853–1939), who argued that Indian sub-
jectivities, unlike European ones, did not have a submerged ‘id’ charged
with sexual desire as existed in European civilisation.44 Girindrasekhar
Bose, as a member of the Swadeshi avant-garde, maintained that Hindu
dharma created a social order in which polymorphous perversity was
not at the base of personality, but rather a transcendent spiritual self.45
While such a claim for the civilisational distinction of Indian psyches
from Western psyches was opposed to M. N. Roy’s insistence on the
global commonality of repressed sexual drives across cultures, we should
not miss that both Bose and Roy assumed that there was some hidden or
shrouded force at the depth of the self.46 The notion of deep selfhoods, out
of which transcendent energies could spring, was a shared idea stemming
from the nineteenth-century Bengali context. That Roy’s discussion of
sexual politics aimed at criticising the very notions of culture and Hindu
dharmic order that thinkers such as Girindrasekhar Bose championed,
does not mean that Roy’s views simply ventriloquised Western values.
Once we resist the binary between western knowledge and authentic
Indian (Hindu) knowledge, we begin to appreciate Roy’s position as an
intermediary, expressing views that connoted the polyphony of the
worlds he travelled between.
In his essay, ‘Why Men are Hanged’, written in 1932 in Bareilly prison,
Roy provided examples from newspaper articles he read of individuals
whose sexualities were constrained or dominated by oppressive social
mores. First, he spoke of a young man from a small town who because of
the level of sexual repression at home, was apparently driven to have a
relationship with a relative. He also recounted the case of a young woman
driven to kill her sixty-year-old husband due to the extent of her sexual
frustration. In each case, social oppression in the realm of sexuality
caused violent eruptions of individual agency. Roy concludes that the
‘criminals’ were not at fault, but the social order they lived in.
In early 1935, Roy records his increasing preoccupation with Freud,

Adler and Jung.47 ‘Sex instinct is one of the two sovereign factors of
organic existence (the higher form). It cannot be suppressed’.48 In
prison, Roy envisioned a utopia of sexual liberation. ‘Let the Indian
masses taste the joy of life, and their natural love of life will no longer
be camouflaged in all sorts of religious superstition … it will flow openly
into real spiritual values’. This focus on sexuality, certainly informed
by his 1920s Berlin background, provided him with another ‘horizontal’
category, apart from class, to affirm the ways Indians belong to the
world. Roy asserted that all humans share their ‘animal instincts’ and
biological drives in common. ‘In reality, he is an animal. His whole being,
including the much-vaunted spiritual qualities, is driven by impulses
that are common to all the higher forms of organisms. He is so proud
of his intelligence, but he knows so little of the animal instincts that
dominate the thin layer of his conscious mind... Thus the superiority
of the human being is a fiction...’49
Roy’s vision of freedom entailed individuals engaging in unhindered
traffic with their material surroundings, and free experience of the
pleasure of the senses without the limitation of social codes or taboos.
The insistence on the flux and traffic of sense enjoyment, not on an
unchanging construct of authenticity, was Roy’s ‘Epicurean’ path to
freedom. ‘Epicurean pleasure is not to eat, drink and be merry, but know-
ledge. Knowledge of the causes of the constantly changing things frees
man from fear and anxiety which arise from the feeling of helplessness,
and that freedom makes man happy’. 50 Roy again emphasised: ‘To seek
happiness is the object of life. Epicurus taught that every pleasure is
good, every pain is evil. Every pleasure is good because it results from
knowledge; pain is evil, because it is caused by ignorance’. 51
Roy’s focus on the freeing of sexual drives conflicted with the writings
of many feminist nationalist writers of the time, such as Rameshwari
Nehru, Annie Besant, Sarojini Naidu, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya and
Lakshmi Menon, who presented women most often as mothers and
wives, and situated women’s welfare within the framework of national
culture.52 It is difficult to evaluate Roy’s contribution to debates on Indian
feminism and sexual politics. Some of his essays, which he deemed too
controversial, were only published posthumously in 1957. Roy made no
sustained contribution to the theory or practice of the Indian feminist
movement after his release, apart from the publication of some prison
writings. Instead, his prison preoccupation with sexual politics seemed to
have chiefly served as an avenue for criticising forms of social oppression
beyond the framework of class analysis.
Culture as Conformity
The discussion of sexual politics served Roy’s larger intent, articulated
from his prison years into the 1940s, of breaking the frame of a bounded
national culture. Roy insisted that what he derisively called ‘Gandhism’
was dangerous because it construed culture as a corporate ahistorical
entity, defined by dogmatic notions of authenticity, social hygiene
and bodily discipline. ‘Profession of spiritualism commits Gandhian
materialists to the vulgarist, most-brutal practice of materialism…
Spiritualist dogmas hide anti-democratic counter-revolutionary,
tendencies of orthodox nationalism’.53 For Roy, the ‘vulgar materialism’
of ‘Gandhism’ lay precisely in its insistence on authenticity — on
unchanging boundaries of group identity.
Another aspect of Roy’s prison writings focused on the implications
of revolutionary discoveries in the field of physics, especially relativity
theory and the quantum view of matter. Roy’s interest in theoretical
physics first developed while in Berlin, the world centre for the
development of quantum theory, with Albert Einstein, Max Planck and
Erwin Schrödinger working in the city, and Werner Heisenberg and
Max Born not far off in Göttingen. The philosophical implications of the
remarkable new discoveries of a non-Newtonian universe formed one of
the favourite subjects of discussion between Roy and August Thalheimer.
Thalheimer wrote an essay in 1925 on the philosophical implications of
the interwoven fabric of space and time seen from a Marxist point of
view.54 Roy, in his prison writings, discussed the resonance of the new
quantum theory of matter with Spinoza’s monistic notion of the universe,
and with Marx’s historical materialism, both of which took no recourse
to a transcendent or metaphysical realm. In prison, Roy wrote a number
of essays along these lines. In an entry on the ‘Theory of Knowledge’,
for example, he explained, ‘Individual “self” is an arbitrary concept. It
has no foundation than the mistaken notion that my body is a stable
unit having an existence distinct from the rest of physical existence…
My physical being is a continuously changing bubble in the ocean of
cosmic flux, a mere ripple in the endless flow of becoming’. 55 It was the
eradication of fixed differences, and the vindication of history not as a
linear progression, but as a field of interconnection and relativity, that
captivated Roy.
Individual egos and intelligences were interwoven into the phys-
ical universe of perpetual flux.56 ‘As a matter of fact’, Roy wrote, the
‘external world’ is a misleading term. As integral parts of the world of
experience, our bodies and our cognitive faculties… are themselves all
parts of the world’. 57
Thus the erection of an ahistorical realm of Indian culture based on
reconstructed notions of Asian civilisation generated social violence,
Roy believed. ‘The nationalist leaders are opposed not only to socialism;
they are antagonistic to a democratic reconstruction of the Indian
society. Consequently, every one of these pompous fighters for “Purna
Swaraj” is sheep in a tiger’s skin. They will compromise with imperialism.
They are bound to do so’.58 Roy pointed out the affinity of many Indian
nationalists of his day for the notion of ‘race purity’. He mockingly
remarked, ‘The northern Indians are the stoutest protagonists of the
cult of Aryanism. It is such a misfortune that they are so brown — to
the extent of blackness!...’59 Roy noted that in some circles, ‘Germany
[has become] the ideal of Indian nationalism. In as much as Hitler’s
Germany possessed all the “spiritual” characteristics and more, it is
sure to have sympathisers among Indian nationalists of the orthodox
school’.60 Leaders from the Hindu Right such as Hedgewar and Savarkar
publicly praised Hitler’s pursuit of race purity. With the rise of interest
in eugenics in India in the 1930s, including projects to ‘Hinduise’ the
untouchables and to perfect the racial stock of India, Roy was respond-
ing to a not uncommon fascination with Nazi Germany in some Indian
nationalist circles.61
Roy knew first-hand of the violence and vulgarity of the Nazis and
fathomed the extent of the danger they represented. ‘This wild paroxysm
of a moribund social system has for the time overwhelmed Germany,
and its poisonous infection seems to be threatening other countries …
the ideology of this bloodiest, vulgarism of materialist phenomena of
the capitalist culture is intensely spiritualist’.62 The vulgar materialism
of ‘spiritualist’ ideology resided in the establishment of ahistorical
categories of authenticity that shrouded the continually changing
historical quality of human existence.
At the crux of Roy’s prison writings was the reimagining of explo-
sive subjectivities, pregnant with energy to destroy societal forms of
stagnancy and oppression. Whereas he thought in terms of explosive
dharmic energy during the Swadeshi years of his youth and of the erup-
tion of peasant consciousness in 1920s Berlin, in prison he focused on
the explosiveness of the sexual drives, and the ways in which sexual
politics could be employed to transgress and critique the boundaries
of collective identity. But, here too, one senses the traces of Brahmo
exegesis, devoted, as it was, to reading interconnection and unity
beneath the apparent world of distinct forms.
Notes
1. A. K. Hindi. 1938. The Man Who Looked Ahead, Ahmedabad: Modern Publishing
House, p. 242.
2. In February 1933, Nazi police imprisoned Indian anti-colonial activists. The
Communist Party was banned in March 1933. See OIOC: L/PJ/12/73.
3. Roy to Ellen Gottschalk, 11 August 1931, in M. N. Roy. 1943c. Letters from Jail,
Fragments of a Prisoner’s Diary. Dehra Dun: Indian Renaissance Association, p. 1.
4. David Laushey. 1975. Bengal Terrorism and the Marxism Left. Calcutta: Firma
Mukhopadhyay, p. 192.
5. Rajnarayan Chandavarkar. 1994. The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India, Busi-
ness Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 236, 399ff.
6. This began in 1934. See Dipesh Chakrabarty. 1989. Rethinking Working Class History:
Bengal, 1890–1940. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 127.
7. John Patrick Haithcox. 1971. Communism and Nationalism in India: M. N. Roy and
Comintern Policy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 166.
8. Gene Overstreet and Marshall Windmiller. 1959. Communism in India, Berkeley:
University of California Press, p. 148.
9. See ‘Indian Information Bureau and Chattopadhyaya’, 15 May 1930, OIOC: L/
PJ/12/223: 79–81. Compare Haithcox, Communism and Nationalism, p. 166.
10. August Thalheimer, Zurück in die Eierschale des Marxismus?, IISG: KPD-O, p. 12.
11. A. K. Hindi. 1938. The Man who Looked Ahead, Ahmedabad: Modern Publishing
House, p. 220.
12. John Haithcox. 1971. Communism and Nationalism in India. Princeton: Princeton
13. Sibnarayan Ray. 2005. In Freedom’s Quest: A Study of the Life and Works of M. N. Roy.
Calcutta: Minerva, vol. 3: p. 192.
14. V. B. Karnik. 1978. M. N. Roy: Political Biography. Bombay: Nav Jagriti Samaj, p. 339.
15. Ibid., p. 345, for assertion of Roy’s involvement. Gandhi took this resolution with
him to the Second Round Table meeting in London in 1930. Also, Leonard Gordon.
1990. Brothers Against the Raj: A Biography of Indian Nationalists Sarat and Subhas
Chandra Bose. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 244; Nehru emphatically
denied this assertion. See Nehru, Autobiography, 2003: 267, 268.
16. Haithcox, Nationalism and Communism in India, p. 175. G. L. Kandalkar and
J. N. Mitra were vice presidents, and Tayab Shaikh was one of the secretaries.
17. Roy’s Letter to Ellen, 6 February 1931, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library,
Delhi (NMML): Ellen Gottschalk File.
18. Sumit Sarkar. 1983. Modern India, 1885–1947. Delhi: Macmillan, p. 315;
Horace Williamson. 1976. Communism and India, chapter 17.
19. ‘Judgment’, OIOC: L/PJ/12/421: 13.
20. Roy to Ellen Gottschalk, 18 January 1932, NMML: Ellen Gottschalk File.
22. Einstein to the Ambassador of England, Washington, 17 September 1934. NMML:
M. N. Roy Papers, ‘Relation to Imprisonment’.
23. OIOC: L/PJ/12/421, p. 62.

24. 28 January 1932, OIOC: L/PJ/12/421, pp. 9, 28.
25. Karnik, M. N. Roy: A Political Biography, p. 199; M. N. Roy. 1932. ‘My Defence’.
Reproduced in: Sibnaryan Ray (ed.). 1990. Selected Works of M. N. Roy, pp. 573–646.
M. N. Roy. 1938b. ‘On the Congress Constitution’, Calcutta: Independent
India; M. N. Roy. ‘Letters to the Congress Socialist Party (1934, 1935, 1936) in Selected
Works of M. N. Roy, Sibnarayan Ray (ed.). Delhi: Oxford University Press, vol. 4.
26. Sarkar, Modern India, p. 332.
27. Roy, Letters to the Congress Socialist Party (1934, 1935, 1936) in Selected Works of
M. N. Roy, p. 4.
28. Karnik, M. N. Roy: A Political Biography, p. 407.
29. V. B. Karnik. 1960. Indian Trade Unions, Bombay: Labour Education Service, p. 93ff.
30. See Thalheimer to Karnik, 24 May 1934, Paris. NMML: Roy Papers, Karnik
Files. The wording of this long letter makes clear that it is part of a lengthy
series of correspondence. Thalheimer insists that ‘a regular correspondence is
essential…’
31. This is the case with the Roy Group and the CSP in India. But the fate of the POUM
in 1936–37 in Spain provides another, fateful, example. See E. H. Carr. 1984. The
Comintern and the Spanish Civil War. New York: Pantheon Books.
32. Roy mentions in a letter from prison the work that August Thalheimer had
begun in finding applications of discoveries in theoretical physics to the
theory of historical materialism. See Letters from Prison, Roy to Ellen Gottschalk,
16 February 1932; See August Thalheimer. 1928. Spinozas Stellung in der
Vorgeschichte des dialektischen Materialismus. Wien: Verlad Fur Literatur und
Politik. In prison Roy was reading Stanely Eddington and James Jeans. See Roy
to Sneevliet, IISH: File of A. Pannekoek, 18 July 1934.
33. See M. N. Roy, Letters from Prison, footnote to 11 July 1932: 27, ‘as a matter of
fact, all references to my health and conditions of life in jail were struck out
from my letters…’
34. Superintendent to Gottschalk, NMML: Bareilly Prison Files, 1933, p. 33, Roy to
Gottschalk, 13 September 1920, NMML, Roy to Gottschalk, 22 September 1933,
Roy to Gottschalk, 19 June 1934, Roy to Gottschalk, 24 February 1936.
35. Elaine Scarry’s insights into the objectification of the body in pain are useful
here. See Elaine Scarry. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the
World. New York: Oxford University Press, p. 147ff.
36. Jawaharlal Nehru, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, 7: 657, 658.
37. Roy to Ellen Gottschalk, 24 May 1936, NMML.
38. Roy to Gottschalk, 20 June 1936.
39. Roy to Gottschalk, 21 July 1935.
40. Roy to Gottschalk, 21 October 1936.
41. Prison Notebook 2, 91b, NMML.
42. Prison Notebook 2, 90b, NMML.
43. Roy to Gottschalk, 20 January 1935, NMML. Alexandra Kollontai. 1972. Sexual
Relations and the Class Struggle: Love and the Morality. Bristol: Falling Wall Press,
pp. 6–8.
44. Girindrasekhar Bose. 1921. Concept of Repression. Calcutta: n.p.

45. Ashis Nandy. 2004. ‘The Savage Freud: The First Non-Western Psychoanalyst
and the Politics of Secret Selves in Colonial India’, in Bonfire of Creeds, p. 345.
46. See Christiane Hartnack. 2001. Psychoanalysis in Colonial India. New York: Oxford
University Press, pp. 127–33; Ashis Nandy in his essay, ‘The Savage Freud’ in
Bonfire of Creeds, p. 369.
47. Roy to Gottschalk, 20 January 1935, NMML.
48. Prison Notebook 5, 338, NMML.
49. Prison Notebook 5, 336.
50. Prison Notebook 2, 91b.
52. Kumari Jayawardena. 1986. Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World. London:
Zed Books 1986. The complexity of women’s ‘self-configuration’ within the
discourse of nationalist politics is addressed by Mrinali Sinha. 2008. ‘Gender in
the Critiques of Colonialism and Nationalism’, Sumit and Tanika Sarkar (eds),
Women and Social Reform in Modern India. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
pp. 452–72. On critiques of gender relations in literature of the time, particu-
larly within the Progressive Writers Movement of this period, see Priyamvada
Gopal. 2005. Literary Radicalism in India: Gender Nation, and the Transition to Inde-
pendence. London: Routledge, p. 65ff. On the role of men in feminist movements
in India, see Gail Minault. 1998. Secluded Scholars: Women’s Education and Muslim
Social Reform in Colonial India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, p. 11.
53. Prison Notebook 5, 164a, NMML.
54. August Thalheimer. 1925. ‘Über einige Grundbegriffe der physikalischen Theori
der Relativität von Geschichtspunkte des dialektischen Materialismus’ in Unter
dem Banner des Marxismus, vol. 1. pp. 203–338.
55. Roy, Prison Notebook 7, ‘Theory of Knowledge’, p. 183. Several of Roy’s essays on
the theme of science were published later in the volume Science and Philosophy.
Calcutta: Renaissance Publishers, 1947.
56. Prison Notebook 8, 98a.
57. Prison Notebook 2, 184.
59. Roy to Gottschalk, 22 September 35, NMML.
60. Prison Notebook 8, 161a.
61. Themes of corporatisation, public works, eugenics and social regeneration
received much shrift in Indian political science of the day. Keshav Baliram
Hedgewar founded the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in 1925, and the group
grew quickly in the 1930s. Leaders such as, M. S. Gowalkar, expressed early
support for the Nazi Lebensraum offensives, and conceived of Hindus as an
ethnos that had to likewise claim living space from the Muslim populations.
See Walter Andersen and Shridhar Damle. 1987. The Brotherhood in Saffron.
Boulder: Westview Press, p. 40ff.
5
Interstitial Politics
Roy’s travel through the deterritorial body of India created a mediated

worldview that could not be assimilated into the mainstream political
camps of the day. One consequence of the deterritorial nationalism of
the early twentieth century was that it produced in-between figures
such as M. N. Roy, on the margin of multiple worlds, but centred in
none. In the period from 1936, after his release from prison, up until
1946 when he decided to exit political life, Roy positioned himself outside
three regimens of anti-colonial form, Gandhian nationalist discourse at
the All-India level, the neo-Swadeshi politics of Bengal led by Subhas
Chandra Bose, as well as the orthodoxy of communist internationalism.
As opposed to notions of cultural continence, Roy continually advanced
his scandalous political project of cultural and conceptual promiscuity.
His two major causes in the years of the Second World War — strident
anti-fascism and the support of the war, and the campaign for
Hindu–Muslim solidarity — show in practical ways how he insisted on
the need to mediate identity divides. By trying to bridge and amalgamate
domains seen as opposed, Roy made himself a persona non grata in Indian
politics in the specific context of the Second World War.
Anti-colonial struggle in the twentieth century depended on a set
of modernist styles for contemplating value, truth, social change and
the form of the anticipated good society. It was partly marked by the
pursuit of form, of boundaries of moral order, and what Axel Honneth
has called the pursuit of ‘self-esteem’.1 But anti-colonialism also sought
the transgression of boundaries and the mediation of identitarian
boundaries, what we might call, following Honneth, the wish for
‘solidarity’.2 In his discussion of modern patterns of self-realisation,
Honneth speaks of the development of ‘internal freedom’ by the
cultivation of respect through ‘group-pride and collective honor’.3 The
anti-colonial struggle can be understood as such a form-centred project.
However, this pursuit of internal freedom is supplemented by the effort
to create trans-group sympathies. ‘Solidarity can be understood as an
interactive relationship in which subjects mutually sympathize with their
various different ways of life because, among themselves, they esteem
each other symmetrically’. 4 According to Honneth, the internal freedom

derived from group-pride and the ‘symmetrical recognition’ beyond the
boundaries of group identity with other groups constitutes two aspects of
the modernist pursuit of political freedom.5 Roy’s thought represents a
heightened case in a broad family relation of anti-colonial discussions
about solidarity and the building of trans-group sympathy.
On Stepping Out of Prison

Roy stepped out of prison in November 1936. The new constitution
promulgated in 1935, the Government of India Act, threw down a new
gauntlet to anti-colonial leaders. By 1937, the Indian National Congress
formed provincial Ministries, an act spoken of as the ‘rightward
shift’ of Congress politics in these years, both in terms of a growing
de-emphasis on questions of social reform, but also a growing stress
on constitutionalist as opposed to radical politics.6 Nehru was at the
peak of his ‘infatuation with mass politics’ in 1936, but by the time of
the formation of ministries in 1937, the Congress was coming under the
increasing control by a conservative high command.7 In the first years
after his emergence from prison, Roy concerned himself chiefly with
orienting himself within this new field of politics. He not only emerged
physically diminished, but appeared to some onlookers within the
nationalist mainstream as a man deformed first by his deep immersion
in international communism, and then again by his rancorous break with
it. To many, Roy represented a disruption of the regimen of anti-colonial
autonomy. ‘I find myself in a rather peculiar position’, Roy noted soon
after his release. ‘One section of the Congress looks upon me with sus-
picion, as a dangerous communist intriguer, trying to press through some
invidious scheme, and another section, the Socialist Section, says that
here is a man who is a traitor to communism… But I have walked into
that position with open eyes and I stand to-day with clear conviction
and these doubts and disbeliefs about me will be dispelled before long,
and that will be done by my action’.8
As a communist, Roy proved himself a contrarian, a rebel against
relays of institutionalising power within the Communist International.
Now after six years in prison isolation, Indian anti-colonial nationalists
of many walks were suspicious of him — suspicious of where he owed
his allegiance and what he intended to do. The fear and distrust of
M. N. Roy from within mainstream anti-colonial movements, the way
in which he was pictured by some as a figure deserving scorn, suggests
Interstitial Politics 113
that he was more than contrarian — he was interstitial and taboo. His
life course and his political philosophy epitomised a temporality of
global circulation that seemed to contaminate and infect the regimens
of anti-colonial morality and discipline. The global crisis of the Second
World War, and the sense in these years that radical political change
was imminent had the effect of strengthening party disciplines and
group identities in the anticipatory competition for representation in
the postcolonial state apparatus.
The Gandhian National Body

The suspicion accorded to Roy throughout the 1940s was largely due
to his unyielding criticism of regimes of cultural continence and his
resistance to retrenchment by the Indian National Congress and other
groups as they articulated visions of strong autonomy.9 On the All-India
level, Mahatma Gandhi focused on building self-esteem for independence
by training Indians in cultural continence, austerity, and the practices
of a territorialised selfhood.10 Gandhi wrote in his journal, The Harijan, of
1934 that ‘culture is the fruit of compulsory continence… If there is no
compulsory pre-nuptial continence, a society will display little energy’.11
Gandhi’s practice of political liberation, from the early experiments
at the Phoenix colony to the concluding period during the Second World
War, concentrated on the organisation of a continent and autonomous
Indian nation body, both in the physical and the political sense. This
can be seen in his critical reinterpretation of the term ‘Swadeshi’ during
the decline of the movement after the First World War. As we saw,
Swadeshi, under Gandhi’s revision, referred to the practices necessary
for constituting Indian autonomy.12 He pursued a reorganisation of
individual physiques as part of the symbolic warfare orchestrated
against British domination. His practices of renunciation and personal
discipline aimed to attain ‘non-violence and truth’. The satyagrahi
‘must have a living faith in God ... he must be leading a chaste life and
be ready and willing for the sake of his cause to give up his life and his
possessions … he must be a habitual khadi-wearer and spinner. This is
essential for India. He must be a teetotaller and be free from the use
of other intoxicants in order that his reason may be always unclouded
and his mind constant’.13 Gandhi also recommended purges and fasting,
especially in his 1920s Young India journal. He favoured experiments
with dietetics, including vegetarianism and eating ‘unfired foods’. These
would train both the physical body and the nation– body to be continent,
to wean itself off spiritual subjection to the West, which ‘[had] germs in
it, certainly, of the true type’.14 On specific occasions, Gandhi undertook
spectacular fasts, ‘fasts until death’, in order to provide an example of
autonomy and continence.
To protest the divisive scheme for political representation of untouch-
ables outlined in the 1932 Communal Award, Gandhi went on ‘indefinite’
hunger strike, eventually lasting three weeks, and culminating in the
Poona Pact. Speaking of his decision to begin the fast, Gandhi commented,
‘unfortunately for me, God or Truth has sent me this as it appears to me,
much later than it should have come. But as I cannot be the judge of
God Himself, I have submitted to His peremptory injunction’.15 In 1939,
shortly before the Tripuri Congress, Gandhi again began the spectacle of
a grand fast, this time to protest the incarceration of political prisoners
at Rajkot. As a commentator in the Harijan noted ‘it is purer than any
previous fast undertaken by Gandhiji — excepting the Three Weeks’
Fast of 1933 (sic)… It has been described as a Christ-like “self-imposed
death”… resolved upon in order that others may live’.16 The timing of
the fast, however, also suggests that it was also intended to ‘purify’ the
Congress, which met at Tripuri at the same time and threatened to
swerve towards the competing principle of Subhas Chandra Bose’s neo-
Swadeshi politics. ‘In my opinion’, wrote Gandhi in this context, ‘the one
and only task before the Congress is to make supreme efforts to clean
the Congress house of proved corruption and impurities. The strongest
resolutions that the Congress may pass will be of no value if there should
be no incorruptible organisation to enforce them’.17
Control of the appetite and cleansing of the body also related
to abstinence from sexual activity. ‘From that day when I began
brahmacharya, our freedom began’, Gandhi commented in his
Autobiography. ‘My wife became a free woman, free from my authority
as her lord and master, and I became free from my slavery to my own
appetite which she had to satisfy’.18 Gandhi insisted that abstinence was a
necessity for ethical political action. ‘Chastity is one of the greatest dis-
ciplines without which the mind cannot attain requisite firmness. A man
who is unchaste loses stamina, becomes emasculated and cowardly. He
whose mind is given over to animal passions is not capable of any great
effort’.19 His speaking tours throughout villages and towns in India often
touched on the theme of abstinence, sometimes even receiving the
weight of his attention as with his tours in the context of the Poona Pact
of 1932 and his insistence on Hindu unity across caste boundaries.20 This
was far from a question of the regulation of intimate bodily functions
alone. It was a politically efficacious practice of autonomy that Gandhi

wanted, creating a culture among much larger swathes of the population
beyond the elites. Bodily asceticism was a means of counteracting what
elite anti-colonial politicians called ‘Mobocracy’, in the pursuit of a new
populist form of political mobilisation that would successfully coordinate
insurgency across classes.21 ‘Thirty-four years of continuous experience
and experimenting in truth and non-violence have convinced me that
non-violence cannot be sustained unless it is linked to conscious body-
labour and finds expression in our daily contact with our neighbours’,
retorted Gandhi to his critics.22 The practice of sexual continence had the
effect of giving the nation–body dignity, of inspiring self-esteem, and of
defining clear boundaries of separation and austerity from the lures of
Anglicised colonial power and status. The special capacity of Indians, as a
national group, to perform autonomy in the midst of colonial oppression
characterised India’s special message to the world, Gandhi maintained.
‘India has, I think, a peculiar place today in the colonies of the world.
It has both a moral prestige and organisational strength enjoyed by
few colonies. The others look to it for a lead in many matters...’23 Roy
spoke of a different principle of anti-colonial struggle, which operated
through bridging boundaries, deterritorial eruptive acts of creative
amalgamation, and the striving for cultural unions.
Non-Indian Indian
Roy understood himself in his post-prison years as a non-Indian Indian.
The notion of the non-Jewish Jew was used by Isaac Deutscher to describe
a category of Jewish intellectuals situated on the borderlines of European
Jewish communities, while also standing on the margins of European
nation–state cultures.24 It is a particularly apposite concept to use in
connection with M. N. Roy, since Deutscher’s interest in the cultural
location of the doubled outsider stemmed from his own experience as a
member of the Polish–Jewish communist community of 1920s and 1930s,
a group Roy knew well, given his close association with the German
Communist Party Opposition. Roy too felt himself to be a misfit to linear
traditions and thus to ‘comprehend more clearly the great movement
and the great contradictoriness of nature and society’.25
Upon Roy’s release from prison, he ostensibly had all the needed
credentials for becoming a major player on the stage of national politics,
and he wasted no time in arriving at his ‘Waterloo’, as one observer at
the time commented.26 After prison, he travelled directly to Bareilly
to meet Jawaharlal, where the two held long talks. Roy recalled,
‘we discussed a number of current political problems and found our-
selves in agreement on most of them… I can say that I shall be able to work
in close cooperation with him’. 27 Jawaharlal Nehru, in his presidential
speech, welcomed the recently alighting Roy at the Faizpur Congress of
1936, saying ‘Comrade M. N. Roy has just come to us after a long and most
distressing period in prison… he comes with fresh mind and heart…’28
He had ‘a halo around his name’, Subhas Chandra Bose remembered, and
young intellectuals crowded to listen to his speeches.29 Roy was viewed as
a ‘mystery man’ in the press, with a formidable revolutionary pedigree
but his cards still to be played. After listening to Roy’s programme for
social revolution, Gandhi offered Roy the biting advice that he should
rest and stay out of active politics.30 At the inception of Roy’s new weekly
magazine, Independent India in 1937, Gandhi asked him to ‘render mute
service to the cause of Indian freedom’.31
In 1938, Roy’s name was mentioned in league with Rajendra Prasad,
Subhas Chandra Bose and Jawaharlal Nehru as among the young leaders
of national struggle. And yet, at this same time, he was already writing in
letters to friends of his sense of unease with the Congress institution.32
Adherence to Gandhian discipline would be the deal-breaker between
Nehru and Roy. If Roy was a heretic within the context of the Comintern
of the 1920s, a fringe communist who continually criticised the Euro-
centrism and the regimentation of the organisation, he situated himself
in a similarly contrarian position within the Indian National Congress
of the late 1930s. By 1939, in the context of the incipient world war,
Nehru began to appraise Roy as a threat to Congress unity.33 While Nehru
praised Roy’s intellectual work as ‘the only attempt to develop a definite
[social] policy’, he also commented that it was ‘clearly at variance with
anything we have done so far’, and ‘a complete break with the past’. For
Nehru, Roy was making it all too clear that he was ‘utterly out of touch
with realities in India to-day’.34
Such critiques at first only heightened Roy’s conviction to nevertheless
still find a fringe for himself within the Congress organisation as a critic
of the Gandhian leadership. Roy’s main critique of the Congress after
1937 centred on the increasingly regimented political party, what he
called an anti-colonial ‘army’ headed by Gandhi and his inner circle
that ‘imposed from above’ their tactics on the ‘rank and file’.35 On
the workings of the Congress, Roy said, ‘there is more than enough
of centralisation, but it is not democratic centralisation. It is rather
authoritarian–dictatorial’.36 The criticism recalled his stance towards
the Comintern in the late 1920s before his return to India.
Foreshadowing his official break with the Congress in August 1940, he

wrote to Gandhi, ‘if, for no other fault than the courage of our conviction
and our devotion to the cause of Indian freedom, we shall ever be driven
out of the Congress, then the responsibility of weakening and destroying
this organisation will belong to others’.37 In 1940, when Roy ran for
Congress president on an ‘anti-fascist’, pro-war stance, he received a
mere 183 votes compared with Abul Kalam Azad’s 1,864 votes.38 The
electoral insignificance of M. N. Roy by 1940 shows how much things
had changed in just three years, since the initial Congress excitement
over his release.39
Neo-Swadeshi Deterritorial Nationalism

If Gandhi’s Swaraj politics envisioned territorialisation of the Indian
nation–body, there was another powerful trajectory of Indian anti-
colonialism that originated in Bengal, and asserted that autonomy
could best be established through deterritorial practices of travel,
coalition-building and modernist cultural promiscuity. It was most
strongly represented by the neo-Swadeshi global nationalism of Subhas
Chandra Bose in the 1930s and 1940s. Ever since the early 1920s, when
Gandhi was establishing his major role in All-Indian politics, Bengali Left
politics defined itself in contradistinction to him. Elements in the Bengal
Congress remained a prodigal son to Gandhi’s national paternalism. The
birth of the communist politics in Bengal — a region in which it had one
of its most important expressions in the 1930s onwards — was also often
phrased in anti-Gandhian terms.40 Many leaders in the Bengal Congress,
typified in these years by the charismatic Subhas Chandra Bose, grew
organically out of the Swadeshi underground of the early part of the
century and favoured eruptive revolution and global travel through
the deterritorial body of India. In his famous 1922 Congress presidential
speech, the famed Bengali leader, Chittaranjan Das, the mentor of Subhas
Chandra Bose, asserted the aims of anti-colonial nationalism as part of
a larger global movement. He enunciated a new direction for the anti-
colonial struggle that diverged from a politics of physical and political
continence and spiritual purity.
In his critique of the Gandhi’s Swaraj politics of abstinence and
inwardness, C. R. Das proclaimed, ‘I admit that our freedom must be won
by ourselves but such a bond of friendship and love of sympathy and
cooperation, between India and the rest of Asia, nay, between India and
all the liberty loving people of the world is destined to bring about world
peace. World peace to my mind means the freedom of every nationality,
and I go further and say that no nation on the face of the earth can be
really free when other nations are in bondage’.41 This Swadeshi-era
emphasis on deterritorial politics gave birth to the claim that Indians
must participate in alliances of global reach.42
There was an interplay between autonomy and solidarity in Subhas
Chandra Bose’s politics and thought. He typified the workings of neo-
Swadeshi politics in the 1930s and 1940s, and represented a style of
politics different from Gandhi’s more emphatic insistence on austere
autonomy, and M. N. Roy’s heightened argument for radical solidarity
and amalgamation. The style of Bose’s politics derived directly from
the global temporal and spatial framework of avant-garde Swadeshi
politics. He established his political base in Vienna in 1933, travelling
to Czechoslovakia, Poland and Germany, France and Italy. In 1934, he
travelled through Romania, Turkey, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. On all
of these journeys, he met political dignitaries, spoke of the future
needs of independent India, but also placed himself in the position of an
observer, remarking on social organisation, administration, scientific
developments and cultural norms of the societies he encountered, with
the intent of bringing the best of these influences back to India.43
After a period back in India, Subhas Chandra Bose again travelled
abroad as a worldly envoy of Indian autonomy in 1937, making stops
in Naples and London, again meeting dignitaries, academics and anti-
colonial comrades such as Irish President de Valera. And finally, in
1941, Bose made his grandest gesture of deterritoriality by escaping
British house arrest and travelling with the help of supporters to Kabul,
then on by train to Moscow to finally reach Hitler’s Berlin. Subhas
Chandra Bose had been attempting to re-establish an interconnected
infrastructure for deterritorial nationalism for a decade. He had sought
assistance wherever it was offered, including from the Nazi regime. By
invigorating the deterritorial body of India through various means:
travel abroad by prominent Indians, the invitation of foreign scholars
to India, the production of radio broadcasts and the distribution of
interviews, the proliferation of images of India in global newspapers
and film, and the encouragement of social mixing between Indians
and foreigners, the englobement of India would lead to its ability to
overwhelm the increasingly brittle axis of British rule, Bose insisted.44
A host of other Indian travellers in the late 1920s and 1930s, many
with roots leading back to the Swadeshi Movement, were likewise
involved in projects of global cultural diplomacy, including Taraknath

Das in New York, Kalidas Nag in Calcutta, Benoy Kumar Sarkar in Munich,
Mohammad Shedai in Rome, Krishna Menon and Shapurji Saklatvala in
London, Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, Maulana Obeidullah Sindhi and
Shahid Suhrawardy in Moscow, Vithalbhai Patel and Rattan Singh in
Geneva and A. C. N. Nambiar in Berlin.
But M. N. Roy, who himself was born of the Swadeshi deterritorial
political context, began to voice strident criticism of neo-Swadeshi global
nationalism, especially in the context of the Second World War. Travelling
the world with a nationalist imagination, and attempting to utilise
global circuitry for specifically nationalists ends would lead to destruc-
tive consequences, possibly even devastation, especially given the rising
spectre of world fascism, Roy maintained. For him, national struggle was
to be totally subordinated to the pursuit of international solidarity.
For some time after his release, Roy collaborated closely with main-
stream forces of Bengali regional politics. M. N. Roy championed some of
the concrete political causes of neo-Swadeshi activism: a decentralised
Congress, the ‘guidance and control of respective provincial Congress
organisations’, emphasis on social policy and insistence on the global
itineraries of Indian anti-colonialism.45 He also demanded the release
of Bengali political detainees from the last major phase of insurgency
in 1933–34 who were still being held in colonial jails.46 In a tone much
different from his humanist meditations in prison, Roy, upon his release
could be heard calling for an eruption of anti-colonial insurgency and
the immediate end of British imperialism. ‘We must regard Congress
men in office as the vanguard of the revolutionary army which is pene-
trating the citadel of the enemy and they must open up breaches in the
ramparts of the enemies’ citadel. Once that is done the task before us
is to lead the entire army on the trail blazed by the vanguard’.47 And
from his release in 1937 until the beginning of the World War, British
surveillance officials considered M. N. Roy to represent the threat of
renewed radicalism in Bengal.48
At the 1939 Tripuri Congress, Roy, now a member of the Provincial
Congress of the United Provinces, supported the re-election of Subhas
Chandra Bose as Congress President. Subhas Chandra Bose and Sarat
Bose represented a stable base of opposition to the Bengal Gandhians
led by B. C. Roy in the 1930s.49 Members of the Congress Right submitted
a resolution that Subhas Chandra Bose should choose his Committee in
strict conformity with Gandhi’s wishes.50 Roy and his followers voted with
Subhas Bose in opposition to the Pant group. The Congress Socialists and
the Communists, who each were trying to lead their own ‘consolidation
of the left’ voted against Bose and allowed the resolution to pass. Bose
finally stepped down, unable to choose his own Working Committee,
and the Gandhian presidential replacement, Rajendra Prasad, ensured
that the Congress Working Committee would be free of the radical left.51
Gandhi’s behind-the-scenes orchestration of these events, especially
his Rajkot fast and his statement that ‘the defeat of my candidate is my
defeat’, sealed M. N. Roy’s conviction to break away from the National
Congress organisation. After Tripuri, in an open letter to Gandhi in his
journal Independent India of 1939, Roy lamented: ‘since I returned to this
country with no other object than to place my services at the disposal
of the great organisation leading our struggle for freedom, I have been
looked upon with suspicion, treated as an outcaste (sic.), although I have
the poor satisfaction of seeing some of my modest contributions going
home, often much too belatedly and indirectly’.52
Roy increasingly seemed a strange life-form in the ecosystem of
1930s Indian anti-colonialism — identifiable by genus but not by species.
His break with the Congress after Tripuri spurred by his support for
Subhas Chandra Bose and his critique of Gandhi did not lead to his
integration into Bengali regional politics. Instead of joining Bose’s For-
ward Bloc that was formed in the aftermath of Tripuri, Roy set up his
own organisation, the League of Radical Congressmen on 1 May 1939.
In May 1939, Roy went further in his insubordination by deciding
that his Radical Congressmen group would not even affiliate itself with
Bose’s Forward Bloc. When Bose established the Left Consolidation
Committee to bring together groups of dissenting leftist parties to
counter the Gandhian centre and proclaimed an All India Protest Day
in June 1939, Roy called the move ‘hasty and ill-advised’, and withdrew
the support of his group ‘at the eleventh hour’.53 In the very same month
as the Forward Bloc’s All-India protest day, he presided over the first
All-India conference of the League of Radical Congressmen in Poona.
The meeting attracted 250 delegates from eleven Congress provinces.54
It passed a resolution of ‘co-operation on concrete issues’ with the
Forward Bloc, but refused to merge with it. In 1940, Rajkumar Sinha,
publicity secretary to the Forward Bloc, declared the Bloc’s virulent
opposition to Roy’s candidacy for Congress President as due to the
latter’s sense of ‘amplified self’.55 Subhas Bose later appraised the misfit:
‘[M. N. Roy] is too individualist and cannot go in for teamwork. That is
a great drawback for him’.56
Roy’s old comrades from the Swadeshi revolutionary milieu, old

revolutionaries who participated in the Jugantar and Anushilan samitis
during the Swadeshi years, were among his most active supporters in
the years after his release. These included especially Jibanlal Chatterjee,
Bhupendra Kumar Datta, his cousin Hari Kumar Chakravarty, and
Amarendranath Chatterjee.57
Political detainees in Bengal, suspected ‘terrorists’ held in camps
for prolonged periods without trial according to the provisions of
numerous Bengal Criminal Law Amendments passed between 1925 and
1934, were finally released from British prisons in 1937 and 1938 to mark
the inauguration of the Government of India Act. These ex-detainees
tended to join the leftist groups within the Indian National Congress,
and distributed themselves among Subhas Chandra Bose leadership, the
Congress Socialist Party, the Communist Party of India and the Royists,
and other small groups of the left. A significant number of the Bengali
ex-revolutionaries joined Roy’s political group after their release,
and thought of Roy as a Swadeshi revolutionary who had returned to
Bengal.58 Others among the old revolutionaries, however, were imme-
diately skeptical of his erudite Marxism. Jadugopal Mukherjee, a famed
Swadeshi revolutionary and now leader of a major faction of Bengali
radicals, had recommended the young Narendranath in 1915 to the
charge of his brother, Dhangopal Mukherji, at Stanford when Roy first
went abroad. However, by 1938, Jadu Mukherjee chastised Narendranath,
a.k.a. M. N. Roy, for the transformations he had undergone, ‘I wish I
could say — instruct you — for goodness sake, to desist from blurting
out your philosophical Marxism either in the press or from the platform.
You do not know by doing this, I think unnecessarily, you have antag-
onised many of [the] sincerest friends, admirers and well-wishers,
supporters and sympathisers… From members of the public comes the
criticism “Roy babbles in a subject for which he has no competence”’.
Subhas Chandra Bose, who had much more patience for Roy’s scholarly
approach, nevertheless felt that Roy had arrived to fragment Bengali
politics and aggrandise himself. Roy protested in response that he ‘[had]
no missionary spirit, and shall leave Bengal to her fate’.59
But it was the pitch of Roy’s critique of Subhas Chandra Bose that
would really account for his estrangement from Bengal politics. While a
number of Bengali groups remained skeptical of Subhas Chandra Bose’s
contact with the Nazi regime, and also criticised the Gandhian resist-
ance to joining the war, Roy’s attacks on Bose’s involvement with the
Axis powers, and his bitter warnings that the evil of fascism knew no
boundaries, led to his almost total loss of resonance on the Bengal
political stage. Jibanlal Chatterjee, once a leader of Jugantar in the
Swadeshi years, and a long-time close associate and associate of Roy,
broke with Roy in 1943, and formed his own party.
Soon other old revolutionaries and colleagues began to separ-
ate themselves from Roy. Gracefully bowing out, Amanendranath
Chatterjee wrote to Roy, ‘I am feeling I am aging. You are younger than
myself by at least a dozen of years’.60 Students at Presidency College were
cautioned by communist intellectuals not to attend Roy’s lectures.61 And
the Pleiades of Bengali Marxism such as Hirendranath Mukhopadhyay
and Sushobhan Sarkar viewed Roy as a vain and oppor-tunistic meddler,
out of touch with Indian culture and society.62
If there were a group with which one would have expected Roy to
form cordial ties, it would have been the Congress Socialists. But in
March 1937, Roy instructed his group to leave the Congress Socialist
Party (CSP). Almost all of Roy’s followers during his years of imprison-
ment had joined the CSP upon its founding in 1934, and played, by
all accounts, an important role in establishing the party platform.63
Originally, the leaders shared many of Roy’s views and admired him
as an intellectual émigré to Weimar Germany.64 Jayaprakash Narayan
finished advanced studies in the United States; Rammanohar Lohia
received his doctorate from Berlin; Minoo Masani completed a degree
at the London School of Economics and took the occasion to travel to
Moscow during one of his breaks to ‘glimpse the workers’ fatherland’.65
Charles Mascarenhas, a Royist, was directly involved in the founding of
the Congress Socialist Party in 1934, and both J. P. Narayan and Minoo
Masani spoke explicitly of Roy’s influence on them.66
But in three letters written from prison between 1934 and 1937, Roy
made it clear that he would have trouble breaking bread with a dis-
tinct Congress Socialist Movement.67 Instead of forming a named party
within the Congress, the proper strategy for radicalising it from within
was to be ‘an organized left-wing of the Congress, acting, as such with
no other party label…’68 The CSP would tend to divide the Congress
into camps, Roy wrote, and would hamper the ability to win over those
radical anti-imperialist elements who did not identify themselves
with socialism.69
Minoo Masani commented that the young CSP theoreticians were
‘rather shaken and somewhat shattered when [they] met Roy. He no
longer seemed the revolutionary [they] had once known’.70 Jayaprakash
Narayan reflected on Roy’s sour disposition after exiting prison: ‘the
entire responsibility for disrupting the measure of unity that had been
achieved must be laid at the door of the Royists, and above all of
Shri Roy’.71 Narayan continued, ‘perhaps he had come to realise that
the Congress Socialist Party could not be a plaything in his hands, nor
a platform that he could use to boost his own ego…’72
Beginning in 1936, the Communist Party of India embarked on
its People’s Front policy, a ‘minimal programme’ articulated in the
Dutt–Bradley Thesis, promoting the affiliation of communists and other
leftist parties.73 The Indian Communist Party, which had fallen into
a lull by the mid-1930s due to its Moscow-derived policy restricting
collaboration with other parties from 1928–35, subsequently grew
by leaps and bounds as it began to build up its supporters within the
Congress and the CSP. At the beginning of 1937, the so-called ‘Lucknow
Pact’ between Communist and CSP leaders signalled their intent to
form a common platform.74 The Roy Group, which had been a part of
the CSP since its inception in 1934, resigned from the organisation in
March 1937.
Communists on the national stage attacked Roy as a ‘unscrupulous
liar’ and a traitor — epithets which were historically rooted in his
excommunication from the Comintern almost a decade earlier, but
flared up again due to his seeming unwillingness to work for Left
consolidation.75 Communists libelled him as ‘trying to disrupt the
Left Wing radical movement in this country’, and declared ‘Royism…
the greatest enemy which must be combated before Imperialism’.76
P. C. Joshi, leader of the All-India Communist Party, asserted that Roy
was ‘a Rightist of the Rightists, more reactionary than the so-called
Gandhian reactionaries and less progressive than the holy monks of
the Wardha shrine’.77 In another statement he continued, ‘Roy shouts…
about anti-Fascism, but only as a cover to his policy of disruption on
the national and labour fronts. Like all renegades, Roy is an adept at
using revolutionary phrases in order to confuse and divide the people’.78
Continuing to invoke Roy as a ‘renegade’, the official Indian Communist
Party presented him as a heretical exegete of the Marxist texts.79
Ironically, the Communist Party of India’s (CPI) strategy was looking
ever more like that ex-pounded by Roy, especially after the 1935 com-
munist change of course to the collaborative ‘people’s front’ approach.
Eminent CPI intellectuals such as Gangadhar Adhikari articulated
similar ideological emphases on internationalism, anti-fascism, and
the critique of Hindu majoritarianism.80 Shortly after 1935, Roy wrote an
open letter to the Communist International: ‘practically, all my views,
condemned previously, have now been accepted. Why I am still treated

as an “outcaste” and castigated as a culprit, is more than I can say’.81 But
the perennial problem for Roy, both the source of his ability for fresh
thought and the cause of his status as an ‘outcast’ to multiple political
regimes, was his way of continually breaking out of the regimens
of group identification. This self-marginalisation was itself a feature of
his politics, as a thinker who viewed the position of the outsider as a
privileged standpoint for critique.
The dislike for M. N. Roy, even the derision of him, became a strong
feature among Calcutta’s left intelligentsia, with the charge led already in
1938 by eminent figures such as writer and political leader Hirendranath
Mukhopadhyay, the historian Sushobhan Sarkar and the poet Manik
Bandopadhyay. In Calcutta, during the 1930s, communism became the
hegemonic intellectual culture, the source for symbols and institutional
discipline for status competition among the urban Bengali intellectual
elites.82 Writing in the Bengali communist literary journal, Parichay,
or participating in its adda, or Bengali-medium salon, bestowed on
intellectuals a high social standing, and the ability to project his
views broadly among the urban middle-class. In Calcutta, the dislike
of left intellectuals for M. N. Roy resulted both from the threat to the
established status hierarchy he represented, as well as from ideological
disagreement on substantive points of politics.
One gets a sense for the degree of dislike of Roy by considering
Syamal Krishna Ghosh’s diary of the Parichayer adda meetings from 1936
to 1941, a book that reads like a hidden transcript of the week-to-week
discussions within the group. Parichay, founded in 1931 as a modernist
literary journal, was eventually transformed into the premier organ
of the Calcutta communist intelligentsia. Along with the print organ,
Parichay magazine also supported an adda that often took place in the
home of its founding editor, Sudhindranath Datta. Datta eventually
became one of Roy’s closest friends in the 1940s, and distanced himself
increasingly from the more orthodox communist line of Parichay.
According to Ghosh’s vivid account, there was indeed some discussion
of M. N. Roy’s thought during the adda, but it tended to take the form
either of older members of the adda teaching younger members about
Roy’s shortcomings, or of sarcastic dismissal of his views.
In January 1938, Sajjad Zaheer, the Muslim writer originally from
Lucknow who co-founded the Progressive Writers Association, com-
mented in the group, ‘Not a word of response has been given to Roy’s
invitation to Bengalis… He is trying to court the Muslims, but he will
see that there are many political thinkers much more perceptive than
himself here’. 83 On other occasions, Sushobhan Sarkar, a renowned
professor of History at Presidency College and perhaps the most
influential Bengali communist thinker of his day, counselled younger
members of the adda to recognise Roy’s failings and stay away from
him. For example, on 4 February 1938, Sarkar delivered a lecture on the
historical role of capitalists in supporting militarism and war. From the
audience came a question regarding M. N. Roy’s writings on a similar
theme. The famed professor responded by asking the young inquirer:
‘But do M. N. Roy’s ideas have any following among any group (in India)?’
Referring to Roy’s decision to work within the Congress after his release
from prison, Sarkar continued: ‘[Roy] wants to first win the medal of
Independence, and then turn to the social questions. There is neither
any truth, nor any success to be had in this line of thinking’. 84 The adda
space was a place for intellectual debate, but also for the assertion of
status hierarchy among camps, and for older members to train younger
ones to maintain this hierarchy.
Status could be affirmed didactically, through a lecture or a peda-
gogical assertion, or more indirect, as with the multiple examples
of ‘M. N. Roy sarcasm’ that laced the adda discussion. In April 1940,
Hiren Mukherjee, graduate of Oxford and leader of the underground
Communist Party of Bengal, was heard to say, ‘Would someone care to
straightforwardly ask him [Roy] why he decided to return from Moscow
anyway?’.85 On another occasion, a member of the adda group jokingly
announced that ‘it would be more amusing to read Hitler’s writings or
Gandhi’s letters’ than to go too deeply into M. N. Roy’s counsel.86 And
another time, in 1941, amidst laughter, someone wondered out loud why
M. N. Roy was still staying so close to ‘Uncle Joe’ (Stalin).87
If M. N. Roy had become something of a risible figure among the
communist intelligentsia of Calcutta, his importance was also diminish-
ing within the eyes of British observers. In 1938 and 1939, British surveil-
lance followed Roy’s activities doggedly, believing him to be a source
of renewed unrest in Bengal. Yet, his early support of the British war
effort against Nazi Germany led, ironically, to his dismissal as a viable
political ally for colonial administrators.88 By late 1940, British officials
had a very low estimation of Roy as an intermediary, a non-Indian
Indian, who did not belong squarely in any of the representative camps
of Indian political identity. After having once feared him in 1930, as
one of the most dangerous revolutionaries in India, an official in
the Criminal Investigation Department now contentedly reported about
his post-prison activities in 1940: ‘in short Roy’s political achievement

has so far been nil. It is indeed difficult to see how a man with Roy’s
vanity and arrogant personality, listening to none and only stopping to
pause when an old ally has to be discarded or a new one appears at the
scene, can never be expected to make an effective leader of a coalition’.89
Stafford Cripps said of Roy in a report during his war mission: ‘I have
always regarded Mr. Roy as an unreliable and self-seeking politician and
I do not think he has any real influence in India’.90 Roy did not fit into
the cultural-symbolic regimens of wartime Indian politics, organised as
it was increasingly according to the imperative of national autonomy.
In the late 1930s, Roy challenged the status hierarchies and dis-
cipline of established political camps, and this was the true source
of his downfall, not any supposed anti-nationalism or lack of Indian
authenticity, as many of his opponents often maintained. Roy’s outsider
status does not mean that he did not identify with the anti-colonial cause
or with the Indian nation. Rather, by the time of the Second World War,
he argued that the freedom of the deterritorial body of India could only
be achieved in solidarity with a global struggle against fascism. Roy
proposed a mediated form of autonomy, instead of an insurgent one.
Geopolitical Shifts
The 1930s saw a reordering of the world, especially in the context
of the Great Depression and what Karl Polanyi called the interwar
failure of ‘capitalist internationalism’.91 Although Indian deterritorial
energies remained as strong, or even more pronounced, than they had
been during the previous decade, they were now channelled not only
through the undergrounds of global cities and harbours, but also through
the foreign ministries of authoritarian states, especially among the
future Axis powers. Many of the infrastructures of big states, whether
American, German, Ottoman, Japanese or Soviet, that had supported the
global Indian anti-colonial networks of the early twentieth century up
to the mid-1920s, had been greatly altered, both because of the fall of
the empires (such as Germany or the Ottomans), and the new type of
strong state governmentality, economic protectionism and surveillance
control, including passport laws and immigration laws, that prevented
Indian activists from easily or clandestinely exploiting major tech-
nology and communication hubs outside of the British Empire.92
The post-First World War cracks in the world order were being
plastered over by the mid-1920s, and the reconfiguration of muscular
nation–states and domains of autarchy soon surpassed the levels of
the pre-war context.93 The interwar years saw an accentuation of the

dialectic between territorialisation and deterritorialisation. In the name
of Italian Romanità, Japanese Greater Nippon and Nazi Mitteleuropa,
militarised states began to metastasise over larger and larger domains
supposedly in the attempt to extend state boundaries to incorporate
‘irredenta’ communities, such as the ‘Auslandsdeutsche’, to pursue the
alignment of state boundaries with mythic civilisational zones.94 Of
course, these projects to expand the state apparatus to corresponded
with purported zones of civilisational unity had their precedent in
the movement in Great Britain in the late Victorian period leading to
new Commonwealth institutions of the 1930s, or the coeval rise of the
Greater France idea, and American interwar paternalism.95 Powerful states
of mid-century justified their projects of expansive territorialisation
in the name of calibrating state boundaries to the ‘real’ deterritorial
civilisational or cultural domain of its people. In Germany, Japan and
Italy, to a special extent, but also in Britain, France, the Soviet Union
and the United States of America, economic corporatism, biopolitics
and aggressive reterritorialisation preoccupied state elites.96
Gandhi’s form of nationalist politics sought to carve out Indian auto-
nomy from a global map increasingly ordered into power blocs of big
powers: a capitalist West, a Nazi Central Europe, a Communist Eastern
Europe, a Fascist Southern Europe, a Japanese co-prosperity zone.
Gandhi began his Purna Swaraj campaign with the Dandi March in early
1930. The march had a powerful impact on India’s political imagination,
recalibrating Indian politics to the dimensions of a people–body — to
its natural resources and its localities, as opposed to its deterritorial
energies. His great fasts of 1934, 1939 and 1941 can also be understood in
this context, as projects to ‘bring anti-colonialism back home’ as it were,
and focus it inwardly, especially given the increasingly treacherous
international political scene.
Subhas Chandra Bose, on the other hand, maintained that in order for
the anti-colonial pursuit to progress, it had to work in and through the
growing tensions between the world’s major power blocs. Mussolini’s
Italy granted Bose the passport that facilitated his travels in 1941,
and Hitler invited him to Berlin to establish an anti-colonial base for
radio addresses and publication, and to establish the Indian National
Army. Tojo facilitated his organisation of the INA in South East Asia.
Subhas Bose’s circulation through Hitler’s Germany and Tojo’s Japan
represents the application of a long-standing tradition of Swadeshi
deterritorial nationalism to use the conflicts of international relations
in its nationalist struggle.
Global Civil War

But Roy felt that the Second World War was not just about geo-political
conflict between nation-states, but primarily about the future of the
people of the world as a whole. Ever since the beginning of the war in
September 1939, much before it took on its fully global dimensions in
1941, Roy felt it was not localisable to a specific region or to specific
theatres of conflagration. In August 1941, the Germans seized control
of the Balkans, sent armies marching across Russia, and stood poised
within range of the Suez Canal. From the vantage point of 1941, a great
moment of contingency had arrived. It was a war in the world’s body.
‘The world is in the midst of a civil war, the severest battles of which
are yet to be fought…’, Roy wrote.97 His notion of an ‘international civil
war’ highlights the degree to which Roy perceived the world as a monad,
marked by systemic interconnectedness between the local expression
and the global embodiments of political forms.98
War was declared in Europe on 1 September 1939. The Congress
initially postponed taking an official stance then declared a policy
of ‘neutralism’ and non-co-operation with the war effort. Finally, it
declared its outright opposition to the British in 1942, in the absence
of a grant of immediate self-government. But already on 6 September
1939, Roy controversially commented in a public speech, ‘all freedom
loving people will congratulate the British Government on the decision,
even though much belated, to put an end to Hitlerism which it has
been encouraging all the time…’99 Less than two weeks later Roy made
statements in the press congratulating Britain on the ‘war against
fascism.’100 On 14 September he admonished the Congress President in
a letter, ‘the Congress cannot but sympathise with the victims of Fascist
aggression and be willing to co-operate in freeing the world from that
standing menace.’101 By the middle of October 1939, the League of Radical
Congressmen, Roy’s group, issued its official statement warning that
the defeat of Hitler was the immediate task. ‘The present war is not an
imperialist war… it is not permissible for the fighters for democracy
and freedom, not only in Europe, but throughout the world, including
India, to be indifferent about the outcome of the conflict and its possible
developments…’102
By contrast, the declaration of war between the Western Powers
and the Axis was widely interpreted in India as ‘sharpening the anti-
imperialist struggle’, as Subhas Chandra Bose called it. The Congress
Working Committee responded to the viceroy’s unilateral declaration of
India as a belligerent in the war by stating that ‘India cannot associate
herself in a war said to be for democratic freedom when that freedom is

denied her’.103 The call for Congress ministries to resign in protest came
in the third week of October. The communists, given the Nazi–Soviet
pact of August 1939, made the most forceful anti-British declaration:
‘the most effective way in which the Indian people can serve the cause
of world peace and democracy is by striking for their own freedom and
weakening British imperialism…’104 This stance eventually landed many
CPI members in jail in March 1940.105 Yet after their shift to a pro-British
stance in late 1941 following Hitler’s invasion of Russia, Indian com-
munists soon won the trust of the government and were released from
jail and legalised for the first time since 1934.
Already in May 1940, a month after Hitler’s successful assault on
Western European countries, Belgium, Holland, Denmark and Norway,
Roy expressed to his group at a League of Radical Congressmen retreat,
‘Every morning I open the newspaper with a shudder. I have no love
for imperialist France and Britain. But I cannot think of the possibility
of the Fascisation [sic] of European without horror…’106 France was
conquered by the Nazis the following month. Given the rising pitch
of the war in Europe, and Roy’s growing sense that cataclysm was
imminent, the Radical Congressmen carried out anti-fascist demon-
stration on 1 September 1940, the one-year anniversary of the start
of the war. As a result, Roy was expelled from the Congress for his
insubordinate action.
His response was to form a new independent political party, the
Radical Democratic People’s Party, whose first conference was held
beginning on 21 December 1940.107 By the following year, the organ-
isation remained small, but not insignificant, with a membership
numbering almost 2200.108 And in July 1941, M. N. Roy’s group formed a
more consequential organisation, the Indian Federation of Labour (IFL)
by breaking away from the AITUC to promote worker collaboration with
the war effort.109 The IFL went on to become one of the largest and most
important umbrella organisations for trade unions of the 1940s.110 In the
years after the war, the Indian labour movement was led by two major
groups, the AITUC (communist) and the IFL (the Roy group).111
Global Fascism
Roy argued that imperialism had brought about a ‘psychosis’ among
Indians, such that proper judgement of international politics as skewed.
‘[Nationalists] thought Imperialism was the greatest enemy of India.
Once upon a time it was. But now it is dying; and for the future of India,
it is only a ghost’.112 There were other, more substantial threats, Roy
maintained. Chief among them was the global rise of fascism. Roy was not
referring to a specific system of totalitarian rule, whether Nazi, Japanese
or Italian, but rather to what he believed to be a more general style of
politics of collective identity and cultural authenticity. ‘In this new
situation, we shall have to fight fascism on our home front’.113 Roy saw
fascism as a social phenomenon that could arise in any cultural setting
of the modern world, on either side of the colonial divide. It was not a
product of Western ‘civilisation’ as European thinkers assumed. Theodor
Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Hannah Arendt and others insisted that
the Nazis were only possible within Western civilisation alone.114
Roy challenged this geo-culturalist assumption. He insisted that
fascism was ‘a socio-political manifestation of our time, and its pattern
is determined by the peculiarities of the country in which it grows.
German fascism was different from Italian fascism, and the fascism in
the East again was different from both. Therefore, we should not have
an a priori notion about our enemy… To put the point straight: Indian
Fascism will be cultural; it will be a cultural reaction. Therefore, violence
may not be such a very outstanding feature of Indian Fascism… In India,
Fascism may even be non-violent’.115
Roy saw the cultural features of an Indian fascism in Gandhi’s politics
of cultural continence and civilisationalism. In Gandhi’s practice of
anti-colonial politics in a culturalist key, Roy sensed an inkling of fascist
discourse. ‘In Germany, it was the old nationalist preoccupation and
the readiness of the German people to accept regimentation and the
militaristic tradition. The highest ambition of any German is to put on
a uniform. When Hitler put all of them in uniforms, they believed they
were all supermen, and followed him. Similarly, in our country also, the
people are being put in a uniform: khaddar is a political uniform; and
they also think that by donning the Mahatmic uniform, and a particular
kind of headgear they become supermen’.116
A struggle for asserting cultural unity would be ultimately detrimental,
argued Roy. The pursuit of mediation was equally important. ‘The
characteristic feature of Indian nationalism is to ignore the fact that
India is a part of the world. If the aspirations of the nationalist and
communalist politicians were not immediately fulfilled, the rest of
the world might go to hell… the primary concern for those honestly
fighting for the freedom and progress of the masses of the Indian people
is to make the greatest possible contribution to the struggle for the
destruction of Fascism’.117 If Indians see themselves primarily as members

of a world community, then the status of fascism as a universal threat,
inherent in every society, would be clearly appreciated.
Roy also criticised Subhas Chandra Bose’s involvement with Nazi
international politics. Roy attacked both the underlying logic of Bose’s
variety of neo-Swadeshi deterritorial nationalism, as well as the specific
instance of engagement with European fascism.
I had grave misgivings about the consequences of the experiment [of the
Indian National Army]… My misgiving was based on experience. A quarter
of a century ago, during the last world war, I tried to organise an I.N.A…
Nevertheless, systematic efforts were made to invade India with an army
raised in a neighbouring country, armed and equipped by an ‘allied power’,
which happened to be Germany at the time… ‘our ally’ of that time sabotaged
the plan…118
Roy saw Bose’s politics as reminiscent of an older variety of Swadeshi

internationalism, not yet able to grasp the monadic relationship between
the microcosm of Indian context and the macrocosm of the world
community. Elsewhere, he indirectly scorned Subhas Chandra Bose’s
inauguration of the Indian National Army in Nazi Germany, ‘if you stand
on the roadside and watch an I.N.A. demonstration, subconsciously
your feet move as if marking time. So, you see how, dormant in every
revolutionary, lies the counter-revolutionary’. In a letter to Humayun
Kabir, Roy wondered whether representatives of Bengali radicalism,
especially Subhas Chandra Bose, were going too far in their search for
autonomy, to the point of developing admiration for the strong men of
the fascist world. Roy believed that some in Bengal ‘secretly wish Hitler
to be victorious, not only because they like England to be humbled by
someone else, but also they believe Hitler to be a superman entrusted
with a divine mission’. 119 He thought neo-Swadeshi ways of relating the
nation to the world could have treacherous results.
Through his critique of fascism, M. N. Roy was a figure of admiration
for many leaders of the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association. The
group, which along with the Indian People’s Theatre Association, grew
into one of the most influential cultural forces in South Asia in the 1940s
and 1950s, was first founded in London in 1935 and was galvanised by
a series of international anti-fascism writers’ conferences in London, Paris
and Brussels over the coming two years. At this time, the main reference
point was the civil war in Spain and the death toll caused by Franco’s
army, not the genocidal Nazi regime. Mulk Raj Anand and Sajjad Zaheer,
the two early leaders of the movement’s Indian branch, were present at
the meetings in Paris in June 1935, in London in June 1936, and in Brussels
in September 1936.120 And the inaugural conferences of the Progressive
Writers’ Association took place in Calcutta in 1937, inaugurated by
Rabindranath Tagore. Linked up to the international cultural pro-
grammes sponsored by the recently revived ‘people’s front’ Communist
International, progressive writers set out to ‘to develop an attitude of
literary criticism, which will discourage the general reactionary and
revivalist tendencies on questions like family, religion, sex, war and
society’.121 Among those Indian members of this international writers’
movement who admiringly spoke of M. N. Roy were Abu Syed Ayub,
Humayun Kabir and Sudhindranath Datta in Calcutta, Khwaja Ahmad
Abbas in Bombay, Mulk Raj Anand in London, Abburi Ramakrishna Rao
in Hyderabad and Gopal Mittal in Lahore.122 Mulk Raj Anand even
incorporated M. N. Roy as a character in one of his novels.123
Policy Suggestions
Roy’s social vision of Indian interconnectedness with the world was
given shape in these years in two documents, the ‘People’s Plan for
Economic Development of India’ of 1943, and the ‘Draft Constitution of
India’ of 1944. The ‘People’s Plan’, penned by three of Roy’s lieutenants,
consisted in a summary of the programme articulated by Roy at the
Indian Federation of Labour meeting of that year.124 The publication
of the economic plan slightly preceded the publication of the ‘Bombay
Plan’ of 1944, which represented the Congress’ blueprint for the post-
Independence economy. The Bombay Committee led by P. C. Mahalanobis
and M. Visveswaraya emphasised the nationalisation of heavy industry
as the first priority, and the involvement of the state in organising a
market for handicrafts.125
Roy, on the other hand, argued that the primary emphasis should
lie on the rationalisation and modernisation of agriculture and the
expansion of the domestic consumer market. The development of
irrigation, communications (railways and roads) and basic rural
industries (electrification, chemicals, engineering) should be first
addressed. The starting point of Roy’s proposal was that ‘human
freedom’ had to be maximised, not ‘economic benefits’. 126 This involved
thinking in terms of how to best equate production with, what Roy
called, ‘human demand’.127 The incomes of agriculturalists must rise so
that they could consume above subsistence level, at a ‘human level’,
and this would create a market for consumer goods that would drive
economic development, the expansion of home industries and import
markets, eventually the relocation of labour away from land towards
industrial production. Roy insisted that India had to travel a non-aligned,
third route, away from the model of the Soviet Union or the ‘Fordist’
democracy of the United States.128
Roy’s second policy proposal, his ‘Draft Constitution of India’ of
1944 — we could call it a ‘dream constitution’ — consisted of thirteen
chapters and 137 articles. The proportions of his alternative vision of
post-independence India entailed the decentralisation of power to local
people’s committees in villages, towns and cities as the basis for the
democratic States of the Indian Union. A similar idea was mentioned
in C. R. Das’ Draft Constitution of the Swaraj Party in 1923, and Gandhi
too wrote extensively on the need for a decentralised panchayati raj.129
In Roy’s proposal, local committees would nominate candidates for the
federal assembly and provincial council, and would be able to initiate
legislation and demand referenda on any measure. The provincial
governments would be formed by universal suffrage. All provinces would
have the right to opt out of the federal union, but would be required to
establish itself independently with a democratic constitution. Members
to the federal assembly would be chosen by a college of electors, com-
prised of those from the ‘learned professions’.130 And a Council of State
would be appointed by the provincial governments. Arguing for a
postcolonial mediated autonomy, as opposed to a heroic, strongly
autonomous one, Roy proposed that Indians form a ‘British–Indian’ co-
operative Commonwealth, a federation of federations, as a full member
in a post-imperial relationship.131
In debates about the constitution of an independent India in the
mid-1940s, Roy argued for an Indian federation, ‘composed of units
based, as much as possible, on cultural, religious, linguistic and racial
homogeneity. The idea of Federation implied autonomy on the part of
the Constituent units of the Federation; and autonomy was an entirely
meaningless term unless it carried with it the right of secession’.132
The India that Roy envisioned, like many other anti-colonial leaders
of the day, was an inclusive plurality. He insisted that a ‘number of
culturally heterogeneous communities can be artificially welded into
a united nation without destroying culture’.133 In terms of the idea of
Pakistan, Roy wrote favourably in 1941, that it encouraged the birth of a
non-centralised union of state. ‘The Pakistan scheme as it stands today
cannot be reasonably objected to. The objection comes from the fear
that ultimately the Muslim units might also break away from India. I
do not share that fear… Why should we establish a system of coercion
in the name of national unity?’134 Here, his writings anticipated the per-
spective of the Communist Party of India as articulated by Adhikari
in 1943.135
Thinking not in terms of a strong autonomous body but rather in
terms of mediated autonomy within a transnational union put Roy
in the company of a group of federative political thinkers of that time,
from Muhammad Iqbal and Abul Hashim in India to H. N. Brailsford and
H. G. Wells in Britain, to Ewald Ammende in Germany, to figures such
as David Starr Jordan in the United States.
By 1942, Gandhi was clear that the war offered Indians the moment
to force the British from the country. ‘I am convinced’, he wrote in the
Harijan, ‘that time has come during the war for [non-cooperation], not
after it, for the British and the Indians to be reconciled to complete
separation from each other. That way and that way alone lies the safety
of both and shall I say, the world’.136 Chiang Kai-shek, long contending
with Japanese occupation in China, travelled to India in February 1942
with hopes of convincing Congress leaders to support the war effort.137
Gandhi, however, insisted on the granting of complete self-government
before India would support the war. With the Quit India Movement of
1942, Gandhi took his ‘do or die’ stance and mass anti-British uprisings
swelled up for the next three months. Whereas before imprisonment,
Roy’s critical practice aimed at critiquing the Soviet regime, calling it to
a new Tsarist dictatorship, now, in the context of war, his target became
the mainstream Congress. Coming to terms with the brinkmanship of
Roy’s rhetoric — his insistence on calling Gandhi’s politics ‘fascist’ —
requires us to correctly picture the countervailing brinkmanship of
Congress politics in 1942.
The Divides of Nationalism:

Hindu–Muslim Politics
Apart from the divide of India versus the West, there was another
identity divide that Roy sought to mediate. The 1930s saw a ratcheting
up of communitarian politics based on the Hindu–Muslim divide. To
understand why Roy was such a misfit within Indian anti-colonialism of
the 1930s and 1940s, we have to bring to light not only what he protested
against, but also what he worked towards. In the context of economic
crises in the countryside, social conflict and economic distress came to

be increasingly ‘politicised’ in communal modes. The Hindu press in the
1930s built up a stereotype of the threatening, rioting Muslim peasants.
Meanwhile the Muslim press deployed the trope of the unscrupulous
and exploitative Hindu moneylender and landlord.138 The ranks of the
Hindu Mahasabha grew significantly in this period, as leaders of the
party, such as L. B. Bhopatkar, suggested that the greatest threat to
the Indian nation was that of ‘Muslims [who] have been trying and
directing their energy towards destroying the Hindu culture…’139 And
in 1938, V. D. Savarkar, the most celebrated figure of the Mahasabha and
its president at the time said in a public lecture, ‘[Hindus] have borne
the brunt of the fight, struggled single-handed down to this day while
the other non-Hindu sections and especially the Mohammedans …
[are] nowhere to be found while the national struggle goes on and are
always to be found in the forefront at the time of reaping the fruits of
that struggle’.140
In this context, Roy’s symbolic action revolved around crossing the
Hindu–Muslim identity divide. To do this, he emphasised the mixed and
mestizo nature of South Asian civilisation. In his years after prison, he
sought to critique the notion of continent, linear civilisational divides
that underlay much of regnant majoritarian and minoritarian Indian
political discourse.
In July 1939, Roy organised a conference with radical and progressive
Muslim politicians.141 In Calcutta in 1939, he also spoke to the National
Muslim Youth League at the invitation of Maulana Mohammed Akram
Khan, and announced his new stance after the Tripuri Congress: ‘… our
task is to destroy the Congress as well as the Moslem League and create
in their place a great united political party of the Indian people, free
from religious prejudices and communal narrowness. If that is your con-
sidered decision, come to me and I shall create a united party of India’.142
In March 1940, in the context of the Lahore resolution on Pakistan,
Roy made arrangements with Maulana Hazrat Mohani, a veteran of
the Muslim League, who had played a major role in left ranks of the
Congress in the 1920s, to combine the League of Radical Congressmen
with the left wing of the Muslim League.143
Roy complemented this political pursuit with the publication of his
new ‘dream history’, The Historical Role of Islam, which narrated Indian
history in terms of the crossings and cultural fusion between Islam and
other Indian traditions. Written in prison in 1932, M. N. Roy’s treatise was
particularly salient in 1939, the year of its publication. In the context of
the rise of communitarian aggression in that year, Roy began on a note

of irony, remarking that despite the population of Muslims outnum-
bering that of any Islamic land, Muslims were still considered an
‘extraneous elements’ to the mainstream Indian population.144 ‘This
curious but extremely regrettable cleft in the loose national structure
of India has its historical cause’, Roy continued.145 In the contemporary
context of anti-colonial struggle, imaginary civilisational divides between
Hindus and Muslims had been produced in nationalist discourses. ‘A
Hindu, who prides himself in the prosperity of the reign of an Akbar …
is even to-day separated most curiously by an unbridgeable gulf from
his next door [Muslim] neighbour…’146
Roy’s book undertook to revise the idea of Indian civilisation not
as continent and pure, but as cosmopolitan. While in the West, the
monotheism of Islam cleared away the ‘dark superstition of the Magian
mysticism, and the corrupt atmosphere of the Greek Church’, the ar-
rival of the Mughals also prepared the way for the cultural advancement
of India, Roy argued. The spread of Islam produced the peace needed
for the development of long-distance trade routes.147 Islamic thought,
and its rationalist fundaments, contributed to the development of
scientific instruments and the acquisition of exact knowledge of the
natural world.148
Roy insisted on the constructive consequences of the Mughal con-
quest of India, especially in terms of spurring social reform.149 Roy’s
interest in using history to write across lines of genealogical purity
resonated with a number of Muslim intellectuals. Humayun Kabir, a
major Bengali Muslim intellectual and admirer of Roy, wrote in an
article after Roy’s death, ‘it is not always realised that what we regard
as ancient Indian civilisation was itself complex and composite. Till
some forty years ago, we thought of ancient Indian history as a history
of only the Aryans’.150 Extending Roy’s argument Kabir went on to note
that all civilisations must thus be understood as ‘complex’. ‘Europe is
as much a debtor to Asia as Asia is today a debtor to Europe. What we
call western civilisation is the result of contribution from Hellenic,
Hebraic, Egyptian, Iranian, Indian and Arab sources’.151 M. N. Roy was
admired by other Muslim intellectuals on the left, such as Ahsan Habib,
Farrukh Ahmad, Syed Ali Ahsan, Abdul Gani Hazari and Syed Waliullah,
while Roy became particularly close to Calcutta-based intellectuals,
Humayun Kabir and Abu Syed Ayub.152
The Historical Role of Islam was widely read, generating both accolades
and controversy. Some members of the Hindu Mahasabha went so
far as to claim Roy had converted to Islam, mockingly calling him
‘Maulana Roy’. And some Muslim leaders writing in the Urdu press
criticised the book for ‘harming [Muslim] religious sentiments’.153 By
evaluating Islam solely in terms of its social rationality and scientific
genius, Roy failed to appreciate the specificity of the spiritual qualities
of Islam, responses claimed. As was wont for Roy in his position as an
intermediary, he defended himself before Hindu and Muslim critics
alike. ‘A scientific study of the history of all religions led me to the
conclusions that Islam, being the most rigorous form of monotheism,
is the purest type of religion… I fail to see how any Muslim can believe
that I have disparaged his religion or been disrespectful to its Prophet’.
By transgressing the Hindu–Muslim cultural divide, he perturbed the
votaries of authenticity.154
Chosen Family
According to the round of opinions at the time, Roy was surly, contrarian,
and to a point, egocentric. His in-betweeness made him an outcast,
like Caliban, ‘hag-born’ to the world of 1940s Indian nationalism, not
honoured with the shapeliness of national form. Roy, as a political and
intellectual intermediary, tended to nonplus and perturb the regimens
of Indian anti-colonialism nationalism. This was not only a choice. It was
the historical effect of his lived experience of travel and social fusion.
These ‘defects of his character’, as onlookers at the time were wont to
describe, were the photo-negatives of his cosmopolitanism.
In 1938, Roy and his wife Ellen, decided to settle in Dehra Dun, the
town where he spent the last phase of his imprisonment, from May 1935
to November 1936. It offered a cooler environment and a place on the
peripheries where Roy could invent his own community and intellectual
space. Even before Roy left prison, he thought about establishing a
‘scientific institute’ for the development of new thinking in India.155
He took the first steps in that direction in 1943, when he set up his
Renaissance Publishing House.156 It would culminate in 1946 with the
establishment of the Radical Humanist Movement. Roy wanted to create
a space for his particular cosmopolitan worldview, as he sensed his
growing estrangement from All-India and Bengal politics.
As well as his permanent exclusion from the ranks of international
communist ranks, in 1940, he began forming a chosen family by holding
‘study camps’ in Dehra Dum. In April 1940, he held the first study camp
of his associates.157 The camp lasted for two weeks, with subsequent
camps held intermittently — in 1942, 1946, 1948 and 1950. The aim was
to carry out a critical exegesis of post-Soviet Marxism and to eventually

develop a way of thinking beyond Marxist assumptions. ‘Those doctrines
of Marxism which cannot be reconciled with the (materialist) essence
of Marxism, I reject as incompatible with Marxism. While Materialism is
the essence of Marxism, Marx went far towards idealism in his economic
and political doctrines’.158
Those who visited Roy’s home in Dehra Dun remarked the presence
of wine on the table, something most uncommon, and the way in which
Roy would speak German with Ellen when they were in private con-
versation.159 Roy’s polyglot and transculturated home environment,
mixing English, German and Bengali, was simply a different kind of
play between cultural influences that was standard among colonial
intellectuals, particularly of mid-century Calcutta. When Roy visited
Calcutta and participated in Sudhindranath Datta’s adda, discussion
would flow freely in Bangla and English, with language often switching
mid-sentence.160 Colonial intellectuals exhibited a quotidian cos-
mopolitanism, shifting between languages and cultural symbols, not as
habits derived from high philosophical reflection but rather from the
sensibilities context of daily life.161
Roy’s chosen family had global dimensions. After returning to India,
he identified more closely with an invisible college of opposition. Jay
Lovestone, leader of the American Communist Opposition Party and
colleague of Roy in Moscow in the 1920s, helped organise the protest to
have Roy released early from prison, and tried to convince Roy to move to
Mexico after his release.162 By the late 1930s, Lovestone became staunchly
anti-communist by the 1940s. During the Cold War, he was sponsored
by the CIA as a leader of the American Federation of Labour, and was
also involved in the Congress for Cultural Freedom. 163 In the context of
the Second World War, Lovestone began corresponding frequently with
Roy, often encouraging him to take a more forthright and denunciatory
stance towards the Soviet Union. 164 It is significant, however, that Roy
chose not to attend the second Congress for Cultural Freedom conference
in Bombay in 1951, sponsored by the U.S. government.165 Minoo Masani
and Jayaprakash Narayan were the lead figures in organising the event,
which attracted over seventy Indian delegates.166 Roy sent a letter
of support, but was unwilling to repudiate the ideal of international
communism fully. In fact, in his later years, he wrote openly of his
admiration for Stalin’s resolve to oppose the capitalist world order,
while also deploring the Stalinist use of authoritarianism and terror. 167
A similar hedging was common among the global left, disheartened by
the Soviet experiment but unwilling to participate in anti-communist

demonisation campaigns.
Roy’s closest companions from his Berlin days, August Thalheimer,
Jan Pollack and Jakob Walcher, members of the German Communist
Party Opposition, wrote to Roy from Paris in the late 1930s, where they
had fled to escape the Nazis. 168 Connection was lost, however, as Jewish
members of the KPD-O entered global diaspora in Palestine, the United
States, Britain and Cuba as Hitler’s armies expanded into France.169
August Thalheimer emigrated to Cuba in 1940, where he began editing
the Internationale Monatlische Übersichten in the hopes of providing
new direction to the International Communist Opposition movement.
Thalheimer wrote a number of essays on culture and philosophy,
including on such diverse themes as phenomenology, revolutionary
art, and Indian theatre.170 But Roy and Thalheimer were never able to
restart their correspondence, to Roy’s disappointment. 171 Through this
all, the closest connection Roy maintained to the critical communist
milieu of the 1920s, the group he continued to call ‘meine Familie’, was
the company of his wife Ellen Gottschalk who had once worked as a
secretary at the Comintern’s Western Office in Berlin before travelling
to India in 1936 to join Roy after his release. Gottschalk became a leader
in the Radical Humanist movement in the 1940s. 172
In the years after the war, Roy frequently wrote to American friends
voicing his interest in coming to the United States for work and travel — a
wish that would never be fulfilled. 173 Initially, he was not granted a visa
by the United States government, but when the visa was finally obtained
in 1952, he was too weak.174 His articles, however, were published in
foreign journals such as The Pacific Affairs, The Manchester Guardian, and
The Times Weekly Review. 175
In India, it was not a party or a particular ideological camp that
defined Roy’s intellectual community. Rather, it was a relatively small
group of fellow intermediaries. There was the young Viennese con-
vert to tantric Hinduism, Leopold Fischer (1923–92), who first came to
India as a German infantrymen in Subhas Chandra Bose’s Azad Hind
Army. Fischer, of Czech Jewish descent, had actually converted
to Hinduism much earlier, taking the name Ramachandra at the
age sixteen while still in Vienna.176 He adopted the name Swami
Agehananda, meaning ‘blissful homelessness’ after release from a
prison of war camp, and became a prolific writer and an advocate for
the integration of sex into spiritual life. Fischer went on to take up
a post at Syracuse University, New York, as an eminent scholar on
Hinduism beginning in the 1960s.177 In 1948, Fischer, a newly-minted

sannyasi at age twenty-five, contributed articles to Roy’s Marxian Way
press on spirituality. But it was not your typical spirituality. Leopold
Fischer wrote, ‘I constantly harp on and recur to sex, because I hold
that the erotic part of it is the prototype and in a way the consum-
mation of the rich life. I shall show you later that the monastic and
mystical life are entirely based on a particularly set of experiences
which are, in the last analysis, erotic’. 178 His interest in tantra, and the
relationship between sexuality and spirituality attracted him to Roy’s
sensibilities. Roy also associated closely with Philip Spratt who had first
come to India fresh out of Cambridge as an envoy of the Communist
Party of Great Britain. 179 He was one of a handful of Britons imprisoned
in the Meerut Communist Conspiracy Case of 1930. After his release,
Spratt remained in India as a vocal critic of the Soviet allegiances of the
Indian Communist Party. In the 1930s and 1940s, he began publishing
his journal MysIndia from Madras, writing regularly with the aim of
challenging the official Indian communist line. Spratt became a strong
critic of both Russia and China by the late 1940s.180
Roy was attracted to the Bengali literary vanguard and found one
of his closest friends in Sudhindranath Datta. A famed Bengali poet,
leading figure among the Progressive Writers, and co-founder of
the Comparative Literature Department at Jadavpur University in
Calcutta, Sudhindranath proclaimed atheism, and evoked an aporetic
and downcast existentialist perspective in his art. ‘There is nothing in
him that is happy or light or sparkling; all is dark, darkly and bitterly
passionate’, wrote Buddhadeb Basu about his friend and colleague.181
All of these figures, although disparate, shared their interest in trans-
gression and in challenging social orthodoxies. When he visited
Calcutta, Roy had adda with Sudhindranath Datta, Abu Sayed Ayub,
an intellectual force in the philosophy department at Presidency
College, Humayun Kabir, a renowned social thinker, literary figure and
politician — all leading members of the Progressive Writer’s Association. 182
Roy also discussed issues frequently with Sushil Dey, a high-level member
of Indian Civil Service who went on to become the Minister of State in the
Government of India after independence. Dey had trained as an engineer
in U.S.A. and wrote articles often critical of the British government
under the pseudonym of Sikander Chaudhury.183 Roy mentored a
number of young intellectuals, many of them Bengali, especially the
literary scholar Sibnarayan Ray, and the professor of economics,

Amlan Datta. There was also Sitangshu Chatterji, a philosopher and
expert on Spinoza, the historian Niranjan Dhar, and political scientist
Gouripada Bhattacharya. A notable addition to the Bengali group was
Surindar Suri of Lucknow, a young political philosopher who went
on to write a book entitled ‘Nazism and Social Change in Germany’ at the
Frankfurt Institute for Social Research in 1957, before returning to India
as a noted academic.184 The film writer, director and producer, J. B. H.
Wadia, provided Roy a pied-à-terre in Bombay, and financially supported
the founding of the Indian Renaissance Institute.185 And finally there
were the members associated closely with the trade union organisation,
the IFL. Many powerful labour organisers, known as the Old Royists,
especially V. B. Karnik and Maniben Kara, were operating from Bombay.
Meanwhile V. M. Tarkunde, G. D. Parikh and R. D. Nigam became forces
behind the political organisation of Roy’s Radical Democratic Party.
By challenging boundaries and transgressing the symbolic orders
delimiting nation, culture and civilisation, Roy had long felt that
underlying all human difference there was a unity. And yet, such an
assertion was critical in intent. In the context of the rise of what Roy termed
the ‘collective ego’ in different mid-century forms, from culturalism to
civilisationalism, nationalism to corporatism, a countervailing critique
of those categories was necessary. Roy wanted to create distance from
identity categories such that they could be critiqued, revised and kept
open. The symbolic action of M. N. Roy involved a critical in-betweenness
that must not be mistaken for betrayal of the anti-colonial cause or an
unresolved heteronomy to the West. Roy belonged to multiple social and
intellectual emplotments, and in that sense, was defined by an excess of
interconnection, not a condition of political loneliness.
Roy said at a Radical Congress Youth Conference at Madras, in 1937,
‘Revolution does not mean only a change in the political administration
of a country. It is a more far-reaching event. It replaces a decayed social
order by a new one. Each social order has a philosophy of its own; its
subversion, therefore, must be preceded by a critique of its philosophy’.186
He insisted that it was not merely an economic system, but a ‘historical
and cultural background’ that had to be upset.187 Whereas Roy came
to criticise the pursuit of strong, heroic, autonomy, he proposed not
subservience to Western culture, but mediation across the borders
of autonomy.
Notes
1. Axel Honneth. 1995. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social
Conflicts. Cambridge: Blackwell, pp. xi–xii, 129.
2. Roy overtly said that he valued the ‘culturally Dionysian’, see M. N. Roy. 1953c.
‘In Power by Proxy’, Radical Humanist, 19 July, vol. 17: p. 343.
3. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, p. 128.
4. Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, p. 128.
5. Ibid., p. 179.
6. David Washbrook. 1990. ‘South Asia, the World System and World Capitalism’,
in S. Bose (ed.), South Asia and World Capitalism, p. 42. See Sumit Sarkar. 1983.
Modern India, 1885–1947. Delhi: Macmillan, pp. 259, 351. But there was also a
rising ‘leftwardism’ in 1936 and 1937, with the rise of trade union politics, and
Nehru’s two consecutive socialism-oriented speeches as Congress president.
See Sanjay Seth. 1995. Marxist Theory and Nationalist Politics: The Case of Colonial
India. New Delhi: Sage Publications, p. 161.
7. Vivek Chibber. 2003. Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in
India. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 115; Rajnarayan Chandavarkar.
1998. Imperial Power and Popular Politics: Class Resistance and the State in India,
c. 1850–1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 299.
8. ‘Communism or Socialism’, Madras Mail, 27 July 1937.
9. A polemical account of the battle for political hegemony in India is offered by
Shashi Joshi and Bhagwan Josh. 1992. Struggle for Hegemony in India, 1920–47: the
Colonial State, the Left and the National Movement. New Delhi: Sage Publications,
vol. 1: pp. 25–41.
10. Ranajit Guha. 1997. Dominance without Hegemony, Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, p. 135.
11. V.G.D. (Valji Govindji Desai), 1934. ‘Culture is the Fruit of Compulsory Continence’,
The Harijan, 21 September, vol. 2, p. 254.
12. Lisa Trivedi refers to ‘making an “Indian” body’ in Lisa Trivedi. 2007. Clothing
Gandhi’s Nation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 113ff., 67–80. Trivedi’s
discussion of the ‘geo-body’ resonates with Sumathi Ramaswamy’s discussion
of the relationship between nationalism and national corporeality. Sumathi
Ramaswamy. 2002. ‘Visualizing India’s Geo-body’, in Contributions to Indian
Sociology, 36(1–2): 151–89.
13. M. K. Gandhi, 1939d. ‘Requisite Qualifications’, Harijan, 25 March, vol. 7, p. 64.
14. M. K. Gandhi, 1938. ‘Choice Before Congressmen’, Harijan, 3 September, vol. 6,
p. 24.
15. Quote of M. K. Gandhi in interview with Mahadev Desai, ‘Sparks from the Sacred
Fire’, Harijan, 13 May 1933, vol. 1, p. 4.
16. Mahadev Desai, 1939. ‘A God-Given Fast’, Harijan, 11 March, vol. 7, p. 41
17. M. K. Gandhi. 1939c. ‘The One and Only Task’, Harijan, 5 November, p. 43.
18. M. K. Gandhi, 1939b ‘My Life’, Harijan, 4 November, vol. 7, p. 325.
19. Gandhi. 1997. Hind Swaraj and Other Writings. Anthony Parel (ed.). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, p. 96.
20. For example, a note in the Harijan reads: ‘Abstinence: Propaganda for abstinence
has been made in all the districts of Orissa. Gandhiji stressed this point in all
his speeches. Much useful work has been done in the direction in the district
of Ganjam’. Nandakisandas, ‘Utkal Report for 8 Months Ending 31-3-34’, Harijan,
19 October 1934, vol. 2, p. 282.
21. Guha, Dominance without Hegemony, pp. 135–51.
22. M. K. Gandhi, 1949. ‘Ahimsa in Practice’, Harijan, 27 January, vol. 8, pp. 428-29.
23. M. K. Gandhi, 1939a. ‘India’s Attitude’, 14 October, Harijan, vol. 7, p. 1
24. Isaac Deutscher. 1968. The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays. London: Oxford
University Press, p. 35. Fringe communism was one resolution of an insider-
outsider identity. Also see Paul Mendes–Flohr. 1999. German Jews: A Dual Identity.
New Haven: Yale, pp. 21–23, on the struggles of German Jewish intellectuals,
especially Rosenzweig, in the 1920s to overcome assimilationist impulses, but
also to preserve their sense of being at home in German mainstream culture.
On a newer application of this claim, see Yuri Slezkine’s discussion of European
Jews as ‘service nomads’. Yuri Slezkine. 2004. The Jewish Century. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, pp. 39–40.
25. Deutscher, Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays, p. 35.
26. Minocheher Masani. 1977. Bliss Was It In That Dawn: A Political Memoir up to
Independence. New Delhi: Arnold-Heinemann Publishers, p. 98.
27. M. N. Roy, On Stepping Out of Jail, December 1936. Reproduced in Sibnarayan Ray
(ed.). Selected Works of M. N. Roy, vol. 4: p. 635.
28. Quoted in V. B. Karnik. 1978. M. N. Roy: A Political Biography. Bombay: Nav Jagriti
Samaj, p. 399.
29. Subhas Chandra Bose. 1964 rpt (1935). Indian Struggle. 1920–1942. Bombay:
Asia Publishing House, p. 327.
30. S. M. Ganguly. 1984. Leftism in India: M. N. Roy and Indian Politics, 1920–1948.
Calcutta: Minerva, p. 161.
31. Karnik, M. N. Roy: A Political Biography, p. 404.
32. See letter of Roy to Humayun Kabir, 15 September 1938, NMML: Roy Papers,
Kabir File.
33. Jawaharlal Nehru, ‘A. I. C. C. and After’, 1939.
34. M. N. Roy. 1939b. ‘Gandhian Policy Must Go’, Hindustan Standard, 4 June.
35. M. N. Roy. 1938b. On the Congress Constitution, Calcutta: Independent India, p. 54.
36. Ibid., p. 4.
37. ‘Letter from M. N. Roy to Gandhi’, Harijan, 18 November 1939, pp. 341–43.
38. Sibnarayan Ray. 2005. In Freedom’s Quest: A Study of the Life and Works of M. N. Roy.
Calcutta: Minerva, 4(1): 40. Sitaramayya Pattabhi. 1946. The History of the Indian
National Congress. Delhi: Chand Publishers, vol. 2: p. 166.
39. Sardar Patel had even organised an ostentatious and festive reception for Roy
at Haripura the year after his release. Ananda Bazar Patrika, 29 December 1936.
40. Gitasree Bandyopadhyay. 1984. Constraints in Bengal Politics 1921–41. Gandhian
Leadership. Calcutta: Sarat Book House, p. 279ff.; Leonard Gordon. 1974. Bengal:
The Nationalist Movement, 1876–1940. New York: Columbia University Press,
pp. 163–87; Dhananjay Das (ed.). 1972. Marxbadi Sahitya–Vitarka. Calcutta:
Praima Publishing.
41. C. R. Das, Presidential Speech at the Thirty-seventh Session of the Indian National
Congress, Gaya, 26–31 December 1922. Reproduced in A. Zaidi. 1985. Congress
Presidential Addresses. New Delhi: Publication Department of the Indian Institute
of Applied Research, vol. 4: p. 67.
42. Joya Chatterjee. 1994. Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932–1947.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 51.
43. Leonard Gordon. 1990. Brothers Against the Raj: A Biography of Indian Nationalists
Sarat and Subhas Chandra Bose. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 271–75.
44. Leonard Gordon, Brothers Against the Raj, p. 280.
45. Hindustan Standard, 21 June 1938; ‘Only Concern Must be Welfare of the Masses’,
Indian Express, 27 July 1937.
46. David Laushey. 1975. Bengal Terrorism and the Marxist Left. Calcutta: Firma
Mukhopadhyay, p. 123; Many of these prisoners were released en masse in 1938.
47. ‘Communism or Socialism Not the Immediate Issue’, Madras Mail, 27 July 1937.
48. See the weekly gazetteers of the Criminal Intelligence Department, OIOC: L/
PJ/12/401. A note from 9 February 1939, p. 54, reads: ‘It seems therefore that
the stage is gradually being set for M . N. Roy to take a prominent role in Bengal
revolutionary affairs’.
49. Leonard Gordon, Brothers Against the Raj, p. 311ff.
50. For the Pant Resolution see Nripendra Nath Mitra (ed.). 1939. The Indian Annual
Register. Calcutta: Annual Register Office, vol. 1: p. 332.
51. Ganguly, Leftism in India: M. N. Roy and Indian Politics, pp. 178–88.
52. Independent India, 26 November 1939.
53. M. N. Roy. 1939a. ‘Fresh Blow to “Forward Bloc”’, Ananda Bazaar Patrika, March;
See Subhas Chandra Bose, Indian Struggle 1920–1942, p. 404.
54. Karnik, M. N. Roy: Political Biography, p. 426.
55. The League of Radical Congressmen, Declaration of Objects and Constitution, 1940: 29,
quoted in Karnik, M. N. Roy: Political Biography, p. 427.
56. Subhas Chandra Bose. 1962. Crossroads, 1938–1940. New York: Asia Publishing
House, p. 144. See Letter of Bose to A. N. Chattopadhyaya, 11 September 1939,
NMML: Roy Papers, Amiya Nath Chattopadhyaya file.
57. See letter from Jibanlal Chatterjee to Roy, 24 July 1943 on the Jugantar group,
NMML: Roy Papers, Jibanlal Chatterjee.
58. Jadugopal Mukerjee to Laushey, Bengal Terrorism and the Marxist Left, p. 126.
59. Jadugopal Mukerjee to Roy, 24 December 1939, NMML.
60. A. N. Chattopadhyaya to Roy, 9 September 1940, NMML.
61. Interview with Amlan Datta, who, as a young man, became an associate of
M. N. Roy in the 1940s. 20 July 2008.
62. Perhaps the best testament to the disdain for Roy comes in Dhananjan Das’
encyclopaedic chronicle of Bengali Marxist thinkers, Marxbadi Sahitya–Vitarka,
pp. 7–12, in which M. N. Roy’s name is not once mentioned. Roy’s absence
makes for an obvious omission, in an exhaustive catalogue of major Bengali
Marxist thinkers of the day including Hirendranath Mukhopadhyay, Girijapati
Bhattacharya, Nirendranath Ray, Hirenkumar Sanyal, Sushobhan Sarkar,
Dhurjatiprasad Mukhopadhyay, Saheed Surawardy, Bishnu De, Muzaffar Ahmed,
Bhupendranath Datta.
63. Gordon, Brothers Against the Raj, p. 315; Laushey, Bengal Terrorism and the Marxist
Left, pp. 111–2; Karnik, M. N. Roy: A Political Biography, p. 383; Charles Mascarenhas,
a member of the Roy Group, was one of the founders of the Congress Socialist
Party.
64. Minocheher Masani and Jayaprakash Narayan both spoke of their great
admiration for Roy’s work. See Masani, Bliss Was It In That Dawn, p. 97.
65. Ibid., p. 29.
66. See discussion in Karnik. 1978. M. N. Roy: A Political Biography, p. 383.
67. Collected by A. K. Pillai and published after Roy’s release as M. N. Roy. 1997.
Letters to the Congress Socialist Party, (1934, 1935, 1936), in Sibnarayan Ray (ed.),
Selected Works of M. N. Roy, Delhi: Oxford University Press, vol. 4.
68. M. N. Roy, ‘To the Executive Committees of the Congress Socialist Party’, 42,
February 1936, Letters of M. N. Roy.
69. John Patrick Haithcox. 1971. Communism and Nationalism: M. N. Roy and Comintern
Policy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 250.
70. Masani, Bliss Was It In That Dawn, p. 97.
71. Jayaprakash Narayan, Socialist Unity and the Congress Socialist Party, 1971,
pp. 6–8.
72. Lakshmi Narayan Lal. 1975. Jayaprakash: Rebel Extraordinary. Delhi: India Book
Company, p. 92; Seth, Marxist Theory and Nationalist Politics, pp. 151–57.
73. Rajani Palme Dutt and Ben Bradley. 1936. ‘The Anti-Imperialist People’s Front’,
International Press Correspondence, 29 February, pp. 297–300.
75. The Communist, 5 May 1937.
76. Madras Mail, 25 July 1937.
77. ‘The Presidential Election’, Hindustan Times, 2 February 1940.
78. P. C. Joshi. 1942. ‘Indian Communist Party, Its Policy and Work in the War of
Liberation’.
79. See, for example, Ganga Narayan Chandra. 1939. The Russian Revolution: How
M. N. Roy Misinterprets it to the Young Intellectuals of India. Chandernagore:
Sambaya Publishing.
80. Gangadhar Adhikari, one of the leading Communist Party of India intellectuals,
wrote on these various topics in the 1940s, including expressing excitement
over the changes in China, arguing in favour of the Pakistan and pointing to
fascism as the greatest danger. See Gangadhar Adhikari. 1943. Pakistan and Indian
National Unity: The Communist Solution. Bombay: People’s Publishing House.
81. M. N. Roy. 1938c. Our Differences. Calcutta: Saraswaty Library, pp. 20–21.
82. Even before Bourdieu’s classic discussion of status and ‘distinction’, André
Béteille’s seminal work from the 1960s highlighted the importance of studying
‘status groups’, as opposed to class or caste entities, in Indian society, with special
attention to the example of Calcutta. See Andre Béteille.1969. Social Inequality
Selected Readings. Baltimore: Penguin Books. For a detailed discussion of the
rise of this hegemonic communist intellectual culture in Western Bengal, see
Rajarshi Dasgupta. 2003. Marxism and the Middle Class Intelligentsia: Culture and
Politics in Bengal 1920s–1950s. PhD dissertation: Oxford University Press, p. 4.
83. Syamal Krishna Ghosh. 1990. Parichayer Adda. Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi, p. 27.
84. Ibid., 4 February 1938, p. 52.
85. Ibid., 11 April 1940, p. 201.
86. Ibid., 8 September 1939, Adda, p. 166.
87. Ibid., 24 January 1941, p. 238.

88. The Gazetteer focused on M. N. Roy’s activities, as well as that of the Anushilan
and Jugantar samitis, which were outright revolutionary organisations.
89. ‘A Short Note on M. N. Roy’, October 1940–January 1941, National Archives of
India: Home/Poll/1941/F.128.
90. V. P. Menon, The Transfer of Power in India, 1957, 2: 340.
91. Dietmar Rothermund. 1996. The Global Impact of the Great Depression, 1929–1939.
London: Routledge, 1996.
92. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. 1976. Rhizome: Introduction. Paris: Editions de
Minute, p. 20. Christopher Torpey shows how a nineteenth century trend towards
liberalisation of travel gave way to a phase of ‘crustacean states’ arising by the
late nineteenth century. America ended its laissez faire policy on immigration
in 1917 and remained relatively impermeable until the 1960s. See Christopher
Torpey. 2000. The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 93ff. Radhika Mongia considers
the Canadian passport policies instituted during the first decade of the twentieth
century in Radhika Mongia. 1999. ‘Race, Nation, Mobility: A History of the
Passport’, Public Culture 11(3): 527–55. On the introduction of identity papers
for Indians after the Mutiny/Rebellion see Radhika Singha, ‘Colonial Law and
Infrastructural Power: Reconstructing Community, Locating the Female Subject’,
Studies in History (2003) 19:1, pp. 87–126.
93. John Agnew and Stuart Corbridge. 1995. Mastering Space: Hegemony, Territory and
International Political Economy. London: Routledge, pp. 34–35. Karl Polanyi. 1944.
The Great Transformation New York: Rinehart, pp. 226–48.
94. See, for example, Max Günther. 1924. ‘Das politische Ende des deutschen Volkes’,
Deutsches Volkstum, August, vol. 12, p. 458. On Romanità see the excellent paper
by Fabrizio de Donno, ‘Aryanism and ‘Romanità’ in Post-unification Italian
Indology’ presented 27 October 2006 at ‘Exchange of Ideas and Culture between
South Asia and Central Europe’ conference, Heidelberg.
95. Duncan Bell. 2007. The Ideas of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of the World
Order, 1860–1900. Princeton: Princeton University Press; Gary Wilder. 2005. The
French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between the Two World
Wars. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
96. Mark Mazower mentions these as characteristic of the governmentality of the
interwar years. In the hankering after empires instead of only nation-states,
in the desire to conquer healthy bodies and do away with sick ones, and in the
response to the global crisis of capitalism through not only protectionist, but
autarchic policies, the political DNA was in place for the rise of totalitarian
regimes on a global scale. See Mark Mazower. 1996. Dark Continent: Europe’s
Twentieth Century. New York: A. A. Knopf. See Chapters 1–3. Roger Griffin. 2000.
‘The Primacy of Culture: The Current Growth (or Manufacture) of Consensus
within Fascist Studies’, Journal of Contemporary History, 32(1): 21–43.
97. M. N. Roy. 1949. The Russian Revolution. Calcutta: Renaissance Publishers, p. 356.
Originally published in 1937 and incorporated into 1949 edition.
98. M. N. Roy, ‘International Civil War’, War and Revolution, 1942c.: 47.
99. M. N. Roy. 1942b. ‘Introduction’. India and World. Lucknow: Radical Democratic
Party, p. 1.
100. See Roy to Bhupen Kumar Datta, September 1939, NMML: Roy Papers, Datta File.
101. Roy, India and War, Introduction, pp. 1–2.
102. Roy, ‘Thesis adopted by the Radicals in the middle of October 1939’, India and
War, p. 52.
103. Roy, ‘Resolution of 14 September 1939. Reprinted in Congress and War, 1939.
Quoted in Sanjay Seth. 1995. Marxist Theory, p. 181.
104. A. K. Ghosh. 1939. ‘What True Internationalism Demands’, National Front,
22 October, p. 501.
106. M. N. Roy. 1940a. The Alternative. Bombay: Independent India, pp. 75–76. Quoted
in Karnik, M. N. Roy: Political Biography, p. 453.
107. Roy, ‘Participation in War Efforts’, India and War, Part 3: xxii.
109. V. B. Karnik. 1966. Indian Trade Unions. Bombay: Labor Education Service,
pp. 129–31.
110. Rajnarayan Chandavarkar. 1994. The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India:
Business Strategies and the Working Class in Bombay 1900–1940. Cambridge
University Press, p. 420ff.
111. Dipti Kumar Roy. 1990. Trade Union Movement in India: Role of M. N. Roy. Calcutta:
Minerva Associates.
112. M. N. Roy. 1946b. New Orientation. Lectures Delivered at the Political Study Camp
held at Dehra Dun from May 8–18, 1946. Calcutta: Renaissance Publishers, p. 173.
113. Ibid., p. 10.
114. Horkheimer and Adorno situated the roots of totalitarianism within the
‘Enlightenment’, and further suggested that the Enlightenment tradition
stretched as far back as the ancient Greeks. Max Horkheimer and Theodor
Adorno. 1987 (1944). Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming. New York:
Herder & Herder, p. 36ff.
115. Roy, New Orientation, p. 180. ‘We are living in an atmosphere pervaded with
the spirit of Fascism. Our fight, therefore must be fought on the home front’.
M. N . Roy. 1941c. ‘Our Task’, Independent India, 24 August.
116. Roy, New Orientation, p. 180.
117. Roy, ‘War and Revolution’, December 1942, in People’s Plan for Economic
Development, 1944: 35.
118. M. N. Roy. 1946a. ‘I. N. A. and the August Revolution’, Calcutta: Renaissance
Publishers, p. 4.
119. Roy to Kabir, 17 August 1940, NMML: Roy Papers, Kabir Files.
120. These meetings were sponsored by the Soviet Union, although officially did not
take place under its banner. This renewed a form of Soviet internationalism, that
is the use of so-called ‘front organisations’, common before the 6th Congress
of 1928. See Pradhan. 1979. Marxist Cultural Movements in India, pp. iii–xii.
121. The Seventh Congress of the Comintern met in Moscow in July 1935. Just
preceding the Congress, an International Peace Conference of Writers was
held in Paris in June, establishing a broad tent among left intellectuals. Also
see the Manifesto of the All India Progressive Writers’ Conference, Calcutta
24–25 December 1938. Quoted in Pradhan, Marxist Cultural Movements in
India, p. 19.
122. On M. N. Roy and Abburi Ramakrishna Rao, the Telegu poet, see Abburi
and M. N. Roy, 1996: pp. 25–63. On Mulk Raj Anand and Roy see ‘A Decadent
Society Needs Renewal’, The Hindu, 11 December 1983. On Roy’s influence on
K. A. Ahmad see Walter Ruben. 1959. Über die Aufklärung in Indien. Berlin:
Akademie Verlag, p. 16.
123. M. N. Roy appears as a somewhat over-academic though perspicacious
revolutionary, under the alias of ‘Professor Verma’, in Mulk Raj Anand’s 1941
novel, The Sword and the Sickle.
124. B. N. Banerjee, G. D. Parikh and V. M. Tarkunde. 1994. People’s Plan for Economic
Development of India, Calcutta.
125. For an excellent discussion of the plan see Benjamin Zachariah. 2005. Developing
India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, p. 224. See also Vivek Chibber. 2003.
Locked in Place: State Building and Late Industrialization in India. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
126. M. N. Roy. 1942e. ‘The Philosophy of the Twentieth Century’, Scientific Politics,
197–98.
127. Banerjee et al., People’s Plan: For Economic Development in India, 1944: 4.
128. Roy, New Orientation, p. 165. ‘The practice of “Western Democracy” is equally
disappointing’. On not following either the American or the Russian model, but
developing a new approach to development, see M. N. Roy. 1948b. ‘Our Future’,
Independent India, 28 November: 572–3.
129. Sugata Bose. 1997. ‘Instruments and Idioms’, in Frederick Cooper (ed.), Inter-
national Development and the Social Sciences, p. 52.
130. M. N. Roy. 1945a. ‘Constitution of Free India: A Draft’ in B. S. Sharma (ed.),
Radical Humanism of M. N. Roy, p. 20. The Council of State was to be selected
by a group of engineers, economists, scientists, medical men, jurists and
historians.
131. Ibid., p. 21.
132. M. N. Roy. 1941b. ‘New Federal Scheme for India’, Independent India, 9 March.
133. M. N. Roy. 1952. ‘Nationalism and Freedom’, editorial, Radical Humanist, 25 May.
134. Speech delivered speech in Madras, 22 February 1941. Quoted in Karnik,
M. N. Roy: A Political Biography, p. 506.
135. M. K. Gandhi, 1942. ‘One Thing Needful’, Harijan, 10 May, vol. 9, p. 148.
136. M. K. Gandhi. 1942. ‘One Thing Needful’, Harijan, 10 May.
137. Independent India, 22 February 1942.
138. Tanika Sarkar. 1985. ‘Communal Riots in Bengal’, in Mushirul Hasan (ed.),
Communal and Pan-Islamic Trends in Colonial India. Delhi: Manohar Publications,
p. 296; Sugata Bose. 1986. Agrarian Bengal Economy, Social Structure, and Politics.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
139. Speech given at Poona on 2 September 1939, quoted in Joshi and Josh, Struggle
for Hegemony India, vol. 2: p. 222.
140. V. D. Savarkar at the 19th session of All India Hindu Mahasabha held at
Ahmedabad, Lahore. Central Hindu Yuvak Sabha, 1938.
141. See M. N. Roy to Habibur Rahman, 30 July 1939, NMML: Roy Papers, Rahman
File.
142. M. N. Roy. 1939. ‘Mr. M. N. Roy’s Call to Muslim Youths’, Amrita Bazaar Patrika,
5 April.
143. ‘Mohani to Join Radicals’, Amrita Bazar Patrika, August 1939; Hirendranath
Mukhopadhyay. 1983. Under Communism’s Crimson Colors: Reflections on
Marxism, India and World Scene. New Delhi: People’s Publishing House,
p. 112.
144. Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1932–1947, p. 15.
145. M. N. Roy. 1974. Historical Role of Islam: An Essay on Islamic Culture. Lahore:
Sind Sagar Academy, p. 1.
146. Ibid., pp. 2–3.
147. Ibid., p. 18.
148. Ibid., p. 67.
149. Ibid., p. 90.
150. Humayun Kabir. 1958. ‘Rationalism, Democracy, Humanism’, Radical Humanist,
21 February, p. 597.
151. Humayun Kabir. 1958. ‘Radicalism, Democracy and Humanism: Islam in Indian
History’, Radical Humanist, 21 December, p. 597.
152. See Ray, In Freedom’s Quest, vol. 4: p. 99; See correspondence between Roy
and Abu Syed Ayub beginning in April 1949, NMML: Roy Papers. They largely
dealt on evaluation of the Soviet Union. They discuss Ayub’s formulations of
a humanistic perspective ‘beyond Marxism’.
153. ‘Mr M. N. Roy’s Reply to Critics’, Statesman, August 1938.
154. Ibid.
155. Letter from Ellen Gottschalk to Jawaharlal Nehru, 10 September 1938, NMML:
Roy Papers, Ellen Gottschalk correspondence.
156. Ray, In Freedom’s Quest, 4(1): 162.
157. Independent India, 7 April 1940.
158. Roy to Sushil Dey, 5 July 1947. NMML: Roy Papers.
159. Oral history interview with R. M. Pal, 19 January 2005, Delhi.
160. Syamal Krishna Ghosh reproduces some of Roy’s half-Bengali, half-English
sentences in Sudhindranath Datta’s adda of 1941. See Ghosh, Parichayer Adda,
p. 235.
161. The lived versus the self-reflective forms of cosmopolitanism can be dis-
tinguished. Within the massive literature on this distinction, Kwame Anthony
Appiah. 2000. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: Yorton,
offers a particularly precise discussion.
162. Lovestone to Roy, 5 October 1934, NMML: Roy Papers.
163. Ted Morgan. 1999. A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, Communist, Anti-Communist, and
Spymaster, Robert Alexander. 1981. The Right Opposition: The Lovestoneites and
the International Communist Opposition of the 1930s, Westport: Greenwood Press.
164. Their debates were particularly intense in 1937, during the Spanish War. See
Roy to Jay Lovestone, NMML, 19 October 1937. Roy’s stance moved in Loveston’s
direction by the end of the Second World War. Alexander, The Right Opposition:
The Lovestoneites and the International Communist Opposition of the 1930s.

166. Peter Coleman. 1989. The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and
the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe. New York: Free Press, pp. 149–53.
167. M. N. Roy. 1953e. ‘Stalin’s Obituary’, Radical Humanist, 15, 17 March; Roy
was critical of the U.S. involvement in the Korean War. Radical Humanist,
8 April 1952.
168. See Roy correspondence with J. Walcher and Jan Pollack in 1939, NMML,
Roy Files. Walcher immigrated to the United States in 1941, but returned to
the GDR in 1946 to take up activity in the trade union movement.
169. August Thalheimer and Heinrich Brandler ended up in Cuba. Meanwhile many
of the KPD-O members in Paris travelled on to the United States. Others such
as Theodor Bergmann fled to Palestine.
170. Many of Thalheimer’s manuscripts were destroyed during a hurricane. One
completed essay, ‘Über die Kunst der Revolution und die Revolution der Kunst’,
is available in the FZH (Hamburg) Archive. See Theodor Bergmann. 2004. Die
Thalheimers: die Geschichte einer Familie undogmatischer Marxisten. Hamburg:
VSA-Verlag, p. 194ff.
171. Thalheimer passed away in 1948. A number of Roy’s letters to Jay Lovestone
in the 1940s contain inquiries about the whereabouts and activities of August
Thalheimer.
172. He regularly spoke of ‘his family’. See, for example, ‘I am glad to know that our
family (the international organisation of Opposition Communists) remains so
firm and optimistic’, Roy to Ellen Gottschalk, 7 December 1932, Letters from Jail,
1943: 39.
173. Roy to Lovestone, 3 May 1937, NMML: Roy Papers.
174. Oral history interview with R. M. Pal, Delhi, 19 January 2005.
175. See Ray, In Freedom’s Quest, 4: 2, 2007: 358.
176. Swami Bharati Agehananda. 1961. The Ochre Robe. London: George Allen &
Unwin. See also an excellent discussion of Agehananda’s life and work in Jeffrey
Kripal. 1995. Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism & Reflexivity in the Study
of Mysticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 207–49.
177. Kripal, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom, p. 221.
178. Swami Bharati Agehananda, Dear Lalita, 1962: 50, quoted in Kripal, Roads of
Excess, Palaces of Wisdom, p. 251.
179. On Spratt’s arrival in India in May 1926, see OIOC: L/PJ/12/308, p. 5. He was
closely associated with Muzaffar Ahmad from 1928 till the Meerut Conspiracy
Trial of 1933.
180. Phillip Spratt. 1955. Blowing Up India: Reminiscences and Reflections of a Former
Comintern Emissary. Calcutta: Prachi Prakashan, pp. 91–100.
181. Buddhadeb Basu. 1948. An Acre of Green Grass. Calcutta: Papyrus, p. 65
182. Kabir was co-founder of the important Calcutta literary magazine, Chaturanga,
along with Buddhadeb Basu in 1938.
183. Vivid and detailed descriptions given in Ray, In Freedom’s Quest, 4(2): 257–58.
On S. K. Dey in the United States see Ramachandra Guha, How Much Should A
Person Consume?: Environmentalism in India and the United States, 2006: 50.
184. Max Horkheimer to Ellen Roy, 6 June 1956, Frankfurt University, Horkheimer
Nachlass: III-11-298-301. See Surindar Suri. 1959. Nazism and Social Change.
Calcutta: K. L. Mukhopadhyay. Suri also published a number of studies
in German, including Der Kommunismus in Südostasien, in Schriftreihe der
Nierdersäschischen Landeszentralefür Politische Bildung, Heft 3, 1965.
185. See extensive correspondence between Roy and Wadia in the NMML Roy Papers,
spanning 1939 to 1953. Wadia was a founding trustee of the Indian Renaissance
Institute. See Independent India, 3 November 1946, p. 631.
186. Anonymous. 1937. ‘Pure Philosophy of Materialism’, Madras Mail, 25 July. Article
reproduces excerpts from M. N. Roy’s presidential speech at the Madras
Presidency Radical Youth Conference on July 25 1937.
187. Ibid.
6
Radical Humanism
As the South Asian nation–states were established in 1947 and the

sense of the givenness of their arrival set in, the principle of hope and
anticipation of new time, always present in Roy’s intellectual project,
was set in increasingly stark relief. If Roy once waged a revolutionary
war on colonial universalism using the tool of futuristic imaginings
and ‘dream histories’, now, in the context of the creation of India and
Pakistan, his project consisted in preserving or protecting hope from the
occurrences of the present. Roy’s final utopian writings bridged intellectual
debates occurring within regional, national and international spheres
of intellectual debate, about Indian anti-colonial cosmopolitanism, the
Bengali avant-garde’s views of selfhood and creativity, and post-Marxist
humanism.
Utopia could no longer be achieved by overt political action under
current conditions, Roy believed. His Radical Humanist Movement,
inaugurated in 1946, was a project to preserve notions of freedom
obscured by the political tectonics of the partition years and the geo-
political tensions of the Second World War era. Freedom, in its truest
form, he concluded, was the ability for individuals to find their own
secret meanings within the accepted canons of knowledge, as well as
the capacity for individuals to deploy their bodily and mental energies
to the fullest extent. Both exegesis and ascesis played an important
role in Roy’s late theory of postcolonial freedom. Yet, there was also
something of the consolatory and therapeutic at work, as opposed to
the revolutionary and agentive.
Roy made the position of interstitiality a place from which to define
selfhood. If Gandhi imagined a continent self, Roy imagined a ‘shiftless,
but also truly adventurous’ one.1 He declared himself a ‘man from
nowhere’ and a ‘heretic’, disappointed by communism, proudly estranged
from anti-colonial nationalism, critical of Swadeshi internationalism
and sensitive to the complexities of a fractal earth.2
Social displays of estrangement and loneliness became important
elements of Roy’s self-fashioning. One must not forget that the figure
of the renouncer had a cultural resonance for him. The ascetic, or
sannyasin, who leaves society and retreats for spiritual contemplation
Radical Humanism 153
enjoyed a special status in the cultural field of Roy’s Bengali Hindu

background.3 Roy said in a statement to the members of his own party
in 1946, ‘You simply disregarded my ideas, took up a tolerant attitude:
the man seems to have gone a little out of his mind, and is talking all
manner of strange things; nevertheless, occasionally he does have
good ideas; that may be enough for the time being, eventually, we shall
drift back to our spiritual home and this interregnum will pass over
as a nightmare’.4 At his August 1946 Radical Humanist study camp,
Roy spoke about his ‘lonely road’.5 In a 1949 letter to Bertram Wolfe at
Stanford, a friend from his days in Mexico City, he mused that ‘it is less
humiliating to plow one’s lone furrow’, than to have compromised one’s
convictions.6 He often employed another religious image, the ‘heretic’,
as a favourite term of self-description. In 1946, Roy described himself as
‘a tormented soul…’ whose ‘political practice, be it liberal, democratic
Illustration 6.1 Roy in 1953.

or proletarian’ had failed to produce the ‘promised result’.7 In India he

fashioned himself increasingly as a persecuted outcast from the power
centres of anti-colonial struggle. On another occasion he said, ‘I have
had enough of politics. If the chance for democracy came again, I hope
others would make a better job’.8
Anti-Colonial Cosmopolitanism
But Roy was not so distant from mainstream modes of anti-colonial
thought as his own claims suggested. His project can be understood as
belonging to the same conversation as thinkers such as M. K. Gandhi,
Rabindranath Tagore and Muhammad Iqbal, all of whom contemplated
the requirements and possibilities of anti-colonial cosmopolitanism in
India. As Indian thinkers articulated visions of difference and cultural
autonomy, they also simultaneously imagined new circuits for travell-
ing beyond the limits of group identity toward larger solidarities.
Imagining the self beyond local or familiar bounds was deeply rooted
in anti-colonial thought. We cannot understand Gandhi’s discussion
about the continent nation-body without also relating it to his vision of
a new internationalism born of mutual recognition and esteem among
cultures worldwide.9 The end of Swaraj was to help create a peaceful
human community, Gandhi stressed. Gandhi wrote in 1939, ‘India has
therefore to tell a very distraught and maddened world that there is
another path that humanity must tread if it would save itself from these
periodical disasters…’10 Ashis Nandy has analysed at least six avenues
through which Gandhi’s thought aimed at reworking the assumptions
of global human exchange.11 Discourses on universalism and humanity
were important implements in the toolbox of anti-colonial thinkers,
providing the ethical context in which the nation could be imagined.
The point is not to argue that Roy prescribed mediation and the
bridging of borders, meanwhile other, more mainstream, anti-colonial
intellectuals solely pursued autonomy and the strengthening of
bounded selfhoods. Such a juxtaposition would be facile and incorrect.
The task is to understand what was distinctive about M. N. Roy’s variety
of anti-colonial cosmopolitanism, and how that difference relates to the
other conversation games he participated in.
Indian cosmopolitan discourse was traditionally phrased in terms
of civilisational continuity and exchange between high traditions.12
In the writings of diverse thinkers of the early twentieth century, and
perhaps most explicitly in the work of M. K. Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore
and Muhammad Iqbal, an insistence on some notion of civilisational

continuity played an important role. Civilisation, as a supranational
domain of cultural holism, provided an important ethical basis for
grounding possible forms of Indian national autonomy. These notions
of civilisation, such as Tagore’s notion of Greater India, or Iqbal’s Islamic
Universalism, or Gandhi’s view of shared Sanskritic civilisation, all
established the contours of a collective identity that ran deep into the
past, but that also facilitated ethical exchange and interaction across
cultural bounds.13
Communist internationalism, as it was rigorously interpreted by
M. N. Roy, once had inspired him to deny notions of inheritance and
tradition altogether, and to assert that only the cross-cutting sociological
category of class properly defined social collectives. Yet, by his late
writings, disillusioned with communist internationalism, Roy felt
that it was not philosophically satisfactory to speak of a free-floating
self adrift in a boundless human universe, solely relating to others in
terms of production relations. Inheritance, traditions and belonging
played an important role in defining not only the social experience,
but the moral sensibilities of individuals, Roy came to believe. ‘What is
necessary to-day is to draw inspiration from the store of the civilised
man’s spiritual heritage. That alone can guide the steps of mankind out
of the present impasse and towards a still unexplored future believed
to be full of promise’.14
If we read his texts Materialism (1940) and Reason, Romanticism and
Revolution (1952–55) together, we see that the term ‘civilisation’ begins
to play an increasingly important role in Roy’s late thought, although
he uses it in an uncommon and avant-garde way. In his late phase,
Roy maintained that it was up to the individual to imagine his own
‘dream’ civilisation, with like-minded thinkers stretching into the past.
Roy spoke of his ‘brotherhood of men attracted by the adventure of
ideas, keenly conscious of the urge for freedom’. 15 While Roy criticised
notions of cultural holism, he introduced his own chosen regime of
authenticity by creating a chosen lineage.16
Roy’s late works were utopian genealogies of this hidden cosmo-
politan humanist tradition in which he fit. He focused on uncovering
a lineage of humanists and heretics, and on grafting himself onto that
line as a modern interpreter and renovator. He traced a submerged
tradition that ran through the writings of Anaxogoras, Heraclitus,
Pythagoras, Democritus, Diogenes. It also ran through Kanada, Kapila,
Gautam, through Vaisheshik and Sankhya philosophy, through the
Gita and the writings of Sankaracharya, through the Carvaka system

of philosophy and Buddhist thought. The tradition connected him to
the German Aufklärung, as well as the Sturm und Drang, and to thinkers
such as Spinoza, Hegel and Marx. Roy maintained that all these figures
together formed an inheritance through space and time, and at the
crux of their disparate systems and thought was a ‘materialist monism’,
that all life was matter and all matter was one. Finally, contemporary
experimental sciences were carrying this tradition forward. ‘The
space–time conception of the Theory of Relativity is yet another step
in advance towards a materialist monism… Even the electron has been
traced down to a state where particles disappear. Today the substratum
of the world has been revealed to be an all-pervasive substance’.17
Radical Humanism
The Radical Democratic Party failed to win a single seat in the Constitu-
ent Assembly elections of early 1946. Roy was forced to recognise the
limitations of his abilities as a mobiliser in the field of party politics.
There was not much place for interstitial politics in the context of post-
colonial arrival. ‘After much thought, I finally came to the conclusion
that our party had no root. We are neither Marxist nor Communists nor
anything else…’, he said to his group at their annual meeting in 1946.18
This played a major role in his decision to disband his political party
after its fourth All-India meeting in December 1948. Reflecting on the
fits and starts of his organisational attempts since 1937, Roy said, ‘the
Party never claimed a strong mechanical apparatus with huge mass
membership which could be no more than a blind following... but it
did surpass any other group in the country in respect of its intellectual
integrity and spiritual strength’.19
Roy proposed to deterritorialise his movement, to make it a border-
less community of like-minded individuals. ‘Whoever agreed with us,
we do not ask them to become members of any organisation; but we
shall expect them to act according to their conviction. We are giving
up a rigidly organised existence because we do not want to create a
barrier around us, excluding anybody as outsiders. We do not want
to monopolise the result of our efforts’.20 The name of his magazine
Independent India was changed to The Radical Humanist in April 1949, the
Marxian Way Quarterly was renamed the Humanist Way. Roy finally set
himself to work on establishing his Frankfurt School in India, the Indian
Renaissance Institute at Dehra Dun.21
Roy’s ‘radical humanism’ declared modernist faith in the ‘laws of

science’, and in evolutionary biology as setting forth undeniable com-
mon principles for all life. The ‘biological urge to life’ was that which
‘developed into the conscious need of a human being to evolve his
personality, his individuality’.22 At the heart of this ‘urge to life’ was
the ‘…harmony and law-governedness inherent in man. They are the
foundation of the special human qualities’. Thus, following Roy’s utopian
logic, selfhood arises out of the biological urges, and the desires of the
self accord with the inherent order of the universe.23
Fundamentally, what the human animal desired in Roy’s interpre-
tation, was ‘spiritual freedom’, something even more satisfying than
economic or political liberation. ‘The urge for spiritual freedom … has
been the lever of entire human development, ever since the birth of the
species. It is the striving to feel that man is a free agent, that he can act
according to his judgment and is capable of discriminating good from evil
and right from wrong without being haunted by the preoccupation that
he is helplessly at the mercy of some capricious superhuman power’.24
In his monistic view, the mind and the body, the judgements and the
instincts, were identical. ‘If the Universe is a cosmos, it is arbitrary to
break it up into matter and mind. A monistic naturalism does not allow
evolutionary ethics to distinguish a world of values from a world of
facts’.25 Roy’s notion of ‘monistic naturalism’ obviously resonated with
the religious discourses that galvanised the Swadeshi avant-garde in
their destruction of colonial universalism’s gradient of consciousness.26
But Roy’s interest in biology, science and spirituality was also in-
formed by debates on the civic role of scientific discovery that had
reached a peak in the interwar years. While in prison, Roy read
books by Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Arthur Stanley Eddington,
James Jeans and Erwin Schrödinger, all written in the 1920s and 1930s,
with the aim of proposing applications for the new discoveries in
theoretical physics, as well as insights from logic and mathematics, to
questions of epistemology, as well as to problems of ethics.27
Roy’s Radical Humanist Movement proposed to combine ‘scientific
rationalism’ with the ‘romantic faith’ that ‘man is the maker of his
world’. Revolution, in Roy’s late writings, no longer had a direct refer-
ent in the material or social world, but referred specifically to an
alteration of consciousness. It entailed mental process and a shift in
viewpoint.28 ‘I am of the opinion that the solution to our problems, which
in varying manifestations are confronting the whole world, will be to
make individuals conscious of their almost unlimited potentialities,

and of the rights and responsibilities which flow from these’.29 The
revolution that would change society and recreate the world would
entail a mental act, namely the realisation that it was in the biological
nature of the individual to continually reinvent itself. Human existence
consists in ‘endless processes of unfoldment of the potentialities which
are of biological heritage’.30 The advent of revolution would come,
wrote Roy, when individuals realised that the claims of science and
those of romanticism were at one. It was not that Roy was escaping
into a utopian conception, or that he was receding into the solipsistic
interiority of the bourgeois self, but rather he was struggling to distil
out the essence of his Swadeshi–Marxist hope. If the contents of anti-
colonial hope could be distilled and articulated in their purest form,
then they could also be preserved for use at a more opportune time in
the future. And this distillation produced, in Roy’s view, a postcolonial
sublime: ‘That philosophy is sublime which opens up before mankind
the vista of infinity without deluding it into the wilderness of meta-
physical abstractions’.31
Post-Swadeshi Modernism
Roy’s late thought resonated with that of many contemporary Swadeshi
modernists. Rabindranath Tagore at his Viswa Bharati University at
Shantiniketan founded institution in order to cultivate imagination
(kalpana), creativity (srsti), and essence (rasa) in his students as
ambassadors of Indian and Asian culture to the world.32 ‘Rasa is not static’,
Tagore wrote. ‘It is not rigid, but soft, and mobile everywhere. It can
be widely dispersed, and because of this it can shake the world with its
ability to create variations. There is no end to its novelty’.33 Aurobindo
Ghosh offered another expression. He exited politics after emerging
from imprisonment in 1909 on charges of Swadeshi insurgency. Moving
to Pondicherry in 1910 he established a renowned yoga ashram that drew
a large international following.34 Aurobindo expounded the notion of
‘integral yoga’ that ‘hastens the soul’s development’. 35 ‘Each man who
enters the realms of yogic experience is free to follow his own way…’, he
wrote. In his Future Evolution of Man (1962) and The Future Poetry (1953)
he argued that an unprecedented evolution of mankind was still to be
expected, in which spiritually enlightened humans would glimpse the
transcendent universal principle at the centre of all being.36
Roy’s Indian Renaissance Institute, founded in the hill station of Dehra

Dun in Uttar Pradesh in 1949, stood in family relation to a number of post-
Swadeshi modernist institutes, such as Rabindranath Tagore’s Viswa
Bharati University (founded 1921), Aurobindo Ghosh’s Pondicherry Ashram
(founded 1926), Girishchandra Bose’s Indian Psychoanalytic Society
(founded 1921), and Kalidas Nag’s Greater India Society (founded 1923).
Another member of this cohort, Meghnad Saha, a world-renowned
physicist who collaborated with Einstein, established the National
Academy of Science (founded 1930).37 Meanwhile, Prasanta Mahalanobis,
a member like Kalidas Nag of Tagore’s inner circle of young modernists,
set up the Indian Statistical Institute in 1931. Indeed, what could be
more modernist than to ground a school or academy or to invent a
movement? Benoy Kumar Sarkar, the great Swadeshi avant-garde
thinker, saw this trend of founding schools as an affirmation of the
abiding modernism of India. ‘Parisats or academies, whether stationary
or peripatetic, have indeed existed in India since time immemorial’,
Sarkar wrote.38 In the period from 1925 to 1938, Sarkar himself went
on to found no less than eight institutes (all at the same address at
9 Panchanan Ghose Lane!), including the Bengali Society of Economics,
the Bengali German Knowledge Society and the Bengali Dante Society.39
Sarkar was hailed by his admirers, such as Radhakamal Mukerjee, as
‘the idol of the young [Swadeshi] intellectuals, the focus of national
idealism and the spear-head of the national education movement in
later times’.40 Unfortunately, space does not permit a detailed treatment
of the web of the Swadeshi avant-garde thinkers in the interwar years;
the topic certainly deserves a book of its own. The point to emphasise
is that Roy’s activities belonged to this same family relation of post-
Swadeshi intellectual activism in the interwar years.
Global Humanism
Mid-century humanism sought to find meaning in the face of unpre-
cedented human destruction. In 1952, Roy became the vice president of
the inaugural session of the International Humanist and Ethical Union
in Amsterdam, although he could not attend due to ill health. The Union
was established among British, American, Dutch, Austrian, Belgian or-
ganisations, as well as the Indian Radical Humanists.41 Critics at the
time said that ‘Royists of tomorrow aspire, through political action, to
create a new heaven on earth before long’. It represented a ‘dogmatism
of “scientific materialism”, which was just as bad as a “dogmatism of
religion’’’.42
The 1940s and 1950s were decades in which a worldwide group of

thinkers were discussing ‘Man’ before the backdrop of unprecedented
human destruction. Following the end of the Second World War, a
flurry of international summits arose to ensure the birth of a new
internationalism.43 Radhakamal Mukherjee’s assertion that an earth
‘radiant with calamity’ provided the background needed to see an
inclusive family of humankind, recalled Kant’s statement during the
European world war of 1793 that contemplating a possible ‘vast grave’ of
humankind was the only truly effective spur to resolving a cosmopolitan
peace.44 Erik Erikson remarked after the war that the possibility of
‘species-wide destruction’ was making possible, for the first time, a
‘species-wide identity’.45 The particular quality of mid-century humanism,
with its concern for the cross-cultural category of ‘man’, arose from ex-
periences of devastation and vulnerability, not from the bravado of
‘grand theory narratives’.46
Hannah Arendt reflected on the new era of the 1950s, observing
‘man [is] being thrown back upon himself’.47 And Ernst Cassirer put it
slightly differently in his 1944 Essay on Man, ‘Man is declared to be that
creature who is constantly in search of himself — a creature who in every
moment of his existence must examine and scrutinize the conditions
of his existence. In this scrutiny, in this critical attitude toward human
life, consists the real value of human life’.48 French existentialism explored
the possibility of humanism in the midst of devastation and absurdity.
Jean-Paul Sartre became a symbol of the existentialist resolution with
his 1946 manifesto, ‘Existentialisme c’est un humanisme’.49 Meanwhile
Christian thinkers such as Reinhold Niebuhr and Jacques Maritain
proposed that only a rebirth of Christian faith could ground human-
ism in the wake of Marxism’s secular failure. The New Left in Europe
and America, with major exponents such as Herbert Marcuse and his
championing of the pleasure principle and polymorphous perversity,
spoke of transforming the whole notion of class revolution to one
of sexual revolution, to give occasion to a less destructive and more
creative social order.50
Roy regularly and critically reviewed European monographs in the
Marxian Way, including books by Ernst Cassirer, Reinhold Niebuhr,
Sidney Hook, Jacques Barzun, P. A. Sorokin and Jacques Maritain.51
Roy’s philosophical journal, The Radical Humanist, published both
commissioned and reprinted articles by Arthur Koestler, Erich Fromm,
Raymond Aron, C. S. Lewis, H. R. Trevor–Roper, Isaac Deutscher,
Heinrich Brandler, and others, showing how attuned it was to European
and American philosophical and social scientific discussions.52 There

were discussions of French existentialism, the Frankfurt School and
the intellectual Left in Britain.53 Occasionally, the Indian Renaissance
Institute would receive visitors from abroad. The young Gloria Steinem
wrote an article for The Radical Humanist in 1957 after her visit to the
institute.
M. N. Roy’s thought was a Swadeshi–Luxemburgist contribution
to this humanist conversation, clearly working from some shared
assumptions, but also drawing on resources outside European dis-
course. The influence of Brahmo exegesis, dharmic asceticism and
the Swadeshi avant-garde left traces in Roy’s work, just as much as did
1920s German Marxist thought. M. N. Roy situated the self athwart
the constructs of the ‘West’ and the ‘East’, in a sublime realm of ‘the
human’ characterised by underlying unity. He would retort to some
European humanists that a peaceful universal community of man was
possible not because Western universalism had spread to the ends of the
earth, and not because the West and the East were finally able to meet
on equal footing after postcolonial independence, and certainly not
because the East had come bearing spiritual peace, but because human
bodies had urges, regardless of their cultural location, and these urges
were universally shared among all humans, and also reflected in the
very order of the natural world.54 Once all peoples came to recognise
this deep monism at the heart of existence, then all configurations of
culture, civilisation and nation would be seen in the light of a higher
sublime truth. My point here is that this idea cannot be traced solely to
deep traditions of Indian thought, nor to Western Marxist conceptions —
it arose from the amalgamation and admixture of diverse thought
traditions under the global horizon of nineteenth and twentieth-century
modernism, as well as Roy’s own efforts to make sense of his social ex-
perience as an intermediary and traveller between very different social
worlds. The hermeneutic ‘middle world’ in which varied influences
meet and fuse is a more appropriate field for situating M. N. Roy’s ideas,
as opposed to attempting to assimilate him to problematically reified
categories of either ‘indigenous’ or ‘Western’ thought.
Return of Hope
The old often return to the questions first posed in youth, surprised
they had in fact not travelled so far. In the years before his passing,
Roy took stock of his life of crossings. After a major fall down a steep
craggy hill in Mussoorie in 1952, his health, already fragile, began
to quickly deteriorate. In August he suffered a cerebral thrombosis

resulting in partial paralysis. And two years alter, after some periods
of improvement, he passed away on 24 January 1954. His friends and
associates recalled the following excerpt from his 1946 writings:
When, as school body of fourteen, I began my political life, which may end
in nothing, I wanted to be free. Independence, complete and absolute, is a
newfangled idea. The old-fashioned revolutionaries thought in terms of
freedom. In those days, we had not read Marx. We did not know about the
existence of the proletariat. Still, many spent their lives in jail and went to the
gallows. There was no proletariat to propel them. They were not conscious
of class struggle. They did not have the dream of Communism. But they had
the human urge to revolt against the intolerable conditions of life… I began
my political life with that spirit, and I still draw my inspiration farther from
that spirit than from the three volumes of Capital or three-hundred volumes
by the Marxists.55
Roy had spent his lifetime fusing conversations and ideologies that
circulated in regional, national and international zones of thought and
debate. His distinction lay not only in his particular political objective,
and his anticipatory vision of the Indian future, but also in his unusually
open disposition towards the many new conversation games and social
worlds he joined over the course of his life.
In his last years, he tempered his views on Gandhi, and even started
adopting Gandhian language to describe his own political ideals.56 In
1946, he proclaimed that his own organisation required a period of
‘spiritual purging and self-examination’.57 Reflecting on his relationship
to Gandhi since the 1920s, the role of the Mahatma as his anti-muse, Roy
said, ‘as a student of philosophy, I have tried to appreciate the positive
aspects of Gandhism. But at the same time, I could not overlook its
obvious defects and fallacies… The most laudable aspect of Gandhism
was the desire to purify public life and raise the moral standards of
politics… But Gandhism also stands for human freedom. It has even been
called a sort of humanism… But in distinction to Marxism, Gandhi brought
back religion into politics, in social science and even in economics’.58
In a critical obituary, Roy criticised Gandhi for inadvertently fanning
the flames of Hindu nationalism in India, despite his efforts to bring
communal harmony.59 But later, a full year after Gandhi’s death, Roy
commented, ‘the practice of the precepts of purifying politics with
truth and non-violence alone will immortalise the memory of the
Mahatma. Monuments of mortar and marble will perish, but the light
of the sublime message of truth and non-violence will shine forever’.60
Talk of anti-culturalism and revolutionary politics during the war years

gave way in Roy’s work to a more meditative language that sounded old
and wise, ‘Humanist politics must be a moral force; it must get out of
the struggle for power of the political parties’.61 Roy was conscious of
this increasing resonance with Gandhian ethics, even as he came to this
appreciation in retrospect.
The poet Sudhindranath Datta soliloquised, in his obituary tribute,
that M. N. Roy had ‘retired into the wilderness… Inevitably, therefore,
he was widely misunderstood in India where virtue has been either
cloistered or compartmentalised, and as he refused to compromise, or
to subordinate reason to emotion, or break up the unity of the world by
arbitrary hostility to some parts, militant nationalism, whether of the
old or the new school, went so far as to consider him an enemy of the
State’.62 At the very end, Roy’s was a sublime conception, characterised
by the location of human meaning beyond the immediate world and in
an enduring unity of human and natural life.
With the arrival of nation–states in South Asia, Roy felt that pre-
serving his hope in its sublime form was the best way to protect it from
the degradation of the present.63 This was a period of unexampled
bloodshed and violence. The Calcutta killings of August 1946 left more
than 4,000 dead. Riots in Bombay, Noakhali, Tippera, Garhmukteswar
and in areas of Bihar added to the year’s number of casualties. Riots
followed in a number of other regions throughout the following year.
And this led to the holocaust that began in August 1947, to more than
an estimated three million missing people by 1951.64 On the coming
of Independence, Roy wrote: ‘On August 15th, the vocal section of the
Indian people, drugged and duped into a delirium, will ceremoniously
enthrone the Leviathan. The exacting deity will demand more and
more sacrifice. Eventually, he will thirst for blood. The Leviathan is the
God of War’.65
In a surrealist essay, Roy imagined an angel flying to India in 1942
and returning in 1946 to ‘have a closer look at things’. The situation he
met did not evince jubilation, but ‘[he] returned to [his] oblivion with
a heavy heart, and for these four years kept on sorrowfully watching
things go from bad to worse. [His] gloomy view about the future of Asia
was born out by the march of events’.66
Whereas in the 1920s, it was clear that utopianism was used as a
tool or weapon in the charged effort to blast apart the ‘is’ with the
‘ought’, it seemed now that hope had to be preserved and protected.
In the study of M. N. Roy’s thought, we seem to encounter something
of a life-cycle of utopianism. As the structures of the world changed,
so too did Roy’s interpretative responses. Perhaps Roy’s notion of

utopia was not dissimilar from that of Walter Benjamin as he wrote
of the ‘Angelus Novus’ while fleeing from the Nazis in 1940. The ‘angel of
history’ is caught in a storm blowing from paradise, Benjamin imagined.
‘This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back
is turned’. Benjamin’s angel has ‘eyes staring, mouth open, and wings
spread’ as ‘he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage
upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet’. In the case of M. N. Roy’s
angel, whom he imagines flying to earth in 1946, the creature concludes
its autumnal comments, ‘let me finish on a note of cautious optimism.
Even a confirmed pessimist like myself can see a dim ray of hope in the
midst of a suffocating gloom. When the war comes Indian fighters of
freedom will have a chance to turn the tide of history’. In the case of
both angels, in the case of both men, keeping hope had become a matter
of seeing a secret promise hidden amidst debris.
Notes
1. Erik Erikson. 1964. ‘Identity and Uprootedness in Our Time’, in Insight and
Responsibility: Lectures on the Ethical Implications of Psychoanalytic Insight. New York:
W. W. Norton, p. 99.
2. Bert Gasenbeek and Babu Gogineni (eds.). 2002. International Humanist and Ethical
Union, 1952–2002: Past, Present and Future. Utrecht: De Tijdstroom, p. 14.
3. Romila Thapar. 2001. ‘Dissent and Protest in the Early Indian Tradition’, in Cultural
Pasts: Essays in Early Indian History. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, p. 215.
4. M. N. Roy. 1946b. New Orientation: Lectures Delivered at the Political Study Camp
held at Dehra Dun from May 8–18, 1946. Calcutta: Renaissance Publishers, p. 62.
5. Ibid., p. 7.
6. Roy to Bertram Wolfe, 21 September 1949, NMML: Roy Papers.
7. Independent India, 11 December 1946, p. 746.
8. Roy to Louis Coney, 20 August 1952, NMML: Roy Papers.
9. A powerful expression of Gandhi’s cosmopolitanism is provided in his letter
exchange with Rabindranath Tagore, collected and edited by Sabyasachi
Bhattacharya. 1997. The Mahatma and the Poet: Letters and Debates Between Gandhi
and Tagore, 1915–1941. Delhi: National Book Trust India. 1997.
10. M. K. Gandhi. 1939a. ‘India’s Attitude’, Harijan, 14 October, vol. 1.
11. Nandy brilliantly discusses the critiques of scientism, technicism, professionalism,
hyper-adulthood, hyper-masculinity, among other dimensions, in Gandhi’s
thought. See Ashis Nandy. 1987. ‘From Outside the Imperium: Gandhi’s Cultural
Critique of the West’, in Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias, Delhi: Oxford University
Press, pp. 127–62; See Leela Gandhi. 2006. Affective Communities: Anticolonial
Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship, on Gandhi’s
alternative of a ‘politics of friendship’, pp. 85, 86.
12. See Cemil Aydin. 2007. The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order
in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought. New York: Columbia University Press,
pp. 59–68.
13. Shashi Joshi and Bhagwan Josh. 1992–94. Struggle for Hegemony in India, 1920–47:
the Colonial Stale, the Left and the National Movement. New Delhi: Sage Publications,
vol. 3: pp. 200–03. Also see Javed Majeed. 2007. Autobiography, Travel and Post-
national Identity: Gandhi, Nehru and Iqbal. New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
pp. 19–40, 52–69.
15. M. N. Roy. 1953f. ‘Our Creed’, Radical Humanist, 1 February.
16. Pheng Cheah. 1997. ‘Given Culture: Rethinking Cosmopolitical Freedom in
Transnationalism’, Boundary 2 , 24 (2): 157–97.
17. M. N. Roy. 1982. Materialism: An Outline in the History of Scientific Thought. Delhi:
Ajanta Publications, p. 51
19. M. N. Roy. 1960. Politics, Power and Parties, Calcutta: Renaissance Publishers,
pp. 98–99.
20. Roy, Politics, Power and Parties, p. 107.
21. V. B. Karnik. 1978. M. N. Roy: Political Biography. Bombay: New Jagriti Samaj,
p. 553.
23. Ibid., p. 136.
24. Reproduced in M. N. Roy. 2004. M. N. Roy Radical Humanist Selected Writings. Innaiah
Narisetti (ed.). Amherst: Prometheus Books, p. 173.
26. J. C. Bose, an eminent Bengali scientist (1858–1937), famously wrote on the
monistic principle uncovered through scientific research, and how this accorded
with the ‘Hindu’ worldview. See Ashis Nandy. 1995. ‘Defiance and Conformity in
Science: The World of Jagadish Chandra Bose’ in Alternative Sciences: Creativity and
authenticity in two Indian scientists, Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 17–87.
27. He read Eddington’s New Pathways in Science and The Nature of the Physical World;
James Jeans, The Universe around Us; Émile Meyerson’s Réel et déterminisme dans la
physique quantique (1933); Erwin Schrödinger, individual titles not listed in file;
Bertrand Russell, individual titles not listed in file. See Prison Notebooks, vol. 2,
pp. 187–91 and vol. 5, p. 481ff.
28. M. N. Roy. 1952–55. Reason, Romanticism and Revolution, Calcutta: Renaissance
Publishers, vol. 1: p. 16.
29. M. N. Roy. 1957. ‘Humanism — The Answer to our Basic Problems’, Radical
Humanist, 7 July, p. 333.
30. Roy, Reason, Romanticism, Revolution, vol. 2: p. 264.
31. Roy, Reason, Romanticism, Revolution, vol. 1: p. 16.
32. Prathama Banerjee. 2005. ‘The Work of Imagination: Temporality and Nationhood
in Colonial Bengal’, Subaltern Studies, vol. 12: pp. 280–322; Tapati Guha-
Thakurta.1992. The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art: Artists, Aesthetics, and Nationalism
in Bengal, C. 1850–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 146–84.
33. Rabindranath Tagore. 1973. Racanabali, Calcutta: Viswa Bharati, vol. 8:

p. 546.
34. Sugata Bose. 2007. ‘The Spirit and Form of an Ethical Policy: A Meditation on
Aurobindo’s Thought’, in Modern Intellectual History, vol. 4: pp. 129–44.
35. Wilhelm Halbfass. 1988. India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding, 249.
36. Aurobindo Ghosh. 1949. The Life Divine, pp. 856, 857.
37. Meghnad Saha’s journal Science and Culture, which begun in 1934, advanced
themes that were very resonant with M. N. Roy’s own views on intellectual
agenda in India. Saha contributed occasionally to Roy’s press, for example in
‘New Philosophy of Life’, which appeared in Roy’s Independent India magazine on
27 January 1928, and ‘Philosophy of Industrialisation’ on 4 September 1938.
38. Benoy Kumar Sarkar. 1937. Creative India, From Mohenjo Daro to the Age of
Ramakrsna–Vivekananda. Lahore: Motilal Banarsi Dass, p. 143.
39. Report on the Bangiya Jarman Vidya Samsad in 1933, National Library of India,
Kolkata: File 149.B.311.
40. Radhakamal Mukerjee. 1997. India: The Dawn of a New Era: An Autobiography.
New Delhi: Radha Publications, p. 53.
41. Gasenbeek and Babu Gogineni. 2002. International Humanist and Ethical Union,
p. 14.
42. Review of In Man’s Own Image in The Times of India, 30 August 1949.
43. Especially the Inter-Asia Conference held in Delhi in 1947; The Progressive
Writers’ Conference held in Lahore in 1949, the Bandung Afro-Asia Conference
of 1955, the 1958 Afro-Asia Writers Bureau Conference in Tokyo, the Cairo Afro-
Asian Women’s Conference of 1961, the Non-Aligned Movement Conference in
Belgrade of 1961, the 1966 Tricontinental Conference. See Vijay Prashad. 2007.
The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World. New York: New Press.
44. Radhakamal Mukerjee begins his The Way of Humanism, ‘Mankind has never
before so endangered its very existence as in this epoch, dividing itself into
two vast, hostile blocs struggling for world domination’. Mukerjee, The Way of
Humanism. East and West. Bombay: Academic Books, p. v. The book, written in
1968, redresses many of Roy’s arguments from the 1940s without mentioning
him by name; Immanuel Kant. 2006. Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings,
trans. David Colclasure. Yale: Yale University Press, p. 81.
45. Erik Erikson, Insight and Responsibility, p. 242.
46. A later postmodernist critique of ‘grand narratives’ would obscure the
historical context of war devastation that informed 1940s and 1950s thought.
See, for example, Jean-François Lyotard. 1988. The Differend: Phrases in Disputes.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
47. Hannah Arendt. 1958 rpt (1951). Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Meridian
Books, p. 320.
48. Ernst Cassirer. 1944. An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human
Culture. Garden City: Doubleday, p. 5.
49. Originally published in German in 1947, and translated into French in 1952.
50. Herbert Marcuse. 1972. Counterrevolution and Revolt. Boston: Beacon Press,
Alain Schnapp et al. (eds). 1969. Journal de la Commune Etudiante. Paris: Editions
du Seuil.
51. He reviewed the following in The Marxian Way, later The Humanist Way after
1949: Cassirer’s Die Philosophie der Aufklärung, 2 April 1946; Reinhold Niebuhr’s,
The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness, 1 March 1946; Sidney Hook’s The
Hero in History, 1943; Jacques Barzun’s Romanticism and the Modern Ego, 1 April
1949; P. A. Sorokin’s The Crisis of Our Age, 2 January 1946.
52. Following articles were published in the Radical Humanist: Raymond Aron.
1960. ‘Europe’s Resurgence’, 1 March. Erich Fromm. 1960. ‘The Present Human
Condition’, 23 January p. 39; Isaac Deutscher. 1958. ‘Act Two of Hungary’s
Tragedy’, 18 October, p. 517.
53. Sachin Roy. 1958. ‘Existentialist “New Humanism” in France’, Radical Humanist,
12 May, p. 234. Also see M. K. Halder. 1958. ‘Man in the Modern World’, Radical
Humanist, 24 August, p. 401. Sachin Roy. 1957. ‘Beyond Communist towards
Humanism’, Radical Humanist, 19 May, p. 251.
54. Roy mocked this view repeatedly, particularly sarcastically in, M. N. Roy. 1946a.
‘Four Years Later’. Here he styles himself as a mythic messenger of Asia who is
a ‘confirmed pessimist’ and ‘[preaches] revolutionary defeatism…’ in I.N.A. and
the August Revolution, p. 105.
55. Roy, New Orientation , p. 183.
56. Independent India. 1947. 28 September.
58. M. N. Roy. 1955. ‘Gandhism, Marxism, Humanism’, Radical Humanist, 19 June,
pp. 294–95.
59. M. N. Roy. 1948a. ‘The Message of the Martyr’, Independent India, 8 February
60. Independent India. 1948. 22 February, p. 47.
62. Sudhindranath Datta. 1995. ‘Homage to M. N. Roy’, in M. N. Roy: Philosopher–
revolutionary. Sibnarayan Ray (ed.). pp. 194–96.
63. Saranindranath Tagore, ‘Benjamin in Bengal: Cosmopolitanism and Historical
Primacy’ in Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra (eds), Cosmopolitan Thought Zones of
South Asia [forthcoming].
64. Asim Khwaja. 2008. ‘The Big March: Migratory Flows After the Partition of
India’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 43: p. 35.
65. Independent India, August 1947, quoted in Karnik, M. N. Roy: A Political Biography,
p. 563.
66. Roy, ‘Four Years’, in I.N.A. and the August Revolution, p. 94.
Epilogue
In 1950, Roy was mostly bed-ridden and otherwise barely able to walk.
Nevertheless, he implored those taking care of him to drive him to the
Hindu holy town of Haridwar for the Kumbhamela festival. This seems
a strange demand from an ex-communist revolutionary and proponent
of secular humanism. Roy’s protestations were so strong that only the
firm intervention of a doctor, insisting that the trip would do harm,
could put plans in abeyance.1 The fact that Roy fervently wanted to see
the Kumbhamela in his final years suggest the way in which religious
sensibilities continued to animate him. Roy read Marxism canonically,
as an exegete, and he continuously envisioned deep subjecthoods,
pregnant with world-changing creative energies, cultivating and
socially distributing these energies through ascesis. This book has
suggested that the palimpsest of discourses in Roy’s thought blurs dis-
tinctions, least of which is that between the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘secular’
in philosophical discussions about meaning, value and ‘new times’ in the
anti-colonial era.
M. N. Roy, despite all of his travels and transformations, persisted in
contemplating three recurring themes: the eruption of energy out of
form, the reading of underling unity out of apparent difference, and the
articulation of mediated autonomy and solidarity. These can be taken
as topoi of his life work, but also, perhaps, as central recurring themes
in different forms of modernist thought and aesthetics of the twentieth
century. The struggle to break the frame of linear temporal succession,
and to define self within new universal communities, was at the heart
of Bengali thought from the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth
century, just as much as it preoccupied German, Russian or other groups
in the same period. Different local expressions of moder-nist avant-
gardism arose like reflecting mirrors in the modern period.
Studying M. N. Roy’s thought leads to more than an inquiry into an
unusual life-arc, for he represented a nexus between some of the most
powerful and historically significant discourses of the early to mid-
twentieth century. We have come across Swadeshi global travellers,
philosophers of anti-colonial cosmopolitanism, avant-garde expositors
of temporal rupture and ‘new time’, and intermediaries working on
Epilogue 169
the margins of identity divides. The history of the deterritorial body

of India continually exceeds the bounds of the territory-bounded
historical narrative. And the heightened case of M. N. Roy’s anti-colonial
cosmopolitanism opens up those middle worlds of circulation, travel and
in-betweenness for further study, not as an alternative to the study of
anti-colonial nationalism, but indeed, as central to it.
Roy’s championing of solidarity and of mediated autonomy led to
his own forgetting in a time when postcolonial nation–states were
being born. But, one of the claims of this study has been that deter-
ritorialisation, including the social and cultural effects that follow from
it, was not the product of individual intentionalities or worldviews, but
was an inherent force working itself out in the modern era. For this
reason, global perspectives and cosmopolitanism continually resurfaced,
with different aims, different eventualities, different ethical implications
throughout the period. This, above all, is why Roy did not die lonely
in 1954. For the birth of nation–states did not ‘win out’ over deterritorial
forms of identification, thought and social existence. Roy’s thought was
not the occasion for a deterritorialised imagining. Rather, his ideas were
the consequence of historical forces long at work.
Note
1. Oral history interview with R. M. Pal, 17 January 2005.
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Tinker, Hugh. 1974. A New System of Slavery: The Export of Indian Labour Overseas. London:
Oxford University Press.
Toews, John Edward. 1980. Hegelianism: The Path Toward Dialectical Humanism, 1805–1841.
Torpey, Christopher. 2000. The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and
the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Trilling, Lionel. 1951. The Liberal Imagination. New York: Viking Press.
Trivedi, Harish. 1993. Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India. Calcutta:
Papyrus.
Trivedi, Lisa. 2006. ‘A National Public in the Colonial World: Swadeshi Goods and the
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Empire, (2006). pp. 150–75.
———. 2007. Clothing Gandhi’s Nation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Tully, James. 1988. Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Turner, Victor and Edith L. B. Turner. 1978. Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture:
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pp. 40ff.
Weber, Hermann. 1963. Der deutsche Kommunismus. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch.
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Index 195
Index
Acharya, M. P. T. 45 Bhashani, Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan

agency xix, 4, 19, 44, 49, 52, 71, 79–82, 104 20
adda 124, 125, 138, 140 Bhattacharya, Abinash 9
Adhikari, Gangadhar 88, 123, 134 Bhattacharya, Narendranath 32, 121.
All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) See also M. N. Roy
101, 129 Bloch, Ernst 46–47
All-India Progressive Writers Association Bolshevisation 72, 86, 94n79
131–32 Borodin, Mikhail 79; for Communist
Alvarado, Salvador General 32 Party 80
Anand, Mulk Raj xxiiin4, 60n86, 131, 132 Bose, Girindrasekhar 104; Indian Psy-
antarjatik (international) education 7 choanalytic Society 159
anticipation, and hope xvi, xvii, 1, 3, Bose, Subhas Chandra 54, 98–99, 116, 118,
8, 22, 47, 48, 50, 103, 134, 153, 158, 120–21; anti-colonial nationalism 117;
161–164 as Congress President 119; and
anti-colonial Cosmopolitanism xix, 152, Gandhi 120; Hitler invitation 127;
154–56, 168, 169 at Karachi Congress 100; neo-
anti-colonialism xv–xvi, 3–4, 5, 6, 7, 8–9, Swadeshi politics 111, 114, 117–18;
63; dissarray 52–55; leaders of 74, in opposition to Pant group 119;
111–12, 115, 139; networks xiii, xvi, and Pant group 119; travels 118; and
8, 9, 72, 126 young intellectuals 116
Anti-Imperialist League in Berlin 74 Bose, Sugata xx
Boxer Rebellion 7, 26n35
Arendt, Hannah 130, 160
Brahmo exegesis 12–15, 20–22, 35, 51,
ascesis xv, 2, 10, 15, 19, 20, 152, 168
108, 161
‘Asiatic Mode of Production’ in China 85
Brahmo Samaj 12–15
aspirant (sadhak) 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20
Brandler, Heinrich 77, 86
atmashakti 17, 22
British Empire 73, 83; against Nazi
autonomy, mediated xvii, 133, 134, 169;
Germany 125; communist envoys to
and solidarity xx, xxi, 169
India 71; extradition of M. N. Roy 74
avant-gardism in Bengali thought 50
Ayub, Abu Syed 136
Calcutta killings 163
Calles, Plutarco Elias 37
Barakatullah, Mohammed 45, 98
canonicity xv, 13–21, 43, 51, 52, 152, 168
Barbusse, Henri 74
Cassirer, Ernst 160
Basu, Buddhadeb 140 Cawnpore Conspiracy Case 75, 100
Bengali ex-revolutionaries 121 Chakrabarty, Dipesh xviii–xix
Benjamin, Walter 50, 164 Chakravarty, Hari Kumar 121
Berlin xvi, 45; communist culture 39–40; Chatterjee, Amarendranath 121
fleeing from 75; Indian communists Chatterjee, Bankimchandra 4, 16, 17, 50;
71 Dharmatattva of 17
Chatterjee, Jibanlal 121–22 counter-insurgency 5, 73, 74

Chatterjee, Partha 5 Cripps, Stafford 126
Chatterjee, Ramananda 4, 8 cultural diplomacy 119
Chatterji, Sitangshu 141
Chattopadhyay, Nripendrakrishna 50 Das, C. R. 117–18
Chattopadhyay, Vivendranath 70, 75; Das, Dineshranjan 50
group of 71–72 Datta, Amlan 141
Chaudhury, Sikander 140 Datta, Aswini Kumar 5
China 74, 77–83; communist revo- Datta, Bhupendra Kumar 121
lution of 1926–27 84; Kuomintang Datta, Bhupendranath 9
‘bourgeoisie’ 80 Datta, Sudhindranath 140, 163; pro-
Chitnis, C. Y. 99 claimed atheism 140
Christian thinkers 160 Dawn Society and Satish Chandra
civil disobedience movement 73 Mukherjee 5
Civil War 127–29 Deterritorialisation 3, 4, 127, 169;
civilisation 41, 155 deterritorial nationalism 112, 117,
colonial universalism 10, 15, 34 118, 127, 131; deterritorial bodies
Comintern xiii, xiv, xviii, 37, 39, 43, 45, 3, 9, 53, 112, 117, 119, 126, 169; and
51, 52, 64–67, 70, 72, 75, 76, 79–89, 98, territorialisation 3, 5, 53, 54, 113, 117,
116, 123, 139; and Indian communist 127, 156, 169
70–73; Roy’s expulsion from 67, 82,
Dharmic Asceticism 15–20; ‘inner
123; Roy’s role in 52, 63; Sixth Con-
realm’ 15
ference 84; and Stalin 99
‘Draft Constitution of India’ 132, 133
communism 31, 52–53, 78; class critique
dreams 50, 84, 133, 135, 153, 155, 162
versus cultural critique 104–107;
Dutt, Clemens 71, 99
erudition 39, 40; German versus
Dutt, Rajani Palme 71, 89
Russian variants 64–69
communist internationalism 102, 111, Dutt, Ram Bhaj 6
155
Einstein, Albert xiii, 74, 106; wrote for
Communist Manifesto 86
Roy’s release 101; Roy reading books
Communist New Time 46–48
of 157
Communist Party in Germany Ortsgruppe
83; German fringe communism 64, Eisner, Kurt 46
65, 71, 89; Opposition (KPD-O) 99 Epicurean pleasure 103, 105
Communist Party of Great Britain 71 Erikson, Erik 160
Communist Party of India 45, 123; anti- Europe, Roy in 63–64; thinkers of 130;
Roy pamphlet by 88 war declaration 128
Communists in New York, invitation evangelicalism in India 12
by 98 exegesis xv, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20,
Congress for Cultural Freedom 138; 107, 138, 152
Socialist Movement 122 Expressionism 46
Congress Socialist Party (CSP) 122
cosmopolitanism xx–xxi, 3, 4, 44, 112, Fascism 129–32
154–56; aspirational versus ex- federative political thinkers 134
periential xx; chosen family xxii, feminism 104, 105
137–141; and crossing 7, 23, 76, feudalism xiv, 48, 78, 122, 128; European
78–81, 161 131; global 129–32; Indian xvii;
Index 197
Fischer, Fritz 36 Great Depression 126

Fischer, Leopold 139–40 Gruzenberg, Mikhail Markovich. See
flag independence 1922 73 Borodin
Forward Bloc 120. See also Bose, Subhas
Chandra Hardayal 6, 8, 26
Frankfurt, Institute for Social Inquiry 70 Harvey, David on Oriental space 42
‘Fundamental Rights Resolution’ 100 Hegel, G. W. F. 10–11
future xvii, 16, 19, 47, 48, 50, 52–55, 64, Hegelian Marxism xvi, 66
82, 83, 118, 126, 128, 130, 155, 158, hermeneutic approach xix, 19, 161
162, 163, 164; Futurism xvi, 47–50 Hindu dharma xvi, 15, 104
Future of Indian Politics 79 Historical Role of Islam 134–37
history, philosophy of xvii, 10–12, 19, 20,
Gandhi xiv, 5, 52–55, 113–18, 127, 130, 42, 48, 49, 50, 51, 55, 66, 67, 84, 85, 86,
133, 134, 154, 155, 162, 163; as anti- 106, 107, 136; Historical Materialism
colonialism 98; Ashis Nandy on 154; 50, 51, 102, 106; stadial view of 1, 19
on culture 113; civil disobedience Hitler xiv, 130; assault on Western
movement of 73, 98; critical European countries 129; and Roy
reinterpretation of ‘swadeshi’ 53–54; 131, 127
as deterritorial politician 54; ‘fasts Honneth, Axel 111, 112
until death’ of 114; Hind Swaraj of humanism xvii, xix, 35, 152, 156–58,
54; National Body of 113–15; form of 159–62
nationalist politics 127; non-violence
72, 115 Purna Swaraj 127; and Roy imperialism 9–10, 73, 82–83, 107, 123,
116–17, 120–25; self-esteem for 129–30
independence 113; Swaraj politics India in Transition 45, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52
117; on war and British 134; on his Indian Communist Party at Tashkent
wife 114 45–46
Gandhi, Leela xx Indian Communists 70–73, 88, 99, 129
Gandhism 53, 71–72, 106 Indian Federation of Labour xiii, 129,
geopolitical shifts 126–27 132, 141
German Communist Party 78; – Opposition Indian National Army in Nazi Germany
(KPD–O) 83, 86, 139; revolutionary 131. See also Forward Bloc
attempt 87 Indian National Congress 99
Germany 37, 77; communism in 40, 66; Indian Renaissance Institute 159
control of Balkans 128; Fringe Com- Indian, culture of 107; civilisation 136;
munism 63–69; Jewish intellectuals Brigade to Shanghai 80; anti-colonial
64, 67; neo-Kantianism 65–66 nationalists 98, 112; communism
Ghosh, Aurobindo 5, 6, 10; yoga ashram 70; communist intellectuals 46;
158, 159 nationalism 137; students in Germany
Ghosh, Barindrakumar 2 74; communist leaders 71; trade
Gottschalk, Ellen campaign for Roy’s union 83, 101; organisations xiii, 141;
release 101; Radical Humanist move- movement xvi–xvii, 99; activity in
ment 139; Roy to 100–1, 103; wife of Bombay 100; social work with 2
Roy 137–39 insurgency xiii, xvi, 1, 65, 72–73, 78–79,
gradient of consciousness 7, 11, 14, 34, 115, 119, 158; Swadeshi xiii, xvi, 1,
42, 63, 64, 157 7, 25n31
internal freedom 111–12 Marinetti, Filippo, Futurist Manifesto

International Humanist and Ethical of 47
Union in Amsterdam 159 Marx, Karl, Asiatic Mode of Production
Internationalism, Indian forms of 44, 98, 41–42, 85; curse of 40–44; writings of
102, 123, 131, 154; Wilson 33, 34 33, 41–42, 44, 51
interstitial subjectivity i, xvi, xx, xxiin1, Marxism 51–52, 64, 69
37, 113, 152, 156 Masani, Minoo 122–23, 138
Irish Civil War (1921–24) 73 Mascarenhas, Charles 99, 101, 122
Islam, Kazi Nazrul 20, 71 May Day 98
Mazumdar, Pratap Chandra, ‘Oriental
Jewish intellectuals 68, 115 Christ’ 14
Jones, Richard 41 Meerut Conspiracy Case 75, 140
Jordan, David Starr 32–33; in World Mehta, Mahendra Pratap 45
Peace Foundation 32 Mexican Communist Party xiii
Joshi, P. C., leader of All-India Communist Mexican Socialist Party 37
Party 123 Mexico City, Roy in 35–37
Mill, James 11–12; 40, approach to
Kabir, Humayun 136, 140 colonialism 12
Kai-Shek, Chiang 79, 81, 134 Minh, Ho Chi 74
Kara, Maniben 99, 102, 141 Mobocracy 115
Karnik, V. B. 99, 102 modernism, in political philosophy xvii,
Kautsky, Karl 47 37, 43, 44, 50, 158, 159, 161
Kaviraj, Sudipta xiv–xv Mohani, Maulana Hazrat 135
Khan, Maulana Mohammed Akram 135 monistic naturalism 157
Khaparda, G. S. 6 Moplah Uprising (1921) 73
Khilafat Movement 45–46, 73 Mukerjee, Radhakamal 159, 160
Kopf, David xviii; Mukherjee, Ashutosh 5
Korsch, Karl 40, 66–67; Marx and Mukherjee, Jadu 121
Philosophy 66 Mukherjee, Satish Chandra 10
Kuomintang Party 79–80 Mukherji, Dhanagopal 31–32, 55n2
Mukherji, Rajani 101
Lenin Day 98 Mukhopadhyay, Hirendranath 124
Lenin, Vladimir xiii–xiv, xiv, xviii, 37, Muslim intellectuals 136
42–47, 51–53, 65, 71, 78, 83, 86–89;
death of 47, 78; thesis of 71–72 Nag, Kalidas, Greater India Society of 159
Lohia, Rammanohar 122 Narayan, Jayaprakash 88, 101, 122–23, 138
Lucknow Pact 123 Nazi 78, 99–100, 107, 130
Lukács, Georg, History and Consciousness Nehru, Jawaharlal xiii, xiv, xxii, 74, 88, 112,
66 116; for labour internationalism 98;
Luxemburg, Rosa and communism xvi, and Roy’s condition in prison 100, 103,
43, 64–68, 87 116; Roy’s Defence Committee 100–1
Luxemburgism 44, 70, 71, 86, 87 Nehru, Motilal 53, 88
neo-Kantianism 47, 65, 66
Mahalanobis, Prasanta C. 132, 159 neo-Swadeshi Deterritorial Nationalism
Mahamanab 18, 20 117–26. See also Subhas Chandra
Malthus, Robert 41 Bose
Index 199
Nigam, R. D. 141 language 162; as ‘arch-conspirator’

November Day 98 75; on ‘brotherhood of men’ 155;
childhood 1–2; in China 79; chosen
Pakistan 133, 135, 153 family 137–41; ‘collective ego’ 141;
Pal, Bipin Chandra 6, 7, 10 critique of Subhas Chandra Bose
Palestine uprising (1929) 73 121–22; death of 162; decolonisation
Palit, Taraknath 5 thesis 83; student of Benoy Kumar
Pant, Govind Ballabh 103 Sarkar 2; and European Marxist
Paramahansa, Ramakrishna 16 thought 49; faith in ‘laws of science’
Parichayer adda 124 157; as Father Martin 38–9; and
Parikh, G. D. 141 Gandhism 53, 106, 162; as ‘gray-
peasants 43–44, 65, 71, 81, in China 80; suited Marxist’ 76; journals edited
class consciousness among49; eruptive by 140, 156, 160; Roy Group 101–2;
agency found in 52; universal struggle on ‘international civil war’ 128; as
of workers and 55 ‘Maulana Roy’ 137; learning Spanish
‘People’s Plan’ 132 and German 36, 37; as non-Indian
Pillai, A. K. 101 Indian 115–17; prison life of 75,
Polish–Jewish community 64, 115 101–3, 112, 157; sarcasm about 125;
Pollack, Jan 139 on salvation (mukti) 15; in San
Pomian, Krzyztof 10 Francisco 31; sanatanadharma 15, 16;
Post-Swadeshi Modernism 158–59 second policy proposal of 132–4; on
prison writings 102–7 ‘Revolution’ 141; renegade 86–88;
proletarian revolution 81 selfhood 152, 157; rumored ties
proletariat 43 with CIA 138; self-marginalisation
Provisional Government of India in 124; on sexual politics 104–05;
Kabul 45 shaktiyogin 44; as social mestizo 38;
Purna Swaraj 107, 127 as Swadeshi revolutionary 121; as
violent revolutionary 79; romantic
Quit India Movement xiv, xvii, 134 involvements 75–76, 137; writings
of M. N. Roy 34, 43, 50–51, 54–55, 63,
Radical Democratic Party 156
76, 87, 97, 105–6, 155–56; Memoirs 1;
Radical Humanism 153, 157–161
in prison 107
radicalism 5, 6, 54, 71, 83, 119, 131
Roy, Rammohan 10, 12–13; anti-colonial
Rai, Lajpat 6, 34
resistance of 14; Tuhfatul Muwahhiddin
Raj, Kapil xx
13
Ray, P. C. 5
rural self-government 80
Ray, Sibnarayan xi, 141
Russian Revolution 8
Reason, Romanticism and Revolution 50, 155
Rebellion of 1857 xvi, 16, Roy on 51–52 Saha, Meghnad 159, 166n37
Revolts, in Egypt 73; Roy on 49, 162; Saklatvala, Shapurji 71, 88, 119
Iraq 73; Saraswati, Dayananda 16
Revolution and Counter-revolution in China Sarkar, Benoy Kumar 18, 159; Futurism
84–86 of Young India of 50; as teacher of
Right deviationism 87 M. N. Roy 20
Roy, Manabendranath xiii, 1, 75, 130, Sarkar, Sushobhan 125
139, 153, 160–61; adopting Gandhian
Sartre, Jean-Paul 160
Savarkar, V. D. 135 Swaraj 53–54, 107, 117, 133, 154

scientific rationalism 157 Swarajya Party 53
Sen, Dinesh Chandra 5
Sen, Keshab Chandra 16 Tagore, Rabindranath 5, 10, 132; Viswa
Sen, Kshitimohan 5 Bharati University at Shantiniketan
sexual politics 103–5 58, 159
Shaikh, Tayab 102 Tagore, Saumyendranath 89
Shakti 17 Tarkunde, V. M. 141
Shetty, A. N. 99 Tashkent, Indian Communist Party
Shetty, M. R. 99, 100 founded in 45
Sindhi, Obeidullah 45 Tegart, Charles 74
Singh, Ajit 6 territorial nativism 5
Skinner, Quentin xxi Thalheimer, August 67–68, 77, 86, 139;
Sneevliet, Henk 74–75 Dialectical Materialism of 84; Rote
Fahne of 70
social democrats 78; revolution 82
Theory of Relativity 156
socio-fascism 78, 94n80
Third Republic 21
solidarity xx, xxi, 3, 23, 54, 63–65, 77–83,
time 1, 3, 8, 9–20, 23, 42–52, 55, 63, 67,
111, 112, 118, 119, 126, 168, 169
76, 85, 106, 107, 153, 156, 158, 169;
Somaliland uprising (1919) 73. See also
chronosophy 10, 49; framing of xv,
revolts
xxviin10, 3, 5, 8, 10, 12, 15, 46; the
Soviet Union 87
‘Not-Yet’ 47, 55; rupture xv, 1, 7, 17,
Spanish–American War 32
43, 47, 48, 168; ‘new time’ xvi, xvii, 1,
Stalin, ‘blank sheet’ 79; ‘socio-fascism’
8, 10, 19, 20, 46–48, 55, 64, 153, 168
of 78; ‘triumphs’ 87; ‘young men’. See
trade union movement 83, 99
also Roy, as gray-suited Marxist Treaty of Versailles 34
strikes in India 98–99. See also trade union Trent, Evelyn 32, 37, 39, 74–6, 93n64; with
movement Roy to Berlin 37–8; as M. N. Roy’s
subjectivity xv, 17, 19–22, 43, 67, 104, wife 74–75
107, 169 Tse, Lao 85–86
Suri, Surindar 141
Swadeshi xv–vi, 52–55, 118–19 inter- Utilitarianism 12
nationalism xvi, xix, 7, 131, 153; Utopia xvii, 1, 47, 50, 81, 105, 153, 155,
Luxemburgist contribution 161; 157, 158, 163, 164; utopianism xvii;
modernism 44; thinkers 54; under- as tool or weapon 163–64
ground 72–73
Swadeshi Avant-Gardism xv–xvi, 6–8, 20– Vaishnav devotionalism 30n108
23; Neo-Swadeshi 111, 114, 117–119, Vienna, political establishment in 118
131; Post-Swadeshi 158, 159; and Visveswaraya, M. 132
Bipin Chandra Pal 22; Aurobindo Vivekanada 10, 16, 17; on dharma 19;
Ghosh’s writings on 21; colonial on Mahamanab 17; on salvation 18;
universalism 21; and Rabindranath shakti 18
Tagore 22–23
Swadesh-Marxist amalgam xvi, xxi, 51, Wadia, J. B. H. 141
64, 83, 112, 115, 118, 158, 161 Walcher, Jakob 64, 139
Index 201
Western universalism 161 Workers and Peasants Parties (WPP) in

Wilson, Woodrow 42; ‘New Inter- India 81–82
nationalism’ 34
Wilsonianism 33–35 Zaheer, Sajjad 124
Wittfogel, Karl 85

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M. N.

Series Editor: Dilip M. Menon

Also in the Series

LONDON NEW YORK NEW DELHI

Simultaneously published in the UK

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Transferred to Digital Printing 2010

© 2010 Kris Manjapra

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

List of Illustrations viii

1. The Swadeshi Avant-Garde 1

2. Marxist New Time 31

3. The Transformations of M. N. Roy 63

4. Criticism and Incarceration 98

5. Interstitial Politics 111

6. Radical Humanism 152

1.1 Roy as a Swadeshi revolutionary in 1910. 2

ACLU American Civil Liberties Union

I wish to thank all those who helped me deepen my understanding of

foundation to begin my own explorations. Our long conversations

Manabendranath Roy was an intermediary between many worlds.

revolutions across continents; and collaborating closely with some of

Frame Making and Frame Breaking

Movement (1903–1917), the most severe insurgency in India since the

of ‘united front’ politics. But during six years of imprisonment beginning

authentic local and the heteronomous global. More recently, Andrew

the political elites of European nation-states as the state of benign peace

well as the breakdown of Roy’s intellectual tools in moments of crisis. I

4. James Siegel. 1997. Fetish, Recognition, Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University

The Swadeshi Avant-Garde

M. N. Roy’s Memoirs (1964) can be read as a piece of expressionist art.1

Benoy Kumar Sarkar, disciple of Satish Chandra Mukherjee.7 It is likely

Illustration 1.1 Roy as a Swadeshi revolutionary in 1910.

Practising yoga, abstaining from sexual activity and reading the

anti-colonial activists, travelling beyond boundaries and seeking fusions

The Swadeshi Movement

globe and the place of Indian consciousness within global tempor-

Bengal, brought one phase of Swadeshi insurgency to an end by 1910.

These key features of Swadeshi avant-gardism — the focus on the advent

These kaleidoscopic mirrors in which Swadeshi avant-gardists saw

to organise the delivery of weapons from German consuls.47 Roy made

Schemes of Colonial Universal Time

modernist imagination can be seen as arising out of critiques of

He developed a narrative of the World Spirit journeying through

vices of insincerity; dissembling, treacherous, mendacious, to an excess

The approach to colonialism that Mill prescribed coincided, unsur-

of a more inclusive universalism. Rammohan sought to disclose a

He proposed that all humans, regardless of religion, existed on an equal

Brahmo textual practices were characterised throughout the nineteenth

always available to the aspirant (sadhak) through the labour of spiritual

Ramakrishna’s message of dharma arrived in a moment of kairos. When

a Hindu messiah, in that he ﬁrst distributed knowledge of salvation

The Swadeshi Avant-Garde

also set out to imagine autonomous new universal communities that

immediate bearing on Bengal’s own experience.107 The world map that

in place.113 Speaking of Mother India not as a static geopolitical entity,

What characterised the Swadeshi avant-garde was the pursuit of new

45. Ramananda Chatterjee, ‘Russiai sadharantantra pratishthai amader ananda’

63. The interconnection between liberalism and colonialism is explored in detail