A Study in the Formation of Communist Thought in India, 1919-1951

Submitted to the Faculty of History in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge

By

Ammar Ali Jan (Wolfson College)

Supervised by

Dr. Shruti Kapila

Lahore, Pakistan

January 2018

1
 A Study in the Formation of Communist Thought in India, 1919-1951

By

Ammar Ali Jan (Wolfson College)

Summary

Despite having roots in 19th century Europe, Marxism had a deep impact on the trajectory of
political ideas in the non-European world in the twentieth century. In particular, anti-colonial
thinkers engaged productively with Marx’s ideas as part of their struggle against Empire. Yet,
little attention has been paid to the displacements and innovations in political thought as a result
of this encounter between anti-colonialism and Marxism.

This dissertation aims to fill this gap by studying the history of Indian communism, focusing on
the first three decades of the communist movement (1921-1950). I claim that this is an ideal time
period to interrogate the formation of political ideas in India, since they presented themselves
with particular intensity in the midst of an unfolding anti-colonial struggle, and arguably, the
birth of the Indian political. The entry of communist ideas into the charged political environment
of the 1920s had an impact on the ideological debates within the Indian polity, as well as
stamping Indian communism with its own specific historicity. Through a tracing of debates
among communist leaders, as well as their non-communist interlocutors, this work seeks to
provide a novel lens to consider the relationship between ideas and their historical actualization,
or between the universal and its instantiation in the particular.

Moreover, the dissertation argues that the radically different socio-political and historical
landscapes of Western Europe and colonial India necessitated a confrontation with the stagist
view of history dominant in the history of Western Marxism, prompting novel theoretical work
on the issue of political temporality. Consequently, the relationship between necessity and
volition, central to enlightenment thought, was radically transformed in the colonial world,
particularly in terms of its entanglement with the problem of subjective violence. Engagement
with such questions not only impacted Indian political thought, but transformed global
communism itself, putting into question the concept of an “originary site” for political ideas.
Thus, this work intervenes in debates in three distinct registers: Global Intellectual History,
Marxist theory and Indian political thought

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 Preface

This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of
work done in collaboration except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text.
It is not substantially the same as any that I have submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted
for a degree or diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other
university or similar institution except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. I
further state that no substantial part of my dissertation has already been submitted, or is being
concurrently submitted for any such degree, diploma or other qualification at the University of
Cambridge or any other University or similar institution except as declared in the Preface and
specified in the text.
It does not exceed the prescribed word limit for the relevant Degree Committee.

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 Table of Contents

1. Introduction 5

2. Colonial Governmentality and the Idea of Communism 33

3. Freedom from Necessity: M.N. Roy and The Politics of Volition 55

4. Islam, Communism and the Search for a Fiction 77

5. In the Shadow of Ghadar: Marxism and Anti-Colonialism in Colonial Punjab 99

6. The Postcolonial Condition: Ranadive and the Search for Authenticity 121

7. The Subject of Communism: Towards a Conceptual Framework 147

Bibliography

4
 Introduction

Writing on India’s 60th independence day, Jyoti Basu, the longest-serving chief minister in the
country’s history, asserted the ‘immensely important role’ of the communist movement in
India’s anti-colonial struggle. Remembering the intertwined history of Indian nationalism and
communism, he declared

The Indian communists have a proud record of dedication and sacrifices in the cause of
national liberation, in defence of the interests of the working class, peasantry and other
toiling millions. They were able to draw into their fold the overwhelming majority of
revolutionaries and represented the best traditions of revolutionary movement in India.1

By 2007, the communist Left in India could indeed claim to be one of the largest communist
movements in world during the post-Cold War era. Leading state governments in the provinces
of Tripura, Kerala and West Bengal, with 30 consecutive years of elected rule in the latter, the
Indian Left is an aberration in the history of global communism in the twentieth century.2 The
Communist Party of India (CPI) also lent critical electoral support to form the United
Progressive Alliance (UPA) federal government in 2004. A decade ago, the CPI was forming its
own federal government, but declined the offer.3

If Indian communism’s engagement with questions of nationalism and democracy gave it its own
historical specificity, such engagement did not foreclose the question of violence, whose
subterranean existence has haunted the Indian political imaginary, notwithstanding the excessive
reverence for Gandhi’s ‘non-violence’ in Indian public life. From communism’s inception in
alleged terrorist groups, such as the Ghadar Party and Anushulan, to the ongoing ‘People’s War’
being waged by Maoist groups (popularly known as the Naxalites) across India, the question of
‘revolutionary violence’ has remained central to debates in Indian communism. As recently as
2006, the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh, deemed the Naxalites the ‘number one
internal security threat to India’, demonstrating the resonance of Left politics well beyond its
interlocutors in the communist movement.4

For a movement that enhanced its global appeal by sustaining itself beyond the collapse of the
Soviet Union, the collapse of Indian communism in the past few years has been equally
spectacular. After suffering heavy losses in the general elections of 2009, communists were
dislodged from their strongholds in West Bengal and Kerala, while their share of seats in the

1
Jyoti Basu, ‘60 Years of Our Independence and the Left: Some Thoughts’, People’s Democracy 31 (August,
2007), available at http://archives.peoplesdemocracy.in/2007/0819/08192007_jyoti%20basu.htm accessed 15th
March, 2016.
2
See Kheya Bag, ‘Red Bengal’s Rise and Fall’, New Left Review 70:4 (2011), pp. 69-98.
3
Aijaz Ahmad, Lineages of the Present: Ideology and Politics in Contemporary South Asia (London: Verso, 2000),
pp. 209-239.
4
‘Naxalism Biggest Threat to Internal Security: Manmohan Singh’, The Hindu (May 24, 2010), available at
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/Naxalism-biggest-threat-to-internal-security-
Manmohan/article16302952.ece accessed 20th March, 2016.

5
national legislature fell from 53 in 2004 to 10 in 2014.5 The crisis was severe enough for pundits
to declare that Indian communism had finally reached its terminal stage.6

A key nodal point in debates on Indian communism revolves around the relevance of communist
ideology to the specificity of Indian history. Was the communist movement’s fidelity to global
Marxism a hindrance to embedding itself within the questions particular to India’s political
trajectory? Did the universalizing narrative of ‘working class’ unity leave little room for an
engagement with more historically sedimented antagonisms in India, including those of caste,
gender, regional assertion, etc., making Communists merely bitter spectators of the ‘democratic
revolution’ in Indian political life since the 1980s?7 Was the idea of communism so inherently
flawed that after its global collapse in the 1980s, it was inevitable that Indian communism had to
follow suit and reveal itself to be ethically and politically bankrupt? 8 If that is true, then it would
imply that the crisis of Indian communism has to be located at the site of its philosophical
‘origin’, in the writing of Karl Marx himself, bracketing political and historiographical concerns
as peripheral.

Extracting ‘foreign’ ideologies out of Indian history would be quite difficult without negating a
large (if not overwhelming) part of the history of modern India. ‘European’ ideologies, including
Marxism, Nationalism, Liberalism, Democracy, Republicanism, etc., have played such an
integral part in the history of colonial and postcolonial India that it would be hard to distinguish
these ideas from ‘indigenous’ realms of Indian politics, whether elite or subaltern. As recent
scholarship has demonstrated, even the idea of the Indian ‘nation’ was formed in conversation
with processes and concepts in global space, signifying the immanence of the global within
Indian political thought.9

This dissertation engages with such questions arising out of the history of Indian communism,
focusing on the first three decades of the communist movement (1921-1950). I claim that this is
an ideal time period to interrogate these themes, since they presented themselves with particular
intensity in the midst of an unfolding anti-colonial struggle, and arguably, the birth of the Indian
political. The entry of communist ideas into the charged political environment of the 1920s had
an impact on the ideological debates within the Indian polity, as well as stamping Indian
communism with its own specific historicity. Through a tracing of debates among communist
leaders, as well as their non-communist interlocutors, this work seeks to provide a novel lens to

5
‘Lok Sabha Elections 2014 Results: State-wise Results’, One India (May 20, 2014), available at
http://www.oneindia.com/bengaluru/lok-sabha-election-result-2014-state-results-1449516.html accessed 12
February 2015.
6
Meghnad Desai, ‘The Strange Death of Indian Communism’, The Indian Express (January 10, 2016), available at
http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/the-strange-death-of-indian-communism/ accessed 22nd March,
2016.
7
Thomas Crowley, ‘The Many Faces of the Indian Left’, Jacobin (12 May, 2014) available at
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/05/the-many-faces-of-the-indian-left/ accessed 14th November, 2016.
8
See Sadanand Dhume, ‘The Coming Collapse of India’s Communists’, Wall Street Journal (April 16, 2014),
available at https://www.wsj.com/articles/dhume-the-coming-collapse-of-indias-communists-1397666681 accessed
3rd November 2014.
9
See Kris Manjapra, M.N. Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010).
6
consider the relationship between ideas and their historical actualization, or between the
universal and its instantiation in the particular. Moreover, the dissertation argues that the
radically different socio-political and historical landscapes of Western Europe and colonial India
necessitated a confrontation with the stagist view of history dominant in Western Marxism,
prompting novel theoretical work on the issue of political temporality. Consequently, the
relationship between necessity and volition, central to Enlightenment thought, was radically
transformed in the colonial world, particularly in terms of its entanglement with the problem of
subjective violence. Engagement with such questions not only impacted Indian political thought,
but transformed global communism itself, putting into question the concept of an ‘originary site’
for political ideas. This work intervenes in debates in three distinct registers: Global Intellectual
History, Marxist theory and Indian political thought, as elaborated below.

Intellectual History: Expressive or Incongruous?

I explore the history of Indian Communism by studying the writings of some of the primary
thinkers and leaders of the communist movement during this era. Such ‘history of ideas’ permits
us to trace both the frictions within the global communist movement, as well as the wider socio-
historical context of colonial India that shaped these debates. As Quentin Skinner has forcefully
argued, intellectual history can strengthen our understanding of historical development by
situating the writings of philosophers and political thinkers within a specific historical/cultural
milieu, in which their writings were deployed to respond to particular questions arising from
within this terrain. Skinner was arguing against the tendency, quite widespread in intellectual
history, to seek answers in the corpus of philosophers to questions that these writers were not,
and perhaps could not, be concerned with. Such ‘presentist’ views of history transhistoricise
contemporary concerns by submitting past thinkers to a critique from the vantage point of the
present, invariably finding ‘gaps’, ‘lacunae’, or ‘lacks’ in their work, eventually condemning
them as ‘incomplete’ works when compared to modern, bourgeois thinkers.10

Instead, Skinner calls for grounding thought within the ideological contexts in which it was
being formulated, in which one can provide coherence of meaning to the terms deployed. 11 I
consider such a view of intellectual history ‘expressive’, since it binds thought to the socio-
economic context in which it is produced, with the former expressing the latter in the realm of
ideas. Marxist thinkers have been at the forefront of this school of thought, arguing for a direct
equation between Enlightenment thought and commodity production arising out of the collapse
of feudal Europe. Although a crude version of this historiography at times borders on economic
determinism, with the ‘mode of production’ directly shaping ideas, the more sophisticated
thinkers argue for a more contradictory appreciation of a social formation, thus positing thought
itself to be an expression of unevenness within society.

György Lukács, for example, argues for embedding ‘modern philosophy’ within the ‘reified
structures of consciousness’ dominant in capitalist societies. For him, problems of knowledge

10
Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics: Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 57-
89.
11
Ibid., pp. 87-89.
7
and cognition central to this philosophy increasingly find their resolution in the realm of pure
thought, through a homology with natural science. Such abstractions are a product of the abstract
nature of social organization under capitalism, rooted in the contradictory nature of commodity
production itself.12 Moishe Postone further radicalizes this conception by proposing an
adequation between consciousness and social being, thus linking the specificity of labor under
capitalism to the production of ideas. Since the wider structuring of social organization of
commodity production veils itself in the fetish of immediate phenomena, political ideologies
such as nationalism, liberalism, fascism, and even certain strands of communism, were
misrecognized critiques of modern society, since they substitute the abstract forms of capitalist
domination with concrete, but inadequate, representations such as territory, individuality or even
‘labour’.13

Both Postone and Lukács represent a broader current of that emphasizes the reciprocity between
being and thought, between the ‘dynamics’ of capital and its representation in ideas. We can
categorize Michel Foucault within the broader category of expressive thought, though he
displaces the centrality of capital with more disparate forms of power that circulate in spatial and
discursive relations. Through a genealogical investigation of modern subjectivity (albeit
European), Foucault argues that the disciplinary processes in modernity aim to turn ‘multitudes
into ordered multiplicities’.14 This social ordering takes place equally in the realm of seemingly
neutral institutions such as schools, jails and psychiatric wards, as well as in the public
proclamations of bourgeois society. Ideas, therefore, notwithstanding their pretense to being
scientific or ‘revolutionary’, are themselves products of this longer history of subject-production,
often implicated in the structures of power that they claim to subvert.15 The only space for
critique in such frameworks rests either in working through the system, as is true for both
liberalism and orthodox strands of Marxism, or by claiming an absolute, almost mystical outside,
whose vitality remains as pure as it is evasive.16

12
György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone
(Cambridge/Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), pp. 110-149.
13
Moishe Postone, Time, Labour, Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 216-226. Postone argues that the alienated structure of modern society is a
result of social relations of production mediated by abstract labour, which in turn is measured by abstract time.
Domination in modern societies is less a function of direct, personal subjugation, and more a result of the
imperatives of an indirect and impersonal process of capitalist reproduction. Yet, the emphasis on the impersonal
character of control is unable to account for the direct, and often militarized, surveillance and subjugation of bodies
under colonial rule.
14
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage,
1995), pp.135-149.
15
Foucault makes this argument forcefully in his debates with French Maoists, particularly over the idea of
“People’s Justice”. See Michel Foucault, ‘On Popular Justice: A Discussion with Maoists’, in Power/Knowledge:
Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1972).
16
Bruno Bosteels uses the term “Speculative Left” for a tendency among leftist intellectuals, for whom an actually
existing political sequence is never sufficiently pure enough to be identified with, thus reducing their radical
critiques to little more than impotent posturing of a beautiful soul. See Bruno Bosteels, Badiou and Politics
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
8
I argue, however, that while a ‘thick description’ of historical contexts, and their genealogical
tracing, are essential features for writing intellectual history, they are nonetheless inadequate.
Despite the pervasive presence of structures of power in shaping subjectivity, there remain
elements that appear unassimilable to these structures, interrupting linear or homogenizing
narratives of historical development. The focus on an overarching dynamic of a historical period,
whether named capitalism, modernity or colonization, does not permit the study of such events
and processes that seem out of sync with its logic. This shortcoming of historicism is amplified
in the historiography of the colonial world, where phenomena incongruous with conceptual
categories developed in Western history frequently appear as irrational and belonging to a
different temporal sequence, eventually to be integrated into the march of History, a project of
assimilation common to both the state and dominant trends within social sciences. In other
words, such a framework lacks an engagement with the excess in history, one that remains
immanent to, yet unanchored in, any historical conjuncture.

I define ‘excess’ here as the paradoxical elements that exist in reality as antagonistic to it, as
categories exceeding the framework of an overarching dynamic, whether economic or
civilizational. These include ‘subaltern’ groups such as peasants, tribals, lower castes, and other
unpedagogised bodies that remained on the margins of, if not annihilated by, the processes of
capitalist accumulation. More broadly, the term includes groups such as diasporas or minorities
that exceed the frameworks of nation-states, historical events such as communal riots that cause
embarrassment to proponents of linear narratives of historical progression, or even popular
revolts that defy the temporal rhythms of existing power by seizing the present, and
consequently, opening new possibilities for the future. This work argues that the task for political
thought, and consequently, for intellectual history, is to give conceptual clarity and political
orientation to excess, and to turn it into a coherent political project. If we focused solely on the
myriad ways in which power produced disciplinary subjects, we could only legitimately write
history of ideas produced by Capital or the modern bureaucracy, since modern subjectivity is
assumed to be in sync with their logics.17 The diversity, as well as the subversive power, of
political ideas stem from their ability to uncouple social being and thought, beginning the
process of detachment necessary to produce genuine novelty in the realm of politics.

Positing separation as the quintessential commencement of political thought does not necessarily
provide an alternative to expressive forms of writing intellectual history. Even orthodox
Marxism rests on the assumption of an irreconcilable antagonism between ‘modes of
production’, with nascent capitalism breaking itself off from feudalism, with the same fate
awaiting capitalism when it will be superseded by communism.18 Liberal ideology is also
ungirded by the constant separation between the civilized and barbarian populations, with the
former eventually subsuming the latter under their moral and political superiority. Intellectual
history written with such parameters remains expressive insofar as political thought expresses
nothing more than an innate tendency within Being that is constantly moving towards ‘Coming-

17
The relationship between reproduction of social power and its potential breakdown remained a central concern in
post-68 French philosophical thought, particularly around the concept of “the event”. See Bruno Bosteels,
‘Traversing the Heresies’, Platypus Review 54:3 (2013), pp. 1-4, (p. 1).
18
See Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Scientific and Utopian (New York: Mondial, 2006).
9
into-Being’. Yet, the entire history of modern politics, particularly in the twentieth century, has
demonstrated the potentialities of unexpected disruptions in political development, from the self-
annihilation carried out by ‘civilized’ Europe during the two world wars, to the impatient
demands of anti-colonial politics to seek equality in the here and now, making such violent
interruptions more central to political subjectivity than reliance on gradualist and uninterrupted
notions of progress. Yet, such events do not lend themselves automatically to a coherent political
project, revealing instead the absence of a permanent ground, be it History, Capital, nation or
revolution, as the paradoxical basis for political intervention.19

The indeterminacy of a political conjuncture negates the possibility of a direct adequation

between the historically sedimented contradictions and their spontaneous expression in political
thought. Instead, this work views political thought as nothing less than an intense labour that
transforms scattered tendencies into a cohesive political project. The process of detachment from
dominant logics is a provocation for a disciplined engagement to sustain and clarify the de-
linking of being and subjectivity, of History and politics. Neither an ‘intersection’ between
disparate struggles, nor an automated movement towards predetermined destination, political
thought has to be produced through an intervening subject against the logic and inertia of
History. The process of mobilizing, concentrating and sustaining social antagonisms does not
stem from sociological guarantees, but is premised on the contingent capacity of political
thinkers to articulate dispersed and sporadic events into a specific politics.20 Therefore, I propose
to investigate political thought as a contingent, creative process in which thinkers make
theoretical interventions in novel situations, rather than merely becoming carriers of a
subjectivity innate to existing structures. In other words, I argue that political thought, rather than
being symptomatic and expressive of a displaced essence, is a productive process premised on
the volition of political actors to intervene in a historical conjuncture, a position that I expand
upon throughout this dissertation.

Global Intellectual History

The emergence of anti-colonial and national liberation struggles made the non-European world a
central site of political contestation during the twentieth century. Yet, the referents used to study
political ideas embedded in these struggles remained within the enlightenment tradition, positing
that their trajectory tended towards, but had not yet fully acquired, the universal ideals developed
in (19th-century) Europe. This tendency is most clearly reflected in modernization theory, which
viewed the Global South as a site of deficit in relation to the Global North, prescribing
technological and economic fixes (under Northern supervision) for overcoming the lag. This
basic framework has structured much of Marxist, liberal and even nationalist historiography,

19
According to Alain Badiou, the grounding of political thought on a “groundless terrain” is a result of the
unbinding of the social bond. This means that while the existing political culture operates within a certain logic, an
authentic political process begins as a break from this logic, without guarantees or a definite plan for the future. It
must eventually develop its own logic, in fidelity to the Event. See Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Baker
(London: Verso, 2005), pp. 68-77.
20
My argument is similar to, though not identical with, Jodi Dean’s recent work on the relationship between the
dispersed nature of social movements and the unifying role of political practice. See Jodi Dean, Crowds and Party
(London: Verso, 2016).
10
where intellectuals working on the historical instantiation of these ideas in the non-European
world view them as ‘deviations’ from the ‘originary’ ideas as developed in European political
thought. The spatial binary between the colonizers and the colonized is transformed into an
intellectual division of labour, one between those ‘producing’ and ‘applying’ of ideas.

Postcolonial thought has emerged as a direct challenge to the pervasive depiction of non-Europe
as a site of a ‘lack’ always in need of economic and intellectual aid (even in its revolutionary
manifestations). The search for the specificity of ‘Indian’ thought, for example, has led
postcolonial thinkers to create a division between ‘elite’ and ‘subaltern’ domains, with the
former mimicking global ideologies, and the latter embodying the ‘autonomy’ of indigenous
resistance.21 While such a separation between the ‘derivative’ nature of Indian nationalism and
subaltern consciousness was an attempt to resist the flattening of ‘local’ thought into the global,
it nonetheless finds it difficult to explain the political claim-making of subaltern groups in the
language of these very global ideologies, be they nationalism, communism or liberalism. 22 If the
power of colonial modernity has become so pervasive as to seep into the deepest recesses of
popular consciousness, then the only option left for writing a global intellectual history is by
subsuming the local under the imperatives of the universal, creating a homology between
political ideas produced across global space.

This approach has recently been developed by Andrew Sartori and Manu Goswami. In his work
on the formation of ‘culture’ as a political category in Indian politics, Andrew Sartori has
attempted to move away from the colonial/colonized binary by locating the rise of cultural
politics within the specific forms of practice constitutive of global capitalist modernity. In a
theoretically complex argument, Sartori claims that culture becomes a misrecognized critique of
the abstract domination of capitalism, induced by the uneven and fragmented global
development engendered by Capital itself.23 Sartori further argues that the formation of such a
‘parochial critique’ of global capitalism is not restricted to India or the colonized world more
broadly, but is pervasive in capitalist peripheries, including European countries such as
Germany. Similarly, Manu Goswami points out both the temporal and spatial imaginaries
produced by late nineteenth capitalism that induced a particular imagination of a territorially
bounded nationalism in colonial India within a globally hierarchized, uneven and fragmented
global space. Such an imagination of a peripheral, perpetually exploited Indian national space
allowed a conducive environment for the appropriation of similar, spatially bounded critiques of
global Capital such as Friedrich List’s theories against global uneven-development, and led to
calls for more state regulation.24 These works not only showed the remarkable global resonance
of conceptual categories such as culture and nationalism, but also point to affinities between the

21
See Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge/Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1998).
22
See Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1986).
23
See Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in The Age of Capital (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2008).
24
See Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2004).
11
‘East’ and the ‘West’ beyond the colonizer/colonized divide, for example by tracing the
relationship between German and Indian intellectuals.

Yet, the very insistence on a particular reading of global Capitalism as constitutive of political
thought in diverse spatial and temporal sites is eventually also a weakness for this theoretical
framework. For instance, while Sartori and Goswami are correct to point out a structural affinity
between concepts emerging in disparate locales (that structure being Capital), they show little
interest in demonstrating how these concepts were reshaped and reformulated not only based on
specific, historical contingencies, but also by entirely different political questions that were at
stake in each appropriation of these concepts. Secondly, since both Sartori and Goswami lay
emphasis on the misrecognized nature of such conceptual tools (culture, nation, etc), they are
unable to see how these very concepts were able to open up spaces for emancipatory politics
during the anti-colonial moment.

Both the focus on ‘derivative discourses’ or ‘universal’ practices instituted by modernity deprive
anti-colonial thought of its historical specificity. Chris Bayly attempted a way out of this impasse
by highlighting how colonial thinkers engaged with global ideas to ‘relativise, deflect and
hybridize’ them ‘with modern Indian themes’. While making a historically grounded argument
on the encounter between ideas circulating in a global public sphere and the ‘life-worlds’ in
which colonial subjects found themselves, this approach nonetheless maintains a diffusive
perspective on the global flow ideas.25 Such theories, whether consciously or subconsciously,
posit that modern Europe was the primary site for universal debates in political thought, after
which these ideas spread to the non-European world, where they were deployed either for the
perpetuation of domination or as tools for resistance. Either way, such gospel-like diffusion
meant that Europe remained the originary site for producing ideas, while others, too caught up in
the immediacy of their ‘life-worlds’ to think universally, encounter these truths as they develop
consciousness of the modern world.

We then encounter the classic problem of the relationship between the universal and the
particular in global intellectual history. This question is historically unavoidable, since the
‘global’ increasingly framed debates and practices, whether of colonialism, nationalism,
communism, violence, etc., across disparate locales, creating thematic resonance in seemingly
unrelated places. Yet, the debate, unfortunately, hinges on whether these themes had an
‘originary center’ in Europe, from where cosmopolitan or subaltern groups in the non-European
worlds ‘received’ the same theories to apply in their particular contexts. The task for global
intellectual history is to move away from this fundamental bias against, if not blindness to, the
intense and critical engagement with political ideas in the colonial world. I draw on the recent
work of Shruti Kapila’s on the necessity of studying the specificity of Indian political thought,
particularly when it encounters global concepts. Kapila argues that engagement with global
themes in Indian politics should be read less as a reception of already formed ideas, and more as

25
See Chris Bayly, Recovering Liberties: Indian Political Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011).
12
a process of ‘rupture’ from the ideas’ origins in foreign lands. 26 This framework posits that ideas
were torn apart from their European iterations and re-formulated to embed them within the
specific questions emanating from the terrain of anti-colonial resistance. Thus, the harmonious
development of ideas was disrupted through the intervention of political actors, much like the
interruption of colonial political life by the violence of revolutionary groups or mass revolts.

Such moments necessitated a distancing not only from colonial rule, but also led to ruptures
from, rather than fidelity to, any pristine, originary idea. Reference to global thinkers in Indian
political texts should be seen less as a sign of incorporation into global discourse, and more as an
attempt to demarcate the point of departure from a theoretical edifice. Indeed, Kapila sharply
notes that such ‘heresy’ was key to the universalization of ideas beyond their origins, turning
theoretical infidelity into a practical fidelity to an idea.27 Consequently, the alleged intellectual
deficit in colonial South Asia is also challenged by this framework, since prominent figures as
diverse as Ambedkar, Gandhi, and Iqbal can now be studied not only as political actors, but also
as producers of novel ideas, not least by developing a new practice of modern politics. Therefore,
disruption and production, rather than reception and consumption, remained central to non-
European political thought.

Kapila’s work is an invitation to rethink the anti-colonial struggle as a moment of violent

ruptures from the state and History, rather than as a tale of triumphant non-violent resistance, as
much of historicist writing depicts. One can, however, extend this argument by claiming that
citations, much like borders, both separate and conjoin ideas across space.28 Thus, to trace the
global itinerary of an idea, it is necessary to view how seemingly disparate instances of an idea’s
citation can nonetheless be held together in a dialectical unity, without positing an absolute
origin. In its encounters with non-European subjects, such as tribal and indigenous groups, or
peasants that persisted in the midst of capitalist development, European ideas had to be either
held in a state of suspension (as in the case of denial of citizenship rights to ‘barbarians’ in the
colonies) or stretched every time they engaged with radical alterity. In the latter case, one could
not simply posit the non-European world as a site for ‘data collection’ for already complete
theoretical frameworks. Instead, the very substance of these theories itself had to be radically
transformed.

In other words, the universality of an idea depended on its ability to erase its origins by tearing
itself away from its site of birth, and becoming embedded in the questions emanating from a
different terrain. Ideas that can bear the violence of an internal scission necessary for their
translation across disparate locales alone can lay claim to universality. An antagonism, therefore,
not only exists among different political ideas, but are immanent to ideas themselves, as a
necessary motor for their development and universalization. As Žižek argues, it is only

26
Shruti Kapila, ‘Global Intellectual History and the Indian Political’, in Rethinking Modern European Intellectual
History, eds. Darrin MacMahon and Samuel Moyn (New York: Oxford University Press USA, 2014), pp. 253-274.
27
Ibid., pp. 260-266.
28
Dipesh Chakrabarty makes a similar claim in terms of the borders between the past and the present. See Dipesh
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2007), pp. 97-116.
13
retroactively that political actors summon predecessors, i.e. one is not incorporated into a
particular heritage by birth, but by retroactive identification with it. In this way, predecessors are
more dependent upon their inheritors than the latter are on the former.29 The same is true for the
universal, which cannot actualize itself without the ruptures necessary within a contingent
situation.

Therefore, this work posits that ‘global’ ideas are not fixed and eternal truths that slowly reveal
themselves to humanity living in false consciousness. Instead, the trajectory of an idea is an
adventure full of ruptures, disruptions, antagonisms, as well as an abandonment of
‘fundamentals’ of the idea. If we can place together political actors as diverse as German trade
unionists and Vietnamese peasants under the category of ‘communists’, or Democrats in the US
or an Ambedkar in India as ‘liberals’, it is not because of a direct equivalence between their
politics. Instead, the relationship between the internal consistency of an ideology and its
dislocation in its global itinerary remains contingent, contested and fragile, and the ‘deviations’
are only retroactively placed in the ‘traditional’ corpus of political thought, reconfiguring its
internal contours. The task for us then is to study ideas as processual and always in flux, with a
symptomatic reading of their dispersed effects across the globe to permit a reconstruction of their
theoretical edifice.

Global Marxism, Non-Europe and the Twentieth Century

If we posit that the history of political thought develops as a result of ruptures and internal
scissions, then nothing provides this claim with more evidential backing than the historical
trajectory of Marxism. Writing in the midst of Europe-wide uprisings against authoritarian rule
and declining living standards in the 1840s and 1850s, Marx saw the socio-economic and
political developments of Western Europe as encompassing a universality that would in time
engulf the rest of the world in its logic. Thus, in his preface to Das Kapital, he could confidently
assert that ‘The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the
image of its own future’.30 Such understanding of historical time, in which other spatial and
temporal sequences dissolve to enter the logic of Capital, necessarily meant that (Western)
European nations that were already gripped by it were the site of this future, subjecting the rest to
a perpetual effort to ‘catch up’. Even by the early twentieth century, Lenin, when discussing the
‘three sources of Marxism’, could only draw his inspiration from ‘German philosophy’, ‘French
socialism’, and ‘British political economy’, reflecting the centrality, if not the total
epistemological domination, of Europe in Marxist imagination.31

Despite the continued centrality of Western Marxism in the realm of what we today call ‘theory’,
the trajectory of Marxist politics in the twentieth century made all claims to European centrality
untenable, if not outright redundant. Marxism stands out as perhaps the only ‘European’ idea that
held more popular appeal outside of Europe than on the continent itself. By mobilizing victorious

29
See Slavoj Žižek, ‘Mao Zedong: The Marxist Lord of Misrule’, in Mao On Practice and Contradiction, ed. Slavoj
Žižek (London: Verso, 2007), pp.1-28.
30
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (London: Penguin Classics, 1992), pp. 89-94.
31
Vladimir Lenin, The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism (London: Forgotten Books, 2015).
14
revolutions in countries and regions as diverse as Central Asia, China, Cuba, and Afghanistan,
Marxism increasingly became associated with anti-colonial, and later, anti-imperialist forces
throughout the non-European world. By the mid-60s, a section of the European Left itself was
engaged in discussions on national liberation and ‘Maoism’, which as Bruno Bosteels has
recently argued, was the vanishing mediator between different currents in the French
philosophical milieu in the 1960s and the 1970s.32

Such cursory historical tracing is enough to demonstrate the practical de-centering of Europe in
Marxist politics. Yet, the effects of twentieth-century politics in the peripheries has often only
appeared as symptoms in the writings of Western Marxists, rather than as results of committed
engagement with novel questions arising out of the local experiences, in order to clarify and
develop their concepts. Thus, this dissertation is an attempt to overcome the widening gulf
between theory and practice in global Marxism, by taking political developments in the non-
European world as not only (imperfect) applications of an already furnished theory, but as sites
generative of ideas that perpetually transformed theory itself.

The two key, interrelated themes that this work studies are the conception of History and the
revolutionary subject in Marxist thought. As Gavin Walker has recently demonstrated, the
process of primitive accumulation not only controlled labour power, but accumulated difference
itself, to articulate it in a re-configured hierarchy, whether racial, gendered or national. The
historical dynamic produced by Capital induced a ‘historical’ consciousness that implied a
certain beginning of History (in Western Europe). In the same vein, it also produced a
consciousness of ‘divergence’ for peripheral regions, since societies not following the ‘logical’
trajectory of capitalist development were designated as ‘backwards’. 33 This spatio-temporal
divide, exacerbated by colonial ideology, is a key problematic in reading non-European thought,
since the giant shadow of History, despite its provincial origins, continues to haunt the
imagination of modern political thinkers. Marxism remains internal to this problem.

Moreover, if Marxism is not merely an analytical tool, but a vehicle for transformative practices,
then the question of transition, whether from feudalism to capitalism or from the latter to
socialism, becomes central. Consequently, the search for the subject embodying the tension
between the past and the future within the present turns equally critical. The figure of the
proletariat played precisely this role in Marxist thought, as an immanent excess in European
capitalism that had the potential to overthrow it. In other words, the complement to the theory of
History is the theory of the political subject, the latter acting as a motor for the transformations in
the realm of the former. Yet, the debates on revolutionary subjectivity in the non-European world
revolve around an absence of the traditional proletariat, where the process of accumulation never
coincided with the normative description provided in Volume One of Das Kapital.34 Thus, we
32
Bruno Bosteels ‘Post-Maoism: Badiou and Politics’, Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 13: 3 (Winter, 2005),
pp. 575-634.
33
Gavin Walker, The Sublime Perversions of Capital: Marxist Theory and Politics of History in Modern Japan
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).
34
Dipesh Chakrabarty discusses the ‘stretching’ of the concept of the revolutionary subject in his recent writings.
See Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Belatedness as Possibility: Subaltern Histories, Once More’, in The Indian Postcolonial:
A Critical Reader, eds. Elleke Boehmer and Rosinka Chaudhuri (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), pp. 163–176.
15
encounter endless debates on the ‘stage’ of each peripheral region in relation to its nearness or
distance from Europe, prescribing economic development to induce the production of the
proletariat. A natural outcome of this particular trajectory in Marxism is what Dipesh
Chakrabarty termed ‘the waiting room of History’, in which colonial subjects were expected to
wait until the maturation of socio-economic relations, from which would have stemmed an
authentically modern political subjectivity.35

Thus, both these conceptions underwent a crisis as Marxism encountered the non-European
world, where the genealogy and habitation of modernity took a radically different form from its
instantiation in Europe. If communists in the non-European world rejected the linear
incorporation of their regions into an allegedly singular trajectory of Capital, what alternative
conception of historical progression did they posit to permit their own participation in the
international communist movement? What relation would exist between historical necessity and
active volition in this re-configured framework? And more importantly, who will be the subject
that can simultaneously claim political contemporaneity with revolutionary movements in the
West, while also embodying the potential for actualizing an emancipatory future? Non-European
communists simultaneously confronted these questions as they began developing their distinct
response to the relationship between the historical development of Marxism in Europe and the
radical alterity of their societies to that history.

These questions have even compelled contemporary Marxist intellectuals to undertake renewed
interrogation of Marxist theory of capitalism itself, moving away from frameworks of totality
and towards investigations into the ‘unevenness’ of global space.36 As Capital’s drive for
universality crossed paths with histories foreign to its logic, this entanglement necessarily
implied an intellectual engagement between the abstract dynamism of Capital and the concrete
history of particular regions. Dipesh Chakrabarty has posited two separate realms for studying
the history of capitalism, which he calls H1 (History of Capital) and H2 (Concrete History), with
both reinforcing, but also interrupting each other.37 While such a neat dichotomy between
Capital and History has been criticized by a number of writers, 38 it nonetheless points to the
dilemmas of writing the history of the non-European world while avoiding its pre-determination
by a master-signifier, such as Capital, or even nation. The history of non-Europe, thus, could not
be narrativised in linear terms, necessitating engagement with its ‘broken time’ of politics.

For writing an intellectual history of Marxism in the peripheries, I engage with Bruno Bosteels’
recent work on Marxist thought in Latin America.39 Bosteels argues that in conditions of
‘underdevelopment’ that are dominated by foreign interests, it is hard to identify a unifying

35
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, p. 8.
36
A central category of anti-imperialism in twentieth-century politics, ‘unevenness’ became increasingly important
in the theoretical edifice of post-war Western Marxism. See Louis Althusser, For Marx (London: Verso, 2006), pp.
87-128.
37
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, pp. 47-72.
38
For example, Manu Goswami critiques Chakrabarty for failing to view how History 2 is already internal to the
History of Capital. Goswami, Producing India, pp. 73-102.
39
Bruno Bosteels, Marx and Freud in Latin America: Politics, Psychoanalysis, and Religion in Times of Terror
(London: Verso, 2012).
16
center for consciousness, since Capital itself does not accumulate on the national terrain, but
instead completes its circuit via the metropole. Similarly, ‘global’ ideologies formed in Europe
circulate in the peripheries but remain incomplete, owing to the difference in the material
conditions of their production in the metropole. The engagement with such ideas induces
‘incompleteness’ as an ideological, if not psychic, condition, negating the possibility of
connecting words that exist in theory with actually existing phenomena. Thus, the crisis of
finding an adequate ideological framework to anchor political practice in the non-European
world is experienced also as a linguistic crisis, with the inability of existing language to
adequately nominate material processes, often resorting to imprecise comparisons to Europe by
declaring non-Europe to be ‘not-yet’ fully ‘liberal’, ‘Marxist’ or even ‘Nationalist’. Such
rendering of non-European thought as a site of deficit is not only prevalent in Western
scholarship on the subject, but also posed a major challenge for thinkers from the Global South,
especially as the language of lack and waiting confronted the vigour and impatience of the anti-
colonial ‘now’.

As noted earlier, the fundamental gap between orthodox Marxism and the ‘insufficient
conditions’ for its realization on the peripheries has fueled much debate on the ‘stages’ of
revolution corresponding to each social formation. Bosteels, however, posits a much more
effective way of engaging with both the novelty of non-European Marxism and its potential
universality by utilizing the theory of ‘the missed encounter’.40 He argues that Marx’s lack of
rigorous engagement with non-Europe created a structural antagonism between Marxism and the
disparate practices of rebellion outside of Europe. This gap between the two, rather than
hindering the development of Marxism, became a provocation for innovations on the part of non-
European thinkers, while also reinventing Marxism itself in foreign situations. This antagonism,
and the contingent and disparate responses to it globally, rather than being a peripheral
phenomenon, was constitutive of Marxism as a global practice, since it permitted it to turn the
different indices of pain, suffering and rebellion into a common political project.41

Such a framework not only transformed Marxism into a contested terrain whose future remained
contingent, but more importantly, elevated ruptures from orthodoxy as the necessary condition
for Marxism’s relevance as a global ideology. Moreover, if ‘objective conditions’ were displaced
as the sole criterion for analyzing politics, it also necessarily implied a transformation in the role
of the revolutionary subject in Marxist thought. If the structures of modernity were experienced
as an ‘iron cage’ of the present, then the dialectic of history could only move forward through an
intervening subject against the inertia of this structure. Thus, rather than being determined by the
innate ‘laws’ of a sociological process, for Bosteels, the communist subject appeared in moments
of rupture from these laws, as a figure of disruption. Much like psychoanalysis, where the
hysterical patient becomes the site for revealing the truth of society, Bosteels argues that
Marxism also relied on a ‘hysterical break’ that interrupted the potential for linear, harmonious
development of capitalism.42 These breaks, which included riots, rebellions, protests, etc., were

40
Ibid., pp. 29-51.
41
Ibid., p. 116.
42
Ibid., pp. 1-28.
17
not only incompatible with the reproduction of capitalism, but also posed serious challenges to
orthodox Marxism, necessitating breaks immanent to theory itself.

One such point of departure was the centrality of volition against the fatalism of necessity in non-
European Marxist thought. A momentary breakdown at the interstices of the capitalist system
only points to the contradictions and gaps within the system, and does not itself produce a
specific politics. Turning these ephemeral moments into a sustained and coherent project, with
intellectual depth and a precision of target, always required hard conceptual and practical labor.
Consequently, since the subject that could play the vanguard role unifying the various threads of
the struggle (such as the proletariat) could not be neatly identified within an existing sociological
category in non-Europe, it had to be produced. The absence of the proletariat turned concepts
and processes such as nation, peasantry, indigenous communities, racial and gender justice into
potential mobilizers for political action, with the subject formed often at the crossroads of these
seemingly divergent tendencies. Thus, rather than following the trajectory of Capital, the task for
Marxist thought and action in the non-European world was to embed itself in the disruptions to
the system, tear subjects away from their subjection to the logic of under-development, and
affirm a new praxis of politics, elevating volition above sociological determinacy.43

Such sociologically indeterminate moments necessitated sovereign decisions to overturn the

impasse, turning politics into a singular inception, a radical beginning. I use Alain Badiou’s
concept of political ‘sequences’ to highlight the historically specific instantiations of communist
politics, grounded not on the vacillations of political economy, but on sovereign decisions taken
in moments of practical and theoretical paralysis, as points of departure for a new form of
communist politics.44 This implies that the particularity of a communist politics (summoned by
proper names such as Leninist, Maoist, Trotskyist, National Liberationist, etc.,) can only be
apprehended by a historical tracing of its specific genealogy, including the ruptures produced in
the realm of ideas outside of orthodox Marxism. Such reliance on the ‘interiority of thought’ to
grasp the referentiality of different modes of communist politics allows us to take into account
both the continuities within global Marxism as a conscious political project aiming to overcome
the organization of social life geared towards surplus-value production, while also historicizing
each ‘communist’ movement based on its internal dynamics.

In this work, I posit that the formation of communist parties in colonial countries such as India
led to a specific ‘anti-colonial sequence’ of communist politics, as both anti-colonialism and
communism grappled with their earlier ‘missed encounter’, transforming both in their quest for
producing a common politics. This encounter led to a shared vocabulary in Marxist thought
globally, with terms such as primitive accumulation and imperialism, arguably of peripheral
value for Marx himself, taking center stage throughout the twentieth century, both intellectually
and politically. In particular, the question of ‘colonial backwardness’ was turned on its head by
anti-colonial Marxism. It registered the colonial world as lagging behind Europe in industrial
terms, but also potentially at the peak of its development due to its potential to break from global

43
See Peter Hallward, ‘Fanon and Political Will’, Cosmos and History: Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy
7:1 (2011), pp. 104-127.
44
Badiou, Metapolitics, pp. 26-57.
18
capitalism and begin the work of building socialism, a paradox whose theoretical importance I
explore in the dissertation.45 I study Indian communist thought as part of this dialectic between
continuity and breaks, between History and Politics, and between fidelity and heresy, both
simultaneously reinforcing and interrupting each other.

Finally, non-European Marxism does not represent merely an instance of global Marxism, its
commensurability with the latter based on a supposedly universal critique of surplus-value
production. Instead, this work argues that Marxism’s encounters with the non-European world
opened the theory to certain repressed themes within its own edifice, including the question of
historical difference, the temporality of socialist revolution, the role of the state and the
relationship between the peripheries and the metropole. The opening up of this vast continent of
knowledge is what truly turned Marxism into one of the most popular and contested global
political projects in the twentieth century, with a massive appeal in the colonies that could only
be matched by mainstream nationalists. The universality of this shift to the margins was
premised precisely on its ability to transform conversations in the global public sphere occupied
by Marxist intellectuals and militants. This, however, does not mean that we fetishize non-
European Marxism as the site for the revelation of ‘true Marxism’. Instead, it is simply a call for
recognizing the multiple sites of production of communist thought in the twentieth century, and
to include them in our analysis as we describe, criticize and develop the concepts of Marxist
politics.

Intellectual History and India

The third, and perhaps the most significant, thread in this dissertation is the development of
Indian political thought in the twentieth century. Historians belonging to Subaltern Studies were
some of the earliest proponents of studying the distinctness of Indian political thought,
particularly in relation to European epistemology. For instance, Partha Chatterjee, in his book
titled Nation and its Fragments, while analyzing the production of the ‘nation’ in colonial India,
argued that Indian nationalist thinkers demarcated ‘outer’ and ‘inner’ domains to both engage
with and resist colonial hegemony.46 The outer or public domain was one in which nationalists
sought to contest issues of the state, aiming to outdo their colonial masters on their own turf.
However, it was the ‘inner’ domain of cultural autonomy that provided both a distinct self to
Indian nationalism in relation to its Western counterpart and provided the impetus for the
growing anti-colonial consciousness. This emphasis on distinct realms of Indian modernity is
reiterated by Dipesh Chakrabarty. Chakrabarty argues that much of Indian historiography has
borrowed epistemological categories from Europe, which has impeded our understanding of the
complexities of India’s modern public life.47 By focusing on diverse issues such as anti-colonial
temporalities, the role of religion in public life, as well the historicism prevalent in history
45
Etienne Balibar argues that this paradoxical relationship to time existed within the thought of Vladimir Lenin. See
Etienne Balibar, ‘The Philosophical Moment in Politics Determined by War: Lenin 1914-1916’, in Lenin Reloaded:
Toward a Politics of Truth, eds. Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2007).
46
Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1993), pp. 12-14.
47
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, p. 32.
19
writing, Chakrabarty called for novel hermeneutic tools, distinct from ideological categories
attendant to European enlightenment and Capital, to analyze popular politics and culture in India.
This approach then categorized many cosmopolitan anti-colonial thinkers as ideologues of
universalizing themes of the Enlightenment, which, according to Chakrabarty, are
‘indispensable’ yet ‘inadequate’ for understanding Indian modernity.48

While such work is correctly criticized for presenting reified understandings of a ‘Western’
realm and ‘Indian’ realm, it nonetheless demonstrates the inadequacy of existing frameworks to
analyze the specificity of Indian history. As argued earlier, the task of global intellectual history
is to resist the temptation to dissolve the historical density of a particular situation into the
general, global tendency of an era. Instead, it is the study of the specific that permits the grasping
of a general dynamic, as well as tracing the ruptures immanent to that dynamic, thus allowing for
a better comprehension of both the continuities and the breaks that mark political thought in a
historical period. Through a historical tracing of Indian political thought, I show how the specific
genealogy of anti-colonial politics in India intertwined with global Marxism in the interwar
period to produce a specific practice of Marxism that I call ‘Indian Communism’.49 Here, I
decisively move away from notions that posit a relationship of ‘production’ and ‘reception’
between Marxism and Indian thought. Such a framework often places Indian thought in the not-
yet stage of political consciousness, with only its encounter with Marxism permitting this
‘incomplete’ thought to come into being. Instead, while acknowledging that Marxism as an idea
opened new horizons for Indian political actors, the reverse was equally true; Marxism’s
encounter with the anti-colonial movement in India re-configured Marxism itself, expanding its
horizons and making certain aspects redundant, as we discuss later. Thus, Indian communism
was neither Marxist hegemony over Indian consciousness, nor a fusion of two different
ideologies, but the dialectical inter-locking of two disparate political trajectories that
continuously interrupted, and propelled, each other to produce a novel practice of politics.

Therefore, my aim is to situate global ideas in a productive tension with the specificity of Indian
history. This work points three broad characteristics of the Indian political that stemmed from the
specific history of the formation of anti-colonial thought, and that overdetermined the production
of political thought in India. I see these distinctions in the themes of ‘distancing’, ‘historical
difference’ and ‘political violence’, tropes that I explain below and explore throughout this
dissertation.

As mentioned, the experience of colonial modernity, with its reliance on the repressive
apparatuses of the state to discipline populations in the name of a ‘civilizational process’, did not
generate popular enthusiasm in linear notions of progress. In the absence of local rule or rights of
citizenship, political thinkers in colonial India developed practices envisioning an active
distancing from dominant ideologies of colonial rule. Thinkers as diverse as Vivekananda,

48
Ibid., p. 4.
49
Matthieu Renault has recently termed the Marxism of the peripheries as ‘National Communism’. See Matthieu
Renault, ‘The Idea of Muslim National Communism: On Mirsaid Sultan Galiev’, Viewpoint Magazine (March,
2015), available at https://www.viewpointmag.com/2015/03/23/the-idea-of-muslim-national-communism-on-
mirsaid-sultan-galiev/ accessed 23rd May, 2015.
20
Aurobindo Ghosh, Gandhi, and M.N. Roy participated in, or developed, practices incongruous
with the disciplinary procedures of the colonial state. These practices, ranging from religious,
pedagogical and organizational concerns, were aimed at developing a counter-discipline to the
inertia of colonial rule and its attendant ideologies. In other words, the thrust of anti-colonial
thought was to develop new horizons in opposition to the ones imposed by colonial modernity, a
tendency that forced Indian Marxists to re-pose the question of History within their theoretical
edifice.

Second, such a break from colonial sovereignty necessitated an engagement with the question of
historical difference. Colonial rule was premised on legal, political and epistemological
exceptions, whether in the endless separating of the ‘fanatics’ from the ‘civilized’, or the liberal
use of emergency laws to quell any perceived danger to colonial power. Anti-colonial revolts,
however, posed a major challenge to the exercise of colonial sovereignty, particularly since they
sought to create alternative forms of sovereignty grounded in religious, cultural, and political
institutions.50 This led to a politicization of difference itself, with the ‘nation’ becoming a terrain
for mobilizing the uneven political, economic and epistemological relations between colonial
Indian and the metropole. Another major example was the elevation of the Indian peasant as a
political subject in the anti-colonial movement, bridging, if not annulling, the divide between
‘modern’ and ‘pre-modern’ subjectivity in the formation of the public sphere in India. 51 Not only
did it traverse the colonial/anti-colonial divide, but difference as a political category also
structured conflicts internal to the social sphere in India, resulting in popular contestations over
caste, religious and linguistic identities. This work studies the persistence of seemingly archaic
attachments, such as the nation, religion, and the countryside, as stemming from the peculiar
trajectory of anti-colonial politics in India. Further, I argue that these historically sedimented
differences could not be erased by a universalizing narrative of Marxism, and had to be inscribed
within ‘Indian communism’ for the latter to resonate in colonial India, prompting displacements
and shifts within Marxist theory.

Finally, the complementary processes of distancing and historical difference developed

simultaneously with a novel conception of violence in colonial India. In her reading of G.I.
Tilak, India’s foremost anti-colonial leader prior to Gandhi’s emergence in the 1920s, Shruti
Kapila emphasizes the centrality of anti-colonial violence in thought. Rather than stemming from
historical progression, the Indian political was conceived in terms of a war that reconfigured
notions of kinship and enemy. Thus, a violent scission from the repetition of routine was a
necessary condition for producing political demarcations, a view equally shared by the ‘terrorist’
organizations proliferating in early twentieth-century India, as well as political organizations
such as the National Congress or the Muslim League, which frequently deployed confrontational
tactics, including public agitation, for political claim-making.52 A politics based on exceptional,
violent moments of rupture from business-as-usual structured the Indian political, without the
theoretical or ethical certainties typical of Western political philosophy. The contingent and

50
Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, pp. 3-14.
51
Rochona Majumdar, ‘Subaltern Studies as a History of Social Movements in India’, South Asia: Journal of South
Asian Studies 38:1 (2015), pp. 50-68,
52
See Shruti Kapila, ‘A History of Violence’, Modern Intellectual History 7:2 (2010), pp. 437-457.
21
exceptional nature of the Indian political is described by Partha Chatterjee as ‘the spectre of pure
politics’.53 Unlike Western Europe, where the disciplinary processes of modernity displaced
conflicts existing in the social body onto the institutional terrain, the violence of anti-colonial
movements brought these wars into the public domain, giving Indian political life its specific
relationship to violence.

We are then confronted with the problem of delineating the relationship between Indian political
history with the theoretical edifice of Marxism. As mentioned earlier, this work rejects the binary
between ‘Western’ ideas and ‘indigenous’ Indian thought as mutually exterior. Instead, the task
for us is to view their trajectories as immanent to each other after the encounter between
Marxism and anti-colonialism. ‘Indian communism’ then is an incomplete, contingent and
ongoing political project that brings together the historical specificity of Indian politics with
Western Marxism, which results in the continuous reconstitution of both terms of this divide.
Thus, this work emphasises this dialectical tension to move between these two terms, delineating
how anti-colonial politics in India were influenced by Marxist ideas, and how Marxist ideas
themselves were reconstituted by their engagement with novel tropes of distancing, historical
difference and violence. There is then neither an origin nor a definite end to the consequences of
this encounter, which remain open to transformation in novel encounters and contingent
circumstances.54

Historiography of Communism

Over the last two decades, intellectual history has become a vibrant field in Indian
historiography. As discussed earlier, Subaltern Studies played a major role in focusing
scholarship in the production, translation and circulation of ideas in colonial India. Yet, the focus
of this corpus has been either on understanding ideas implicit in popular practices, or on major
figures of the Indian national movement such as Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Bal Tilak. 55 The
scholarship on the Communist Movement, however, has seldom delved into the theme of
intellectual production, a gap I aim to fill through this work.

Yet, there have been a number of important works on communism in colonial India over the
years that have attempted to develop a perspective on the movement, if not recovering the ideas
of the movement.56 The history of the communist movement in colonial India has been written
53
Partha Chatterjee, ‘Sovereign Violence and the Domain of the Political’, in Sovereign Bodies: Citizens, Migrants
and States in the Postcolonial World, eds. Thomas Hansen and Finn Stepputat (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2005), pp. 82-100.
54
I take inspiration from and build on Althusser’s later writings on the ‘encounter’. See Louis Althusser, Philosophy
of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987, eds. Oliver Corpet and Francois Matheron (London: Verso, 2006),
trans. G.M. Goshgarian, pp. 163-207.
55
See Faisal Devji, The Impossible Indian: Gandhi and the Temptation for Violence (Cambridge/Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2012).
56
In this section, I only engage with scholarship on communism in colonial India. The tactics and practice of
communism are significantly different in the postcolonial sub-continent, particularly due to debates around
constitutionalism, democracy and citizenship. For a discussion on the trajectory of communist politics in
postcolonial India, see Praful Bidwai, The Phoenix Moment: Challenges Confronting the Indian Left (New York:
HarperCollins, 2015), Vijay Prashad, No Free Left: The Futures of Indian Communism (New Delhi: Leftword
22
with three major themes. The first strand treats Communism as a threat to India’s (and global)
stability, and identifies with the counter-insurgency tactics of the state. The second revolves
around the theme of ‘failure’, in which an attempt is made to understand why communists were
unable to achieve the goal of bringing a revolution in India. The third attempts to read the
communist movement in India on its own terms, by delineating the hybrid forms of political
practice developed by communist activists. In this section, I discuss each of these themes, and
conclude showing how my work borrows from this scholarship, and where I depart from their
frameworks.

Gene D. Overstreet and Marshall Windmiller’s work, ‘Communism in India’, was the first
comprehensive academic study on the history of the communist movement in colonial India.57
The article is impressive in its breadth. The authors vividly describe the international situation
and the circumstances in which communism appeared as an attractive ideology on the Indian
political strategy. They also delve into the debates within the Communist Party of India in the
1920s, 1930s and 1940s, as well as their intersection with debates in global Marxism. The book
also provides a detailed context of the anti-colonial movement in India, with particular emphasis
on the relationship between the Indian National Congress and the Communist Party.

Yet, the primary problem with their work is their identification with the colonial state’s narrative
when describing the ‘threat’ posed by communism to the region. For example, the work posits
the advent of communism in India as part of the Bolsheviks’ strategy to spread their influence
over India, turning the ‘origin’ of Indian communism into a geostrategic calculation made in
Moscow.58 More significantly, Overstreet and Windmiller treat the colonial state as a benevolent
entity desiring the best for its subjects. Consider the manner in which they depict the state in its
conflict with anti-colonial activists:

Moreover, the British proved amenable to an appeal to conscience. Though they did not
fully satisfy the nationalist demands, neither did they wholly thwart them, and nationalist
agitation was rewarded with gradual progress towards self-rule. Thus, radicalism had
little chance to flourish; as long as peaceable political action produced some result, a
violent revolutionary program could not inspire overwhelming mass enthusiasm.59

The framing of colonial rule as open to dialogue with the national movement is historically
inaccurate. As a number of historians have demonstrated, excessive violence by the colonial state
was not an aberration, but provided the context in which anti-colonial politics took shape. This is
particularly true after the end of the First World War, when many Indian cities were placed under
emergency laws and handed over to military administrators. This historical inaccuracy on the
part of Overstreet and Windmiller compels them to characterize communist tendencies as

Books, 2016), Bidyut Chakrabarty, Communism in India: Events, Processes and Ideologies (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2014), Kamran Asdar Ali, Surkh Salam: Communist Politics and Class Activism in Pakistan,
1947-1972 (Lahore: Oxford University Press, 2015).
57
Gene D. Overstreet and Marshall Windmiller, Communism in India (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1959).
58
Ibid., p. 7.
59
Ibid., pp. 15-16.
23
‘extreme’ and, at one point, label the politics of militant outfits as ‘clumsy acts of violence on the
part of teenage conspirators’.60

Such depiction obfuscates how violence was central for producing the dynamic that resulted in
the ‘gradual progress towards self-rule’. The idea of Indian self-rule was intimately tied to the
anti-British militancy inspired by Tilak in the early twentieth century. 61 Moreover, as discussed
earlier, even Gandhi’s ‘peaceful’ tactics involved ‘extremist’ tactics such as direct action against
government policy, often leading to violence from both sides. Conceptually and historically,
communist politics was neither alien to the history of armed struggle against British rule in India,
nor to the mass anti-colonial upsurge after 1919, but existed within this milieu.

This framework prevents the authors from seeing communist politics as part of this continuum of
anti-colonial politics confronting a powerful, and at times brutal, Empire. The clichéd depictions
of communists as violent stem from a fundamental misreading of the historical moment of
communism’s emergence onto the political stage in India. Such an approach is particularly
inadequate for studying the development of ideas, since it fails to contextualize thought in
relation to the political situation, viewing it instead as deviations from an ideal (imperial) liberal
order.

The second strand of writing on the communist movement focuses on its failure to become a
hegemonic force in the national movement, particularly in relation to the Indian National
Congress. Such framework is used by D.N. Gupta in his book ‘Communism and Nationalism in
Colonial India, 1939-1945’.62 Gupta studies the intersection of communism and nationalism
during the Second World War, and asks why communists were unable to capture popular
imagination during this period.63 He rejects the notion that Indian communists were mere agents
of the Soviet Union, and instead places them within the wider context of the burgeoning anti-
colonial movement. Moreover, he also criticises Marxist historians who make retroactive
justifications for the mistakes made by the Communist Party of India, preventing a critical
assessment of the strategy of the party leadership.64 His aim is neither to question the motives of
the political actors involved in the communist movement, nor glorify their work, but to focus on
the consequences of the decisions made by the party during the war.

The CPI supported the British war effort after the Soviet Union was attacked by Germany,
declaring it a ‘People’s War’. Yet, the decision backfired since the Indian National Congress was
leading the ‘Quit India Movement’ against the colonial government. Gupta argues that the
primary reason for the failure of the party during this period was its active support to the war
effort, a decision that made it appear as a collaborator of the British at the peak of the anti-

60
Ibid., pp. 285, 17.
61
Kapila, ‘A History of Violence’, pp. 437-442.
62
D.N. Gupta, Communism and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1939-1945 (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications,
2008).
63
Ibid., pp. 16-17.
64
Ibid., p. 19.
24
colonial movement.65 Moreover, the party’s belief that independence could only be achieved
under its own leadership meant that it was more focused on breaking away Congress activists
from the party leadership, than on building a genuine united front against colonial rule. While the
party lost prestige due to its stance on the war, it was also unable to convince the Indian public
that the jailed leadership of Congress would betray the cause of independence.66 The result was
that by the end of the war, Congress emerged as the largest political force in the country while
the CPI remained a peripheral player in the country’s politics.67

While the book provides an important window into debates on nationalism and internationalism,
an excessive focus on failure prevents Gupta from focusing on the innovations/interventions
made by the CPI, both in Indian politics and global Marxism. Indeed, if one were to make the
absence of revolution as one’s point of departure, then it would have been difficult to identify the
contributions made by communist intellectuals such as Antonio Gramsci or Rosa Luxemburg,
since they participated in ‘failed’ movements. In fact, the failure to attain political power can
itself generate novel thought, particularly as political actors reflect on their past and look for
opportunities in the present. What remains missing in Gupta’s narrative, therefore, is an
understanding of the ways in which members of the CPI navigated a complex local and
international political terrain to contribute on themes such as internationalism, nationalism, and
violence to produce a specific practice of communist politics.

The third major theme studies communist politics in India as part of the global circulation of
ideas and practices in the first half of the twentieth century. Maia Ramnath’s work on the Ghadar
Party, titled ‘Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Party Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to
Overthrow the British Empire’, is part of the scholarship focused on the global nature of anti-
colonial politics.68 While the book focuses on the international trajectory of the Ghadar Party, it
devotes a substantial section to the intersection between Ghadar activists, Indian communists and
the Soviet Union.69

Ramnath focuses on the ‘combination of contexts, populations, issues, frames, scales’ that
structured transnational anti-colonial politics.70 The migration of Indians to North America
permitted political activists to build a political organization that could challenge the British
Empire in disparate locales, rather than being confined to a fixed geographical location.
Moreover, the CPI’s politics, particularly its global connections, were formed by using the
networks of groups such as the Ghadar Party and the activists from the Caliphate Movement.71 In
this sense, the CPI was part of a global, cosmopolitan space of radicalism where ideological

65
Ibid., p. 230.
66
Ibid., p. 270.
67
Ibid., p. 20.
68
Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to
Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
69
Ibid., pp. 123-165, and pp. 194-232.
70
Ibid., p. 4.
71
Ibid., pp. 194-232.
25
affiliations remained flexible as part of the larger political commitment toward undermining
Empire.

Ramnath’s focus in this work is on the practical solidarity developed by communist partisans
with other groups, demonstrating how this period was ideologically promiscuous. Yet, the
emphasis on the overlapping practices of different groups in the anti-colonial movement veils the
significant differences between them. While hybridity and fluidity were important features of
this period, so were polemics among anti-colonial activists. In fact, the differences between these
groups were serious enough to lead to outright confrontation as the British withdrew from India.
Ramnath’s scholarship also demonstrates why the glue of ‘internationalism’ or
‘cosmopolitanism’ is inadequate for explaining the development of a political project. 72 Many of
the major political currents that rival each other in the contemporary sub-continent were formed
in the diaspora, but this common feature should not obfuscate how they fundamentally diverged,
producing a conflictual public sphere. The author does little to delineate the singularity of each
political project, a position that reproduces a simple binary between the Empire and a reified
anti-colonial movement.

From the perspective of intellectual history, Ramnath’s approach does not move beyond the
language of ‘interests’, since what brought together an eclectic group of activists was their
opposition to Empire. Yet, I argue that these groups, despite the flexibility of tactics, were rooted
in distinct ideological registers. The ideological promiscuity of these groups is a result of their
departure from fixed categories that exist in political thought. Yet, the failure to nominate
unorthodox political ideologies is a shortcoming on the part of intellectual history, which views
political projects, particularly in the non-European world, as ‘combinations’, as if European
Marxism or Liberalism were not influenced by disparate ideological tendencies. The more
difficult, and for this reason important, task is to develop an adequate language for nominating
political projects that violate established categories, rather than labeling them with terms such as
‘eclectic’ or ‘flexible’, that tell us more about the lacunae in our field rather than something
specific about their politics.

The theme of hybridity is given particular attention in Shalini Sharma’s work on communist
politics in colonial Punjab.73 Her work examines the ways in which Indian tropes became part of
the Communist lexicon developed in colonial India. In particular, she focuses on themes such as
suffering, heroism and martyrdom as the conceptual vocabulary for anti-colonial politics in
Punjab. According to Sharma, Marxism had to be inserted within the broader tradition of anti-
colonialism, leading to a novel vocabulary for communist politics. For example, the theme of
sacrifice became central to the organizational culture of the party, overtaking concerns about
Marxist political economy.74

72
Kris Manjapra’s work on M.N. Roy has the same shortcoming. While it seeks to imagine the past and the future
beyond the imperatives of the nation-state, it does not specify the singularity of each political ideology.
Cosmopolitanism becomes too large a framework to explain the political practice of disparate groups. Manjapra,
M.N. Roy, pp. 111-151.
73
Shalini Sharma, Radical Politics in Colonial Punjab: Governance and Sedition (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014).
74
Ibid., pp. 35-59, 116.
26
Sharma’s work is fascinating as it shows the intersection between the circulation of global ideas
and their deployment in popular politics. She pays attention to the transmutations that occur in
the process of translating an ideology in a novel setting. Yet, her work is of a descriptive nature,
and does not delve into the theoretical contributions made by Indian communists in their
attempts to formulate a political project relevant to colonial conditions. In other words, this work
remains within the framework in which ideas are produced in the West and are applied in the
non-European world through deviations engendered by the particularities of each locale.

My own work departs from the existing literature on the Communist Movement of India by
asking different questions: What were the salient features of Communist thought in India? What
was the contribution of Indian communism to global Marxism, particularly in the domain of
political thought? What historical, structural and ideological contexts formed the background for
the production of communist thought in colonial India? How did partisans of the communist
party improvise to produce a new vision and new practice of communist politics? And finally,
what was the relationship between tradition and novelty for simultaneously claiming inheritance
and distance from global Marxism and Indian politics?

These questions allow us to trace the genealogy of ideas through the politically charged decades
of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. Rather than focusing on the ‘failures’, ‘lack’ and ‘mistakes’ of
the communist movement, this work focuses on the ideas and practices affirmed by Indian
communism. This will prevent the examination of the movement from the point of view of fixed
theoretical frameworks, and allow us to interrogate the challenges posed to communists
emanating from the conjuncture itself. Moreover, I move away from descriptive accounts of
debates among communists during this period. Instead, my aim is to highlight the theoretical
difficulties that structure these debates, and the attempts at finding resolutions for them.

Studying innovation in colonial India is particularly difficult since Indian political thinkers often
use canonical vocabulary in their political writings. Yet, I argue that the references to orthodox
texts often cloak the ways in which Indian political actors departed from orthodoxy and
formulated new political ideas. Part of our task as intellectual historians is to make explicit what
is already implicit in these texts by retrieving the novelty that lies in the guise of tradition. As
intellectual historians of the colonial world, we must place the non-European world as a site for
intellectual production, rather than mere repetition. Yet, we need to also resist the temptation of
positing the colonial world as completely autonomous from developments around the world.
Instead, our task is to study the paradoxical movement of ideas both within a broader tradition,
and simultaneously in excess of it. In other words, we must show how anti-colonial thinkers both
appropriated and reconfigured global ideas as they deployed them in political struggles.

The debates on identifying Marxism as ‘extreme’, ‘Euro-centric’, or ‘hybrid’ can benefit from an
engagement with contemporary literature around the ‘Idea of Communism’. This theoretical
framework views communism as a practical attempt to overcome hierarchy and exploitation,

27
denying an origin to the idea in the process.75 It studies communist thought as tied to contingent
eruptions of emancipatory politics (often termed the Event), in which political actors develop
thought within a particular situation while maintaining fidelity to more universal ideas, affecting
both the particular situation and the universal idea itself. Such a framework allows communist
movements in disparate locales nationally and regionally to become part of the global discourse
of Communist thought without effacing their own historical trajectory.

This method is now being used to study communist thought in places as diverse as Latin
America, North America, Europe, and East Asia.76 The ‘deviations’ in communist practice in
disparate locales is no longer viewed as a lack on the part of communist partisans, but as
generative of global communist thought. Yet, this novel lens remains missing from scholarship
on Indian communism, which remains confined to traditional concerns of reception, deviation,
failures and national security. In this dissertation, I attempt to overcome this lacuna by using a
similar lens to study the development of communist thought in colonial India. Through this
work, I also hope to push forward the scholarship on the ‘Idea of Communism’, since the
colonial world remains a major gap in this framework.

Finally, I focus on the ‘revolutionary subject’ as the nodal point through which I delineate the
improvisations in Indian communism. The focus on ‘deviations’ stems from the negligible
presence of the most important element for 19th century communist thought, i.e. the proletariat.
At the heart of the polemics among Indian communists, as well as their International
interlocutors, was precisely the identification of the political subject that could become an agent
of emancipation in colonial conditions. In particular, the colonial situation, with its denial of
citizenship and unrestrained violence, provided a distinct context for formulating political
thought. Yet, this crucial search, and its implications, remained missing from scholarship on
Indian communism. My aim is to bring to light this debate, and show how the study of Indian
Communism can aid us in re-thinking debates on political subjectivity, and contribute towards
broadening the debates in global intellectual history.

Methodology

This work, therefore, attempts to intervene in debates on the global circulation of ideas, the
theory and history of Marxism, and the specificity of colonial India. The vanishing mediator that
brings together these seemingly disparate threads is the question of novelty; how did history
collide to produce a new theory and practice of communism? Following Althusser, I posit that
the primacy in all three belonged to the exigencies of a determinate political conjuncture (in this
case, colonial India) that propelled an engagement with Marxism and other European ideas to
overcome the impasse of an unfolding struggle. Indian communist thought is studied here as an
adventure of invention and production, with Indian Marxists becoming important interlocutors
75
This framework is primarily inspired by the intersection of French Marxism and Maoism from the 1960s and
1970s. Different thinkers working in this tradition came together in London in 2009 for the ‘Idea of Communism’
conference, which led to an edited volume. See Slavoj Žižek and Costas Douzinas (eds.), The Idea of Communism
(London: Verso, 2010).
76
See Alessandro Russo, ‘How to Translate the Cultural Revolution’, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 7:4 (2006), pp.
673-682, and Bosteels, Marx and Freud, pp. 299-310.
28
simultaneously on the Indian political stage as well as in the global public sphere of Marxist
intellectuals.

Such a task requires a number of innovations on the part of historians while writing intellectual
histories of anti-colonial intellectuals. First, the lack of popular education, in addition to tight
surveillance by the colonial state on college campuses, meant that anti-colonial thinkers lacked
institutional spaces for producing their ideas. Therefore, unlike Kant, Hegel or John Stuart Mill,
all of whom worked in state-sanctioned institutions, anti-colonial thinkers often had to produce
their thought in ‘unconventional’ sites, including jails, while in exile or in the midst of popular
revolt. The most profound impact of this displacement was on the relation between theory and
practice, since anti-colonial thinkers were writing to intervene in the midst of ongoing struggles,
turning into theorists of practice. Contrary to the abstractions of Western political philosophy,
Indian political thought was formed within the framework of an ‘immediacy’, i.e. with direct
consequences for immediate political practice. This difference has led to a grave error on the part
of intellectual historians who often create a dichotomy between the sufficiently abstract, and
hence universal, thought produced by European thinkers, and the historically specific ideas
formulated by anti-colonial thinkers that cannot be extricated from their particular moment of
enunciation. Moreover, the intellectual import of such practice is often downplayed by confining
it within the ambit of ‘strategies’, ‘tactics’, or ‘interests’, thus making such work purely
contingent phenomenon.

Against this epistemological violence that negates the universal lessons of anti-colonial thought,
this work proposes that interventions of anti-colonial thinkers were simultaneously profound
conceptual innovations. To trace them, however, we must develop frameworks adequate for
grasping the dialectic between theory and practice, in which theoretical texts become ‘seditious
acts’, while practices open new domains for theoretical reflections. I argue that novel practices
such as Satyagraha by Gandhi, the Caliphate movement’s mobilization based on notions of
‘hurt’, or the Ghadar Party’s formation as a militant organization in the diaspora, point to radical
rethinking of themes as diverse as violence, affect and Empire. As Faisal Devji argues, the
language of ‘interests’ remains inadequate since it is unable to explain the complex ethical,
political and strategic decisions undertaken by anti-colonial thinkers to align disparate ‘interests’,
and also fails to take into account that a political project takes a life of its own beyond the
contingent circumstances of its birth77

Therefore, the task for us is to study the writings and the practices of anti-colonial actors as
simultaneously generative of political ideas. By recognizing that ‘ideology is embedded in
practices’, we are able to shed light on the ways in which novel practices rendered old
conceptual categories redundant, thus stretching, if not transforming, European ideas within the
Indian political landscape. This approach also permits us to study the gap between European
ideas deployed by anti-colonial thinkers, and the deviations from these ideas in actual practice.
Therefore, we can examine this gap as the space for innovation and novelty in the colonial world,
without which anti-colonial thought continues to appear as merely deficient application of fully
formed concepts.

77
See Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (Cambridge/Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013).
29
Yet, such a project requires laborious effort on the part of the intellectual historian to develop the
concepts implicit in these practices. Since political thinkers in colonial India were writing in the
midst of a national liberation struggle, they could not be as concerned about how their actions or
writings fit into the existing corpus of enlightenment ideas. Merely reiterating the history of
resistance in colonial India would not grant us access to the thought that conditioned the Indian
political, since the very structure of these innovations are veiled through the imprecise use of
European interlocutors by Indian political thinkers themselves. The task of intellectual historians
is to retrieve, and further develop, the concepts embedded in the polemics and practices of anti-
colonial politics. If intellectual historians can have endless debates on the ‘real meaning’ of the
corpus of a Marx or a Hegel, and further develop their ideas in the process, then we can apply the
same principle to political thought in colonial India. Thus, this work studies the gap between the
citations of Marxism in the writings of Indian communists, and their ‘deviations’ from these
works in practice, as a provocation for rethinking the development of political concepts in
colonial India, as well as studying the consequent ruptures immanent to Marxist theory itself.

Dissertation Overview

This work is organized into five substantial chapters. The first chapter discusses the colonial
state’s engagement with the ‘idea of Communism’. Through a tracing of debates among colonial
officials on the question of ‘Indian fanaticism’, I show how the control and disciplining of bodies
was an essential component of colonial governmentality in India. By focusing on the
introduction of tear-gas as a part of the British arsenal for ‘pacifying’ Indian political life, this
work argues that British authorities aimed to transform ‘Indian mobs’ into docile, individual
subjects, thus constituting a liberalism produced under bodily pain. Yet, the 1920s saw an
increasing search for political ideas as an anchor within the developing popular political sphere
in India, making ideological demarcations central to political debates during this period. The
colonial state, which had mastered the art of managing the bodies of subjects, found its own
frameworks inadequate when confronting the appearance of rival political ideas. As a result, the
state found it increasingly difficult when the ‘irrational’ Indians were no longer agitating as
spatially specific and temporally ephemeral mobs reacting to a particular issue, but were
mobilizing around geographically dispersed, and temporally enduring groups held under the sign
of an idea. I show the (dark) comical effects of attempts to control political ideas in the 1920s
and 1930s, culminating in the outlawing of Marxist ideas during the Meerut Conspiracy Case.
Consequently, I show the centrality of political thought in contestations, both inside the anti-
colonial movement, as well as between the colonial state and anti-colonial activists, a major
lacuna in discussions on colonial history.

In the following four chapters, I look at four different figures from the Indian communist
movement to delineate the continuities and ruptures both within Indian political life with the
appearance of Marxist ideas, and within global Marxism. One clarification is due-- I look at
individual militants of the communist movement, but not because I adhere to a ‘great men’ view
of history. Instead, I engage with these specific people since their lives provide us an effective
background for the encounter between Marxism and disparate strands of anti-colonialism, while
they were also some of the most prolific and eloquent chroniclers of the political project
30
emanating from this encounter. Thus, the names used in this work do not represent individual
intellectual biographies, but serve as anchors to examine aspects of communist politics, grasped
in their continuities and certainties, as well as the infidelities and contingencies inherent in the
conjuncture.

The second chapter traces the life and writings of M.N. Roy from his early years as a member of
the underground ‘terrorist’ network in Bengal, to his heydays as one of the most important
interlocutors between European Marxism and the non-European world, to his eventual
denunciation and removal by the Stalinist bureaucracy (1905-1929). Roy captured the
imagination of the global communist movement when he challenged Lenin on the colonial
question at the Second Comintern meeting in Moscow (1920). I explore how Roy developed a
critique of the Communist movement’s neglect of the burgeoning movements in the colonial
world, in which he stressed that capitalism at the peripheries was more vulnerable, and hence
provided more opportunities for a successful communist movement. Moreover, I argue that
‘time’ was the central problematic for Roy, as he militated against the notion of History that
framed the colonial world as politically backwards, and made attempts to formulate a politics
based on a shared time of revolt and rebellion across global space. Although Roy later
condemned Marxism as a threat to individual liberty, replacing it with his philosophy of ‘Radical
Humanism’, I argue that within his oeuvre, we find useful critiques of bureaucratic socialism and
linear notions of History that can aid us in tracing the rupture he created within orthodox
Marxism.

The dissertation’s third chapter engages with the works of Shaukat Usmani, a young partisan of
the revivalist Caliphate movement who became the central leader of the Communist Movement
in India in the 1920s. By describing his journey out of India as part of the Hijrat Movement and
eventual encounter with communist rebellions taking place in Muslim Central Asia, I show how
political Islam entered into an ideological and practical entanglement with global communism.
As two of the most important global ideologies opposed to Empire, I propose that they shared a
deep subjective affinity that inscribed the two onto each other throughout the twentieth century. I
demonstrate the ways in which Usmani saw his journey from a militant of the Caliphate
Movement to a partisan of the Communist Movement as part of a continuum of anti-imperial
politics, shedding light on political subjectivity in India, as well as reconceptualizing Marxism
based on its encounter with historical difference, in this case, religious attachments.

The next chapter follows the afterlives of the ‘Hindustan Ghadar Party’, as this diasporic outfit of
revolutionaries attempted to find a foothold in the political landscape of colonial Punjab. By
following the politics of Sohan Singh Josh, the foremost leader and intellectual of the communist
movement of Punjab, I study how communism was inscribed within the tradition of the
Ghadarites. Josh chose the peasantry as the social group that could bridge the gap between
Marxism and the Ghadar Party to develop a communist praxis in colonial Punjab. How did the
peasant emerge as the inheritor of the potentialities located earlier in the global itineraries of
Punjab militants? What transformed the peasantry, viewed in enlightenment thought as a figure
of deficit, into the bearer of a future lying dormant within the present? Moreover, I also examine
the utilization of the motif of shame by Josh as a vehicle for anti-colonialism, highlighting the
importance of affect in communist subjectivity.
31
The chapter on B.T. Ranadive, the firebrand general secretary of the Communist Party of India
(1948-1950), deals with the engagement of Indian communism with the problem of
decolonization. Ranadive has often been accused of ‘left-wing adventurism’ for his calls for a
nationwide insurrection against the Nehru government. Yet, I argue that the absolute dichotomy
created between the ‘people’ and the postcolonial state was a result of a loss of historical
referentiality in the abrupt absence of the (almost) universally detested colonial enemy. The
consequent impasse in the communist movement, which led to Ranadive’s removal from the post
of general secretary, was a result of the failure of the Indian communists to formulate an
adequate response to questions of sovereignty and republicanism in postcolonial India.

I conclude the dissertation by tying together the various threads through a discussion on
revolutionary subjectivity in the twentieth century. Through a brief discussion of communist
politics in contemporary India, and drawing on recent debates in intellectual History and
philosophy, I show how this work can broaden our conception of the subject by tracing its
formation within, and beyond, the anti-colonial sequence. The encounter (or lack thereof) of
Indian communism with diverse social groups, such as lower castes, religious and ethnic
minorities, tribals, and women, forecloses the possibility of imposing a universal subject of
revolutionary politics. Instead, the presence of this ‘motley’ crowd demonstrates the
incompleteness of Eurocentric theories of subjectivity, and opens up new avenues for inquiry
into communist thought. Such focus is not only crucial for appreciating the singularity of Indian
communism, but also allows us to intervene in the political impasse of the communist movement
in contemporary India, as the latter oscillates between a textual fidelity to orthodox Marxism and
the ‘divergences’ in actual practice that continue to intensify in the rapidly transformed social,
economic and political landscape of India today.

32
33
 Chapter 2

Colonial Governmentality and the Idea of Communism

Introduction

In the summer of 1921, a flurry of messages was exchanged between the Peshawar Intelligence
Bureau chief, the members of the Crime Investigation Agency and the head of the Indian
Intelligence Bureau. There were news of local authorities in the Chitral Valley, near the Afghan
border, unearthing a major ‘Bolshevik Conspiracy’ in India, presumably funded by the Soviet
Union. The seven men arrested were accused of carrying ‘subversive’ literature into the country
and of conspiring to take advantage of the anti-government unrest in the tribal regions along the
Indo-Afghan border as well as the general unrest prevalent due to the Gandhi-led non-
cooperation movement.78

In what later became known as the Peshawar Conspiracy Case, the colonial state received its first
major opportunity to consider a threat posed by Indian Communism to colonial rule. The
Intelligence Bureau had already taken keen interest in the proceedings of the Communist
International in Moscow, particularly its open support of anti-colonial struggles in the colonized
ld. The intelligence community in India was of the opinion that attempts by communists to
exploit the anti-government sentiment prevalent in India in the aftermath of the Great War was
one of the gravest dangers to the perpetuation of colonial authority, and recommended empire-
wide efforts to prevent communist infiltration. David Petrie, Chief of the Indian Intelligence
Bureau, cautioned against judging the threat of communism based purely on the low membership
in communist organizations. Instead, declaring communism a plague and recommending
vigilance similar to that which hospital authorities are expected to show, ‘even in times when
public health is at its best,’ he called upon the Government of India to ‘make sure there is no way
any communist or communist idea can enter India’.79

Such nervousness about the very presence of communists pervades the judgements made in the
Peshawar Conspiracy Cases. In justifying the harsh sentences doled out to the accused, despite
lack of evidence of any overt act to further their allegedly intended goal, the judges invoked
section 121-A of the Indian Penal Code to assert that proof of membership with a ‘communist
conspiracy’ (which had become synonymous with a ‘communist organization’) was enough to
indict an individual for challenging colonial sovereignty. This equation of communism with
violent conspiracy was summed up in the judgement for the case in the following words:

The attitude of the Bolsheviks towards all settled governments is a matter of common
knowledge. So also their hostility and desire to overthrow the governments of all civilised

78
G. Adhikari, Documents of the History of the Communist Party of India (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House,
1974), pp. 27-29.
79
David Petrie, Communism in India (Calcutta: Government of India Press, 1928), p. 321.
34
 powers as at present constituted. This general knowledge is a matter of which judicial
notice can be taken.80

The guilt by association established in this first appearance of communism within the juridical
apparatus of the colonial state would continue to structure the latter's understanding of the threat
associated with communism. The very existence of communists as subjects embodying legal
rights is questioned by emphasizing their refusal to accept the legitimacy of colonial sovereignty,
since the latter remains the sole guarantor for protecting those legal rights. A cursory look at over
half a dozen major ‘conspiracy cases’ initiated to wipe out the communist ‘threat’ makes it clear
that those accused of taking part in communist activities were no longer ordinary juridical
subjects. In fact, their refusal to accept colonial authority had already placed them outside the
system, a place from which the legal apparatus could only include them through the act of
exclusion, as we shall discuss later.

But the question remains, why would an idea ‘imported’ from abroad have the potential for
social disruption? Indeed, critics of government high-handedness toward Indian communists
often complained that the communist threat was a figment of the imagination of the intelligence
community in India, and had little appeal beyond a few sections of society. In response to such
charges, Petrie's successor as the head of the Intelligence Bureau, H. Williamson, asserted that
these criticisms were less attentive to the state of Indian society.

A former Home Member of the Government of India has recently written that the only
appeal that Communism can make in India is to the predatory instincts which are to be
found throughout the whole country among the have-nots, or those who prefer living by
their wits to living by honest work… But the ‘have-nots’ in many parts of India constitute
not only the most numerous but also the most virile section of the population...any
effective subversive movement (except perhaps, that of Gandhi, who has at times
revealed a capricious willingness to compromise with the powers that be), whatever, its
outcome, is welcome to Moscow.81

The image of a ‘virile section’ of society has a much longer genealogy within colonial
governmentality, from regions inhabited by ‘turbulent and excitable races’ to a general character
of ‘Indian mobs’, who, when in a state of frenzy, understood ‘no language other than of the
bullet.’82 It is this fear of the potential combination of communist thought with the excitable
nature of the Indian masses that overdetermined the state's response to the communist
movement.

As a prelude to my work on communist thought, this chapter engages with the colonial state’s
depiction of communism with three main aims. First, I study colonial governance in India
through an engagement with contemporary theoretical concerns regarding sovereignty and

80
Adhikari, Documents of the History, p. 29.
81
H. Williamson, India and Communism (Calcutta: Government of India Press, 1933), p. 3.
82
J.D. Coleridge to Under Secretary of State for India, (12th August 1936), File 868/30/30, Use of Tear Gas in
India, IOR/L/PJ/12/414, The British Library Archives.
35
exceptionalism. In addressing this question, I argue that the colony is an ideal site for the
investigation of sovereignty, where the lines between legal and illegal remain perpetually
ambiguous. I do not intend, however, to reproduce another genealogical study of biopower and
the construction of the security state. While indebted to such scholarship, my own aim in this
work is to consider moments in which the gaps and fissures in the structures of power allow for
the possibility of political novelty. The emphasis on the gaps inherent in colonial governance
makes it possible to locate an active anti-colonial political subjectivity that was able to produce
ruptures within the structure, rather than merely reproducing ideologies attendant to Capital and
the Enlightenment.83 In other words, I employ the method that Bruno Bosteels recently termed
‘strategic ahistoricism’ in order to read state power as not only a constraint, but also as an
enabling condition for the specific form of communist thought produced under colonial
conditions.84

Second, I trace the genealogy of the idea of ‘fanatical’ in the colonial discourse to elucidate the
threatening potential of communism in India. Since a fanatical mob is viewed as one that is
passionately attached to its objective as compared to the rational self-interested individual, the
state engages in acts of ‘dispersal’ as the primary method for taming and pacifying the frenzied
mob. Such a method increasingly targeted the very conditions essential for bodily functionality
as potential avenues for the deployment of sovereign power. Further, I show that the use of the
phrase ‘professional agitator’ by the colonial state introduces a key distinction between frenzied
mobs that could be pacified, and political actors who operate with a diligently elaborated ‘Idea’
and, hence, were in the position to 'exploit' societal unrest. Thus, efforts to separate the
physiological from the ideational conditioned the state's attempts at containing communist ideas.

Finally, I examine colonial anxieties regarding anti-colonial geographies utilized by communists,

and the depiction of communists as part of a larger ‘foreign conspiracy’, a charge that has
endured into the post-colonial era. I argue that the attempts of the British authorities to depict
Indian communists as ‘foreigners’ was not only ironic, but can also be used as a provocation for
rethinking the metaphor of foreignness under colonial rule.

Colonial Liberalism, Crowds and the Figure of the Fanatic

In his reply to critics who argued that the communist threat in India was a mere figment of the
imagination of the intelligence community, Sir David Petrie cautioned that the presence of
communists in great numbers was not the key element required for a larger conflagration.

A mob, indulging in the kind of mass violence of which we had an unpleasant foretaste in
1920-22, does not require to be composed of convinced communists, but only of persons
whose minds have been inflamed beyond all control; and that Communism is an
exceedingly potent and subtle poison for exciting the mob-mind in such a way.85

83
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, pp. 3-26
84
Bosteels, ‘Traversing the Heresies’, p. 1.
85
Petrie, Communism in India, pp. 316-317.
36
What is revealing in this statement is that the power of communism is not said to stem from its
reach within Indian society. On the contrary, it is the specific construction of the image of Indian
society as perpetually on the verge of mob rule that induces the latent power of communism.
Petrie adds:

...the ease with which popular feeling against the Government can be whipped up in this
country, will ever tend to increase the odds in favour of communism being able to find its
opportunity.86

The intersection of ‘frenzied crowds’, anti-government sentiment, and communism (the anti-
government ideology par excellence) produced the perception of constant subversion in the
minds of colonial officials. But it was British understandings of the very nature of the collective
Indian subject that drove their anxieties towards both popular agitation and political ideologies
inside India, phenomenon they would tolerate inside Britain. It is this construction of the
‘irrationality’ of the ‘Indian mind’ that we now turn to.

A number of scholars have demonstrated the difficulties for liberal thought when dealing with
the question of crowds in public spaces. Arjun Appardurai has argued that liberalism finds it
difficult to manage any small number other than the number one. This is because at the heart of
liberal ideology resides the ideal of a rational individual. To the extent that collectivities are
viewed as an aggregation of self-interested individuals coming together through and for a
process of deliberative action, they are deemed to be legitimate actors. The mob, regardless of its
size, is always in excess of the number one, and hence is unable to make a calculated and rational
choice, more enthused by passion than informed by reason.87 The differentiation between the
cognitive capabilities of rational subjects (mostly European) and frenzied mobs (colonized
subjects), can be gleaned from the following statement by Lord Chelmsford in support of the
repressive measures used against the non-cooperation movement:

...when this movement (Civil Disobedience) was initiated, it was apparently not obvious
to its promoters, as it was to all thoughtful persons, that in India in its present state of
development (whatever may be the case in other countries) the unsettling effect of the
advice to the public in general to break selected laws was likely to lead to a situation
which might involve the overthrow of all law and order. 88

The inability of Indians to distinguish between opposition to a particular law and between the
dissolution of all forms of law owed to the stage of their ‘development’, thus securing the
domain for the state to continue its pedagogical process. It is pertinent to point out that in all
such conversations on mob frenzy, a distinction is made between a detached rational observer
and someone who is too closely tied to her object(ive), and hence incapable of rational cognition.

86
Ibid., p. 319.
87
Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Number: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham: Duke University Press,
2006), pp. 59-63.
88
Nasser Hussain, ‘Towards The Jurisprudence of Emergency: Colonial Rule and The Rule of Law’, Law and
Critique 10:2 (1999), pp. 93-115, (p.111).
37
Alberto Toscano focuses his discussion on the persistence of the fear of the fanatic in liberal
thought on the question of the proximity between the subject and the object.89 Toscano argues
that since its battles with the aristocracy in the 18th century, liberalism has sought to separate the
domain of interests (associated with commerce) from the domain of passions (linked to the
irrational desire for valour found in the aristocracy). While the pursuit of particularistic interests
allows for conflict, it stops well short of an all-out war stemming from the intensity of an
impassioned attachment.90 If the advocacy of rationality and interests was initially used to
critique the perceived decadence of the aristocracy, Toscano shows how, in the last two hundred
years, the allegation of passionate attachment has been directed against subaltern classes and
colonized subjects. He continues

As a politics of abstraction, fanaticism is to be condemned for its unconditional character

(‘without regard to consequences') and its refusal of measure and moderation... detached
from any calculation of utility and feasibility.91

The characterization of frenzied mobs as totally consumed by their passions and placed beyond
all possibility of a rational dialogue allows the state to justify its engagement in exceptional
forms of violence to maintain order. Such sentiment was echoed by J.D. Coleridge, military
secretary to the Government of India. In the aftermath of an incident in Karachi in 1936 in which
the police shot protesting crowds, killing 47 protesters, Coleridge was asked to give his opinion
on whether more ‘humane’ methods of crowd control could be used in India, such as tear gas, as
had been used in the United States. Mr. Coleridge replied:

The analogy of conditions in America has been drawn. I submit however that conditions
between riotous mobs in India and America are different. The former are fanatical and
usually in far greater numbers than in the latter. If filled with frenzy (such as at Karachi) I
am extremely doubtful if anything less than the bullet will stop them!92

Both the categorization of fanaticism and such heavy-handed responses by the state have a long
history in Colonial rule in India. Laws such as the Thuggee Act of 1836 and the Act for the
Suppression of Outrages in the District of Malabar in 1854 had already categorized large sections
of the native population as ‘special categories’ to whom the normal juridical procedures could
not fully apply, owing to their deficient political development. Giving his reasons for the creation
of such exceptions, D.F. Mcleod, the Lieutenant Governor-General of Punjab, stated that such
laws become necessary, due both to the particular political relations in the colony and the nature
of crimes committed by the excitable races.

89
Alberto Toscano, Fanaticism: The Uses of an Idea (London: Verso, 2010).
90
Ibid., p. 24.
91
Ibid., p. 6.
92
J.D. Coleridge to Under Secretary of State for India, (12th August 1936), File 868/30/30, Use of Tear Gas in
India, IOR/L/PJ/12/414, The British Library Archives.
38
 There can, I think, be no doubt in the mind of anyone that this class of offences wholly
differs in character from ordinary outrages, and should be dealt with differently from
them.... In Great Britain and Ireland, where happily the causes which give rise to such
acts can rarely arise, resort is had to Martial Law, or suspension of the Habeas Corpus
Act.... But in this country, where he [sic] relations between the Rulers and the ruled are
so widely different, and more especially in those parts inhabited by turbulent or excitable
races, such acts may at any time occur... [and] would not... be adequately met by such
special action.93

In commenting on pre-emptive forms of violence against the allegedly uncontrollable rage of the
fanatic, Toscano correctly points out that such violence operates as a mimetic gesture of
fanaticism, an anti-fanatical fanaticism.94 Such a gesture does not function within a closed
economy of crime and punishment, instead it is aimed at containing the excess that cannot be
contained by the normal juridical procedure. Thus we must place the anxiety experienced by the
British with the onset of the mass movement in 1919 within the larger history of the construction
and the subsequent fear of the body of the fanatic. In a more overtly political register, Ranabir
Samaddar argues that government under colonial rule meant nothing more than the ‘physical
tasks of watching, disciplining, deploying, annihilating, besides the paltry task of the welfare of
individual body to detach from the bodies and the minds of the colonised’95 It is the question of
watching and disciplining ‘bodies’ during and after the Punjab disturbances that we shall discuss
in the next section.

Obedience, Violence and Colonial Sovereignty: Punjab Disturbances 1919-1920

The end of the First World War marked a decisive turn in the political climate prevalent in the
colonized world. From Indonesia to Algeria, colonies began witnessing an intensification of
political activities, with whispers of total independence emerging as a serious possibility on the
political horizon.96 In India, the ‘disturbances’ in the Punjab and the North Western Frontier
Province marked a watershed moment in the constitution of anti-colonial politics as a mass
movement. This was soon followed by the Non-Cooperation Movement announced by Gandhi, a
moment that brought in the peasantry and other marginalized groups as active participants in the
Indian political sphere. The Intelligence Bureau of India declared the non-cooperation movement
comparable to 1857 in the ways it ‘had shaken the foundations of our rule’, adding that another
such ‘general upheaval, such a widespread outbreak of disorder will render a continuance of our
rule impossible’.97

Dipesh Chakrabarty has aptly emphasized how the immediacy or the ‘now’ inaugurated by mass
participation in the anti-colonial movement existed in antagonism with gradualist notions of

93
Mark Condos, 'License to Kill: The Murderous Outrages Act and the Rule of Law in Colonial India, 1867-1925’,
Modern Asian Studies 50:2 (2016)., pp. 479-517, (p. 489).
94
Toscano, Fanaticism, p. 15.
95
Ranabir Samaddar, Emergence of the Political Subject (New Delhi: Sage, 2010), p. 45.
96
See Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2008).
97
Petrie, Communism in India, pp. 316-317.
39
History propagated by Imperial liberalism, the latter conceptualization relegating colonized
subjects to the ‘waiting room of History’.98 Much has been written conceptualizing the
emergence of a subaltern subjectivity prior to the pedagogical procedures recommended by
colonial ideologues in preparation for full citizenship. My own aim in this section, however, is to
focus on the response of the colonial political and legal apparatus to the Punjab riots of 1919-
1920, after government troops massacred over 400 unarmed protesters for ‘unlawful assembly’
at the Jalianwala Bagh in Amritsar.99 An exploration of the emergency promulgated in the
Punjab provides us a closer glimpse into colonial sovereignty and violence, revealing itself to
ward off threats perceived to be exceeding the normative legal frameworks.

Ranajit Guha asserts that colonial authority stemmed less from the need to garner consent from
colonial subjects than from pure coercion. If the potential of this loss of authority over
indigenous populations is the key element that haunted colonial rule in India, the anti-
government riots in 1919 played a major role in heightening this colonial anxiety. 100 For
example, the chanting of the slogan Hukum kya chiz hai, hum koi hukum nahin jante – (what is
an order; we know of no such thing as an order) during anti-government protests in the Punjab in
1919 was cited by colonial officials as symptomatic of the breakdown of colonial ‘obedience’,
hence necessitating a state of emergency for ‘punishing’ such behavior. 101 These punishments
included spectacles such as parading all the students and the faculty of the Santam Dharam
College in Lahore in the hot sun to be eventually interned at the Red Fort for 3 hours. Their only
crime, if it can be termed as such, was that they happened to study in a college whose walls were
defaced with anti-government slogans.102

Such an attribution of a generalized guilt can also be seen at work in the saluting orders issued by
the local commander in Gujranwala. This particular order required all inhabitants of Gujranwala
to leave their conveyances whenever they witnessed a European officer and stand in an upright
position to salute. When the Hunter Committee, a commission set up to investigate alleged
violations of law during the Punjab Emergency, pressed the commander to explain his reasons
for issuing such an order, he pointed to the accelerating decline of respect for authority,
something that this unusual decree was meant to reinforce.

The tendency of the present day is to abolish respectfulness. The Indian father will tell
you that sons are not respectful even to their parents.103

Thus, the collective power of the mobs could only be neutralized by the spectacle of the
suffering, tortured body. As Nasser Hussain suggests in his illuminating study of the Punjab
disturbances, the primary target of ‘fanciful punishments’ during the emergency were not
particular individuals who committed particular crimes. He claims that in some ways these acts

98
Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, p. 8.
99
See Alfred Draper, Amritsar: The Massacre That Ended the Raj (West Sussex: Little Hampton, 1981).
100
Guha, Dominance without Hegemony, pp. 1-99.
101
Hussain, ‘Towards The Jurisprudence’, pp. 93-100.
102
Ibid., p. 113.
103
Ibid., p. 114.
40
cannot even be constituted within the economy of punishments, as their goal was intended to be
elsewhere, i.e. towards the re-establishment of a fledgling colonial authority. Reading Walter
Benjamin's distinction between myth-making and myth-sustaining violence as moments equal to
the founding gesture of law and its subsequent reiteration by the state, Hussain claims the martial
law or state of exception enforced by the Punjab government had resided in the former sphere,
where the state had to announce its authority as a gesture akin to the ‘manifestation of gods...a
manifestation of their existence’.104

The colony becomes a privileged site for the study of the relationship between the foundational
and normative violence, with both co-existing in a shared temporality rather than in a sequential
manner, as the terms may suggest. In fact, when the state of emergency was imposed in large
parts of colonial India after 1919, colonial rule had already been established and sustained for
over 150 years. Moments of fear and vulnerability force the state to expose the ‘dirty secret’ of
its own origin by setting aside normative legal procedures to institute a regime of direct and
arbitrary force aimed at maintaining a fragile social bond, a violence whose memory the state
otherwise continuously aims to wipe out in its normative functioning.

One can infer this from the statement given by General Dyer, the man responsible for ordering
troops to fire indiscriminately at the crowds in Jalianwala Bagh. In one of the more glaring
examples of the link between colonial violence and colonial vulnerability, General Dyer
reiterated the logic of his actions in the following words:

I fired and continued to fire until the crowd dispersed, and I consider this is the least
amount of firing which would produce the necessary moral and widespread effect it was
my duty to produce if I was to justify my action. If more troops had been at hand, the
casualties would have been greater in proportion. It was no longer a question of merely
dispersing the crowd, but one of producing a sufficient moral effect from a military point
of view not only on those present, but more especially throughout the Punjab. There
could be no question of undue severity.105

. Apart from revealing the cruelty of the colonial administration of law and order, what is
remarkable about this statement is that this particular act of killing people was intended to have a
‘moral effect from a military point of view’ to pacify an insurgent Punjab, rather than to deal
with the threat posed by individuals defying law Fear of colonial vengeance was the structuring
principle of this violence, both for dispersing/annihilating the crowds present, as well as
demoralizing anti-colonial groups throughout the province, if not the country. Thus, the public
torture, humiliation and annihilation of the Indian body was a mechanism used by the colonial
state for a generalized control of Indian political life. As the primary form of producing the
subjection of its subjects, colonial violence suspended liberal legal notions of individual rights
and responsibilities, comprehending Indian resistance through the racialized notions of ‘mobs’
‘frenzied’ and ‘fanatics’, thus permitting the deployment of collective punishment.

104
Ibid., pp. 106-109.
105
Ibid., p. 95.
41
Yet, the colonial state disavowed such exceptional violence, insisting on continuing the
civilizational process of disaggregating Indians into rational, individual subjects. This alternative
trajectory in colonial governmentality became increasingly tied to the use of violence in shaping
the individual subject. In the next section, we discuss how bodily violence became a key practice
not only for inducing fear among the population, but also as a detailed pedagogical technique for
producing the subject of liberalism, ‘the individual’.

Mobs, Tear-Gas and The Production of the Individual

In his much celebrated essay titled ‘Necropolitics’, Achilles Mbembe described colonialism as
constituting a vertical sovereignty that distributes communities and violence ‘along the y-axis’.
In a direct reference to aerial superiority, Mbembe argues that such power both allows the state
to literally remain ‘on top’ in terms of surveillance, while also acquiring the capacity to punish
entire populations in campaigns of terror unleashed from the skies.106 This literally became the
method of colonial disciplining following the riots in Punjab and the North Western Frontier
Province in 1919. The first case of aerial bombardment in Colonial India occurred immediately
at the end of the First World War in Gujranwala, where jets were used to silence a riotous mob
the day after imperial troops had fired and killed 400 people at Jalianwala Bagh, acts that made it
difficult to judge whether the war had ended or begun for the colonized world. Indeed, from only
November to December 1919, The British dropped between 2.5 and 7 tonnes of bombs there
every day for a full month to crush insurgencies in Waziristan.107

While the bombardment of the tribal regions continued periodically until 1947, these areas
received another major challenge via the Air Disarmament Resolution, which was drafted at the
Geneva Disarmament Conference, that prohibited the use of aerial bombardment against civilian
populations. British military commanders, however, reiterated that the ‘whole moral effect of air
power would be destroyed’ if bombing villages was to be considered equivalent to bombing
civilians.108 While denying the humanity of those living in these border regions, colonial officials
also considered aerial bombardment to be a ‘more humane’ way of dealing with insurgent tribes
as compared to sending in troops, which would cost more ‘in heavy casualty lists, deaths from
disease, and expense which runs into millions of pounds’.109

The question of ‘humane’ forms of violence lay at the heart of colonial attempts at allaying
unruly elements. If we read this ‘humanism’ together with Mbembe's elucidation of vertical
sovereignty, the crucial question for the state emerges to be not the literal conquering of airspace,
but in finding ways to disable the mechanisms through which insurgent or frenzied violence
could threaten colonial powers. In other words, the aim of such violence was to forcefully
‘detach’ the mob from its frenzy, to pacify it and hence, to facilitate its passage from a passionate
collective to an aggregation of individuals. The introduction of tear-gas as a weapon to suppress

106
Achilles Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics’, Public Culture 15:1 (2003), pp.28-29.
107
Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, ‘Altitudes of Imperialism’, The Caravan ( August 1, 2014), available at
http://www.caravanmagazine.in/perspectives/altitudes-imperialism accessed 17th February 2015
108
Zamindar, ‘Altitudes of Imperialism’, (2014).
109
Zamindar, ‘Altitudes of Imperialism’, (2014).
42
popular agitation became an important example of violence that individuates. I use the debates
around the use and utility of ‘tear-gas’ on anti-colonial crowds among colonial officials as a
window for studying the pedagogical aspect of ‘humane’ forms of violence. As Peter Sloterdjik
has argued, the creation of two distinct zones of conditioning in the same space is a gesture par
excellence of modernity.110 Commenting on the use of gas warfare in the First World War,
Sloterdjik posits that the use of gas in combat is directed not directly at the life of the enemy, but
on the climatic and atmospheric conditions inhabited by the enemy. Gas

voids the distinction between violence against people and violence against things: it
comprises a form of violence against the very human-ambient ‘things’ without which
people cannot remain people. By using violence against the very air that groups breathe,
the human being's immediate atmospheric envelope is transformed into something whose
intactness or non-intactness is henceforth a question. In other words: air and atmosphere-
the primary media for life, in both the physical and metaphorical sense-only became an
object of explicit consideration and monitoring in domains such as aero-technics,
medicine, law, politics, aesthetics and cultural theory in response to their terrorist
deprivation.111

The conditioning of the environment and the habitat became an important site for consideration
by modern states when met with the sight of the mobs. Yet, the use of tear-gas in the colonial
world had a different genealogy than gas-warfare during the First World War, since it was geared
not at mass annihilation, but centered on the production of docile, individual bodies.

Tear gas was first used in the British Empire in March of 1936 in the Punjabi village of Buttar a
to force two ‘outlaws’, Ujagar Singh and Kundan Singh, out of a house where they had taken
refuge, so that they could eventually be shot dead. Despite acknowledgement of technical
difficulties such as blowback from the wind towards the police and leakage of cartridges in the
police van, the report submitted by the superintendent of Ferozepur’s police unit, H.D.M. Scott,
considered the use of gas grenades and long range shells to be ‘invaluable’ and felt that the ‘tear
gas was used with excellent results’ in this particular encounter.112

The use of tear gas had been debated for nearly a decade prior to its deployment in Buttar
Bakoha, with colonial officials in Cairo, Palestine and Punjab taking particular interest in
convincing Westminster of the advantages of using tear gas, particularly as a more humane way
of controlling mob violence than bullets.113 Yet, there remained nervousness regarding the use of
tear gas on protesting crowds, not least because the use of gas had become synonymous with
carnage during the First World War. Other anxieties revolved around the precise nature of the

110
See Peter Sloterdjik, Terror from The Air (Cambridge/Mass.: MIT Press, 2009).
111
Ibid., p. 25.
112
H.D.M. Scott to Chief of Intelligence Bureau. Copy of Letter from the Government of Punjab (March 18, 1936),
File 868/30, Use of Tear Gas in India, IOR/LP/PJ/12/416, The British Library Archives.
113
Copy of Letter to Government of Punjab on Tear Gas Experimentation in Cairo (March 14, 1936), File 868/30,
Use of Tear Gas in India, IOR/LP/PJ/12/416, British Library Archives.
43
impact of this gas on human physiology, its effects on surrounding civilian populations,
particularly if they happened to be European, the high costs associated with purchasing this
equipment from US firms, and the potential blowback toward the police depending on the
direction of the wind.114

None of the colonies were keen to be the first ones to pull the trigger because of such fears.
Indeed, in experiments conducted on Indian constables at the police training school at Phillaur,
Col. D. R. Thomas, the chemical examiner for the Government of Punjab, stated that he was
‘struck’ by ‘the lack of gas control’.

The gas was rapidly carried away by air currents from the scene of action, not so much
along the ground but invariably to an altitude where its effect was lost. I would suggest
that the density or weight of the gas was at fault when compared with that of the
surrounding atmosphere.115

If the relationship between the ‘gas blanket’ and the surrounding atmosphere was one major
reason for the use of tear gas, which was otherwise deemed ‘a useful auxiliary for Police
purposes in India’, the report recommended the following precaution.

What is really required is a blanket or a curtain of gas which would persist in the crowd,
and when the crowd has dispersed would fall down and not penetrate into the houses of
innocent people and inconvenience women and children. I firmly believe that on this
factor depends the success of otherwise of the use of tear gas for the dispersal of mobs in
the streets and village squares.116

Such capacity to break down the very possibility of cohesive action by the mobs becomes
plausible only when a line of demarcation can be established between the ‘gassed area’ and the
‘air-conditioned zone’ free from such effects. It is for this purpose that a military document
produced for the ‘tactical employment’ of tear gas on rioting mobs recommended the use of gas
masks while launching these in order to gain a tactical advantage over the assembled crowds. 117
If a passionate attachment as compared to a reasoned interest is what divided fanaticism from
rationality, the use of tear gas, with its focus on building an atmospheric ‘curtain’ aimed to
impair the sensory organs from where the frenzied passion of the natives arises.

All these details are geared towards transforming the haunting figure of the mob into an
aggregation of docile individuals, while amassing the collective strength of the colonial state.
Jodi Dean has recently argued that the central function of ideology under modern capitalism is to
produce individual subjects through a process of detachment from the crowds. She argues that
114
Ibid., pp. 3-4.
115
Copy of report on Tear Gas Demonstration, at the Police Training School, Phillaur, by col. D.R. Thomas, O.B.E.,
M.B., I.M.S., Chemical examiner to Government, Punjab, Lahore (January 18, 1936), File 868/30, Use of Tear Gas
in India, IOR/LP/PJ/12/416, The British Library Archives.
116
Ibid., p. 2.
117
Report on Tactical Employment of Tear Gas, Public and Judicial Department, Punjab, Lahore (June 22, 1936),
File 868/30, Use of Tear Gas in India, IOR/LP/PJ/12/416, The British Library Archives.
44
Althusser’s conception of ‘hailing’ is better understood as a process of separation from the
crowds, a form of isolation that has the function of demarcating concrete, identifiable individuals
from the anonymous crowds. A policing tactic widely used during the May ‘68 riots in Paris, the
hail was used to not only identify individual protestors, but also to imprison them. For Dean, the
individual, when removed from the crowds and denied the emancipatory political possibilities
opened up by the coming together of the latter, becomes a prisoner of the status quo. Using such
instances of interpellation as a metaphor for modern ideology, Dean argues that the formation of
the individual, far more than representing liberal virtues of rationality and liberty, is better
understood as an imprisonment, a ‘form of capture’.118

This framework is useful in understanding the relationship between violence and the production
of the individual subject. Similarly, the function of the tear-gas was not merely negative in its
ability to disperse a charged, threatening crowd, but also had a generative dimension in its
capacity to individuate members of the crowd. This process is made obvious in a letter to the
Secretary of State of India written by the Inspector General of the Punjab Police, in which he
advocated using tear gas against a ‘more determined class of rioters’. He states that

the psychological effect in combination with the physical effect is very great at all times.
The extreme and unendurable irritation to the eyes, nose and skin is combined with
complete incapacity for coherent action and an overpowering desire to abandon
everything in order to shield the eyes and escape from the gassed areas...it breaks the
cohesion of a crowd, reducing it from a dangerous unit with a common and constructive
objective to disorganized collection of individuals with nothing but the negative objective
of the personal escape from the gas...The tactical principle underlying the action of
military force in civil military disturbances is exploitation of the lack of cohesion which
is characteristic of a mob to effect dispersion, thus relieving the menace of assembled
opposition.119

This form of ‘dispersion’ became a common method used in colonial police manuals to describe
the eventual goal of any police action against mobs. We are here presented with a process of
transformation, minutely studied in its scientific detail, from a crowd passionately attached to its
objective to a collectivity of individuals concerned with nothing but a negative interest of self-
preservation within the confines of gassed area. What is remarkable is that the ‘rational’ subject
is created not through the exercise of critical faculties in a pedagogical process, but through the
disabling of the sensory organs. Similarly, the ‘free’ subject is not formed through voluntary
decisions, but is forced to choose between self-annihilation or self-preservation through the
‘terroristic’ alteration of the natural habitat. In other words, the ‘rational’ and ‘free’ subject of
liberalism is better read as a coerced, frightened, obedient and unthinking subject of colonial
despotism.

118
Dean, Crowds and Party, p. 51.
119
Letter from IG Punjab Police to Under-secretary of State for India, Punjab, Lahore. (February 17, 1936), File
868/30, Use of Tear Gas in India, IOR/LP/PJ/12/416, The British Library Archives.
45
This simultaneous attack on collective action and thought resulted in the production of the liberal
individual under bodily pain. If colonial pedagogy aimed for a teleological progress towards
rational, self-interested individuals, in the case of the fanatics, such an ideal type was eventually
secured in the negative space of dispersion, where impairing sensory organs elevated the
preservation of the individual body to the primary task for the political subject, an individualism,
constructed primarily through the immediacy of pain and suffering.

Yet, the continued advancement in techniques of control did not decrease the nervousness of the
colonial state regarding the growth of communism in India. In particular, the state's method of
fighting political agitation through force met an impasse when faced with political opponents
fraternizing neither on the basis of an instinctual frenzy, nor on an individualist interest rooted in
self-preservation, but in adherence to a thoroughly articulated idea of communism. Difficulties
in dealing with this novel figure of a political subject meant that despite repeated attempts to
decimate communist organizations, including through the most elaborate network of surveillance
deployed against any one particular organization during colonial rule, communism always, in a
begrudging acknowledgement by H. Williamson, ‘ like it makes an immediate comeback...a
resilience worthy of a better cause’.120 In the next section, we discuss colonial panic around its
failure to nominate this novel figure of politics, one that it tried to grasp through the imprecise
term of a ‘foreign conspiracy’.

Foreign Conspiracy

Since at least the early 20th century, the British Empire had been closely monitoring the activities
of Indian radicals in exile. The Ghadar Party, formed in North America in 1913, was one of the
most significant attempts to forge a political platform for anti-colonial activists in the Indian
diaspora. Spanning work over 4 continents with a particularly powerful base in North America
and Europe, the Ghadar Party became a major vehicle for conducting anti-British activities in
both India and abroad.121 Similarly, Anushulan Party, a Bengali militant organization, capitalized
on its links in the Far East to procure arms and literature for conducting an armed struggle
against the British. The Caliphate Movement, with its rhetoric of pan-Islamic solidarity, coupled
with rising ‘restlessness’ amongst the Muslim tribes of the North Western Frontier Province,
only accentuated the vulnerability felt by the Government of India over a ‘foreign plot’ against
colonial rule.

Enseng Ho, in his illuminating study of the politics of diasporic communities, argues that due to
their global resonance, ideologies such as communism and Islamism were able to utilize their
unmoored geography as a tactical advantage over imperialism.

120
Williamson, India and Communism, pp. 208-209.
121
Ramnath, Haj to Utopia, pp. 1-16.
46
 Internationalization of anti-colonialism achieved what a spatially less ambitious push
could not: anti-imperialism, a clear view of the beast, the full elephant of empire instead
of merely one of its four colony-legs touched by the blind.122

This gaze from the outside onto the ‘full elephant of empire’ meant that ‘viewing from the top’
was no longer the monopoly of colonial regimes. The ability of anti-colonial political actors ‘for
geographical mobility often meant crossing imperial and departmental jurisdictions’ from where
they appeared as ‘sophisticated like empire itself, and enough so to represent a potential
threat’.123

The perceived potential of Indian communists to produce an anti-colonial geography in sync

with the enemies of the British Empire accentuated the threat of communism in the minds of
officials in India. The Government of India took particular interest in following the debates in the
Communist International regarding the British colonies. Depicting communism as a Soviet tool
against the British Empire, David Petrie elucidates the centrality of British colonies in the fight
against communism.

There can be no doubt whatever that Great Britain has drawn upon herself the main force
of the Bolshevik attack, partly as being the antithesis of all the Soviet system stands for,
and partly as the chief bulwark against the world-wide revolution which the Bolsheviks
regard as the essential condition of their ultimate success.124

The characterization of Indian communism as a ploy for Soviet communism set off what Chris
Bayly refers to as ‘knowledge-panic’ within official circles.125 A close watch was kept on any
Indian entering or leaving the country, particularly keeping track of his or her possible
association with communism. Pilgrimages such as the Haj provided avenues for particular
anxiety, since they provided spaces where colonized subjects could meet and discuss politics
outside the gaze of the state. In a report on the connections between pilgrims and Khakimoff, a
Soviet agent based in Mecca, an intelligence official had the following to say:

Reports have been received from time to time indicating the efforts made by Khakimoff.
It was stated that Bokharan hajis would be used in furthering propaganda. Some of these,
en route to the Hedjaz, were subsequently arrested under suspicious circumstances in
Peshawar… Although there is little tangible result of Bolshevik propaganda in the
Hedjaz, there are good grounds for suspicion that the Soviets are not idle… In the guise
of pilgrims, visitors from India, Malaya, Java, and Russia get into touch with Khakimoff,

122
Enseng Ho, ‘Empire Through Diasporic Eyes: A View from The Other Boat’, Comparative Studies in History
and Society 46:2 (2004), p. 241.
123
Ibid., p. 240.
124
Petrie, Communism in India, p. 6.
125
Chris Bayly, ‘Knowing the Country: Empire and Information in India’, Modern Asian Studies 27:1 (1993), pp. 3-
43.
47
 who rarely fails to place a member of his staff at their disposal. If there have been no
tangible results, there are at least great possibilities.126

Threats of the ‘great possibilities’ emanating from such sites led the state to enact many laws
aimed at hardening the borders deemed to be porous. The Passport Act (1920), for example, was
one such attempt at increasing the ability of the state to ‘screen elements’ entering or leaving
India, with particular attention paid to ‘keeping undesirable aliens’ (that included ‘lunatics’ and
‘idiots’ in official categorization) out of India.127 Similarly, the increasing fear of the Indian
Seamen Association, with collaboration from communists in Britain and France, entering India
with ‘subversive propaganda’ (mostly communist publications) led to the Sea Customs Act of
1932, which gave increased powers to colonial officials to prosecute any individual found to be
guilty of using the sea routes to promote anti-government activities in India.128 The extent of
colonial paranoia on the impact of possible infiltration of communists, as well as the
vulnerability felt by the Empire from regions contiguous to India, can be gleaned from the panic
in intelligence circles surrounding the arrival of a French family in the rather obscure valley of
Kulu, near the Tibetan border, in 1931.

Professor Nicholas Roerich moved with his two sons to set up a university, but was believed to
be plotting a ‘communist rebellion’ in the region and linking it to a future uprising in Tibet and
the Sianking province of China. It was also believed by the intelligence community that Roerich
was preparing to exploit a popular myth prevalent in the Kulu Valley and Tibet on the return of
the Buddha to free them from foreign rule, a role that would be played by Roerich's son. Thus,
by taking advantage of the ‘illiteracy’ and ‘superstitious’ beliefs of the people in the region, the
Roerichs would have begun a communist conflagration that could potentially spread throughout
the region, including China, Afghanistan, and eventually engulfing India.129

The highly suspicious activities of Professor Roerich clearly indicate a larger ploy to
promote communist propaganda and help establish a Soviet stronghold in Asia. All of
this might seem like wishful thinking on the part of some highly imaginative communists,
but nothing can be dismissed as outside the realm of the possible regarding communist
intrigue, especially when it has the complete backing of the Soviet Union.130

This leap from suspicious activities of a family to a concrete and achievable plan for global
revolution is symptomatic of the way the colonial state depicted, and often exaggerated, the
latent power of communism. Such attribution of global power to small, mobile groups by the
state resembles what Arjun Appadurai has termed the ‘fear of small numbers’. Appadurai argues
that vulnerable groups in small numbers are often seen by majority groups and the state as
connected to supra-national networks into which these groups can tap for social advancement

126
Petrie, Communism in India, pp. 199-203.
127
‘The India Passport Act, 1920’, in The Indian Code, Government of India, Ministry of Law (Delhi: Manager of
Publications, 1955).
128
Williamson, India and Communism, p. 125.
129
Ibid., pp. 49-52.
130
Ibid., p. 52.
48
and political mileage. Groups with small numbers no longer appear as weak, as connections in
wider global networks make them seem allied with forces much more powerful than the nation-
state. In the context of neoliberal India, this imagined reversal of power between majority and
minority communities opens up space for resentment against the latter, which is accused of being
part of a global conspiracy against the nation, a gap is often filled through acts of violence. 131

In the colonial setting, we witness a similar fear of small groups connected with larger
international players, albeit without the majoritarian anxieties characteristic of the post-colonial
nation-state. From the Government of India's own estimates, even by the middle of the 1930s,
communist organizations could boast a combined membership of only 2,000 people.132 The
menace of communism did not only stem from the lure of Indian fanaticism, but also from its
ability to evoke sympathy and solidarity globally. The struggle against Indian communism
became synonymous with the global fight against the Soviet Union, rendering the bodies of
Indian communists a space for inflicting defeat on global communism. Justifying the persecution
of four communists in the Cawnpore Conspiracy Case, 1924, the Governor of Punjab, Hailey,
declared that the necessity of imprisoning these communists arose due to the need to check the
activity of the USSR in India.

As Home Member, I undertook that prosecution, not so much for the sake of punishing
the people concerned, three-quarters of whom were really rabbits, but in order to warn
people in India of what was happening, and if possible, to prove to the Third International
and its friends that it was no use wasting money on their agents.133

Petrie went on to suggest that the ‘hatred of British rule means Bolsheviks will also have traitors
in India willing to help these outsiders’, implying that Indian communists were traitors due to
their support to ‘outsiders’.134 The accusations of ‘treason’ against Indian communists is hard to
digest, considering that they were being levelled by (British) colonial officials. Yet, I argue that
the source of this anxiety was the colonial state’s inability to grasp the persistence of a political
community formed under the sign of an Idea, and sustained through a common commitment. A
state that had mastered the art of dispersing, organizing, reshaping and annihilating bodies,
became vulnerable when confronted with a physically dispersed but ideologically cohesive
enemy, a conceptual foreignness when viewed from the disciplinary lens of the colonial state.

We see such sentiment most clearly in colonial renditions of the threat posed by communism to
the established order. For example, in the Meerut Conspiracy Case (discussed below), the judges
emphasized the threat posed by communist thought to existing social relations, asserting that
communism was unlawful since it wanted the ‘Destruction of the British and Indian Middle

131
Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2006), pp.79-84.
132
Williamson, India and Communism, pp. 10-15.
133
Quoted in Sharma, Radical Politics, p. 26.
134
Petrie, Communism in India, p. 321.
49
classes’.135 Similarly, while government officials proposed the amelioration of the peasantry’s
condition as a way of avoiding unrest, they felt the ‘trouble’ began with communists when they
tried to make the peasant ‘think too much of himself’. In another example, colonial officials
thought one of the most disturbing facts about a strike in Calcutta in 1931 was the sight of
students from ‘respectable families’ standing in solidarity with striking coolies, a form of
‘vandalism’ not suited to students. 136

In each of these instances, colonial anxiety emanates from the discrepancy in the assigned roles
of social groups and their practices induced by communist ideology, whether in the alleged
‘destruction’ of the middle classes, or in the gesture of a defiant peasant ‘thinking too much of
himself’ or in the act of students departing from the norms of their ‘respectable families’ to
identify with striking coolies. The ability of ideology to produce such dislocations between social
being and political subjectivity prompted the colonial state to move beyond the body and devise
a strategy to discipline the realm of ideas. The contestation over the presence, proliferation and
prohibition of ideas became a central battlefield between colonial officials and anti-colonial
militants, as we discuss below.

Beyond the Body: Suppressing an Idea

By the early 1930s, the Government of India had moved towards recognizing the legitimacy of
trade union activity within the ambit of the law. Similarly, spontaneous protests in of themselves
were no longer the main cause of concern for the state, beyond the usual administrative challenge
of maintaining law and order in the short-term. Hence, the depiction of labour activity as a
banality was a common feature of intelligence reporting on colonial unrest, as is witnessed in the
following report on a strike in Quetta in 1936.

Labour unrest has also occurred at Quetta, where, on May 1st, some 8,000 carpenters,
masons and labourers, dissatisfied with revised rates of pay and the introduction of longer
hours of work for the summer season, suddenly downed tools. This strike, however,
appears to have been entirely non-political in origin and was quickly settled on the
intervention of the local civil authorities.137

The ‘non-political’ nature of the strike consisted in its spontaneity, an act that in earlier years the
entire edifice of colonial rule, but here was reduced to an affair ‘quickly settled’ by the local
administration. Such a distinction between the spontaneous and the ‘political’ was often made in
intelligence reports to designate legitimate and subversive forms of labour activity. ‘Politics’ and
‘genuine demands’ were to be differentiated, a characterization that had a major impact on
political thought in India, as we shall discuss later.

135
Meerut Conspiracy Judgement: Trial (April, 1933) File 59 (C)/28 Part 2, Meerut Conspiracy Case,
IOR/L/PJ/12/333, The British Library Archives.
136
Williamson, India and Communism, p. 77.
137
Extracts from Weekly Report of the Director, Intelligence Bureau, Home Department, Government of India,
Simla (30th March, 1935), File 230/235, Weekly Report of the Director, Intelligence Bureau, IOR/L/PJ/12/481, The
British Library Archives.
50
The difference between what is authorized and what is illegal is made more explicit in the
following reports produced by intelligence agencies that focus on communist ‘infiltration’ of the
labour movement.

The Cawnpore strike was brought about by communist agitators. These agitators, recently
released from jail on the cases against them under section 108, Criminal Procedure Code,
being withdrawn have made the most of their opportunities, and the situation has rapidly
passed from bad to worse. Control seems to have passed completely out of the hands of
legitimate labour leaders, and the avowed intention of the communists to bring about a
general strike in all the mills is not far from being realized.138

A similar distinction between legitimate trade unionists and professional agitators is made
clearer in the following report on a strike in Calcutta in 1937.

In Calcutta and its neighborhoods… sporadic strikes continue. A notable feature of the
dispute is the increasing number of instances in which the stimulating of disaffection
among workers in key positions is made the means of enforcing idleness upon hundreds
dependent on their output. These tactics represent a new departure in Indian strike
technique and are part of a plan drawn up by the professional agitators, most of whom are
communists, for creating continual friction, in order to embarrass the local ministry. 57.
31st July 1937.139

In such reports, we see the emergence of distinct spheres, one belonging to immediate demands
and headed by ‘legitimate’ trade unions or through spontaneous activity, and one belonging to a
more calculated, directed and purposeful activity, led by the ‘professional agitator’. If the fear of
the spontaneous, frenzied mob unravelling the social bond had been haunting colonial rule for
decades, in the era of mass politics, the register had been shifted to the domain of the calculating
political actor who was simultaneously attached to collective action, yet was sufficiently
detached to not be decimated with the withering away of the mob. It is this gap between the
immediacy of the strike and the long-term commitment towards the specified goals that
separated the ‘non-political’ trade unionist and the professional agitator, and precisely because of
the latter's ability to maintain a gap between himself and his its object, it could not be dealt with
using the methods of dispersal directed at pacifying frenzied mobs.

The accuracy of the colonial description of ‘professional agitators’ need not concern us here. For
now, what is crucial is to delineate the contours of this distinction between the non-political and
the political activist articulated by the state, which resonates with debates such as appearance and
essence. Indeed, by the 1930s, mass protests were no longer being condemned for their mere
138
Extracts from Weekly Report of the Director, Intelligence Bureau, Home Department, Government of India,
Simla (7th August 1937), File 230/235, Weekly Report of the Director, Intelligence Bureau, IOR/L/PJ/12/481, The
British Library Archives.
139
Extracts from Weekly Report of the Director, Intelligence Bureau, Home Department, Government of India,
Simla (31st July, 1935), File 230/235, Weekly Report of the Director, Intelligence Bureau, IOR/L/PJ/12/481, The
British Library Archives.
51
manifestation, and were instead constantly placed under a hermeneutical gaze of the state to
excavate a hidden kernel behind the veil of immediacy, attempting to locate the Idea that made
the collective appear threatening.

The Meerut Conspiracy Case, perhaps the most infamous of all the ‘Bolshevik Conspiracy
Cases’ against communists in the 1920s and 1930s, provides a good case study for the
elaboration of the threat posed by the ‘communist menace’. Of the 33 men accused of engaging
in a conspiracy to deprive the King of his sovereignty over India, 27 were found guilty, some of
them life imprisonment.140 One reason for the national and global uproar against the verdicts
involved the duration of the trial, which dragged on for four years and became one of the longest
cases in India's judicial history. Even the Under Secretary of State to India, R.T. Peel, while
considering the incarceration of ‘dangerous communists’ as ‘advantageous’, admitted that the
length of the trial had ‘cast a major discredit upon the government’. 141 Such criticism was
dismissed by the judges, stating that while the ‘Indian judicial system was admittedly
ponderous’, this particular case took so long due to the ‘very wide ramifications of the
conspiracy and the bulk of papers seized. And the natural desire of the accused not to facilitate
the proceedings’.142

When responding to claims by critics that the length of the trial was a particularly gross injustice
to the six defendants, including a Briton, who were incarcerated for four years only to be
acquitted by the judges, the judges blamed the accused for their own plight.

The blame must be placed on the accused themselves, since they had caused reasonable
grounds for suspicion for their association with known communists.143

In a language reminiscent of colonial anxieties over hygiene and contagion in India, those in
close proximity to communists were viewed as possibly infected by communist ideas. If it was
justified to keep the suspects imprisoned on ‘reasonable’ suspicion aroused through their
connections with communists, it was because, much-like any individual in contact with a
contagious disease, they had to be enclosed and minutely inspected before receiving clearance
for resuming ordinary life in society. The disease whose spread the courts were trying to contain
was the idea of communism, which, according to Petrie, had the potential to engulf the Indian
masses like a ‘rat that can decimate an entire population’.144

The language of colonial hygiene directed at communists reflected attempts by colonial officials
to evict the idea of communism out of the bodies of communist activists, as well as remain
vigilant to its spread. In fact, the Meerut Prisoners Committee based in London had vociferously

140
See Sohan Josh, The Great Attack: Meerut Conspiracy Case (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1979).
141
R.T. Peel to Government of India (17th August 1933), File 59 (C)/28 Part 2, Meerut Conspiracy Case,
IOR/L/PJ/12/333, The British Library Archives.
142
Meerut Conspiracy Judgement: Trial (1933), File 59 (C)/28 Part 2, Meerut Conspiracy Case, IOR/L/PJ/12/333,
The British Library Archives. p. 5.
143
Ibid., p.8.
144
Petrie, Communism in India, p. 70.
52
condemned the sentences, since it had judged the guilt of the accused merely on the basis of a
‘notional agreement’, and more importantly, for their adherence to a particular ideology.145 The
emphasis on guilt based on the possession of an idea was criticized by the Manchester Guardian
in the following words:

The 26,000 documents, covering 7,500 pages of print, the readings of Lenin and Karl
Marx, the quotations from the Communist Manifesto of 1848—in a word, all the matter
which it is difficult to imagine any English court of law allowing even to be admitted as
evidence...The other lesson is a much older lesson—old, but yet one which each country
and each age must learn again for itself, that it is an evil thing to prosecute men for their
opinions. The only lasting justification of democracy—that democracy which we are now
trying to introduce in India—is that it has rather higher standards of liberty and tolerance
than the autocratic systems. It is mainly for that reason that the Meerut trial is such an
unpleasant episode in the history of British justice.146

The books of Marx and Lenin being referred to as reasons for prosecuting communists was one
indication that the juridical system was punishing the adherence to a doctrine, an issue that
became a cause of embarrassment for imperial liberalism. Criticism from a range of
organizations in British society, including Labour Party MPs, trade unionists and bar
associations, was serious enough for a detailed response from the judges defending their reasons
for the severity of their judgement. Supplementing the extensive citation of ‘subversive
literature’ in the judgement, the courts took recourse to using public speeches as evidence of a
‘secret’ conspiracy to overthrow the government, one that had been ‘uncovered’ through the
‘diligent efforts of the police and our intelligence services’.147 The absurdity of such statements
was repeatedly invoked by the international press as well as the accused in their polemics with
the judges when they asked the latter to clarify why public speeches were deemed to be secret. 148
It was another case in which the state apparatus was forced into a position where it needed to
create a disjunct between its own claims and practice; in other words, it could not acknowledge
that the accused were being tried for the sole purpose of possessing a prohibited idea.
Responding to such criticism, the judges elaborated their position in the following words:

It is apparent from these few extracts alone that the members of the Communist Party of
India, who subscribe to this programme of the communist international, have
undoubtedly formed a revolutionary body with the professed object of overthrowing the
present order of society and bringing about the complete independence of India by means
of armed uprising of the proletariat...The contention of the learned advocate for the
appellants that such an objective is a distant aim to be realized in the unknown far-off
future cannot be accepted for a moment. No doubt the communists would, as a tactical

145
Meerut Prisoners Release Committee to Members of Bar (18th July, 1933), File 59 (C)/28 , Meerut Conspiracy
Case, IOR/L/PJ/12/339, The British Library Archives.
146
‘The Meerut Trial’, Manchester Guardian (10th June, 1931), p. 8.
147
Meerut Conspiracy Judgement: Trial (1933), File 59 (C)/28 Meerut Conspiracy Case, IOR/L/PJ/12/333, The
British Library Archives, p. 5.
148
Josh, The Great Attack, p. 75.
53
 measure, begin with the preliminary stages in the first instance, but whenever conditions
become favourable they would adapt themselves to those conditions and resort to armed
revolution, if necessary. Nowhere in the programme is it suggested that such an armed
revolution is not to be brought about within any period of time. The question is entirely
one of opportunity and the opportunity has to be seized and not lost sight of as soon as it
occurs.149

It was no longer important to prove that communists had indeed indulged in any particular acts to
further their intentions. Instead, the very act of accepting a ‘revolutionary’ ideology placed
communists in excess of the legal framework, from where the distinction between a past or
future crime was obliterated. Commenting further on the temporality of the crime, the judges
also dismissed the defendants’ claim that the speeches of the accused were not referring to the
overthrow of King George’s sovereignty, but that of an unspecified future sovereign, stating

This argument overlooks the fact that in law the King never dies. It is enough for the
prosecution to prove that there was a conspiracy to deprive the King-Emperor of the
sovereignty of British India. It is not necessary to show further that the conspirators were
conspiring for such deprivation to take place within the lifetime of His Majesty the
present King-Emperor.150

Hence, the intention of ending colonial rule was declared a crime against all past and future
sovereigns. Here, the metaphor of the ‘waiting room of History’ popularized by Dipesh
Chakrabarty does not fully capture the colonial response to the threat posed by communism,
since there is no claim for a movement of History in any particular direction. Instead of the ‘not-
yet’ of colonial liberalism, we see the ‘never’ of colonial authoritarianism, a perpetual present
that is constituted as the prison for the professional agitator, a space where time itself dissolves.
Such a present was to be secured through constant pre-emptive vigilance against an encroaching
future, one that must be ‘nipped in the bud,’151 i.e. tamed within the present.

In fighting the ‘communist menace’, the courts, much like the intelligence apparatus,
acknowledged the distinction between a spontaneous protest and a political sphere regulated by
an Idea. While the former could be tamed through the staging of spectacles and the management
of an economy of pain and suffering to create docile bodies, the latter could only be fought
through its containment in the present, since its being, while traversing individual bodies, always
remained in excess of them. Yet, containing an Idea, for the state, which is more adept at
constraining bodies, proved to be incredibly difficult, as the state repeatedly tried to quantify the
threat of communist ideology. This inadequacy of elucidating the exact contours of the threat
posed by communism led the state to construct the domain of the ‘underground’, a space of
intrigue and conspiracy linked to foreign powers. The charge of a foreign conspiracy was another

149
Meerut Conspiracy Judgement: Trial, (1933), File 59 (C)/28 Meerut Conspiracy Case, IOR/L/PJ/12/333, British
Library Archives, p. 16.
150
Ibid., p. 9.
151
Ibid., p. 12.
54
attempt by the state to embody the communist threat, a threat that was immanent rather than
external to colonial India.

Conclusion: Capitalism, Colonialism and Political Thought

In this chapter, I have explained why communism appeared as a significant threat to the British
Empire despite its relatively small numerical strength. By situating the fear of crowds as a
primary vehicle for retributive colonial violence, I argued that the alleged fanaticism of the
Indian mind prompted detailed mechanisms for demobilizing the crowds, and for producing a
detached individual under bodily pain. Further, the figure of the communist appeared particularly
menacing for colonial rule because it could not be subdued through conventional methods of
dispersal utilized to control crowds, since the politics of the ‘professional agitator’ appeared to
be calculated and durable as compared to the momentary emergence of a protesting mob. Finally,
I have tried to set the premise for interrogating the history of communism as an idea, since such
history was not merely an abstract debate among theorists, but had very real ramifications for
colonial government and for partisans of the communist movement, as the actors involved in the
Meerut Conspiracy Case demonstrate.

Yet, so far I have left untouched an analysis of the specific form of Indian capitalism, a
specificity that for Andrew Sartori constitutes the structuring principle for political thought.152 In
my work, however, I stress how political thought, while operating within the specificity of
historically constituted social relations, is incongruous with capital and the state, and is best
understood as a space of relative autonomy. Similarly, politics cannot fully synchronize with a
social movement; indeed, the latter is a provocation for thought, but it becomes political only
when the logic of the momentary insurrection is separated from the logic of the state, and is
sustained through an interplay between conceptual elucidation and the discipline of a fraternity.
In other words, it is the elaboration of a specific Idea in the midst of a partisan struggle that
provides an autonomous space for political thought. In the next chapter, we will further explore
such themes, as well as examine the temporality of communism in India through reading M.N.
Roy's polemics as an encounter between communism and anti-colonialism.

152
Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History, pp. 1-24.
55
56
 Chapter 3

Freedom from Necessity: M.N. Roy and The Politics of Volition

Introduction

In an open letter to the European working class movement in 1919, M.N. Roy, Abani Mukherjee
and Santi Devi (Evelyn Roy), declared ‘The time has come for the Indian revolutionists to make
a statement of their principles’. As the first programmatic articulation of communist thought in
India, aptly titled ‘An Indian Communist Manifesto’, the authors emphasized the global
historical significance of the entry of the popular classes into Indian politics, a fact that they
noted had been ignored by radical political groups in the European world. Rejecting all
teleological assumptions that explained colonial politics in terms of the impossible task of
‘catching up’ with the West, the open letter stressed the need to rethink communist thought in a
way that placed the colonized world at the centre of the struggle for global political and social
emancipation.

The tremendous strength which imperialistic capitalism derives from extensive colonial
possessions rich in natural resources and cheap human labour must no longer be ignored.
So long as India and other subject countries remain helpless victims of capitalist
exploitation and the British capitalist is sure of his absolute mastery over millions and
millions of human beasts of burden, he will be able to concede the demands of British
trade unionists and delay the proletarian revolution which will overthrow him [...] Cease
to fall victims to the imperialist cry that the masses of the East are backward races and
must go through the hell fires of capitalistic exploitation from which you are struggling to
escape.153

In a constitutive tension between inheritance and novelty, the manifesto questioned normative
political categories of Marxism, simultaneously placing mass politics in India within the tradition
of the international labour movement. More than three decades later, however, Roy was to
become a major critic of communist politics, describing Marxism as inadequate for the ‘moral
crisis’ facing humanity.

A re-examination of the different contemporary political theories [...] reveals the

disconcerting fact that in their practice there is little fundamental difference between
them, because capture of power [...] is the common postulate of all political theories. The
ensuing scramble for power has led to a progressive demoralisation of public life […].
Socialists and later on Communists maintained that economic reconstruction on the basis
of common ownership was the condition for human development. The result has been the
eclipse of the individual by collectivities; totalitarianism and dictatorship in political
practice have been the corollary to collectivist social philosophies.154

153
M.N. Roy, ‘An Indian Communist Manifesto’, in Selected Works of M.N. Roy, ed. Sibnarayan Ray (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1987), vol. I, p. 163.
154
M.N. Roy, Politics, Power and Parties (New Delhi: Ajanta Publications, 1960), pp. 19-20.
57
For Roy, the journey from revolutionary nationalism to communism and finally to radical
humanism was not only his personal story, but also was indicative of the biography of an era’s
slide into pervasive cynicism skeptical of attempts at significant transformation from an
oppressive situation, lest it reproduce at an even grander scale the very authoritarian structures
one claims to be fighting.

It was experience, gained in the various attempts at improving the lot of Indian humanity,
which led me step by step to the realisation of the fallacies and inadequacies of old
beliefs, ideas and ideals. It was not the result of my personal experience alone; it was
deduced from a generalisation of human experience of an entire period.155

These words, delivered at a lecture in 1948, reflected Roy’s disillusionment with the ossified and
paranoid bureaucracies of the socialist states, with whom he enjoyed an intimate relationship
before being expelled from the Comintern in 1929, and also with the post-colonial nation state,
which despite its formal freedom, stood ‘baffled and frustrated’ in its aim to create an egalitarian
society.156 The crisis of this period was not merely related to the presence of oppressive
structures, but was more closely tied to a condition in which all forms of thought and politics that
could potentially pave a way out of the contemporary situation became obscured. This impasse
of political thought in the face of global catastrophes and the disorientation of emancipatory
politics led Roy to assert

[T]he whole civilized world is finding itself in an insecure and unsettled mood; cherished
ideals seem to be crumbling, the present is gloomy and the future looks dark.157

This remarkably pessimistic tone corresponded with the end of a political sequence following the
encounter between communism and anti-colonialism in the early half of the twentieth century, an
encounter whose primary theoretician was Roy himself.158 The inability of History to
progressively lead toward social justice led Roy to conduct an all pervasive critique of existing
political philosophy, leaving the question of adequate political intervention in a state of
suspension.

Those who want to solve the problem of the individual’s relation with society should
apply themselves to the task of making more and more individuals conscious of their
potentialities, convincing them that by birth they are capable of rational judgement, and
therefore, also of moral judgement, and therefore of being free. A society composed of a
significant number of such men, will be a rational and moral society.159
155
Ibid., p.2.
156
Ibid., p. 86.
157
Ibid., p. 86.
158
I use the word “sequence” to group together a form of political ideas and actions formulated to address specific
questions faced by emancipatory politics in particular time periods. I have a more detailed discussion on sequencing
politics in the introductory chapter of my dissertation. Also see Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis (London:
Verso, 2010).
159
Roy, Politics, Power and Parties, p. 18.
58
The displacement of political questions to moral concerns emerged as a major source of criticism
of communist politics in the twentieth century, with the term ‘totalitarianism’ denoting this shift
from the political to the ethical.160 This ethical turn, in its various guises, proposed two primary
alternatives for moving beyond the violent impasse of communist thought in the twentieth
century. The first consisted of elevating the protection of individuals from the excesses of the
state as the primary ethical responsibility, leaving the question of building alternative structures
in a state of suspension, especially since this mode of politics often invokes statist intervention to
guarantee protection.161 The second response involves the unbridled celebration of the
immediacy of social movements, condemning attempts to clarify their theoretical stakes or to
unify their actions as ‘outside interventions’ by an ‘intellectual vanguard’, interventions that by
default lead to totalitarianism in this theoretical universe. In such a framework, we end up in a
nihilistic cycle of extreme enthusiasm generated by the onset of a movement, followed by
disappointment and despondency in the wake of its dispersal, with no articulation between these
two moments.162

Radical humanism, with its emphasis on protecting individuals against violations by the state,
and a greater role on ‘educating’ the masses rather than preparing for subjective interventions,
also aimed to move outside the conflictual terrain constitutive of politics to pedagogical and
ethical concerns for overcoming the conjunctural impasse. The inability of this doctrine to gain
serious purchase in the Indian political imaginary stemmed from its withdrawal from the
immediacy of political struggles underway in post-colonial India, with the search for quasi-
divine ‘moral individuals’ replacing the need for calculated interventions in a heterogeneous
social landscape. The search for purity was the most radical symptom of the defeat of
emancipatory politics, to the point of putting into question the very possibility of political
interventions.

Roy’s critiques of communism, however, continue to speak to the global, not to mention Indian,
disillusionment with Marxist orthodoxies and the logical slide into totalitarianism of a politics
aiming to present volition as History. Keeping in line with the framework of this dissertation, I
revisit Roy’s articulation of the relationship between communism and anti-colonialism, while
also emphasizing the untapped resources of this encounter that could replace the spectral
presence of disappointment and fear with political and analytical clarity. In this study, I conduct
a close historical tracing of Roy’s debates in the Comintern, including his theoretical and
political innovations, and posit the relationship between History and volition as the precise point
of impasse in his thought. Consequently, I aim to recover the possibility of political interventions

160
For a classic rendition of this argument, see Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century
(London: Vintage, 2000).
161
Dipesh Chakrabarty advocates this position in his calls for avoiding ethics’ subsumption under politics. See
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2002). For a critique of this position, see Wendy Brown, ‘Human Rights and The Politics of
Fatalism’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 103:2/3 (2004), pp. 451-463.
162
For a sustained critique of the desire of a politics without such mediation, see Jodi Dean, The Communist
Horizon (London: Verso, 2012).
59
freed from a basis in historical necessity, a possibility that I locate within the fissures of the
Comintern’s thinking on the ‘Colonial Question’.

Further, I distance myself from obituaries of the Left that elevate ‘failure’ as the only standpoint
for reading communist thought in the twentieth century. Such wholesale rejection of this political
sequence compels us to lose the thread constitutive of political debates in this period. On the one
hand, it fuels contemporary nihilism by advocating a synchronization of political thought with
the dominant, and increasingly authoritarian, political frameworks of our time. On the other
hand, it produces a Left in search of a pristine politics, above and beyond all existing
contradictions, with the anxiety of avoiding authoritarian structures eclipsing the goal of gaining
relevance in the socio-political landscape. In either case, such an approach is unable to grasp the
contradictory movement of political thought in the twentieth century, and consequently incapable
of developing theoretical tools for overcoming the political paralysis in the wake of the defeat of
emancipatory projects.

Instead, I argue for reading this historical sequence as an unfinished task, with undercurrents and
missed encounters that cannot only provide us with a novel lens for reading this political
moment, but can also aid us in tracing latent trajectories that could overcome its impasse.
Therefore, while Radical Humanism appears as symptomatic of a suspension of politics in the
aftermath of defeat, I argue that Roy’s identification with humanism was only one of the multiple
possibilities his interventions in the Comintern opened up for rethinking political subjectivity,
with alternative paths still waiting to be utilized in novel encounters. In other words, I read his
writings in the Comintern through Walter Benjamin’s suggestion of making ‘the continuum of
history explode’ in order to set free the unrealized potential of this dialogue and engage with it as
a work in progress, rather than condemning it as a relic from a misguided past.163

Such an approach differs from critiquing political thought through normative frameworks
(whether Marxist, Nationalist or Liberal) and from conscious attempts at distorting history to
present a heroic figure rather than one mired in contradictions. Instead, I conduct a close reading
of Roy’s political writings to tease out the various possibilities within his polemics in the
Communist International, particularly on questions of political subjectivity, History and volition,
in order to recover the underlying trajectory of his thought that can speak to the present. Roy’s
oeuvre presents an ideal site for interrogating the tension between necessity and will, since his
interlocutors were part of incongruous political traditions, ranging from anti-colonial nationalists,
such as Aurobindo Ghosh and Mahatma Gandhi, to communist leaders, such as Lenin, Trotsky
and August Thalmier. This intellectual promiscuity propelled Roy to sculpt ideas inherited from
each tradition in unprecedented and improvisatory ways. Before we begin our discussion of
Roy’s life and work, however, let us briefly clarify the theoretical and political stakes of our
study.

Finally, I do not intend to posit Roy as a thinker who uninterruptedly moved toward a newer
conception of political subjectivity without imbibing on prevalent Marxist orthodoxy. I

163
Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and
Reflections (Berlin: Schocken, 1969).
60
categorize his work as an unfinished task, implying that a parallel trajectory persisted within his
thought, one that conformed to the sociologically driven view of revolutionary change. This
contradictory juxtaposition is itself a product of the globally uneven economic and political
landscape in which political ideas circulate, leaving old and new methodologies anchored in the
same instance. Even the most polemical texts by Roy are marked by a torsion produced by the
superposition of these two trajectories and invite an interventionist reading that can delineate the
contours of each to study their specific development, a task I carry out in this essay.

Roy’s Encounter with Communism: A Brief History

Kris Manjapra, in his illuminating study of Roy's political thought, places him as a major figure
in ‘cosmopolitan thought-zones’, intermediary spaces between worlds without belonging to any,
which emerged around the world in the wake of the First World War. Such spaces hosted
conversations amongst political thinkers from incongruous backgrounds without being
constrained by the apparatus of the colonial state or the disciplining pressures of anti-colonial
movements.164 In this section, I briefly describe Roy’s remarkable journey from nationalism to
communism, with a slightly different emphasis. My aim is to delineate the trajectory that shaped
the possibility of an encounter between anti-colonialism and Marxism and allowed Roy to place
them into a mutually productive relationship, rather than as parallel or divergent methods of
conceiving political subjectivity.

Roy began his political career as a young anti-colonial activist in the Swadeshi movement that
began in 1903 against the British plans to partition Bengal. The Swadeshi movement was
inspired greatly by intellectuals such as Vivikenada and Aurobindo Gosh who were interested in
producing a disjunct from the quotidian temporality of the colonial world. In one of the earliest
examples of the idea of a ‘vanguard’ in the anti-colonial struggle, Swadeshi intellectuals
emphasized the need for bodily and spiritual discipline to build autonomous subjects who could
mediate between the laws of the colonial world and the ‘anxious desire’ of the colonized to burst
open the window of an oppressive colonial temporality.165

The 16-year-old Roy, then known as Narendra Nath Bhattacharya, joined the movement as a
school boy, and began leading student strikes and campaigns for boycotting Western products in
India. The movement eventually dwindled under severe colonial crackdown, and Roy was
arrested in the Howrah Conspiracy Case in 1910. Charged with ‘conspiring to deny His Majesty
Sovereignty over his Indian lands’, Roy was acquitted the following year. With the subsiding of
the mass movement, a core group of activists, operating around the Anushilan and Juguntar
parties, resorted to sporadic acts of terror, such as assassinating colonial officials.166

In an attempt to re-think the relationship between mass politics, organizational forms and
violence, Roy joined Jatindranath Mukherjee, one of the leaders of the revolutionary movement

164
Manjpara, M.N. Roy, pp. 1-30.
165
Ibid., pp. 5-25.
166
John Haithcox, Communism and Nationalism in India: M.N. Roy and Comintern Policy, 1920-1939 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 5-6.
61
in Bengal, in his efforts to bring together different revolutionary factions to build a province-
wide armed revolt of the popular classes. The young Roy was sent to Jakarta, Indonesia (known
at the time as Batavia under Dutch rule), to meet the German consul general to finalize plans for
smuggling armaments into India. These weapons were to be stored in the forests of Sundarban,
from where they were to be distributed to different units of the Juguntar Party in Bengal in
preparation for an eventual march on Calcutta.167

The British intelligence discovered the plan and raided the office of a bogus firm, Harry and
Sons, created to receive German funds. While a number of leading members of the ‘conspiracy’
were arrested, Jatin, the architect of the plan, was killed in an encounter with the police and the
military on the 10th of September, 1915. Further, a large number of arrests and killings of
dissidents was carried out across India, hence diminishing the prospects of a popular, all-India
revolt against the Empire.168 Roy was in Java for the procurement of arms when he heard news
of the colonial intelligence began to crackdown on suspected members of the Juguntar Party, and
he decided against immediately returning to India.

After a dizzying journey that took him across Japan, Korea, and China, Roy obtained a visa to
the United States under the alias of Father Charles Allen Martin, a Roman Catholic priest who
was travelling from the West Indies to Paris to pursue theological studies. On 15th June 1916,
Roy, escaping the British authorities across continents, arrived in San Francisco, the hotbed of
anti-colonial militancy, particularly amongst migrants from colonial Punjab. Removed from the
immediacy of struggle and the all-consuming need to evade colonial authorities, the US provided
a relatively relaxed space for Roy to re-think his politics after the demoralizing debacles of the
revolutionary underground in India. Roy began engaging with a broad range of perspectives
critical of colonialism, including the ideas of the then US President, Woodrow Wilson, as well as
a number of anti-colonial and socialist writers.169 He also met and married Evelyn Trent, a
radical graduate student at Stanford University, who would later co-author ‘An Indian
Communist Manifesto’ with Roy under the pseudonym of Santi Devi.

Roy and Evelyn moved to New York in 1917, and hosted a number of anti-colonial Indians
visiting the US. An event in honor of Lajpat Rai in New York led Roy to seriously question the
limitations of anti-colonial nationalism. When confronted with questions from the audience on
what his vision was for an independent India, particularly on how he differentiated between
foreign and indigenous forms of oppression, Lajpat’s reply that ‘it was better to be oppressed by
one's brother as compared to a stranger’ left Roy unsatisfied.170 In search of ideas that could
unhinge the pursuit of justice from particularized identities or familial linkages, Roy became a
regular visitor to the New York Public Library, where he began a systematic study of the ideas of
Karl Marx.

167
Ibid., p. 6.
168
Ibid., p. 6.

169
Manjpara, M.N. Roy, pp. 30-35.
170
Quoted in Haithcox, Communism and Nationalism, p. 7.
62
This period of reflection and exploration was interrupted as Woodrow Wilson announced the US
entry into the First World War on the side of Allies. One of the consequences of this decision
was the immediate clampdownon anti-British activities in the US, with Wilson advising Indians
to accept a peaceful imperial relationship with Britain. Not for the first time in his life, Roy
found himself on the wrong side of the law, as US authorities launched a ferocious clampdown
on pacifists, socialists and anti-colonial activists.171 An arrest warrant was issued against Roy for
participating in a German-funded conspiracy against Britain and for violating US neutrality laws,
forcing him and Evelyn to abscond to Mexico City in June 1917.

Roy’s experience in Mexico City radically re-oriented his political thinking and propelled him to
prominence in global revolutionary politics. The city was still grappling with the effects of the
Mexican revolution of 1911 and the subsequent civil war, and was a major site for anti-colonial
activists from around the globe, including a dense network of Indian nationalists. Within a few
months of his stay in Mexico City, a time he would later describe as ‘the most memorable
period of his life’, Roy became fluent in Spanish, writing articles for the radical journal El
Pueblo, and became part of the inner circle of President Venustiano Carranza. 172 Carranza had
assumed power in 1915 after the departure of Francisco Madero, and held anti-American views
due to the increasing US interference in Latin America. Germany was keen to exploit the rift
between Mexico and the US, and used Mexico City as a conduit to support anti-Entente activities
in the region, a plot that played a significant role in the US decision to enter the First World War.

German agents in Mexico City, many of whom were familiar with Roy from his stays in
Shanghai and Jakarta, facilitated his entry into the inner circle of Carranza, positioning him as a
major figure in Mexican radical circles, which eventually led to him becoming the general
secretary of the Mexican Socialist Party. By this point, however, Roy was desperate to move out
of German patronage, not as a result of an inclination for nationalist politics, but rather because
of his discomfort with the direction the nationalist movement had taken, which he criticized both
for its questionable alliances in the global arena and its inability to offer a socio-political
alternative to colonial rule. His meeting with Borodin, the Soviet Ambassador who came to
know of Roy through his articles in the English-language section of the newspaper El Heraldo de
Mexico, eventually made it possible for him to move out of the German-backed anti-colonial
circles and closer to communist activists. After having failed to convince the Socialist Party to
rename itself as the communist party, Roy led a small breakaway faction to form the Communist
Party of Mexico, a move supported by Borodin to facilitate Roy's entry into the second
Communist International meeting as a full delegate representing a Soviet recognized party.173

Roy’s personal trajectory, as well the impasse of the anti-colonial movement, had instilled his
interest in communist ideas. Equally uneven and unforeseen developments opened European
Marxism to its encounter with the anti-colonial movement. At the end of the First World War,
Europe witnessed a series of popular working class uprisings that were at least partly inspired by

171
See Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931
(London: Penguin, 2014).
172
Haithcox, Communism and Nationalism, pp. 8-9.
173
Ibid., p. 11.
63
the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. The popular foment, which gripped Germany, Hungary, and
the Netherlands, among other countries, transformed this moment into the most extensive
Europe-wide revolt since the uprisings of 1848.174 The enthusiasm generated by these events led
Trotsky, one of the leading theoreticians of the Bolsheviks, to declare that Europe was on the
verge of revolution, from where the fruits of emancipation would spread to the colonial world. In
his address to the first meeting of the Comintern in 1919, which was held in the midst of these
upheavals in Europe, Trotsky asserted

The workers and peasants not only of Annam, Algiers, and Bengal, but also of Persia and
Armenia, will gain their opportunity of independent existence only in that hour when the
workers of England and France, having overthrown Lloyd George and Clemenceau, will
have taken state power into their own hands... Colonial slaves of Africa and Asia! The
hour of proletarian dictatorship in Europe will strike for you as the hour of your own
emancipation!175

This is not to make the rather lazy argument that Trotsky's perception of the colony was similar
to those of colonial officials, who viewed Europe as the centre for emancipation and at best
could have pity for those in the colonial world. Trotsky did emphasize the uprisings in the
colonial world, and the increasing integration of ‘backward’ countries into capitalist, and
possibly, socialist relations. Yet, this brief sermon to the working classes of the colonized
countries to greet the coming socialist revolutions in Europe as their own triumph is all that we
hear on the colonies at the first Comintern congress. This omission can be explained partly by
the missed encounter between Marx and the colonial world, and partly by the enthusiasm
generated by working-class uprisings across Europe. Whatever the case, the colonized world
remained significantly absent from the knowledge produced by mainstream European Marxism
until the second Comintern meeting in 1920.

By the mid-1920s, the situation had changed significantly across the globe. Working-class
revolts in Europe had been defeated in quick succession by the counter-offensives of European
governments, while a continent-wide crackdown on communist organizations was launched.176
Concomitantly, the end of the First World War witnessed the eruption of mass movements across
the colonial world in the first tryst between colonial rule and ‘popular politics’. A combination of
the failure of working-class revolts in Europe, the rise of popular movements in the colonial
world and a desperate search by the Soviet Union for allies outside the increasingly hostile
European terrain, resulted in the increased importance of the colonial question in the Second
Comintern meeting in Petrograd in July 1920.

M.N. Roy's elevation to a full delegate to the congress, despite his relatively brief acquaintance
with Marxism, and an even more tenuous relationship with Mexico, the country he was
representing, stemmed out of the Soviet search for allies in the non-European world. It is this

174
See Pierre Broue and Eric Weitz, The German Revolution, 1917-1923 (Chicago: Haymarket, 2006).
175
Leon Trotsky, ‘Manifesto of the Communist International to the Workers of the World 1919’, available at
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/ffyci-1/ch01.htm accessed 17th November 2014.
176
Broué and Weitz, The German Revolution, pp. 817-874.
64
encounter, overdetermined by an impasse and an opportunity, that we now turn to in Roy’s
writings as a leading intellectual of the Comintern in the 1920s.

History and the Revolutionary Subject

The primary question confronting communists from the non-European world was whether their
societies were ‘ready’ for communism, a suspicion arising out of the close tie between historical
progress and revolutionary subjectivity in orthodox Marxist politics. The search for
correspondence between socio-economic change and political practice had already been made
tenuous in the wake of the defeats of the European working class, with the most dramatic staging
of this theoretical debate between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks in Russia. Lenin, the chief
architect of communist politics in the twentieth century, elevated the role of political volition in
constructing revolutionary subjectivity, advocating the immediate seizure of state power in
Russia, rather than withholding political action until society reached an ‘ideal’ state of socio-
economic development, a strategy supported by the Mensheviks.177 In Lenin’s thought, the task
of bridging the gulf between historical progression and political practice was handed to the
vanguard party, a watchman that would ensure the synchronization of these two processes.178

If the victory of the Russian revolution opened a sequence in which the disjunct between History
and politics became a cause for propelling rather than constraining the revolution, the
relationship between the two terms became even more tenuous in Marxism’s encounter with the
colonial world. As discussed earlier, the heterogeneous forms in which capitalist modernity
appeared in the colonial world intensified the lack of correspondence between sociological
deduction and political subjectivity. On the other hand, the onset of the mass movement in India
increased the urgency of developing new methodologies to allow for a communist intervention in
the crisis, a question that placed analytical Marxism in a state of crisis. Until the second congress
of the Comintern, however, Marxism remained tied to older categories that could not identify a
neatly defined sociological term that could carry out its ‘historical role’ in the colonial situation.
Roy, as an anti-colonial militant for almost two decades, persistently intervened in the Comintern
proceedings to challenge the hesitation in drawing novel strategies from the uprisings in the
colonial world, a fidelity to orthodoxy that he claimed was becoming an impediment for
globalizing the importance of communist thought.

While the Communist International is discussing the problem of a program it should pay
serious attention to this, in view of the act that to develop the program of the International
in the Eastern countries is more complicated. It is more complicated because
(unfortunately it is to be confessed) our comrades of the Communist International have so
far devoted very little time to the study of these questions.179
177
Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis and Slavoj Žižek (eds.), Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).
178
For a more thorough discussion of Lenin and Mao’s relationship with History, see Bosteels, ‘Post-Maoism’, pp.
575-600.
179
M.N. Roy, ‘Original Draft of the Supplementary Theses on the National and Colonial Question’ (1919),
available at https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/2nd-congress/ch04.htm accessed 11th
October, 2014.
65
In the first major political statement on the colonies by the Communist International, the second
Comintern congress adopted the ‘Thesis on the Colonial Question’ introduced by Lenin, which
called for the expansion of communist politics to the colonial world and an active search for
allies in the anti-colonial struggle. In a crucial intervention into this debate, Roy put forth a
‘supplementary thesis’ as a polemic against Euro-centric readings of the revolutionary potential
in the global conjuncture. Roy argued that colonies had displaced Europe as the raw-nerve of
global capitalism, allowing greater room for accommodation between labour and Capital in the
metropolis.

The Great European War and its results have shown clearly that the masses of the non-
European subjected countries are inseparably connected with the proletarian movement in
Europe, as a consequence of world capitalism. The fountainhead from which European
capitalism draws its main strength is no longer to be found in the industrial
countries of Europe, but in the colonial possessions and dependencies [...] Super-profit
gained in the colonies is the mainstay of modern capitalism, and so long as the latter is
not deprived of this source of super-profit, it will not be easy for the European working
class to overthrow it [...] By exploiting the masses in the colonies, European imperialism
will be in a position to give concession after concession to the labour aristocracy at home
[...] Consequently, the Communist International must widen the sphere of its activity.180

This inaugural gesture of Indian communism aimed to expand the geographical coordinates of
global revolution, stemming out of a need to demarcate a space for communist politics in a
colonial setting. Arguing that the colonial world is a primary site for the perpetuation of global
capitalist domination, Roy was not merely adding to a critical political economy whose seeds
had already been laid by nationalist economists in the colonial world and the European
peripheries.181 In fact, Roy argued that colonial powers shifting the locus of exploitation to the
colonial situation created a high possibility of a breakdown in the capitalist structure at its
peripheral extremities, thus opening up the colonial world for political interventions.

Roy’s fundamental aim was to highlight the uneven trajectory of Capital in global space, and use
this very unevenness as a tool for interrupting and eventually undermining its grip on society.
This dialectical approach allowed him to simultaneously maintain an internationalist position
while launching a critique of the increasing docility of the labour movement in Western Europe,
particularly on its silence regarding British excesses in the colonies. Roy, however, avoided an
essentialist view of the English working class as inherently ‘counter-revolutionary’, by
maintaining that ‘the English proletariat is not an iota worse than the proletariat of any other
country’.182 Instead, he maintained that the English proletariat had ‘deviated’ from its historical
role due to its development ‘alongside the powerful development of British Imperialism’, a
crucial factor in corrupting ‘the psyche and theory of the English labour movement’ due to the

180
M.N. Roy, ‘Original Draft’, (1919).
181
Goswami, Producing India, pp. 31-72.
182
M.N. Roy, ‘Imperialist Plunder and the Corruption of the English Proletariat’, in Selected Works of M.N. Roy,
ed. Sibnarayan Ray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), vol. II, pp. 287.
66
ability of the British ruling class to ‘make concessions’ for them out of the immense wealth
created from colonial plunder.183

Roy elevated the inability of the English working class to act as a supposed vanguard of the
global revolution, beyond any racial, national or territorial prejudice, to a fundamental theoretical
and political task in his polemics on colonial communism. In his report to the fifth Comintern
congress in 1924, provocatively titled ‘Imperialist Plunder, Corruption of the English Proletariat
and Conditions of Revolution in England’, Roy denounced the seduction of the British working
class movement to the bourgeois order
The English proletariat has not only not lost faith in the Labour Party and the Labour
government, but it still has loyalty to them…. We must not ignore facts, and the facts are
that the English proletariat is not only loyal to the labour leadership but, to a large extent,
also to the bourgeois system, the democratic system.184

This observation was not just aimed at the reformism of the labour movement, but was also a
critical appraisal of the relationship between representation and revolutionary subjectivity. For
Roy, the integration of the British labour movement into the liberal-democratic system meant
that its radical potential had been eclipsed by its absorption into statist forms of representation. If
the classic proletariat, with its most complete historical realization in England, managed to
merely find a place for itself within the prevailing norms of representation rather than acting as
the ‘leading edge’ of a global revolution, Marxists were confronted with a situation that posed a
fundamental challenge to any straightforward reading of politics via class positions.

The only way forward, according to Roy, was to view capitalism in its global totality in order to
propel the English working class into revolutionary action. This required a shift away from
locating political subjectivity within a historically constituted sociological term, and towards
novel sites that the hegemonic order had failed to assimilate. Thus, against a politics of
sociological certainty that was bound to integrate into the dominant order, Roy posited the need
to search for fissures within the totality of the system that could be utilized to develop an
alternative adequately removed from the ruling ideology. The colonial world, for Roy, was the
point of excess whose assimilation into the bourgeois order of representation remained
impossible primarily due to the intensive forms of exploitation in the colonies, an intensity that
allowed Capital to accommodate the metropolitan working class. Accordingly, the English
capitalists would continue to ‘bribe the English labour aristocracy’ to ‘maintain their rule’185
unless the colonial world became an active, if not a leading partner, in the struggle against the
bourgeois order.

When we speak of the organization of a communist party in England, we must not forget
that England, i.e., the islands which form the Kingdom of Britain is merely the top of a
large political, economic and financial tree. If we wish to destroy the top of a tree without

183
Ibid., p. 288.
184
Ibid., p. 287.
185
Ibid., p. 288.
67
 giving due consideration to the extensively ramified roots which feed the top, it would be
a mistake, and we would duly experience disappointment in our task.186

What allowed Roy to inaugurate a decisive break in Marxist theory was his rejection of
examining politics as stemming directly from specific socio-economic categories. Instead, Roy
located political possibilities in terms and situations that remained in excess of the prevailing
norms of representation, hence securing an autonomous space for political thought outside its
inscription into the existing social bond sanctioned by the state. Roy’s elevation of the colonial
world as the point of immanent excess within the global conjuncture would resonate with similar
displacements of revolutionary subjectivity in the wake of Marxism’s encounter with the non-
European world, for example with Mao’s positing of the peasantry as a revolutionary factor or
Fanon’s depiction of the lumpen proletariat as the primary vehicle for political
subjectivization.187 The common thread for all these thinkers was their refusal to read the
absence of terms and sites in hegemonic frameworks as a symptom of a historical deficit, instead
viewing this very lack of a stable inscription as a sign of their subversive potential, endowed
with an ability to radically transform the situation in which they find themselves held in a
condition of marginality.

Yet, it is important not to view this argument merely for its resonance with the school of under-
development or Third World nationalism that argues for the predisposition of peripheral regions
for revolutionary upheaval because of the presence of more intensive forms of exploitation. Such
an approach would again tie revolutionary subjectivity to a fixed unit of measurement, in this
case the degree of exploitation, ignoring the political import of Roy’s arguments. Moreover, such
revolutionary potential could not be produced merely in the realm of ideas. If class determinism
was to be replaced by strictly de-socialized thought, for example in which Roy’s assertions alone
could guarantee the production of a revolutionary situation in the colonial world, we would enter
the realm of a purely speculative form of thinking, dangerously detached from any material
realities and hence disallowing political axioms from gaining any serious purchase on a situation
it aims to transform.188 Instead, for Roy, the political possibilities in the colonial world were
determined neither by the level of socio-economic exploitation, nor by a ‘revolutionary desire’
on the part of a few intellectuals, but a ‘will to freedom’ demonstrated by the Indian masses in
their actually existing struggles. In a text titled ‘The Awakening in the East’, he asserts that the
colonial world is ready for revolution precisely because it has demonstrated its readiness.

This is happening today in the Eastern countries, where the myriads of toilers have been
groaning under the same exploitation against which their more fortunate and less
downtrodden comrades of the Occident have been carrying on a heroic fight. The East is
awakening: and who knows if the formidable tide, that will sweep away the capitalist
structure of Western Europe, may not come from there […]. The disruption of Empire is
the only thing that will complete the bankruptcy of European capitalism; and the

186
Ibid., p. 286.
187
See, Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2005).
188
Peter Hallward discussing similar themes his new work on political will. See Peter Hallward, ‘The Will of the
People: Notes Towards a Dialectical Voluntarism’, Radical Philosophy 155:3 (2009), pp. 17-29.
68
 revolutionary upheavals of the Asiatic countries are destined to bring about the crumbling
of the proud imperial structure of capitalism. So, the awakening of the East is perhaps the
fifth act of the World Revolution.189

For Roy, political thinkers could no longer act as philosopher kings, analyzing society through
objective/normative categories at a distance from existing social struggles. Instead, political
theory had to submit itself to the conditions induced by social upheavals, extrapolating lessons
from their emergence while simultaneously elaborating on their significance. Crucially, such a
framework asserted the primacy of struggle for political thought, rather than the deduction of
political functionality from the place assigned to an individual or group within the social edifice.
Roy highlighted this relationship in a letter to a friend in which he criticized middle-class
intellectuals in India for their inability to move beyond their rigid frameworks to embrace the
bold lessons produced by the advent of popular participation in the political sphere.

Look around you and see what the masses of the Indian people want today, and let me tell
you, they are not so unwilling and apathetic as you seem to think. It is only among them
that any fighting spirit is to be found. Who has occupied the center of our movement for
the past three years? [...] The peasantry of the United Provinces, the Punjab, Bengal and
Madras, and the workers in all our great industries are the real power behind the
movement. Those who, overestimating their own importance as intellectuals, overlook
those revolutionary forces, miss the whole significance of what is taking place in India
today.190

Akin to the psychoanalytical model, where the hysterical subject becomes the site for the
revelation of the hidden kernel that structures social consciousness, for Roy the revolutionary
subject also appeared in the form of a ‘collective hysterical subject’ that interrupted the routine
flow of affairs, rather than in an uninterrupted and pre-determined movement toward a
theoretically sanctioned political consciousness. The task for political thought was to elucidate
the consequences of this figure of disruption in order to mediate between the momentary
breakdown of structure and the everyday routine of politics. Despite his willingness to maintain
flexibility in response to unforeseen upheavals in the colonial world, however, the problem of
mediation between these two moments remained a point of impasse within Roy’s thought, a
point that we examine in the next section.

Volition, History and Violence: The Impasse for Roy

While the sudden and momentary appearance of mass politics in India indicated a lack within the
dominant political imaginaries, whether statist, nationalist or Marxist, it did not in itself mark the
birth of a specific political sequence. In fact, there is no reason such brief encounters with mass
mobilization would not be followed by a return to normalcy, with a retrospective categorization

189
M.N. Roy, ‘The Awakening in The East’ (July 1920), available at
https://www.marxists.org/archive/roy/1920/07/15.htm accessed 5th November 2014.
190
M.N. Roy, ‘On Rallying the Masses’, (November 1922), available at
https://www.marxists.org/archive/roy/1922/11/10b.htm accessed 1st November 2014.
69
of such moments via the statist language of criminality or madness. On the other hand, a political
sequence begins precisely after the passing away of the disruption, in a sustained and enduring
fidelity to this aberration by constructing an interface between the ephemeral site of the Event
and the everyday routine, in order to re-examine the latter from the resources made available by
the former. If the Event allows for the momentary appearance of the lack inherent in any social
structure, the process of persisting with the lessons of the popular upheavals long after their
dispersal is what Bruno Bosteels has described as giving ‘being to this lack’, particularly through
its elaboration in political thought and its actualization via adequate forms of organization.191

The task of thinking through the consequences of popular revolts in the colonial world posed
similar questions for Roy, who insisted that the critical challenge for radical politics would be the
construction of an idea that could sustain the will displayed in the momentary but repeated
uprisings of workers and peasants throughout the country. He argued that the new political
capacity indicated in such mass uprisings would remain in a state of suspension until its
inscription into a political program that turned this will into a motor of History. Consequently, in
a book published in 1923, Roy urged the Indian National Congress to develop a fighting program
that could simultaneously borrow from, and lead, the national movement for independence.

[T]he activities of the Congress during the last three years have contributed immensely to
the intensification and crystallization of this national will [...] This much has been
accomplished. The next phase of our movement has to be built on this foundation [...] to
enable it (the Congress) to lead the struggle of the Indian people further ahead on the road
to freedom, the adoption of a fighting programme is indispensable—a programme by
which the Congress will assume the leadership of the struggle for existence, in which the
masses of the people are involved.192

Such interdependence between mass movements and political subjectivity was similarly reflected
in Roy’s elaboration of the purpose of a communist party, which he says

is composed of those who articulate the purpose and desire of the multitude involved in
this movement [...] Since the Party is the political organ of the multitude, the principles it
advocates through its programme must be in consonance with the objective forces
impelling the multitude in the movement.193

Yet, despite his emphasis on the intimate relationship between social action and political
thought, we begin to witness a parallel trajectory in Roy’s works, one that remained tied to an
analytical view of political consciousness. Consider, for example, his criticism of the National
Congress for failing to follow the ‘objective’ tendencies of the national movement.

191
Bruno Bosteels, ‘The Leftist Hypothesis: Communism in The Age of Terror’, in Idea of Communism, eds.
Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2013).
192
M.N. Roy [1923], India's Problem and Its Solution Reprint (Charleston: Nabu Press, 2013), pp. 26-27.

193
M.N. Roy, ‘What is a Program?’, in Selected Works of M.N. Roy, ed. Sibnarayan Ray (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1987), vol. I, p. 432.
70
 The newly acquired political importance obliges the Congress to change its philosophical
background; it must cease to be a subjective body; its deliberations and decisions should
be determined by the objective conditions prevailing and not according to the notions,
desires and prejudices of its leaders.194

We are not merely viewing a reversal to an older, dogmatic Marxist position that had already
been made untenable by a series of events after the First World War. On the contrary, Roy is
responding precisely to the appearance of the disjunction between political action and historical
progression, in other words, the distance between will and necessity. The uncertainty induced
within Marxist theory as a result of History’s progression into totalitarianism and docility
evacuated the ground on which the theory of communist subjectivity was premised upon,
opening up the space for political volition. While Roy was one of the first communist thinkers to
recognize this displacement, the difficulty arose in assigning an adequate place to History within
this transformed paradigm, particularly since the umbilical cord connecting necessity and will
was never severed.

In fact, even in his earlier criticisms of the passivity of the English working classes, Roy sought
to utilize the mass upheaval in the colonial world to unhinge it from its attachment to the
bourgeois order so as to allow it to perform its ‘historical role’. Hence, having overcome the
paralysis imposed by a mechanical reading of the political emergence from a socio-economic
base, the new impasse involved specifying a method for overcoming the disjunct between
necessity and will. In response to this question, Roy remained firmly anchored in the political
sequence opened by Lenin’s thought, for whom the party was a vehicle for closing the gap
between politics and History. Consider the following words, presented to the Sixth Comintern
Congress in 1928, in which Roy elevates the party as an instrument of mediation between the
objective potentialities of the proletariat and its subjective capacity to overcome the bourgeois
order.

The interest of the proletariat demands the complete overthrow of imperialism,

establishment of a revolutionary democratic state [...] In spite of the fact that the Indian
proletariat is objectively charged with a great political task, it is very young, politically
immature and organizationally weak [...] The proletariat will become more conscious and
ready for the revolutionary struggle only under the leadership of the Communist Party. 195

It is at this point that we see the juxtaposition of two contradictory movements that produced an
impasse for Roy, as well as other communist thinkers of his era. On the one hand, political
subjectivity aimed to bridge the gulf between political practice and historical progression. On the
other hand, however, the widening gulf between the two realms in the first quarter of the
twentieth century intensified the crisis of Marxian categories in explaining political subjectivity,

194
M.N. Roy, ‘Manifesto to The Delegates of the 36th Indian National Congress’, (1923) available at
https://www.marxists.org/archive/roy/1923/01/manifesto.htm accessed 12th November 2014.
195
M.N. Roy, ‘Draft Resolution on the Indian Resolution’, in Selected Works of M.N. Roy, ed. Sibnarayan Ray
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), vol. III, p. 105.
71
depriving communist thinkers of an objective criterion from which to measure the adequation of
political action with a purported directionality of History. Such a lack elevated the communist
party to the sole arbitrator of determining the synchronization of subjective actions with
historical progression, and consequently, any movement that developed a trajectory different
from the norms established by the party was castigated for castigated for having a corrupting
influence on the Indian labour movement. The desire for locating a supra-contradiction that
existed above and beyond the multiple contradictions of an actually existing national liberation
struggle was symptomatic of this search without a clearly defined object, and partly explains the
missed opportunity of Indian communism in the national liberation struggle. The following
dismissal of the Swaraj Party by Roy, written in 1925 in the aftermath of the non-cooperation
movement, is representative of this missed encounter.

The period of clash between imperialism and native capitalism is closed. The Swaraj
Party was the ‘foam’ of this clash, to quote Lenin's telling characterisation of the Cadets.
In the coming period of reconciliation there will be hardly any necessity for the existence
of such a Party [….] The anti-imperialist struggle is a historic necessity. It must be
carried on, only with the difference that the social foundation of the Nationalist
movement will be shifted to a different class. The workers and peasants will not only be
the backbone of the nationalist movement in the coming period, they will have to assume
the political leadership of the movement as well.196

By collapsing imperialism and native capitalism onto each other, a shorthand to describe the
uneven contestation between British rule and the nationalist movement led by the National
Congress, Roy attempted to redeem classical notions of ‘class struggle’ by preserving the purity
of the two antagonistic terms of the divide. Yet, such a pristine vision of politics was easier to
maintain in a self-referential Marxist theory than in the unfolding mass movement in India,
particularly frustrated by the Congress’ continued domination of popular politics in the country.
The refusal to acknowledge the messiness of actual politics, where emphasizing a contradiction
remained a theoretical and practical task rather than a scientifically verified given, resulted in a
pervasive presence of suspicion. Such suspicion was extenuated by the widening gulf in popular
politics and normative Marxist categories, with Roy denouncing nationalist leaders for
‘corrupting the direction’ of the mass movement.

The collapse of the movement of mass passive resistance commonly known as the Non-
Co-operation (or Gandhi) movement, led to the crystallisation of a certain political
tendency which found expression in the Swaraj Party. It was the tendency towards
liquidating the revolutionary character of the struggle for freedom and bringing the
nationalist movement back to the bourgeois politics of reformism.197

‘Liquidation,’ a term that gained notoriety in twentieth-century historiography due to its

deployment for the elimination of political opponents in the Soviet Union, was symptomatic of a

196
M.N. Roy, ‘Who will Lead: Class Differentiation in the Indian Revolutionary Movement’ (1925) available at
https://www.marxists.org/archive/roy/1925/x01/x01.htm accessed 20th November 2014.
197
Roy, ‘Who will Lead’, (1925).
72
politics unable to clarify the incongruous movement of objective conditions and political
subjectivity. Roy’s criticism of the popular movement for an alleged ‘deviation’ from its
historical task became a common theme in communist politics in India, reflecting an unresolved
relationship with popular movements. Roy used the metaphor of ‘destruction’ for the pristine
moment, in which the correspondence between the objective and the subjective moments would
usher in a ‘new era’.

When the natural development of events is blocked artificially, the latent energy forces
itself out and then revolution violently destroys the reactionary forces which threaten the
new era.198

Violence here enters the frame to overcome the gulf between an objective tendency and
subjective volition, with the communist party assigned the task of guaranteeing this
correspondence amidst the crisis of an objective Marxism. The search for an absolute break from
the multiple contradictions constitutive of all social formation not only resulted in endless
accusations of corruption hurled at the mass movement, but also led to ‘purging’ within the
communist party itself, since the latter existed within a heterogeneous landscape, hence
perpetually remaining prone to the impacts of societal corruption.199 It is the possible resolution
of this endless violence in Roy’s later writings that we turn to in the next section.

Politics as Production: A Path Not Taken

From the mid-1920s onward, the Comintern was marked by deep divisions, amplified by the
power struggle within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. By this time Roy had become
an important leader of the Comintern, elected to the Executive Committee in 1926 and later a
representative of the body to China. The massacre of Communist Party members in China at the
hands of the Kuomintang in 1927, and the inability of the communist movement in India to
develop into a popular force compelled a rethinking of political strategy in Roy’s work. Initially
apprehensive about the possibility of working with nationalist forces, Roy became increasingly
interested in the potential of nationalism as a vehicle for popularizing communist ideas, as well
as presenting a united front amongst exploited sections of society against colonial domination.200

This ‘centrist’ position placed Roy in the Comintern conflict on strategic issues confronting
communist parties in Europe and the colonial world. Roy’s emphasis on a moderate line brought
him closer to Stalin and Bukharin against Trotsky in 1926, whom he denounced as an ultra-leftist
adventurer for his advocacy of speeding the process of global revolution. In 1928, after Stalin
had a falling out with Bukharin over the latter’s belief that the collapse of capitalism was not
imminent, Roy continued to support Bukharin’s position in favor of working closely with social
democrats in Europe and with nationalist forces in the colonial world. Stalin’s ascent to power,

198
M.N. Roy, ‘India: Her Past, Present and Future’, in Selected Works of M.N. Roy, ed. Sibnarayan Ray (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1987), vol. I, p. 153.
199
For a detailed discussion on the purges of the violence, see Alain Badiou, The Century, trans. Alberto Toscano
(London: Polity, 2007).
200
Samaren Roy, The Twice Born Heretic (Kolkata: Firma KLM [PVT] LTD., 1986), pp. 135-150.
73
however, meant that the space for political debate became increasingly precarious both in the
CPSU and the Comintern, resulting in a backlash against members opposing the official line.
Roy’s insistence on the need to work with popular forces soon earned him the label of a ‘colonial
apologist’ by Comintern members who believed his willingness to work with the Congress was
nothing short of betrayal. His decision to continue writing for the Brandler Press, the organ of the
communist opposition in Germany, eventually proved to be the last straw, as he was denounced
at the Tenth Plenum of the Executive Council of the Comintern and eventually expelled in
1929.201

These purges were a result of the impasse of communist politics in the twentieth century, faced
with the impossible task of finding a pristine contradiction between the old and the new, and an
all pervasive suspicion of the old seeping into the new. If senior Comintern leaders such as Roy,
not to mention Bukharin, Zinoviev and Trotsky, could be publicly denounced as renegades
colluding with the forces of reaction, it was because there was no objective guarantee for
establishing the separation of the residue of the past from the revolutionary present, a lack that
elevated the elimination of individuals deemed to have betrayed the cause as the sole guarantee
for overcoming suspicion. Commenting on such paranoid forms of violence, which increasingly
moved inwards to wipe out alleged traitors within communist organizations, Roy criticized the
arbitrary methodology deployed to denounce former colleagues in the Comintern.

For some time, I have been standing before the ‘sacred Guillotine’ the mad application of
which is causing such havoc to the International movement [....] Manuilsky clinched the
affair by damning me as a renegade. It was a very simple procedure. No evidence
whatsoever was produced to show how a traditional ‘leftist’ has become a right
opportunist, how one suddenly becomes a ‘renegade’ after more than twenty years’ active
service to the revolution.202

We are then confronted with a politics of volition that resulted in massive violence, directed both
against its opponents as well as its own fraternity. The critiques of ‘totalitarianism’ mentioned at
the beginning of the paper often converge on the monstrosity of the purges, to completely reject
the political sequence opened by the Russian revolution. In the post Second World War period,
Roy himself moved toward the ethical turn, beginning with a critique of Marxism as an
‘unrealistic, empirically unverifiable doctrine’:

As that theoretical deduction from a certain Marxian hypothesis could not be

corroborated by the actualities of life, social development did not take place as predicted
by Karl Marx, even after the working-class captured power and established its
dictatorship in one sixth of the earth.203

201
Haithcox, Communism and Nationalism, pp. 130-138.
202
M.N. Roy, ‘My Crime: An Open Letter to Members of The CI’, in Selected Works of M.N. Roy, ed. Sibnarayan
Ray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), vol. III, p. 583.
203
Roy, Politics, Power and Parties p. 56.
74
From critiquing Marxism as a doctrine that posited ‘freedom as necessity’, Roy eventually
denounced the very idea of collective political action as a threat to the sovereignty of the
individual. The pressures of popular politics had ‘resulted in the prevailing psychological
tendency of seeking security in the mass’, with Roy elevating the recovery of the individual as
the primary task of Radical Humanism. 204

Only when the monster called the masses is decomposed into its component men and
women, will an atmosphere be created in which democratic practice becomes possible.205

Roy’s denunciation of collective political action after almost five decades of political militancy
was a response to the political impasse generated by the unresolved relationship between
necessity and will, with the eventual conclusion that willing freely was impossible under a
collectivist project. Instead, Roy’s attempts to detach freedom from necessity resulted in absolute
indifference to socio-historical realities, evacuating all historical sedimentation from his
description of rational, moral individuals. Our historical tracing of the impasse, however,
allowed us to locate it in the transformed yet truncated relationship between volition and History,
enabling a grounding of this violence in the impossible search for an objective criterion to
legitimize subjective interventions. In fact, there exists a different path opened by Roy in his
twilight years with the Comintern, one that he himself chose not to take in his later years. Let us
then conclude this chapter by reconstructing its trajectory, with particular attention to the way in
which Roy amplifies the torsion between History and volition.

I focus on a text titled ‘An Alarm Call for Self-Examination’, which was published in 1929 in the
‘Brandler Press’ of the communist opposition (KPD) in Germany under the pseudonym of
‘Richard’. This text lies at the intersection between a search for a politics freed from necessity
and his eventual distrust of collective action, thus pregnant with multiple possibilities. The essay
begins with the following quotation from Marx’s Eighteenth of Marx to draw political lessons
from the defeat of the French working class in 1852.

Proletarian revolutionaries criticize themselves constantly, interrupt themselves

continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished task in order
to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and
paltriness of their first attempts [...] until a situation has been created which makes all
turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out!
[...] Here is the rose, here dance!206

Beyond the obvious strategic use of this quote to launch a criticism of the Comintern leadership,
who Roy accused of failing to adequately learn the lessons of a series of defeats in Asia and
Europe, he begins to grasp politics as an autonomous domain in conversation with its own
historical unfolding, accumulating the lessons of previous defeats and preparing for the battles

204
Ibid., p. 58.
205
Ibid., p. 59.
206
M.N. Roy, ‘An Alarm Call for Self-Examination’, in Selected Works of M.N. Roy, ed. Sibnarayan Ray (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1990), vol. III, p. 234.
75
ahead. In his attempt to distance himself from a fantastical belief held by the Comintern that the
global conjuncture was on the verge of victorious communist revolution, Roy began to sever the
umbilical cord that attached volition to necessity and had generated such ungrounded optimism
for an imminent revolutionary explosion. Instead, Roy sought an alternative grounding for the
dialectics of communist politics, one in which political thought could overcome its impasse
through an interrogation of its own role in partisan struggles.

Crises, like the present one, lie grounded in the essence of a proletarian revolution that is
yet to mature its dialectics. The revolution will grow stronger and become invincible to
the extent (as we understand it) that it learns from the crises and overcomes them
relentlessly […] We must pay equal attention to our defeats and our victories.207

Roy ties the ‘maturing’ of the revolutionary dialectics to the ability of communists to patiently
examine the lessons of past contestations, rather than waiting for an ideal time for political action
or misrecognizing the present as always on the verge of a revolution. While such patient analysis
replaced attempts to synchronize political movements with the laws of History, it did not mean
that Roy was proposing to de-link political thought from articulation with concrete reality. In fact
Roy was developing a stronger relationship with social reality in this text, freed from the
purported directionality advocated by the dominant trend in the Comintern.

The will to victory is an inherent characteristic of any revolutionary movement. But there
are also other factors which are no less essential [….] If these factors are absent, the
revolutionaries have to be careful that they are not driven by the admirable qualities of
the will to win to such an extent that they lose sight of the actual conditions of the given
situation. Revolution is no romance, it is tied to reality.208

In fact, the entire text is directed against an infantile form of willing divorced from material
reality, that eventually justifies itself only through a theoretical basis in necessity. Roy here is at
his boldest, refusing to take comfort in notions of an uninterrupted movement toward
communism, instead accepting the intellectual challenge of producing a cohesive politics from
the lessons of a pessimistic reality. In the same text, Roy conducts a critique of ‘ultra-leftism’ of
the communist leadership in Germany, which had called for a general strike without adequate
preparation.

That the policy of the Party was based on a misunderstanding of the situation was
decisively proven by the incidents that followed. The call for a general strike went
unheeded […] Even a protest-strike for a few hours could not materialize [...] Throughout
the entire course the people denied the party of its following [….] In such a case the Party
has to recognize the vainness of its heroic gestures and dedicate itself to the more
difficult task of regaining the confidence of the masses, which has been lost largely as a
consequence of the last adventure. 209

207
Ibid., p. 237.
208
Ibid., p. 235.
209
Ibid., p. 236.
76
Roy was even more critical of the Comintern’s position on India, which dismissed any form of
anti-colonial nationalism not under the communist leadership as an equivalent to colonialism.

Today, the whole country except the proletariat and the peasantry has come to be
considered as counter-revolutionary. The communists must now lead the working class
against the entire united front of counter-revolutionaries who, according to this theory,
include everyone from the British Viceroys to the petty bourgeois nationalists who threw
bombs at the Legislative Assembly as a mark of protest against oppression.210

The lumping together of disparate groups as ‘counter-revolutionary’ resulted in a politics

completely unable and unwilling to establish hegemony over the anti-colonial movement. Such a
politics aimed to ride on the movement of History in anticipation of a pristine contradiction
between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, eventually colliding to end the class struggle that
had structured human society since eternity. If the anticipated revolutionary moment failed to
materialize, the deficiency was attributed to reality rather than theory, insisting that the former
needed more time for the ‘maturing’ of the socio-economic contradictions in preparation for the
eventual epochal battle.

Against such infantile enthusiasm, Roy called for a politics that existed in history, one that aimed
to tease out the relations amongst specific sociological terms, and remained open to a fidelity to
unprecedented events that could transform these relations. If the latter was displayed in Roy’s
attempts at unhinging Marxist orthodoxy in the wake of the anti-colonial struggle, the former
became evident in Roy’s insistence on tracing the trajectory of this event within the multiplicity
of contradictions existing in society, instead of searching for a neat social dichotomy sanctioned
by theory. Such attempts to form a self-reflexive conception of political subjectivity have been
characterized by Bosteels as a move from ‘Politicizing History’ to a ‘Historicization of
Politics’.211 The latter allows politics to develop as a result of accumulating lessons from its own
history, without relying on an external referent to legitimize itself. By severing its basis in
necessity and conducting an analysis based on concrete reality, Roy was making a final attempt
to salvage communist politics in the wake of a series of catastrophic mistakes made by the
Comintern leadership.

The incapacity to learn from experience characterizes the present crisis of the
international communist movement [....] The absence of a healthy and constructive
criticism which would be feared by the leaders of the movement, goes hand in hand with
a lamentable mental stagnation that holds its ground under the mask of ‘seclusionism’
and the garb of mechanical discipline. The result is that mistakes, instead of getting
corrected, produce new mistakes [….] Theories are made, not on the basis of vital facts,

210
Ibid., p. 239.
211
Bosteels, Badiou and Politics, pp. 1-45. Politicizing History refers to attempts at closing the gap between
necessity and freedom through political will. Historicizing Politics, on the other hand, refers to politics freed from
the realm of necessity, and one that is able to examine its own historical unfolding without any objective normative
categories. We will discuss this difference in greater detail in the next chapter.
77
 but with a view to justifying mistakes which arise either from ignorance or from well-
intentioned experimentation.212

Conclusion

Roy’s call for untying the knot between History and volition was ignored by the Comintern,
leading to the decimation of communist parties in Europe and India in the early 1930s. Roy
returned to India in 1929 to form an alternative communist movement, but was soon arrested on
conspiracy charges that had been accumulating for a decade and half since he had left the
country. Upon his release after half a decade in prison, Roy moved closer to the national
movement, joining the Congress Socialist Party to widen the base of the anti-colonial struggle.
He had a falling out with the Congress Party over the Quit India Movement in 1942, insisting
that the rise of fascism demanded a temporary united front with the British, without which the
goal of freedom would be further deferred. Roy formed the Radical Democratic Party to support
the war effort, and after six years in obscurity, disbanded the outfit in 1948 to focus on
philosophical work.213

The wholesale dismissal of his own political past as a misguided adventure stemmed from a
series of defeats encountered by Roy in his political career. Yet, I argue that Roy’s interventions
are best understood as theoretical and political innovations, suspended at the nodal point of
clarifying the relationship between History and volition. An unquestioned fidelity to Marxist
orthodoxy would have annulled the very possibility of anti-colonial politics, which propelled
Roy to push Lenin’s ideas to the unfamiliar terrain of the colonial world. Concomitantly, his
attempts to bridge will and necessity via the party elevated the latter to the sole arbiter of
political authenticity, resulting in an endless cycle of violence against elements deviating from
norms established by the party, finally leading to Roy’s own ‘purging’ from the organization.
Radical humanism, with an absolute disconnect between freedom and necessity, and the
consequent lack of a theory of subjectivity, was one outcome of the widening gulf between these
two realms. His persistent critique of official communist politics in the late 1920s and early
1930s, however, pointed towards a different yet unfinished trajectory in his thought that allowed
for a political subjectivity freed from any external referent, while simultaneously remaining
attentive to the specificities of a historical formation.

Roy hinted at, but was never fully able to explicate, the mediation between transcendental ideas
and existing reality, partly due to his absence from India for much of his political life. Yet, the
challenge to clarify this relationship remains central if we are to move beyond the political
imaginaries imposed by the grim realities of modern capitalism, while simultaneously avoiding
an otherworldly posturing that ignores the specificities of the terrain through which politics must
pass.214 We will further explore this question in the next chapter on communism’s (missed)
encounters with popular politics in colonial India.

212
Roy, ‘An Alarm Call’, p. 237.
213
Manjapra, M.N. Roy, pp. 152-167.
214
Peter Hallward discussing similar themes his new work on political. Hallward, ‘The Will of the People’, pp. 17-
29
78
79
 Chapter 4
Islam, Communism and the Search for a Fiction

In one of her major public interventions on the post-9/11 security challenges to the West, former
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sought to draw parallels between the ‘War on Terror’
and the ‘Cold War’.215 Provocatively titled ‘Islamism is the new Bolshevism’, her article argued
that, despite the novelty of contemporary Islamism, its ‘best parallel is with early communism’.
She added,

Islamic extremism today, like bolshevism in the past, is an armed doctrine. It is an

aggressive ideology promoted by fanatical, well-armed devotees. And, like communism,
it requires an all-embracing long-term strategy to defeat it.216

Mrs. Thatcher was not the only public figure in the West who placed communism as a political
precedent to the ‘Islamist threat’ to Occidental governments, owing to their shared ‘fanaticism’.
Indeed a number of politicians, policy-makers, intellectuals and security experts have
emphasised the apparent continuity between the challenges posed by Communism and Islamism
to a liberal Western order.217 The ostensible boldness and novelty of this genealogy, however,
seems to melt away once we turn our gaze towards the colonial era, and the British
characterization of the simultaneously burgeoning Islamist and Communist movements against
colonial rule.

In the aftermath of the First World War, the British-Indian intelligence community extended its
operations to the ‘Mohamedan world’ to counter the activities of ‘Indian revolutionaries.’ The
latter were increasingly exploring the possibilities of forging alliances with the larger Muslim
world, where countries as diverse as Turkey, Egypt, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan were gripped
by popular movements against Empire. Colonial anxieties were exacerbated after the
commencement of the Khilafat Movement (1919-1922), a popular movement in India against
British plans to abolish the Ottoman Empire, and perhaps the most significant challenge to
imperial rule since 1857, as we shall discuss later.218 Such attempts by Muslim (and non-
Muslim) Indians to forge a new anti-colonial political geography centered on Muslim lands
forced the intelligence agencies in British India to make ‘Mohammadan lands’ the primary sites
for their activities, particularly to combat the threat posed to Empire by pan-Islamic radicalism.

215
This chapter is a re-worked version of my article published in Muslims Against the Muslim League: Critiques of
the Idea of Pakistan, eds. Ali Usman Qasmi and Megan Eaton Robb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2017), pp. 255-284.
216
Margaret Thatcher, ‘Islamism is the New Bolshevism’, The Guardian (February 12, 2002),
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/feb/12/afghanistan.politics, accessed 17th November, 2015.
217
See David Satter, ‘Yesterday Communism, Today Radical Islam’, Forbes (November 3, 2009),
http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/30/ideology-islam-communism-opinions-contributors-berlin-wall-09-david-
satter.html accessed 16th November, 2015.
218
See Gail Minault, The Khilafat Movement: Religious Symbolism and Political Mobilization in India (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1982).
80
Yet, towards the mid-1920s, with the decline of the Caliphate movement and the rise of the
Soviet Union as a competing power in Muslim Asia, the primary task of British intelligence
networks shifted from simply combating political Islam, to also, more importantly, acting as a
bulwark against the spread of communism to India and the Middle East. Consider the following
reports from Sir David Petrie, the head of Indian intelligence (1924-1927), on the confluence
between the battle against political Islam and communism.

But another factor of greater importance which has frequently caused

embarrassment, less on the account of the extent of the organisation itself than of
the fanatical character of its members, has been the colony of Hindustani fanatics,
commonly known as the mujahidin who, though mercenaries and in themselves
insignificant, have from time to time been used, or have lent themselves, for anti-
British activities. It is in this respect that they have engaged the attention of the
Bolsheviks, with a view to perhaps their being used as a means of communication
with India through their adherents.219

Thus, when viewed from the perspective of colonial self-preservation, we witness the emergence
of a conceptual vocabulary around the word ‘fanatic’ to co-join the communist and the Islamist
projects, a legacy that continues today. What disrupts such a neat placement of political Islam
and communism together, however, is the actual history of political events of the 20th century in
the Muslim world. Communism and political Islam were often pitted against each other in
perhaps one of the most enduring and fiercest rivalries of the Cold War era. From the Middle
East to South/Central Asia to the Far East, communists and islamists battled each other to win
political hegemony, often resulting in deadly clashes, including for example in Indonesia in the
1960s, or in Pakistan in the 1980s. This political contestation was registered within the domain
of intellectual production, with communist intellectuals accusing political Islam of being tied to
the vestiges of a failing past, while the latter accused communism of being a foreign, and hence,
an imported political ideology.220

We are then presented with a curious case of two global political ideologies that seem to follow
each other like a shadow, either equated as principal threats to liberal universalism, or presented
as fierce adversaries fighting to win political hegemony in the non-European world. If we can
dismiss the liberal attempts to equate the two currents as the official ideology of Western
imperialism, the distinctions made between ‘scientific socialism’ or ‘authentic Islam’ by
partisans of these political projects will also have to be scrutinized, since they were based on the
repression of an embarrassing past in which ‘Islamists’ and ‘Communists’ worked together,
often in the same organizations, to build an anti-imperialist project. The relationship between the
two then remains a spectre that is excessively invoked but is seldom conceptualized or even
historicized, and at other times, is consciously forgotten.

Yet, its continuous return calls for a genealogical investigation into the relationship between
Islam and Communism to unearth both the subterranean connections and antagonisms that

219
Petrie, Communism in India, p. 300.
220
See Tariq Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (London; Verso, 2003).
81
permit such repeated equivalence. My aim in this chapter is three-fold. First, I want to provide a
historical and conceptual basis for analyzing perplexing similarities between communism and
political Islam. Centring my argument on the specificity of colonial India in the 1920s, I argue
that such resonances existed due to the historical moment in which Britain’s imperial order
appeared intellectually, if not politically, exhausted, prompting activists to seek newer horizons
for imagining a future political community. I deploy the concepts of ‘distancing’, ‘negation’ and
‘heroic sacrifice’ as aspects of the shared subjectivity between Communism and political Islam.
We can delineate the contours of these overlapping tendencies, however, only if we view Islam
and communism as political projects in the making within specific histories of anti-colonialism,
rather than as stemming from unrelated, and even opposed, textual traditions. Consequently, I
show how exigencies of the political conjuncture always stood in primacy to any straightforward
textual fidelity.

Second, I argue that communism’s entry into Indian politics was overdetermined by the
specificity of the political conjuncture. I develop the idea of a political ‘fiction’ as a method for
conceptualizing decisions taken to develop new horizons for self-relating.

Finally, I posit that despite a shared geneology, communism and Islam differed in important
ways during this period, in particular on their conception of a future political community. I
particularly highlight the central role played by a permanent ‘antagonism’ in communist thought
in the anti-colonial world.

I tell this story through the figure of Shaukat Usmani, a forgotten figure of the Indian communist
movement who was perhaps one of the best known communists outside Europe during the
1920s. His early life allows for a study of both the convergence and the splitting of political
islam and communism since he traversed both these ideological spectrums in the charged
political atmosphere of the 1920s.

Shaukat Usmani: A Short Biography

Born in 1901 in Bikaner, Rajasthan, Usmani became involved in the Caliphate Movement in
1919 while he was still a student in school. In his memoirs, Usmani often ignores or downplays
his involvement in this religiously inspired movement, as is evident in his later characterization
of the movement as

...the greatest drawback to India’s progress. It strengthened the extra-territorial

sympathies of the Indian Muslims and cut them more and more asunder from the
Nationalist movement. 221

Yet, Usmani never criticizes his own involvement in the movement, which had compelled him to
leave his home and face death on a number of occasions. I shall later return to the significance of
Usmani’s condemnation of a past movement while simultaneously attempting to redeem his own

221
Shaukat Usmani, Peshawar to Moscow: Leaves from an Indian Muhajireen’s Diary (Delhi: Swaraj Publishing
House, 1927), p. 13.
82
role in it. Usmani responded to a call by a number of Ulema imploring Indian Muslims to
migrate to Muslim-ruled lands after British plans to dismember the Ottoman Caliphate were
revealed. As one of the earliest recruits to this movement, which witnessed the exodus of 36,000
people from India, Usmani left for Afghanistan in early 1920, en route to Turkey to join the
forces of Enver Pasha, who were believed to be defending the Caliphate against the British
Empire. Recalling his abrupt decision to join this movement, Usmani sought to highlight the
desire of the Indian youth to escape the drudgery of colonial rule.

Some of us had started with high hopes when we had left our homes, of being able to
liberate our country and drive away British imperialists. I had sharply rebuked a
classmate of mine at the railway station of Bikaner a few days before leaving for hijrat,
when he had sarcastically remarked, ‘What about your holidays, are you also going to
some hill stations to pass your summer vacations?’ I had retorted ‘No, I am going to the
other side of the Pamirs to bring calamity on the heads of the British rulers whom your
relatives are serving so obediently.’ This had completely silenced him. He was the son of
a surgeon in the British service.222

Usmani, who left for Afghanistan with the ‘third batch’ of the Muhajirs (totaling 80 people), was
welcomed by none other than the Amir of Afghanistan, who provided lodging for these
youngsters as state guests at Jabal-us-Sirah, a hill station near Afghanistan. The purpose of this
seclusion was to provide military and political training to the Muhajirin before they could be
integrated into Afghan society. Soon, however, differences emerged between the Muhajirin and
Afghan authorities, as the former asked for more access to major cities such as Kabul, eventually
asking to be relieved to continue their journey towards Turkey to fight in defense of the Ottoman
Empire. Part of their decision to leave Afghanistan in the autumn of 1920, a few months after
their arrival, was influenced by the lack of enthusiasm for the Caliphate Movement amongst the
Afghan population:

The Khilafat which meant so much to the Indian Muhammedans had no meaning
whatsoever for the Afghan masses. They remained quite indifferent to it, save a
few who saw in it a potent weapon against the British government. To an average
religious Afghan, millat [nation] did not mean more than nation….I invite our
Moulanas to come with me to Afghanistan, Turkestan, Azerbaijan or Turkey and
show me half the zeal about Khalifa and Arabia there, as we see in India...It was
the pursuit of some higher ideals that had forced us to quit it (Jaba-us-Saraj), so
very early, and we left it much in the same way as we had left our homes.223

Despite the setback in Afghanistan, the search for ‘higher ideals’ impelled Usmani and others to
continue their journey. Entering Turkestan after a perilous journey across the border, the
Muhajirin, found themselves in the middle of intense civil strife between pro-Bolshevik forces
against the traditional ruling classes of Central Asia. A split occurred within the ranks of the
Muhajirin over their relationship with the political developments in Turkestan. A few, including

222
Ibid., p. 32.
223
Ibid., pp. 15-17.
83
Usmani, insisted on staying in the Soviet Union, while others were adamant about leaving
Central Asia for Turkey to launch a Jihad. The Soviet authorities persuaded Usmani to remain
with the larger group, since they believed that a division amongst the Muhajirin over the Soviet
Union would tarnish the image of communism in Indian nationalist circles. In a bizarre event
(which I will discuss later), Turkestani authorities seized the boat of the Muhajirin as soon as
they left Soviet waters, accusing them of being Bolsheviks. Sentenced to death, only a host of
contingent of circumstances, including bombardments from rival factions, secured the release of
the Muhajirin, who immediately headed back to Soviet-controlled Asia.224

These experiences had exhausted Usmani’s inclination towards the Caliphate, and he became
keenly interested in the communist project. He promptly joined the revolutionary committee to
defend Bokhara against the forces of the former amir (leader). Shortly thereafter he was called to
Moscow, and later to Tashkent, by M.N. Roy, who was given the responsibility by the
Comintern to coordinate revolutionary movements in Asia. Studying first at the University of the
Toilers of the East, which had been set up by Lenin specifically for non-European students, and
then, moving to Moscow, Usmani studied Marxist theory, and undertook military training. He
eventually became a leader of the newly constituted ‘Communist Party of India’ in Tashkent in
1920.225

Usmani returned to India at the end of 1922 as a partisan of the communist movement, was
arrested in 1924 in the famous Kanpur Conspiracy Case of 1923, and then was jailed for 4 years.
Released in 1927, he left for the Soviet Union to participate in the Sixth Comintern Congress,
where he was welcomed as one of the most important international figures of the communist
movement, giving him a place on the Presidium of the Congress, seated only third from Stalin.226
On his return to India, he was arrested in the infamous Meerut Conspiracy Case in 1929 and was
sentenced to life in prison. A global campaign for his release (and the release of other prisoners)
was organised. Usmani also achieved the distinction of being the first Indian to contest the
British general elections while imprisoned in an Indian jail, when the Communist Party of Great
Britain nominated him as a candidate in 1929. While his election campaign further enhanced his
status as a global celebrity of the communist movement, the Indian political scene changed
rapidly during this period, challenging the rootless ‘cosmopolitanism’ of the preceding decades,
as I elaborate later. Local communist leaders challenged the ‘Emigre’ leadership of the party,
ousting many of its founding members in 1932, including Usmani himself.227

Usmani’s political rise and fall was nothing short of spectacular. Welcomed by the King of
Afghanistan as a 19-year-old muhajir, developing personal relations with political giants such as
Stalin, Zinoviev, Nehru, Maulana Muhammad Ali, and even Enver Pasha, in whose name he had
left Bikaner in the winter of 1920, he became one of the most prominent Indian political figures
on the international scene. Yet, by 1932, dejected due to his ouster from the communist party, he
quit active politics at the young age of 31, devoting his life to journalism and literary writing,

224
Ibid., pp. 23-27.
225
Ibid., pp. 37-50.
226
See Shaukat Usmani, I Met Stalin Twice (Bombay: K. Kurian, 1953).
227
Overstreet and Windmiller, Communism in India, p. 135.
84
with a number of fictional portrayals of his voyages across Central Asia. Usmani, however,
remained engaged with exploring progressive political possibilities within the Muslim world, as
he moved to Cairo in 1964 to join Lotus, a literary magazine of the Afro-Asian People’s
Solidarity Organisation. During this period, he also worked closely with the Palestine Liberation
Organization, penning a book dedicated to the Palestinian struggle.228 An Indian ‘Islamist’ who
embraced communism but remained closely tied to political causes in the Muslim world,
Usmani’s story is one of intellectual and political promiscuity opened by the inter-war period, a
project that, nonetheless, remained politically and intellectually incomplete. Writing in 1976, two
years before his death, he emphasized this lack of closure in his political life:

Sweet memories of that period still haunt me, give me inspiration sometimes and at
others depress me because we are still far away from the goal which we cherish.229

‘Divine Cry of Lenin’: Communism and Political Islam

The intense rivalry in Asia between the Soviet Union and the British Empire in the 1920s was
not only a conflict between two different socio-economic visions for the region, but in its
geographical specificity was also a contestation to become the sovereign of Muslim Asia after
the impending collapse of the Ottoman Empire. In fact, what is often termed the ‘National
Question’ in the Soviet Union was primarily a ‘Muslim Question’ since a majority of
‘nationalities’ in the country consisted of Muslims in Central Asia. Posing the most radical
challenge in developing a political relationship between communism and the non-European
world, the newly installed Bolshevik government immediately sought a common ground with
Islamic movements challenging the British Empire, or the remnants of Tsarism within Central
Asia. A special appeal to ‘Muslims’ sent out in December 1917 highlights the significance
attached to political Islam by the newly installed Soviet authorities.

Muslims of the East! Persia, Turks, Arabs, and Indians! All you whose lives and
property, whose freedom and homelands were for centuries merchandise for trade by
rapacious European plunderers! All of you whose countries the robber who began the war
now want to divide amongst themselves...Lose no time in throwing off the ancient
oppressors of your homelands...Muslims of Russia! Muslims of the East! In the task of
regenerating the world we look to you for sympathy and support.230

Here, we witness the contradictory movement inherent in the historical conjuncture within which
the Soviet state found itself. The lack of revolutionary enthusiasm in Europe, the centrality of
Central Asia to any modern state-building project and the emergence of an anti-British pan-
islamism compelled Bolshevik leaders to develop new alliances outside their traditional
relationships with European communists. Such calls for support were followed by a number of
concrete measures to forge unity, including the formation of a ‘Muslim Congress’ in Petrograd,
the introduction of Sharia courts in Central Asia, and a financial campaign to fund a ‘global

228
See Shaukat Usmani, Glimpses of Palestine: Past and Present (Cairo: Anglo-Egyptian Bookshop, 1973).
229
Ibid., p.73.
230
Ramnath, Haj to Utopia, p. 194.
85
Jihad’ against the British, particularly amongst the Pushtun tribes of India. In fact, at the Baku
Congress of the Peoples of the East held in 1920, Soviet leaders such as Zinoviev repeatedly
pledged support to anti-colonial movements in the Muslim world, describing the freedom of
‘Muslim lands’ as one of the primary internationalist duties of the revolution.231

The sentiments were largely mutual, as some of the most important Muslim scholars called on
Muslims to take inspiration from the Soviet revolution in their own efforts to regenerate the
Muslim world. In fact, rather than viewing Bolshevism as a European tradition incommensurate
with Islam, many sought to displace it onto a quasi-spiritual register to allow for a common
political project. Maulana Mohammad Barkatallah, a popular Indian revolutionary with strong
sympathies for pan-Islamism, called on Muslims to ‘embrace’ socialism ‘seriously and
enthusiastically’.

Following on the dark long nights of tsarist autocracy, the dawn of human freedom has
appeared on the Russian horizon, with Lenin as the shining sun giving light and
splendour to this day of human happiness... Oh Muhammedans! Listen to this divine cry.
Respond to this call of liberty, equality and brothership which brother Lenin and the
Soviet government of Russia are offering you.232

This adequation between the ‘divine cry’ of Lenin and the historical regeneration of the Muslim
nation may seem anachronistic today, but it remained a dominant theme in the evaluation of the
Soviet government in Muslim political thought during this epoch. Religious scholars ranging
from Obeidullah Sindhi, who was a member of the Indian provisional government in
Afghanistan, to Maulana Hasrat Mohani, who became one of the founding members of India’s
first Communist Party, praised Soviet policies towards Muslim Asia and sought to develop
fraternal relations between Communism and political Islam.233 Even Maulana Muhammad Ali
Jauhar, the principal leader of the Khilafat Movement, contacted Shaukat Usmani to explore the
possibility of opening up a channel for Soviet funding. It is not surprising, then, that the first
Emigre Communist Party of India formed in 1921 consisted entirely of Indian Muslims based in
the Soviet Union, and almost all of them were related to the pan-Islamic movements of the era.234

My objective in recalling these events is not to inscribe this shared history between political
Islam and communism onto the register of political or geostrategic interests. In such narratives, it
is simply an ‘aligning’ of interests between unrelated political currents that allow for such
momentary alliances. Claiming to be free from an ideological bias but deeply embedded to a
positivist sociology, such analyses naturalize ‘interests’ onto certain sections of society, without
investigating the hard labor through which individuals or groups even begin to identify with
particular causes. For a Muslim or an Indian or a worker is under no abstract obligation to
identify with any one particular cause, let alone to agree to sacrifice his life for it, an act that

231
Dave Couch, ‘The Bolsheviks and Islam’, International Socialism: A Quarterly Review of Socialist Theory 110
(2006), http://isj.org.uk/the-bolsheviks-and-islam/ accessed on 7th August 2015.
232
Couch, ‘The Bolsheviks and Islam’, (2006)..
233
Ramnath, Haj to Utopia, pp. 194-197.
234
Adhikari, Documents of the History, pp. 1-10.
86
blurs the very criterion for judging interests. Moreover, as Faisal Devji has argued, the
conceptual tools used to justify particular movements or momentary alliances often obtain a life
beyond both the ‘inner motives’ of their authors as well as the immediacy of the political
conjuncture.235 My own aim now is to demonstrate that beyond the multiple contingent reasons
that brought together specific encounters between political Islam and Soviet communism, there
are more deeply embedded questions of a shared historical subjectivity that allow these two
political currents to recurrently overlap throughout the twentieth century.

The Act of ‘Distancing’

A number of scholars have argued that the inability of Indian subjects to compete with the
material wealth of Europe prompted the construction of an ‘inner’ domain or spiritual essence of
the nation, both superior to, and uncorrupted from, the experience of Western colonialism.236
From sanyasis to sufis to a number of other ascetic currents in India in the late 19th century,
aimed to re-configure spiritual rituals as transformative practices for carving out an indigenous
mode of existence, autonomous from the constraints of a colonized world. A key feature of these
practices included an active distancing from material and ideological coordinates of colonial life
through embodied sacrifice and personal suffering. In a world dominated by a colonial ideology
preaching gradual assimilation of Indian subjects into the imperial project, and held together by
the terror of unrestrained violence, rejecting the comforts of material life and voluntarily
undertaking bodily suffering were aimed at creating a bulwark against one’s submission to the
compulsions of Colonial rule, at least in the realm of ideology.

Once the modern Indian political burst onto the scene with the onslaught of the Caliphate/non-
cooperation movement, the motif of collective sacrifice and transformative violence took center
stage in the Indian political landscape. From local to transnational ‘terror’ outfits, to organs of
mass ‘national’ politics, the question of self-negating violence dominated the political
imagination in India. Maulana Muhammad Ali Jauhar, the leader of the Caliphate movement
which acted as the first inspiration for Shaukat Usmani, had already called upon Muslims to
‘sacrifice their health, wealth and life in the name of God’ and urged them to decide what ‘they
intended to do and announce it plainly, leaving the authorities to decide their own course of
action as they pleased’.237 Indeed, Devji has shown that even Gandhi, often held up as an
example of liberal humanism in the West, based his theories of non-violence on the absolute
rejection of life preservation as an ideal, instead privileging a relationship with death through
voluntary suffering as a more authentic mode of existence.238

Such indifference to colonial sovereignty and commitment to axiomatic declarations were

attempts to forge a political subjectivity freed from the seductive calculations and imposing

235
Devji, Muslim Zion, pp. 1-12.
236
Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragment. pp. 6-9.
237
Mushirul Hasan and Pernau Margrit, Regionalizing Pan-Islamism: Documents on the Khilafat Movement (New
Delhi: Manohar Publishers and Distributors, 2005), p. 13.
238
Devji, The Impossible Indian, pp. 151-184.
87
violence of colonial rule.239 The absolute disjunct between a linear conception of Historical
progress that had ungirded imperial ideology, and the actual global events that unleashed
unprecedented catastrophes on a planetary scale since the outbreak of the First World War,
necessitated such a distancing. As Shruti Kapila has argued in her reading of Tilak, a foremost
Indian nationalist, the emergence of the Indian political was conceived as being tied to a non-
historicist conception of a violent event that could overcome the increasingly stifling reality of
colonial rule.240 In this conception, politics is neither merely an individual or collective
relationship to the state, nor an expression of historically sedimented contradictions, but is
instead a process of creative production aiming to overcome a political deadlock, with
transformative violence as its motor. It is no wonder then that the Caliphate movement, which
coincided with the peace celebrations of World War 1 in India, urged a boycott of the
celebrations in favor of a martyrs’ week to commemorate Indians killed by the British, indicating
that the war had only begun in India.241

The Caliphate Movement then provided the necessary ruptural event from Imperial rule that
could inaugurate a political modernity beyond the contours of colonial governmentality. In the
ensuing decade, it became the reference point for all the major currents in Indian political life, as
Islamists, nationalists, ‘terrorists,’ and even communists, oriented themselves by claiming
fidelity to it. Shaukat Usmani’s political career itself was the product of the Caliphate Movement
as he, in a supreme act of self-negation, left his home in the hope of finding adequate resources
for launching an effective war against imperial rule. The act of self-exile in the Hijrat movement
inscribed a physical geography to the distancing sought from colonial ideology, as partisans
literally explored novel frontiers for developing new forms of political praxis. But how did
Usmani, and many others like him, subsist in this breach opened by the mass upheavals in India,
guarding against the threats and temptations of re-assimilation?

The Interregnum: Between Negation and Death

The positing of an absolute negation of colonial rule did not signify that Indian revolutionaries
possessed a neatly laid out plan to replace it. This was a moment of purely axiomatic claims
against the Empire, as well as its alleged allies within Indian society, to mark out the emergent
political community from a decaying political order. The Indian political imagination was at a
crossroads, with the old one dying and the ‘new yet to be born’.242 A decomposition without a
239
This is not to make the rather exaggerated claim that there was an absolute binary between colonial and anti-
colonial politics. Indeed, heterogeneous forms of political subjectivity existed in the 1920s, which often engaged
productively with questions of equality and dignity within colonial India. My claim, however, is that following the
Amritsar massacre, the status quo was deemed unstable by both the government (which resorted to emergency
measures) and political organizations in India, including the Congress, which began calling for immediate
independence. It was the overlapping of an end in the belief of colonial infallibility and a desire for a post-colonial
future that led to the search for newer horizons for political action in the present. A key aspect of developing a
politics incongruous with the colonial present was to demarcate an autonomous space for political action, a praxis I
call “distancing,” as I explain later.
240
Kapila, ‘A History of Violence’, pp. 445-454.
241
Hasan and Margrit, Regionalizing Pan-Islamism, p. 11.
242
See David Forgacs and Eric Hobsbawm, The Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935 (New
York: New York University Press, 2000).
88
recomposition, a destruction sans a reconstruction, a negation without an affirmation, this
interregnum was marked by a ferocious violence, which could easily shift from being deployed
against colonial officials to a fratricidal war against religiously or ethnically marked
communities.

The 1920s raised novel questions on both the form and content of anti-colonial politics. The
intellectual promiscuity characteristic of the 1910s, in which political organizations as varied as
the Congress and the Ghadar Party avoided explicit ideological borders, imbibing instead on
disparate ideologies deemed incongruous in European political thought. The defeat of the non-
cooperation movement led to multiple fissures within the nationalist movement, while the
Colonial state’s efforts to implement punishments based on alleged associations with ideologies,
aided the process of consolidating ideological and consequently, organizational demarcations. It
is no wonder then that the intelligence apparatus in India deemed the entry of ideologically
driven into India as the greatest threat to Colonial stability, going as far as using the presence of
Marxist literature as the strongest evidence for indicting a number of anti-colonial activists in the
infamous Meerut Conspiracy Case. I argue against the romanticization of a ‘pre-ideological’ era
of the late 1910s and early 1920s by demonstrating that the need for political ideology as a new
compass was felt precisely as a result of an impasse within anti-colonial politics which operated
with a simple (ideological) binary between the colonizers and the colonized. The bursting of
popular politics in Colonial India meant that social contradictions, including class, caste,
religion, gender etc, could not be easily integrated within the dominant nationalist narrative. The
formation of political projects that could recognize such disparate contradictions and turn them
into political antagonisms, as well as colonial differentiations amongst political currents,
prompted the need for ideological affiliation. 243

Indeed, Usmani characterised his own decision to leave India as not only stemming out of
opposition to British rule, but also out of disgust at the ‘nonviolence’ of the movement, ‘a cult
destitute of any dynamic force,’ which ‘did not appeal in the least’ to ‘the younger
imagination’.244

Usmani’s journey thus begins as a search for a politics that could usher in a radical beginning for
a future political community. We mentioned earlier how Usmani in his writings simultaneously
denounced the ‘misadventure’ of Hijrat as orchestrated by Muslim fanatics while glorifying his
own heroic rule during the epic journey. In fact, in one of his travelogues written from prison in
1927, meant to be one of the most important works of propaganda for the communist movement,
Usmani narrates the heroism of this journey as part of his credentials as a communist leader.
From what subjective position, then, can one of the most widely acknowledged events of modern
political Islam be re-inscribed into the short history of the burgeoning communist movement in
India? Such a collapsing of the two political currents onto each other allows us to locate the
shared subjectivity of this period, held together in the search for a politics adequate to a future
political community.

243
See Ali Raza, ‘Separating the Wheat from the Chaff: Meerut and the Creation of “Official” Communism in
India’ Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and Middle East 33:3 (2013), pp. 316-333.
244
Usmani, Peshawar to Moscow, p.1.
89
The Hijrat Movement provided thousands of Indians ‘an opportunity for going outside and
studying the methods of other countries.’245 This search for new horizons signify the
experimental nature of this period which at least partly explains the overlapping of multiple
political trends before they became anchored into precise ideological and organizational
disciplines. Such a search intensified in Usmani’s life as he, along with a group of Muhajirs,
became increasingly dissatisfied with the lack of political orientation in ‘Muslim Afghanistan’.246
The wrath of the Muhajirin had quickly turned from British officials to Muslim rulers,
particularly the Amir of Afghanistan, who was accused of curbing their enthusiasm by keeping
them isolated in Jabal-us-Siraj, cut off from any political or intellectual activities. This was by no
means a light charge, since the characteristic impatience of anti-colonial politics was precisely
aimed against a ‘politics of waiting’ imposed by colonial rule in which colonial subjects could
attain their full being through a gradual civilizing process supervised by the colonial state.

What role did violence play in this interregnum, characterized by a passionate wandering without
clearly defined goals or a strategic axis to achieve them? The embracing of a heroic death
provided possible destinations that could vindicate the journey begun in India. Indeed, in an
interregnum where the map of the journey-to-come remained insufficiently imagined, death was
elevated to the principal guarantee for subsisting in the negation opened by anti-colonial revolts.
I will elaborate this point with an anecdote from Usmani’s travelogues. As already mentioned,
the Muhajirin were arrested in late 1920 by Turkestani authorities as Bolshevik spies, and were
ordered to be executed. The reasons for their arrest are not entirely clear from Usmani’s account,
owing largely to the fact that none of the Muhajirin spoke Turkish and hence did not fully
comprehend all the discussions. Yet, it is clear that at least from the perspective of Usmani, it
was a case of mistaken identity, since the Muhajirin had arrived to support the Turkestani
authorities.247 Let me now quote some passages that describe Usmani’s thoughts minutes before
an execution that seemed imminent, in order to shed light on the role of death within this chaotic
moment.

There was death-like silence, no one stirred or lifted his head. The rifles were levelled at
our heads in order. The second message that came confirmed the first one. The
commander made a similar announcement. This time the rifles were loaded and we were
convinced that our end was near.... Death began to dance before our eyes. Nothing was
visible, save death stark naked...It was a matter of a few more minutes…With our heads
bowed down we were reviewing our past. Within a few moments our imagination
travelled from home to Kabul, from Kabul to Tirmiz to the massacre ghat…. We resigned
ourselves to our fate and had some consolation that we were dying in pursuit of noble and

245
Ibid., p.1.
246
Ibid., p. 20.
247
From Usmani’s account, it seemed as if the local warlords, fearful of a Soviet invasion, hastily arrested the
Muhajirin arriving from Soviet territory and handed out a death sentence. Usmani does not provide detailed reasons
for his arrest and sentence, claiming that the language barrier prevented him from understanding the intricacies of
the situation.
90
 high principles. We reviewed our past and were satisfied that we were dying at our posts.
We had set out on our journey from India and were dying for India’s cause.248

Within this narrative, we view two seemingly unrelated trajectories. On the one hand, we are
confronted with the utter horror of a meaningless death imposed upon these young partisans,
dying for a charge they never understood, and at the hands of an enemy that never was. Thus,
this imminent death signified an internal deadlock for anti-colonial politics, one that seemed to
take it to a point of exhaustion.

However, we are not immediately offered a Nietzschean recommencement after an end. Without
the delineation of any clear horizon for political action, we are instead presented with death as a
substitute for a political strategy. For if the subjectivity induced by anti-colonial politics did not
allow for annulling the constitutive negation of colonial rule, and the lack of a vision for a new
world denied a novel measure for one’s own political actions, death confirmed the permanent
subsistence within this space of negation. The abrupt move in Usmani’s narrative from the chaos
of an impending, and perhaps pointless death, to ‘dying for India’s cause’ is part of a
retrospective act to provide meaning to what appears to escape it. In short, death here ‘sutures’
the terrifying gap between the subject’s intense desire for a new world and his complete inability
to attain it, suspending political subjectivity within the space of negation.249

Much of the political realignment in India during the 1920s can be read as an attempt to move
out of this impasse, a project in which Usmani was an enthusiast participant. To initiate
discussions on possible future trajectories, a record number of political journals appeared on the
public scene, with the influx of ‘subversive literature’ termed the ‘gravest threat to the Empire’
by colonial officials.250 How should we then understand this widening interest in different
political ideas within India, including Usmani’s association with communism, beyond its
characterization as an ideological entrapment?

Knowledge, Incalculability and Decision

248
Ibid., pp. 68-73.
249
My aim is to build the writings of a number of theorists, including Antonio Gramsci, who argue that the
existence of popular upheaval marks a crisis for the status quo, and if not superseded by an emancipatory political
alternative, is often followed by a morbid fascination with death. Etienne Balibar and Alain Badiou have recently
termed such “intervaillac” periods often lead to pathological symptoms, including fascist mobilization, as a possible
resolution of the gap in social reality opened up political Events. Hence, against the subsistence in a space of pure
negation which may end up aligning itself with fascism, they emphasize the need for alternative political projects,
including alternative fictions (in fidelity to the consequences of the Event) to overcome the impasse produced by an
interregnum. See, Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings, trans. Gregory Elliott
(London: Verso, 2012).
250
Petrie, Communism in India, pp. 16-18. An important part of the CPI’s activities in the 1920s was the goal of
smuggling Bolshevik propaganda into India, while for the British officials, including David Petrie, the inflow of
“subversive literature” was at the heart of the Empire’s strategy to curb Communism. In fact, as stated earlier, the
possession of “illegal” literature, including books from Marx, Engels and Lenin, was the main charge against in the
Meerut Conspiracy Case which led to life sentences for the entire leadership of the Communist Party of India. Raza,
‘Separating the Wheat’, pp. 316-325.
91
While a melancholic attachment to death maintained a pervasive presence within the subjectivity
of an interregnum, it was supplemented by the desire for a heroic overcoming of obstacles, the
two often anchored in the same instance. I argue that this move from one to the other represented
the passing from negation to affirmation. Let me quote a passage from Usmani’s journey from
Afghanistan into Central Asia (1920) as he passed through the notoriously dangerous Panjshir
valley. In a section titled ‘Pansjhir Defiant’, Usmani recounts the decisions imposed on the group
as they confronted the seeming impossibility of moving ahead owing to the physical traits of the
route.

After that came an abrupt descent and we came face to face with the turbulent Panjshir,
then in flood and sweeping over the road. There was no other way and the mountains
looked inaccessible and defiant...Every one of us was forced to think over this serious
question. A bitter feeling of defiance arose in our mind against the refractory river and a
council was called. Some hinted at the plan of going back, but the majority were for
victory or death. Arguments on principles were also made. Napoleon's crossing the Alps
was quoted. Alexander’s exploits were instanced. To go back meant surrender, to step
into the fast-running water meant instantaneous death. Which was to be preferred? All
agreed that death with honour was preferable to turning back. Not a step backward
became our slogan. Death with heroism was something attractive and we decided to go
forward...At moments it seemed that the river would wash away. But our will power
proved stronger than the current, and in due time we reached dry land.251

Both the reference to political figures before crossing the Panjshir, as well the decision to narrate
this event in communist propaganda literature, exemplified the supreme importance attached to
heroic sacrifice in Usmani’s political imagination. The conflation of nature and politics is neither
a stretch, nor without precedent, since in the same era, the Soviet Union was claiming to have
regained the control of nature from the abstract temporality of Capital, directing it through
official will by the Five-Year Plans.252 A few years later, such overcoming of nature through
politics would reach its peak in China during the Long March, where every soldier killed due to
the punishing physical geography was deemed a martyr, while a belief in the human ability ‘to
move the mountains’ became a slogan for the perpetual overcoming of ‘natural’ challenges. 253

Such a determination to overcome adversity through transformative sacrifice structured the

political landscape in which Usmani encountered communism. On his return to Bokhara, the city
had witnessed a ‘revolutionary’ uprising against the Amir, the latter backed by landlords and the
institutional clergy.254 I quote his passages on the encounter with this revolutionary movement,
to elucidate the stakes involved in his decision to side with it as the Amir’s forces launched a
counter-attack to recapture the city.

251
Usmani, Peshawar to Moscow, pp. 19.
252
See Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary life in Extraordinary Times (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000).
253
Mao Zedong, Selected Works of Mao Tse Tung (Oxford: Permagon Press, 2014), vol. III, pp. 271-274.
254
For an in depth study of Bolshevik activities in Central Asia, see Helene Encausse, Islam and the Russian
Empire: Reform and Revolution in Central Asia (London: I.B. Tauras and Co. Ltd., 1988).
92
 In a few days more the Turkomans again mustered strong and surrounded the town.
One day we saw that our Afghan friends who used to come to us at least once daily
did not come for two days, instead we saw a corpse lying on horseback and brought
to the adjacent barracks which were occupied by the Red soldiers. We went to the
President and expressed our sympathy and deep anguish to see a friend of ours thus
killed…We offered him our services if required. The President welcomed our offer
and took us into his confidence as good comrades.255

The Muhijirin were given the task of defending a strategic point near the river by the ‘revcom’,
the revolutionary committee of Bokhara.

To defend the river front was a military problem of great interest...But what could
we do? We were a motley crowd of 36 and our fighting strength really amounted to
nothing. But there was no other course left. Either we should choose to fight and
die, or should see the town plundered before our eyes, then, falling into the hands of
the Turkomans, should meet a death of ignominy and cowardice. Moreover, was not
fighting for the cause of Bokharans a cause of all the freedom-loving people on
earth? We happened to be there, and liked to share the fate of the Bokharan
soldiers.256

We are presented here with a subjectivity identical to the crossing of the river at the Panjshir
valley. The crossing of the flooded area was based on neither a prior knowledge of the operation,
nor could be undertaken with any guarantees of success. ‘Death’ or ‘victory’ were the options.
Similarly, in Bokhara, Usmani was confronted with a political decision to side, and possibly die,
for a communist government, without any knowledge of Marxism, or even an awareness of
military strategy. The execution of their friends, the impending invasion by the city, and the
‘fearlessness’ exhibited by the revolutionaries placed the muhajirin and the Bokharan
communists in a shared existentialist situation. In other words, they offered to die for a regime to
which they had no ideological affiliation, but only a sense of practical solidarity.

This situation invoked the ethical decision of either continuing or abandoning the battle, a
moment of pure scission between confidence and doubt, without any mediating term. For
political action always depends on the existence of a remainder that cannot fully be elaborated
through premeditated action or prior knowledge, opening an interstitial space that must be filled
by axiomatic declarations amounting to a leap in the dark, rather than following sociologically
deduced conclusions. The decision to identify with Bokhara’s revcom opened a new phase in
Usmani’s life, as he successfully defended the town to ‘vindicate the honour of India.’

255
Usmani, Peshawar to Moscow), p. 82.
256
Ibid., pp. 82-84.
93
 ..he [President of Revcom] came straight to us and began to lift us up in ecstasy,
praising us, and shouting ‘Long live the Indian Comrades’ ‘Long Live the cause of
free India’ ‘Long Live the defenders of free India.257

We are already miles away from discussions of ‘scientific’ or ‘sociological’ political theory,
engaging instead with more immediate questions of heroism and sacrifice in the face of
impending danger. Usmani encountered communism as part of the continuum that began with a
distancing from imperial ideology and a search for a new anchor for political action. This
primacy of political action led Usmani to repeatedly complain about the part of his life in Russia
(1921-1922) when he was compelled to undertake classes in Marxist theory.

I had no knowledge of Marxism. My main aim was to fight like a soldier in the
ranks of the fighters for the liberation of India….It was quite amusing to come
across terms such as bourgeoisie, proletariat, petty-bourgeoisie and dictatorship of
the proletariat. Often irresistibly I would laugh while reading such odd terms, and
my fellow-residents would be amused by my behaviour....Frankly speaking, I was
not satisfied with a mere theoretical study of the subject...The big theoreticians
drowned us in their arguments about building a theoretical background for the
Indian revolution.258

In an impatience characteristic of anti-colonial politics, Usmani instigated a revolt against M.N.

Roy whom ‘all regarded as our teacher,’ against his alleged pedantic ways, insisting that he be
relieved from the studies to rejoin the struggle for independence in India. He approached
‘Comrade Raccocci,’ the Secretary-General of the Communist International, who arranged
Usmani’s meeting with Stalin on this matter.

I told him bluntly, ‘I want to go back to India’. And his reply was, ‘why did you come
here if you want to go away without completing your studies? But I succeeded in
convincing him that I could best serve the cause of Indian revolution there, in India’.259

The primacy of politics over theory, of decision over knowledge and of confrontation over
waiting, is clear from these passages.260 The ease with which Usmani was simultaneously able to
occupy the position of a partisan of communism and political Islam allows us to make a
preliminary hypothesis on why political Islam and communism were often anchored in the same
geographical and temporal situations in the 20th century. First, both stem out of a negation of the

257
Usmani, Peshawar to Moscow, p. 84.
258
Shaukat Usmani, Historic Trips of a Revolutionary: Sojourn in the Soviet Union (New York: Sterling Publishers,
1977), p. 46.
259
Ibid., p. 73.
260
There is of course a different conceptualization of waiting in Gandhi’s thought, as recently pointed out by Uday
Mehta. As a response to the dislocations in social life produced by colonial capitalism, Gandhi elevated waiting as a
political virtue for sustaining an authentic relationship with the self. Such a conception of waiting came into a
productive conflict with other strands of anti-colonial politics, including communist, a theme I shall discuss in future
work. See Uday Mehta, ‘Patience, Inwardness, and Self-Knowledge in Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj’, Public Culture 23:2
(2011), pp. 417-429.
94
globally prevalent liberal imperial ideology, creating a space for an intellectual and political
rupture. Second, both engaged in a search for a novel political community, and hence were
oriented towards the future. Third, they used heroic sacrifice, including the voluntary embracing
of death, as both a rejection of the fear of colonial violence and as an assertion of the
transformative potential of political violence.

After leaving his studies in Moscow, Usmani was imprisoned in India in 1923 for 4 years, where
he claims that the only books available to him were the Mahabharta and Ramayana.261 On his
release in 1927, he became involved in clandestine political activity as the leader of the
communist party before being re-arrested in 1929 in the Meerut Conspiracy Case. It is then fair
to suggest that the premier face of Indian communism in the 1920s was not at any point well-
acquainted with Marxist theory, a condition shared by other renowned communists of the era.

If Usmani identified with communism as a result of a pre-history of political action, what did it
even mean to be a communist beyond organizational affiliation? In other words, is there any
utility in using the term ‘communism’ for diverse practices carried out in the name of the idea
across the globe?

Communism, Historical Difference and The Role of Fiction

The search for a regulative idea that could orient a movement caught up in a space of negation
was a response both to the actually existing violence of imperial rule, and to the inertia and
confusion arising out of the collapse of the Khilafat/Non-Cooperation Movement. Usmani’s
association with communism was part of what Althusser in his later writings described as an
‘encounter,’ similar to a person jumping onto a moving train, except that it was the idea of
communism that jumped onto the moving train of anti-colonial nationalism.262

As noted earlier, the deadlock of a violent and discredited imperial order in the aftermath of the
war did not just present an abstract intellectual problem, but was shaping multiple political
trajectories. Thus, if the ideological universe occupied by a supposedly harmonious imperial
liberalism was now viewed as simply a mask displacing a deeper antagonism between the
colonizers and the colonized, attempts to replace it with a newer order required a minimal level
of fiction as a support for political commitment in the present. By fiction I mean the postulating
of certain ideals emanating from a political terrain, in order to interrogate the same terrain in a
self-reflexive act of political knowledge production. While always containing elements of
ideology, the necessity of fiction arises out of the need to move out of the domain of a pure,
melancholic negation and allow for new coordinates of self-relating, a new horizon for
evaluating actions in the present.263 The name ‘communism’ sought to provide one such horizon,
261
Usmani, Peshawar to Moscow, p. 83.
262
See Althusser Louis, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987, eds. Oliver Corpet and Francois
Matheron (London: Verso, 2006), trans. G.M. Goshgarian, pp. 163-207.
263
My argument is influenced, though not determined, by Badiou’s treatment of fiction. Mobilizing popular
mythology and culture was part of a global trend amongst political thinkers in the 1920s, including Sorel, Gramsci
and Ernst Bloch. This engagement was partly a response to the inadequacy of “scientific” analysis in developing
communist praxis, and partly a response to the successful mobilization of popular culture by fascist forces in
95
inscribing into permanence the rupture from imperial liberalism instituted by the anti-colonial
revolt, and allowing particular actions to be invested with larger, transcendental meaning. For
any ‘anti-colonial’ action depended on such a horizon that permitted localized acts of
disobedience gain a meaningful coherence at the national scale, beyond their depictions as
contingent ‘disturbances’ by the colonial state.

It is on such a register that I read Usmani’s glorifying accounts of the Bolshevik Revolution in
Bokhara

At every hundred steps the Russians and Bokharans delivered lectures in Russian and
Persian, emphasising the solidarity of the oppressed people….It was a lesson for us. We
saw freedom in her true guise here. In spite of their poverty the people looked more
jovial, and revolution had instilled in them contentment and fearlessness. The real
brotherhood of mankind could be seen here amongst these people of 50 different races.
No barriers of caste or religion hindered them from mixing up with one another. Every
soul was transformed into an orator..The speech, suppressed for centuries together, burst
out like a flood.264

In other instances, Usmani explains the relationship between religion and communism in the
Soviet Union.

The most amusing was the visit of Faizullah Khojaev, head of the Bokhara
administration...He invited the Indian students to his room for tea and entertained us with
Bokhara sultanas, talking about the progress Bokhara was making under the new regime.
I could not resist the temptation of asking him whether he was a Communist. Prompt
came his reply, ‘By the Grace of God, I am a Communist’.265

The accuracy of Usmani’s descriptions is a moot point, since that would place us back into
questions of hermeneutics, debating whether he had correctly read the situation, tying an entire
generation’s political experience to textual interpretations. Instead, we must read his choice of
narrating these events onto a political register, as an attempt to produce an alternative fiction to
the imperial fiction, one that could both speak to the real anxieties within the Indian conjuncture
and envisage an actionable plan for overcoming them. The depiction of the Soviet Union as a
concrete representation of the future-to-come for the colonized world was perhaps a case of a
poor fiction, one that would be later challenged by the Maoist assertion that argued for locating
and intensifying the contradictions within the socialist states. But that does not take away the
necessary function of a fiction in suturing the space of a lack of absolute knowledge, particularly
when the sacrificial decisions demanded by any oppositional political project require a minimal
level of confidence in undertaking actions laden with unforeseen risks. In this respect, a fiction

Europe. See Alain Badiou, Philosophy for Militants, trans. Bruno Bosteels (London: Verso, 2012) and George Sorel,
Reflections on Violence (New York: Dover Publications, 2004).
264
Usmani, Peshawar to Moscow, pp. 57-58.
265
Usmani, Historic Trips, p. 56.
96
does not represent a sociologically deduced conclusion, but an affirmative prescription, one that
marks the commencement of a conceptual labour aimed at instituting a new form of politics.

Once again, however, this should not be confused with an uncomplicated acceptance of
communist ideology by Usmani and others. Indeed, what he finds fascinating about the Soviet
experience is not its dominant descriptions by prominent communists of the era, but the shared
affinities between the Soviet Union and the ‘Oriental people’. In a section titled ‘Russians and
Soviets are Oriental’ Usmani asserts these similarities.

Firstly, villages in the Soviet Union and especially in Eastern Russia, while differing in
the details of their organisation, present a social picture similar to the villages in India.
They are essentially co-operative. The people of the West resent the idea of the Soviet as
much as they resent the idea of the Panchayat.266 It is due to its coming into direct clash
with their social experience which is individualistic in all respects and aspects. But on the
other hand the eastern tribes and clans as well as villages find nothing inconsistent in the
Soviet idea since their mode of life is primarily social and not individual.267

Needless to say, such purported affinities between a village panchayat (itself too grand a
category to have much meaning) and the Soviets cannot stand any historical test. Yet, as Shruti
Kapila has powerfully argued, citations often functioned to mark a point of rupture from, rather
than an unquestioned fidelity to a textual tradition. The attempts to link Soviet Communism with
the eastern ‘mode of life’ was an example of the infidelity characteristic to Indian political
thought.

Yet, it was the emphasis on communism’s own missed encounters with the non-European world
that propelled anti-colonialism as an agent of communism’s universalism outside its point of
origin. Usmani, and a host of anti-colonial communists during this period, were communists to
the extent that they allowed communism to speak in situations and to processes hitherto outside
its purview. Thus, citations, much like borders, not only separated, but also allowed for shared
intellectual trajectories, in which geographically scattered and historically disparate indices of
suffering could nonetheless be concentrated into a common and actionable political project, in
the here and now. For Usmani, Communism was a name that summoned such heterogeneous
struggles to institute a global political project, making the rupture with imperial liberalism
permanent.

Islam and Communism: The Divergence

If Political Islam and Communism shared an antagonistic posture to imperial liberalism, they
differed precisely on the nature of the fictions they constructed to respond to it. This speaks both

266
Panchayats are traditional forms of village councils, often contrasted with modern institutions introduced by the
colonial state.
267
Usmani, Peshawar to Moscow, pp. 165-168. In this discussion, apart from emphasizing the affinity between the
Soviet and Eastern way of life, Usmani highlights the Soviet aid to the colonized world in order to depict the Soviet
Union as an ally of the East.
97
to their intellectual and geographical overlap, but also to the subtle but crucial differences that
mark out their internal antagonism. Indeed, throughout his retelling of the disputes amongst the
Muhajirin, that is, between those wanting to associate with the Communists in Bokhara and those
wanting to continue the journey to Turkey, Usmani uses the term ‘our step-brethren’, denoting a
familial, yet fraught relationship.268

A detailed engagement with the specificities of political Islam is beyond the scope of this work. I
elucidate my argument by engaging with Faisal Devji’s study of the most successful
manifestation of political Islam in South Asia, the Pakistan movement. 269 As already stated, I do
not want to reiterate the already well-known history of the Communist Party’s attitude towards
the Pakistan Movement. Instead, my aim in this essay has been to simultaneously interrogate the
political projects of Islam and Communism at a conceptual level. If earlier I showed their
overlapping tendencies at their moment of birth, here I attempt to delineate the point of departure
between the two political ideologies, one that sheds light on the reasons for the often tense
relationship between the Muslim League and Muslims belonging to the Communist movement.
Devji’s study of the Pakistan Movement is an ideal site for examining these differences, both for
his emphasis on the political thought produced by the Pakistan Movement, and for explicitly
comparing it to the ideas developed by the Communist movement.

Devji argues that what provided the Pakistan Movement with its historical specificity was a
concept of a nation that never fully coincided with a state or a territory. It was instead religion
that provided an alternative to Pakistan’s lack of territorial anchorage. Moreover, the Pakistan
Movement was conceived as a political community oriented towards a future, in which questions
of territory and ethnic/linguistic diversity would disappear to allow for a homogenous polity, an
ideal that Devji claims it shared with communism.270

There are two major assumptions in this otherwise thought-provoking work. The first is obvious.
Communism in the non-European world, at least since Lenin’s thesis on the colonial world in
1920, always emphasized ‘national liberation’ as the principal task of the communist movement
in Asia, with ‘nation’ understood in a conception as orthodox as possible during the era. 271 It will
be difficult to find any theoretical work of significance from communists in Asia, or even Latin
America or Africa, which rejects the nation as a principal site for political action.272 The other,
and perhaps more significant comparison, concerned the belief that historical differences would
disappear in a future. This perspective offers a more interesting lens to conduct a comparative
study of Islamic and Communist thought, since in a certain teleological itinerary of European
Marxism, the working class is invested with the capacity to overcome all existing antagonisms.

268
Ibid., p. 59.
269
Devji, Muslim Zion, pp. 241-250.
270
Ibid., p. 28.
271
See Vladimir Lenin, ‘Draft Thesis on the National and Colonial Questions’ in Selected Works (New York:
International Publishers, 1938), vol. X.
272
“National Liberation” remained a central concern for political praxis amongst communists in countries as diverse
as Vietnam, South Africa and Indonesia. On the importance of national sovereignty for communist movements in
the non-European world, see Prashad, The Darker Nations, pp. 1-30.
98
The difference, however, persisted on the role of contradiction or antagonism within the structure
of a communist fiction. For whatever the teleologies of European Marxism, the existence of a
radically different political geography in Asia, with questions of colonialism, nationalism,
religion, and regionalism, to name a few, meant the problem of engaging with multiple and
intrinsic contradictions could not be circumvented. A cursory look at the literature of Indian
communism makes it clear that all given political categories such as regionalism, nationalism,
caste politics or even socialism are intrinsically tied to antagonistic terms that never allow for
any full closure. Usmani himself defers any possibility of an epoch shifting moment in a pristine
event of class struggle as he rarely, if ever, mentions the word ‘proletariat’ in his writings,
substituting it with ‘nation’, ‘oriental people’, ‘colonized’, ‘workers’, ‘peasants’, ‘eastern
characteristics’, etc., without any preferential order. Neither does Usmani elevate any particular
contradiction to a transhistorical character to provide for a ‘subject-object’ of history that could
overcome all existing contradictions. Instead, he indicates a number of possible nodal points for
future conflict, arising out of his own political experience, without ever providing a coherent
conceptual framework to explain this apparent aberration when viewed from the perspective of
orthodox Marxism. That these historically sedimented conflicts represented a challenge to be
overcome through the anti-colonial motif of sacrifice, rather than automatically superseded in
industrialized society were further clarified in his electoral campaign in the British general
elections.

As stated earlier, Usmani was chosen as a candidate for the Communist Party of Great Britain in
1929. The elections were important for two symbolic reasons. First, it allowed for publicizing the
cause of political prisoners in India. Second, he was pitted against Sir John Simon from the
infamous Simon Commission Report of 1929, a controversial report on constitutional proposals
in India that led to India-wide demonstrations, often violently suppressed by the police. Placing a
communist imprisoned in a colonial jail against one of the most prominent symbols of colonial
domination in India generated much public discussion on the plight of Indian prisoners, even if
this hype did not translate into votes.273 The following quote from Usmani’s letter to constituents
titled ‘Echo of the General Election’, which arrived too late to be widely distributed in the
constituency, indicates the difficulties he saw in building a shared political project, even while
fully believing in its possibility.

I have been selected by the Communist Party in Spen Valley to stand as a candidate for
Parliament and I wish, though separated from you by 6,000 miles and prison bars, to
place before you an appeal. I appeal to you, not on my own behalf but of the 300 million
toiling masses of India...I claim to be a humble representative of the vast mass forces of
revolt which are now so quickly gaining strength in India and throughout the entire
colonial world. I have been working for the masses of this country since 1920.
Imprisoned without trial in 1923, I was tried and sentenced to four years’ rigorous
imprisonment in 1924 for Conspiracy as a Communist….All in India who take part in the
struggle for emancipation or who assist the exploited masses must suffer more or less the
same fate as I have done…. I am asking you to disregard personal consideration, the
claim of traditions and the ties of race and colour, and to prefer the weak to the strong,

273
Shaukat Usmani, ‘An Echo of the General Election’, The Labour Monthly (1929), pp. 504-508.
99
 the poor to the rich, the absent to the present. I ask you to make this sacrifice not for my
sake, but for the sake of the solidarity of the workers of the world... I appeal to you,
confident that you will rise superior to limitations of race and colour, and, in spite of all
obstacles, stand by your class.274

The first issue to highlight is that there are no claims made of a generalized equivalence between
the interests of the working-class in India and Britain, but rather this unity is viewed as political
project to be constructed. Taking historically produced differences, including ‘race’ and ‘colour’,
which are termed ‘limitations’ and ‘obstacles,’ what is striking is how Usmani describes their
overcoming as an act of ‘sacrifice’, rather than a natural alliance based on easily discernible,
shared interests. Such identitarian claims, having their autonomous anchor in ‘tradition’ could
not be disregarded, not least because much of colonial ideology was built on the fiction of a
separation of races. Nor does it imply an immediate personal advancement for British workers,
since the communists in India had already pointed out the corrupting influence of imperialism on
them. In a characteristic overlap between anti-colonial subjectivity and communist politics,
Usmani calls for an indifference towards ‘personal consideration’ as a condition for building
global solidarity. Thus, his conception of class solidarity, rather than overriding historical
antagonisms, sought their resolution through a process calling for a transformative sacrifice.

Second, what future political community is Usmani invoking by calling on his constituents to
prefer the ‘poor to the rich, the absent to the present’? This ‘absence’ does not point to a future
community fully coinciding with a humanity freed of its immanent antagonisms. Instead the call
to ‘stand by your class’ points towards an insurgent, divisive unity. ‘Class’ in communist politics
denoted a partisan and divisive viewpoint to name a structuring gap impossible to suture within
capitalist society, with class politics indicating a political project corresponding with this
recognition. It is at this point that the communist fiction decisively parts ways with fictions of a
harmonious whole, whether defined territorially or ideationally. The communist fiction in the
colonial world was instead constituted as a response to antagonisms engendered by colonial rule
by not only inscribing them into a specific politics, but also to widen their horizon, displacing
them diagonally onto existing identity formations in search of new political alliances. There is
then only a theory of society as a contradictory totality, one that permanently invokes decisions
on the antagonistic terms within a particular situation, without allowing for any closures.275

Conclusion: The Politics of Place

274
Ibid., pp. 504-506.
275
It was for this reason that the Communist Movement, even while supporting the Pakistan Movement, rejected the
argument that there was an ontological basis for the creation of Pakistan based in religion or territory. Instead, the
demand for Pakistan was supported or opposed on the basis of the resolution of the nationalities question, as a
partial step towards working class unity in the sub-continent. This partly explains the hostility of the Communist
Party of Pakistan towards the Muslim League (and vice versa) immediately after independence, since the
Communists saw the postcolonial situation as displacing rather than ending social contradictions, with the Muslim
League emerging as the primary adversary for “real freedom” in Pakistan. See Ali Raza, ‘The Unfulfilled Dream:
The Left in Pakistan 1947-1950’, South Asian History and Culture 4:4 (2013), pp. 503-519.
100
Usmani viewed his own travels as not only political, but as tied to the politics of India. Even
while traveling abroad, the ‘honour of India’ dominated his political imagination.

This travelogue, this piece of history, this journey, is not a pilgrimage without politics.
We had started our journey because of the political situation in our country. The entire
country was in revolt. The foreigners, the British imperialists, had made our lives
impossible...Though it is true that I have traveled extensively in Asia, Europe and a part
of Africa, it must be frankly stated that there has never been the slightest notion in my
head to become another ‘Sindbad the sailor’.276

Against the contemporary postmodern or postcolonial celebration of hybridity as a political

possibility, anti-colonial thought elevated the geographical categories of territory and place as
primary sites for political intervention. Perhaps Usmani’s non-place within the emergent political
landscape of India is what prevented him from gaining a political foothold within the country
that was equal to his stature in the international arena. His description of the multiple directions
in which he was pulled after his release from prison in 1927 testifies to his own anxiety
regarding his lack of an anchor on the political stage, and indicates the realities of the political
scene in India.

I was facing several problems at this time at the end of 1927. Arjan lal Sethi, who was
held in great esteem by the revolutionaries of North India...was impressing upon me that
being a son of Rajasthan, I should settle down in Ajmer and train revolutionary cadres
there. Then there was the Kanpur Mazdoor Sabha, with whose leaders I had worked
during the period of my underground life before my arrest in May 1923...Thirdly, there
was a call from my Communist party comrades that I should do something for Akbar
Khan Qureishi who had by this time already undergone some seven years of
imprisonment...Habib Ahmed Nasim, one of the Moscow-Tashkent conspiracy ex-
prisoners was already settled in Delhi and it was agreed between him and me that I
should do some editing and journalistic work in Delhi.277

Usmani was even approached by a number of young political activists to begin a guerilla war
against the British, a result of ‘an exaggerated sense of my capacity to lead a military campaign.’
As Usmani emerged from a four-year sentence into the changing realities of the country, the
pressure of the Indian politics, with antagonisms working in multiple vectors, was evident. The
‘problems’ he faced included questions of regional and political belonging, not to mention the
mundane tasks of earning a living. While Usmani decided to settle in Delhi, he was approached
by Maulana Muhammad Ali, who wanted him to tour the Soviet Union to ask for financial aid- a
journey he decided to undertake with the aid of Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who helped him escape to
Afghanistan via the Khyber Pass.278

276
Usmani, Historic Trips, pp. 16; 111.
277
Ibid., p. 85-86.
278
Ibid., p. 84.
101
This journey was Usmani’s last significant public act as a communist leader before his arrests in
1929 and his subsequent retirement from politics. Perhaps it was an indication that his politics
had become suspended at the meeting point between his association with global communism,
and its reconceptualization within the Indian political scene, even though, as I have argued, the
former was overdetermined by the subjectivity of the latter. Against the contemporary
celebration of a groundless cosmopolitanism, the Indian political scene demanded political ideas
to be anchored in specific histories and geographies, not as a hurdle to their universalisation, but
as the only condition of their possibility. The question of ‘place’ is further explored in the next
chapter on communist debates on the peasantry.

102
 Chapter 5

In the Shadow of Ghadar: Marxism and Anti-Colonialism in Colonial Punjab

The relationship between Marxism and the colonial world can best be described as a missed
encounter, since the political trajectories of late 19th century ‘social democracy’ in Europe and
the burgeoning critiques of colonial rule by anti-colonial intellectuals and organizations did not
cross paths until the 1920s. Positivist Marxism, tied to a linear conception of history, could only
view the colonial world as a permanent site of deficit, removed from the universal history of
class struggle prevalent in the industrially advanced West. Such a conception of a civilizational
hierarchy was not only a result of an ideological construction peculiar to 18th- and 19th-century
European thought, but was also tied to an objective process of economic, political and
ideological differentiation produced by the uneven development of capitalism across global
space.279 Yet, a missed encounter does not merely play the role of keeping apart political
ideologies emanating from distinct historical contexts. Rather, this lack of historical
correspondence between specific political ideologies becomes the condition of possibility for
their encounter, overdetermined by contingent events, yet structured by the persistence of deeper,
subterranean currents that allow for mutual translation.280

In this chapter, I interrogate the advent of communist ideas in colonial Punjab in the 1920s as a
new ideological current in the Indian political landscape. I focus in particular on the
simultaneous appropriation of the Ghadar Party history and European Marxism by Punjabi
radicals to produce a specific communist praxis in colonial Punjab. My aim here is not to recount
the complex reasons the Ghadar Party joined the communist movement in India. Instead, I write
a history of the intellectual trajectory of communism in Punjab as a peculiar encounter between
European Marxism and the anti-colonial struggle. Further, rather than asking the usual question
of how Marxism entered and transformed the political landscape of colonial India, I seek to
explore the ways in which political practices in colonial Punjab impacted Marxist ideology,
rethinking and displacing its internal coordinates. The colonial deficit in Marxist thought was not
only viewed by anti-colonial intellectuals as a limit to Marxism’s global import, but also as a
provocation to improvise and reconstitute its framework to permit its resonance in the colonial
world.281 Thus, I argue that a rupture from a pristine Marxism was not a sign of a ‘deviation’

279
Contemporary scholarship convincingly argues against a conception of linear economic, social and political
development within capitalist modernity. Instead, it posits uneven productive space as constitutive of Capital against
its own fantasies of homogeneity. Unevenness produced disparate ideological and political practices, the result of
which are finally being registered within intellectual history. See, for example, Neil Smith, Uneven Development:
Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008) and Chakrabarty,
Provincializing Europe, pp. 97-116.
280
See Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987 (London: Verso, 2006).
281
For a similar argument, see Shruti Kapila, ‘The Majority of Democracy’, Social Text Online (February, 2015),
https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/the-majority-of-democracy/ accessed 16th August 2015. Intellectual
history must move beyond the global division of labor in which European intellectuals think and non-Europeans
practice. Instead, we should study these practices as profound reconceptualizations of modern ideas in and of
themselves. Bruno Bosteels has recently emphasized the theoretical importance of these innovative practices as
‘theoretical acts’ or acts of theoretical production. Bosteels, Marx and Freud, pp. 75-96.
103
from ‘the idea’, but instead was a vehicle for its inscription in a historically specific site, and,
consequently, for its universalization outside its point of origin in Europe.

I explore these questions through the story and writings of Sohan Singh Josh, a communist from
colonial Punjab and vocal defender of the Ghadarite tradition. Josh’s oeuvre is ideally placed to
delineate the convergence of Marxism and the Ghadar Party as he identified with, and worked
through, both these traditions to formulate communist politics in colonial Punjab. By showing
how he developed a new practice of Marxism, particularly on the question of the ‘revolutionary
subject’, I examine how such practice formed the basis for a new framework for Marxist theory
itself. In other words, I consider communism in Punjab as a productive site for theoretical
reflection, rather than merely a place for passive reception of European ideas.

Marxism and Ghadar: The Encounter

A detailed survey of the Ghadar Party’s encounter with global communism is beyond the scope
of this article. It is important, however, to briefly comment on the conjuncture that permitted
these two project to intersect in the aftermath of the First World War.

The Ghadar Party was formed in 1913 to challenge British sovereignty over India. The party
consisted of Indians (mostly Punjabis) living outside and aimed to ignite a rebellion across
colonial India, particularly in the British Indian military to win independence. The party was able
to build an impressive anti-imperial geography, with a network in countries as diverse as the
United States (mostly California), Canada, Honduras, Afghanistan, China and the Soviet Union.
Apart from doing propaganda work through a number of publications, the Ghadar Party sought
alliances with anti-British forces, including Germany and Turkey. With bases in multiple
countries and participating in ‘conspiratorial’ activities, Ghadar was an integral actor in what
Tim Harper has recently called the ‘Asian Underground’, a global space consisting of exiles,
rebels and criminals found in major urban centers of Asia during the early twentieth century.282

By the late 1910s and early 1920s, the Ghadar Party was politically and organizationally
exhausted.283 The party failed to induce widespread rebellion in the British Indian military,
particularly with the defeat of the daring attempt to seize control of the Mian Mir Cantonment in
Lahore, which the party hoped would trigger military revolt. The colonial state punished the
architects of this botched attempt in the ‘Lahore Conspiracy Case’ and concomitantly launched a
crackdown on Ghadarite activities throughout the Empire, reduced its capacity to pose a
substantial challenge to colonial authority.284 In addition, after the US’ entry into the war,
Woodrow Wilson’s government outlawed anti-British groups, including the Ghadar Party in
California,, decimating its organizational structure through a number of sedition cases. Finally,

282
Tim Harper, ‘Singapore, 1915, and the Birth of the Asian Underground’ Modern Asian Studies 47:6 (2013), pp.
1782-1811.
283
The Indian intelligence community also felt that Ghadar activists had “little concrete result to show” during this
period. Williamson, India and Communism, pp. 156-158.
284
See Malwinder Singh Warraich and Harinder Singh (eds.), Lahore Conspiracy Case I and II (Chandigarh:
Unistar, 2008).
104
the defeat of the Axis in the war (a major funder and supplier of weapons to the Ghadar Party)
removed a major global ally, making geopolitical realities increasingly bleak for transnational
anti-colonial groups.285 Top intelligence officials in Colonial India assessed Ghadar’s political
capacity by concluding that there was ‘very little concrete result to show’ and the party was
‘rendered inoperative’ after the ‘Armistice was signed’.286 The Ghadar Party continued its
activities in the pacific and even in North America, but leading members of the group
desperately searched for new ideological and geostrategic anchors.

During the same period, Bolshevik Russia found itself in the midst of a civil war, and faced
hostile territories to the West. Furthermore, the failure of communist uprisings in European
countries meant Russia needed to seek new allies beyond their traditional relationships with
European communists. This conjuncture propelled the colonial world, and the anti-colonial
movements germinating in it, as potential allies in the struggle for global communism.287 Lenin’s
thesis on the colonial question, the holding of the Congress of the Peoples of the East at Baku,
and the formation of the University of the Toilers of the East at Tashkent were tied to the
transformed political possibilities presented by the post-war conjuncture, with the colonial world
at the center of this new imaginary (see chapters 2 and 3). 288 Ghadar Party leaders who were
sympathetic to Marxist thought, such as Santokh Singh and Rattan Singh, became voting
delegates and official observers, respectively, at the fourth Communist International Meeting,
cementing relations between Soviet Russia and the anti-colonial movement in India. Santokh
Singh also enhanced his understanding of Marxism by studying the subject closely during his
stay in the Soviet Union, a continuation of his exploration of Marxist ideas from his stay on the
East Coast.289

Santokh Singh was part of a number of transnational Ghadarite militants who had not only
acquainted themselves with Marxist philosophy, but were also seeking avenues to enter the
transformed political landscape of colonial Punjab. The ‘Punjab Disturbances’ of 1919-1920 and
the violent response of the colonial state, including the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, had not only
solidified anti-colonial feelings in the province, but also opened a new sequence for political
action, displacing the vanguardism of the previous decades with mass mobilization as central to
the political imaginary in India.290 As a Ghadar militant, Santokh Singh inhabited transnational

285
Manjapra, M.N. Roy, pp. 63-97.
286
Williamson, India and Communism, p. 157.
287
See Alexandre Bennigsen and Enders Wimbush, Muslim National Communism in the Soviet Union: A
Revolutionary Strategy for the Colonial World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).
288
The Second meeting of the Communist International witnessed the first in-depth debate on the role of the
colonial world in global communism. Lenin presented his thesis on the “National and Colonial Questions”, which he
followed by presenting another document, that was written by the Indian delegate, M.N. Roy. It signaled the
emergence of the non-European world as the principal theatre for communist politics during the twentieth century.
See Vladimir Lenin, ‘Draft Thesis on the National and Colonial Questions’, in Selected Works (New York:
International Publishers, 1938), vol. X.
289
Petrie, Communism in India, pp. 152-157.
290
The “Punjab Disturbances” and the Amritsar Massacre could be seen as moments of the birth of ‘the political’ in
modern India. Not only did anti-colonialism gain mass appeal in colonial India, but the multiple contradictions
forming the social body also found expression in the political domain, resulting in contestations over the place of
105
spaces incongruous with imperial geography, but now he aimed to situate himself in mass
politics inside Punjab. He returned to colonial Punjab in 1926 to organize a workers and peasants
political party influenced by Marxism.291 After a brief internment in his native village at
Amritsar, he began publishing Kirti magazine, an organ given the twin tasks of disseminating
‘communist ideology’ in vernacular idioms, and defending the legacy of Ghadarite heroes. 292
Singh’s failing health compelled him to seek allies in political communities in the Punjab to
continue his work, which is how he met Sohan Singh Josh, a young and emerging political leader
in the Punjab and future editor of Kirti magazine.

Josh was born into a peasant family at Chetenpura village of Amritsar in 1896. To support his
family, he took up a number of petty jobs before being appointed for a junior post in the
Censor’s Office in Bombay. He was assigned the task of reading letters from the Punjabi
diaspora in order to prevent ‘seditious’ literature from entering India. 293 In a move that would
seem both ironic and embarrassing later in his life, Josh destroyed ‘hundreds of letters’ written
by Punjabi radicals to their relatives and comrades in Punjab, people whose activities he would
later radically identify with.

...the Censor Office were merciless-- a cog in the machine working like automats,
showing no sympathy or human emotions either for the addressers or the addressees.
Rather, we were keen on collecting as much information as possible from those letters for
the special files allocated in the name of patriotic Indians who were considered
‘conspirators, suspects or seditionists’ by the British Government. I was a mercenary… I
was a Sikh, and like other Sikhs was loyal to the government.294

The Akali movement in colonial Punjab radicalized Josh, turning him into a major proponent of
anti-British views.295 The movement had the overt aim of reclaiming control of Gurdawaras
from corrupt, pro-British mahants, and also became the concentrated expression of anger
amongst the once loyal Sikhs against the increasingly authoritarian British rule in the Punjab. In
1922, Josh was one of the prominent leaders of the Akali movement who were arrested by
British authorities, and was sentenced after proclaiming in front of the magistrate that he had
‘little faith in British rule’.296 He gained further fame and notoriety after leading a group of
political prisoners to engage in civil disobedience within the jails, questioning the sovereignty of
colonial power on the bodies of the condemned prisoners.

Our struggle in jail was part of the general struggle that was being waged throughout the
country for religious and political reforms.… We knew that no improvements inside the
jails could take place without struggles and sufferings; we knew how the Ghadar patriots

religion, caste and class within the nation. For an excellent discussion on the colonial anxieties over the
‘disturbances’, see Hussain, ‘Towards the Jurisprudence’, pp. 100-110.
291
Williamson, India and Communism, pp. 159-160.
292
Raza, ‘Separating the Wheat’, pp. 322-327.
293
See Sohan Josh, My Tryst with Secularism (Columbia: South Asia Books, 1991).
294
Ibid., p. 14.
295
Ibid., p. 20.
296
Ibid., p. 88.
106
 had fought in Andaman and Indian jails, and had made great sacrifices for winning their
rights for kachcha and pagree.297

Josh placed himself within the tradition of the Ghadar activists, the people he had spied on for
years, and aimed to emulate their politics, an identification we shall dwell on later. In jail, he was
torn in the struggle between ‘fanatical Akalis’ who insisted on singing songs glorifying Sikh rule
over India, and pro-Congress prisoners who protested against Sikh rule for being exclusive of the
larger Indian nation.298 He became increasingly dissatisfied with the parochial turn in Akali
politics, claiming that a major challenge confronting the anti-colonial movement was to
overcome identitarian divisions. After a number of clashes with the Akali leadership, both
intellectual and physical, he began to search for alternative ideological and organizational
anchors for his politics.299 This is roughly the point (1927) when he met Santokh Singh, who
immediately recruited Josh to Kirti as an editor, an encounter that would prove to be most
enduring for Josh’s political trajectory.300 He would later describe the political significance of
Kirti as a ‘the continuation of the Ghadar Movement in a new way’.301

He became the most prominent leader and intellectual of the communist movement in the Punjab
in the 1930s and 1940s, being repeatedly arrested by the colonial state for his seditious activities,
and served a 5-year jail term for the ‘Meerut Conspiracy Case’.302 Josh led an electoral campaign
in 1937 against Sardar Raghbir Singh (a major landlord in Amritsar) on a platform calling for an
end to ‘landlordism’, defeating the latter by 12000 votes and becoming one of the 5 communist
MLAs in the Punjab Legislative Assembly.303 Josh remained a member of the Communist Party
of India until his death in 1984, serving as a major chronicler of the radical tradition in the
Punjab, giving special emphasis to the Ghadar Party and the Communist Movement within the
continuum of perpetual rebellion.

Thus, we witness the intersection of three different political currents in the 1920s: Leninism’s
decisive move to explore revolutionary potentialities in the East, the Ghadar Party’s attempts to
find a foothold within colonial Punjab, and Sohan Singh Josh’s search for a new ideological
anchor for himself in mass politics in Punjab. Here, I am most interested in the third strand, i.e.
Josh’s attempts to place communist politics in Punjab as a continuation of the twin legacy of
European Marxism and the Ghadar Party. In his writings, Josh does not view Punjab’s radical
tradition as a story of deficit due to its missed encounter with Marxism, a position that would
make orthodox Marxism appear as the universal kernel of wisdom able to unlock the impasse of
any particular situation. Instead, he develops a framework in which Marxism itself needed a

297
Ibid., p. 48.
298
Josh, My Tryst, p. 51.
299
Ibid., pp. 72-73.
300
Ibid., pp. 101-102. Santokh Singh was impressed by Josh's statement in the Akali leaders’ conspiracy case and
approached him through his Ghaddarite comrade, Bhai Bhag Singh, a Canadian, to write articles for the newly found
Kirti at the end of 1926.
301
Sohan Josh, My meetings with Bhagat Singh and Other Early Revolutionaries (New Delhi: Communist Party of
India, 1976), p. 13.
302
See Sohan Josh, Hindustan Ghadar Party: A Short History (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1977).
303
Sohan Josh, My Tryst, p. 215.
107
particular, historically dense site that would not only make it relevant for political action, but in
the process, would also change its own theoretical premises. Consider how Josh rather
embarrassingly writes about his lack of knowledge of Marxism when he joined Kirti, a ‘Marxist
magazine’, as an editor.

I did not know much of Marxist theory. I knew only what I had read and learnt from the
Liberty and the Great Libertarions, which also contained excerpts from the writings of
Marx, Engels and Lenin. Hence, whatever I knew was eclectic, anarchistic and
communistic all mixed together and unsystematic.304

I read this ‘unsystematic’ thought not as a limitation, but as a vehicle for producing political
novelty within the realm of communist praxis. Here, I take a methodological liberty. I study Josh
(and other anti-colonial Marxists) as an author of a new practice of communism, without
necessarily developing a theoretical or conceptual framework adequate to this novelty. I consider
his oeuvre as an ideal site of this novelty, as he brought together disparate strands to build a
viable project for political action in colonial Punjab.305

Theatricality, Violence and the Elevation of the Social

Violence was a central trope for Ghadar activities, providing the party with a ‘universal
language’ for anticolonialism. As Rohit Chopra has argued, the theatricality of violent acts
targeting high profile figures was not only aimed at inducing fear in imperial officials, but was
also geared towards developing a new conception of collective belonging in colonial India. 306 In
his reading of the prominent Ghadar leader and intellectual, Lala Hardayal, Chopra argues that
for the Ghadar Party, violence functioned as a medium of communication between different
ethnic, linguistic and religious groups through its audacious defiance of colonial authority.
Furthermore, while praising the failed bombing of Lord Hardinge (Viceroy of India) in Delhi in
1912, Hardayal asserted that the ability to produce and use bombs set apart civilized nations from
non-civilized ones.307 Apart from inculcating a consciousness of dignity necessary for national
belonging (nation being a marker of civilization), the bomb also gave colonized subjects the
power to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate targets of violence, a necessary
component of modern sovereignty denied to the colonial world.

Chopra is correct to note the limits of sustaining a political community based on the theatricality
of violence, since it required a perpetual production of enemies within the body politic. I argue,
however, that the primary limitation of such a conception was not its identification of
adversaries, since antagonism is inherent to any notion of politics. The key impasse of the

304
Ibid., p. 102.
305
I agree with Shruti Kapila’s argument that the Indian political was formed less as a result of “applying” western
ideas in India, and more through creating ruptures from received ideologies. Citations of European ideas in the
works of Indian thinkers often functioned as a point of departure from, rather than a fidelity to a theoretical
framework. Kapila, ‘Global Intellectual History’, pp. 253-274.
306
Rohit Chopra, ‘The Roar of the Bomb: Violence as Universal Communication in Ghadar Party Writings’, Global
Media and Communication 8:2 (2012), pp.157-170.
307
Ibid., p. 158.
108
Ghadar Party was its inability to appreciate the divisions within the social formation in colonial
India. The absolute belief in the power of singular, violent acts to forge a unified political
community ignored the question of social unevenness, i.e. the fact that colonial rule did not have
homogenous effects, but instead was instrumental in producing and exacerbating differences
within the social body. A political project premised on the absolute binary between the ‘colonial’
and the ‘colonized’ assumed an adequation between the political and the social realms, hindering
its ability to engage with the contradictory nature of colonial social formations.

The lack of mass support for the botched ‘Lahore munity’ led by Ghadar militants shattered their
belief in an unmediated antagonism between a reified ‘colonial state’ and the ‘colonized masses’.
On one hand, the limited popular appeal of Ghadarite activities compelled activists like
Hardayal, exhausted by the alleged inaction of the Indian masses, to abandon militancy,
dismissing Indians as biologically incapable of courage and valor.308 On the other hand, militants
such as Rattan Singh and Santokh Singh took greater interest in understanding the splits internal
to the social formation in colonial India that had impeded the growth of the anti-colonial
movement. The desire for regenerating anti-colonial politics by grasping contradictions
immanent to Indian society, rather than maintaining an absolute exteriority to a closed colonial
‘system,’ opened anti-colonialism to an encounter with the sociological analysis offered by
Marxism.309

As discussed earlier, Josh met Santokh Singh at a moment of political uncertainty, where the
young firebrand and the veteran rebel were both searching for new ideological moorings.
Santokh Singh’s decision to found the Kirti magazine as a vehicle for popularizing Marxist
analysis was one attempt to come to terms with the defeat of the Ghadar Party and to build an
alternative political project that recognized the centrality of social relations in colonial Punjab.
While Josh joined Kirti as an editor of the magazine, the two differed on the nature of the
historical conjuncture they found themselves in, and consequently, on the appropriate line of
action. Consider Josh’s reflections on his final meeting with Santokh Singh:

I found him very pale and emaciated; and there was a tremor in his voice...The only thing
he said to me in his low, tremulous voice was: ‘You are writing very hot stuff; go
cautiously’.

...I thought he was not up to date with regard to the real situation in Punjab.... But now I
think, I was wrong; he knew the nature and character of the movement and wanted to
avoid any premature hazards it contained. He had the experience of the Ghadar Party’s
armed struggle which had been started prematurely, without proper preparation and
thorough assessment of the Indian situation and organisation.310
308
‘Har Dayal, Rebel, Recants His Views’, New York Times, (8 June, 1919), available at New York Times Article
Archives, 1851-Present.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9E03E4DB1F39E13ABC4053DFB0668382609EDE&legacy=true
accessed on 7th June 2015.
309
For an appreciation of the variety of positions held by anti-colonial thinkers in relation to the colonial state, see
Chris Bayly’s work on the formation of liberal thought in colonial India. Bayly, Recovering Liberties, pp. 1-23.
310
Josh, My Tryst, pp. 103-104.
109
There is a move away from the complete autonomy of the political in these writings, to a search
for a new dialectic between state, society and politics. Josh eventually interpreted Singh’s words
as suggesting a lack of a direct correspondence between social and political conflicts, and the
need for ‘patient’ work to produce an adequation between the two spheres.

‘Go cautiously’ could only mean ‘patiently organise the workers and peasants to fight
their struggles, tell them who their friends were and who their enemies: [sic] and,
perhaps, do not indulge in bombastic slogans’.311

Josh’s point of departure from the Ghadar Party lay in two seemingly contradictory manoeuvres-
- the identification of sociological groups that could be ‘objectively’ inclined to join the political
struggle against colonialism, and the simultaneous gap he posited between their social being and
their political project. ‘Peasants’ and ‘workers’ were marked as sociological groups structurally
unassimilable into colonial rule, while emphasis on ‘patient work’ amongst them denoted the
subjective task of turning this social conflict into a coherent political project. Whereas for
Ghadar, the theatricality of violent acts had the potential to seize popular consciousness and
transform social despair into a revolutionary insurgency, for Josh, politics became a creative
process of identifying, intensifying and sustaining specific contradictions within the social body.
In fact, the main point of disagreement between Bhaghat Singh and Josh in the late 1920s also
concerned with the place of violence while they worked together in the Naujwan Bharat
Sabha.312

Bhaghat Singh wanted to do something very quick through the use of bombs and pistols,
in order to politically awaken the slumbering youth and students who had forgotten their
duty towards their motherland; something spectacular that would make them sit up and
do some thinking about the soul-crushing British enslavement of India… ‘Our young, hot
blood cannot wait for that long’ he asserted.313

...It seems that Bhaghat Singh wanted to win me over to his way of thinking. We had
discussed these differences several times, but stuck to our viewpoint of organising the
workers and the peasants patiently [to] prepare for the mass revolution. The Ghadar Party
had failed because it could not get the masses on its side. This awareness was the main
factor which prevented me from joining them.314

This moment signifies the intersection, and transition, between two specific sequences of
political thought. Steeped in modernist conceptions of politics, both Ghadar and communist

311
Ibid., p. 104.
312
Apart from being a member of the same organization (Naujwan Bharat Sabha), Bhaghat Singh also wrote for
Kirti under the pseudonym of “Vidrohi” while Josh was the editor. Until the end of his life, Singh remained torn
between the idea assumption of heroic death, and the approach of patiently building of mass political organizations.
See Harish Puri, Ghadar Movement: Ideology, Organisation, and Strategy (Amritsar: Guru Nanak Dev University,
1993).
313
Josh, My Tryst, p. 133.
314
Ibid., p. 134
110
politics aimed to mobilize an anonymous public sphere. But whereas Ghadar found spectacular
acts as the missing link between anti-colonial politics and popular consciousness, communists
such as Josh sought to create a new dialectic between the vague category of the masses, the
sociologically precise concepts of ‘workers and peasants’, and the subjective will of anti-colonial
nationalism (as we discuss later). In fact, Bhaghat Singh himself, in his later writings from jail,
dwelled upon the limitations of the Ghadar Party’s violence and propagated the need for a more
precise study of existing social contradictions as a way of overcoming the impasse of anti-
colonial agitation, signalling a new sequence of mass politics in colonial Punjab.

The party should start with the work of mass propaganda. It is very essential. One of the
fundamental causes of the failure of the efforts of the Ghadar Party (1914-15) was the
ignorance, apathy and sometimes active opposition of the masses. And apart from that, it
is essential for gaining the active sympathy of and organising the peasants and workers...
This party of political workers, bound by strict discipline, should handle all other
movements. It shall have to organize the peasants' and workers' parties, labour unions,
and kindred political bodies.315

Communists were not the only political force keen to grasp the complex relationship between the
social and the political. In her study of Ambedkar’s thought, Shruti Kapila argues that
Ambedkar’s engagement with the caste question produced a profound reconceptualization of the
role played by social antagonisms in political thought. For Ambedkar, historically embedded
social antagonisms, such as caste, needed to be acknowledged and mobilized in the political
domain. The minimal gap separating the social and the political, and the repeated interruption of
one by the other, provided politics with both its historical specificity and its contingency. 316
Thus, engagement with Marxism was part of a broader trend in Indian politics to create new
ideological and political anchors for the anti-colonial movement, and to find novel appreciation
of the social for political thought. Politics was now deemed to be conditioned by social conflicts,
and thus the production of communist praxis in colonial Punjab required the rethinking of ‘global
Marxism’ to account for the historically specific social relations prevalent in the region.

Such a rethinking not only allowed for the entrance of Marxism as a new horizon for political
orientation in colonial Punjab, but also transformed the theoretical premises of Marxism itself,
providing Indian communism its historical density. Ironically, it was on the question of
sociological precision, namely the revolutionary potentialities of the peasantry, that Josh began
to develop communist praxis distinct from its genealogy in Europe. To explore this singularity,
we must ask why someone who wished to situate himself in the tradition of the transnational
Ghadar Party and ‘global communism’ premised his politics on the peasantry, the archetypal
figure of backwardness in modernist discourse. I examine this question through a study of
transnationalism in the early twentieth century, as well as the socio-historical specificity of the
Punjab.

315
Quoted in Ram Chandra, History of the Naujwan Bharat Sabha, ed. Malwinder Warraich (Chandigarh: Unistar,
2007), p. 264.
316
Kapila, ‘The Majority of Democracy’, (2015).
111
Beyond Global and Local: The Broken Time of Politics in Colonial Punjab

My engagement with anti-colonial politics in ‘global space’ is different from current scholarship
on the subject that examines diasporic politics as a rootless ‘cosmopolitanism’, dissolving the
centrality of ‘place’ with its historical, cultural and affective density, within a universalizing
narrative of the ‘global’.317 As Tim Harper has argued, such a banal focus on flows and
encounters risks obfuscating the anxieties and violence emanating from global migration,
flattening such frictions by constructing a fiction of a seamless emergence of a smooth,
‘cosmopolitan’ humanity. Such a methodological construction has an uncanny resemblance with
colonial narratives that portrayed global revolutionaries as external threats that required the
tightening of imperial borders to prevent their intrusion into the imperial body politic.318

My own task is to restore the centrality of these transnational, anti-imperial networks to the
imperial geography from which they emanated. For despite the global itineraries of Ghadar
revolutions, they never could, nor in my opinion did they seek to, escape the history that
compelled them to migrate from Punjab. Ever since its formation, the primary aim of the party
was to influence political life inside India, while preparing revolutionaries to ‘return’ to the
country to carry out subversive activities. One of the primary tropes of the Ghadar Party was a
call to acknowledge the trauma of the Ghadar rebellion of 1857, a gesture seeking to produce
politics by a confrontation with History , rather than seeking a flight from it.319 In this section, I
first study both the peculiar historical conditions prevalent in colonial Punjab that facilitated the
formation of the transnational Ghadar network. Second, I show how Josh attempted to constitute
a political praxis adequate to the Ghadar legacy inside colonial Punjab to overcome the
internal/external divide constitutive of colonial propaganda, finding in the figure of the peasant a
potential embodiment of the emancipatory promise offered by transnational revolutionaries.

In colonial Punjab (much like the rest of the colonial world), capitalism, state formation and,
consequently, political subjectivity, did not follow a linear trajectory. Instead, we are presented
with a broken time that cannot be narrativized under a master-signifier such as Capital,
colonialism or even less so, feudalism.320 The special relationship enjoyed by the region with the
colonial state meant that the imperatives of security, capital, and land were superimposed onto
each other in a complex unity. The Land Alienation Act (1900) is a classic example of the
contradictory tendencies existing in colonial Punjab that the British had to negotiate in order to
reproduce their power. Punjab’s landed elite felt threatened by the increasing encroachment of
urban-based finance capital on agricultural lands. Yet, the resentment displayed by Punjab’s
landed elite against this process of land alienation greatly perturbed colonial officials since they

317
Manjapra, M.N. Roy, pp. 111-151.
318
See Nivedita Saxena and Siddharta Srivastava, ‘An Analysis of the Modern Offence of Sedition’, NUJS Law
Review 7:2 (2014), pp. 121-147.
319
Josh, Hindustan Ghadar Party, pp. 1-8.
320
In recent years, scholars as diverse as Jairus Banaji and Etienne Balibar have argued that there is no
straightforward correspondence between “base and superstructure” or the content and form in capitalism. Beyond
necessitating a detailed analysis of a particular formation, such an approach also keeps open the possibility of
historical and political contingencies. See Jairus Banaji, Theory as History: Essays on Mode of Production and
Exploitation (Chicago: Haymarket, 2011).
112
required their support in maintaining stability in Punjab, as well as for recruitment for the Indian
military. The result was a peculiar social arrangement in which ‘non-agriculturalist tribes’ were
barred from acquiring agricultural land, solidifying economic, caste and political barriers
between urban and rural Punjab.321 Simultaneously, the Punjab’s peasantry, apart from producing
for the world market, was physically assimilated into a global geography through their
participation in the Indian military, traveling to disparate locales, from the Far East to the Middle
East to the East Coast in the United States.322

A worrying factor for the British was the fact that, despite the integration of a surplus rural
population into the military, the agrarian crisis affecting the middle and the poor peasants was
too acute to be resolved through an absorption of the surplus peasantry into the state apparatus.
Recurrent agrarian crises often led to localized peasant uprisings, such as the 1907 ‘disturbances’
against the Colonisation Bill, the largest mass agitation by the peasantry against colonial rule. 323
Such specific arrangements meant that the peasantry represented the poor and backward ‘other’
of industrial progress, while simultaneously being central to modern geo-politics due their
critical role in the British Indian military, creating a peculiar tension in assigning it a political
temporality. It is not surprising, that the first truly ‘global’ political movement from colonial
India, the Ghadar Party, was fuelled by Punjabi peasants living in the diaspora, signifying this
paradox. Therefore I ask, why did someone who wished to situate himself in the tradition of the
transnational Ghadar Party and global communism premise his politics on the peasantry, the
archetypal figure of backwardness in modernist discourse?

Communism and the Peasant Question

The presence of multiple temporal rhythms made it impossible to decipher a singular socio-
political logic for colonial Punjab. It meant that the question of ‘the global’ had to be rethought
and reconstituted in relation to the internal dynamics of the politically charged 1920s and 1930s
colonial India. Josh locates the rise of the Ghadar Party rebellion within the double
consciousness of the Punjabi peasantry, impoverished, yet globally mobile.

The main reasons for Indians going abroad was economic… The economic conditions of
the Punjab peasants had worsened during the second half of the nineteenth century due to
the increased land revenue, heavy indirect taxes, Sahukar’s debts and fragmentation of
land holdings. Land on which they were making their poor living had passed into the
hands of the rich peasantry and banya sahukars. There was no employment for the
peasant youth except enrolling themselves as military recruits in the British army….The
Punjabi soldier had proved his worth in the wars of expansion of the British Empire. He
had gone overseas, fought many battles in different countries under the British flag and

321
See Hassan Javid, ‘Class, Power, and Patronage: Landowners and Politics in Punjab’, History and Anthropology
22:3 (2011), pp. 337- 369.
322
Ramnath, Haj to Utopia, pp. 17-33.
323
Barrie Gerald, ‘The Punjab Disturbances of 1907: The Response of the British Government in India to Agrarian
Unrest’, Modern Asian Studies 1:4 (1967), pp. 353-358.
113
 seen people of different religions, colours and nationalities. This broadened his mental
horizon to an extent, he acquired an adventurous spirit.324

According to Josh, the intersection of extreme misery and the acquisition of a transnational
‘mental horizon’ imbibed the Punjabi peasant with an ‘adventurous spirit’. The critical place
occupied by the Punjabi peasantry within the coercive apparatus of the colonial state made it a
special target for appeals by revolutionaries aiming to subvert colonial authority. For this reason,
the planned rebellion by the Ghadar Party in 1914-1915 rested on the assumption that there
would be a combination of military rebellion, beginning in the Mian Mir Cantonment of Lahore,
and mass peasant support in the Punjabi countryside.325 Josh argued that the reasons for the
failed rebellion, known in the British legal lexicon as the ‘Lahore Conspiracy Case’ lay precisely
in the inability of the Ghadar leadership to win over the active support of the peasantry.

A wiser, more capable and far-sighted leadership with widespread organisation was
needed to take advantage of the unrest prevailing among the peasantry and in the Sikh-
Hindu and Muslim regiments, prepare them for a combined assault and start the
revolution… But the above formula of men, money and arms was inadequate and
insufficient. Because even if all these three were there, the revolution perhaps could not
have succeeded without the mass backing and an organised central leadership and its far-
flung branches following a strict discipline.326

The active support of the peasantry here appears as the ‘missing link’ between the heroic but
doomed voluntarism of the Ghadarite revolutionaries and a transformative politics in India. The
formation of the Kirti Kissan Party in Punjab was meant to overcome this lacuna and to situate
revolutionary politics in the midst of the agrarian crisis. Thus, communist politics began in
Punjab by invoking the revolutionary potential of the ‘peasant masses’, as Josh's reflections on
the Kirti Kissan Party conferences demonstrate:

...I spoke at great length about the starving and famished conditions of the working
masses, especially the peasant masses…. We wanted to wean away the poor and the
middle peasantry from the influence of the Zamindara League and expose the pro-
landlord politics of Choudhry Chhotu Ram… The agenda of the Rohtak conference was
almost the same as that of the Lyallpur conference...The main task was to meet the land
needs of the peasantry.327

The seamless insertion of the peasantry as the principal vehicle for radical politics is apparent
from these lines. In fact, the primary activities of the Communists in Punjab revolved around the
‘Qarza committees’ formed to organize against increasing rural indebtedness and high rates of
land revenue.328 This also explains why the first (successful) electoral campaign of communists

324
Josh, Hindustan Ghadar Party, p. 40.
325
Ramnath, Haj to Utopia, pp. 70-94.
326
Josh, Hindustan Ghadar Party, pp. 269-270.
327
Sohan Josh, My Tryst, p. 121.
328
Ibid., p. 200.
114
in the Punjab was entirely centered on the agrarian situation. Josh’s electoral campaign against
Sardar Raghbir Singh was also premised on fighting the problems faced by middle and poor
peasants.

But he [Raghbir SIngh] was not all virtue, and he was a known oppressor of peasants of
villages in his possession and under his domination, depriving them of their share of
irrigation water and harshly raising rents from them. Further, he was a lackey of the
British who had never raised his voice against the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, and in fact
favoured the continuation of British Raj. All these factors provided us with enough
ammunition to expose him throughout the length and breadth of the Tarn Taran.329

Josh links the destitute conditions of the peasantry with colonial exploitation (an oppressive
landlord who was also a ‘lackey of the British’), placing the two within a continuum. As stated
above, Josh went on to achieve a historic win against Raghbir Singh, with a margin of 12,000
votes. Gains such as these made by communists in the 1930s, are often attributed to the ‘global’
appeal of communism during the inter-war and post-war periods.330 While broadly correct, such
an analysis nevertheless carries the risk of depicting anti-colonial politics as either a mere
reiteration of ideas already developed elsewhere, or at best local ‘modifications,’ denying the
possibility of intellectual autonomy to the non-European world.

Borrowing from Dipesh Chakrabarty, I posit that European ideas, including Marxism, had to be
stretched each time they were deployed in colonial India, displaying both their utility, but also
their imprecision when dealing with novel political practices outside the sites of their origin. 331
To this sharp analysis I make one addition; not only does historical difference force us to expand
upon existing theoretical frameworks, but it also compels us to reconstitute such frameworks,
challenging the very idea of an original site. I, therefore, argue that the elevation of the peasantry
as the principal revolutionary subject in colonial Punjab, far from being a particularistic
deviation from a pristine Marxist theory, provides us with tools for rethinking Marxism on the
basis of a new practice of theory.

Peasant Deviation or Anti-Colonial Innovation?

Rochona Majumdar has powerfully argued that the primary displacement in revolutionary
thought in colonial India occurred through the politicization of the peasantry during the anti-
colonial movement, a social group deemed ‘pre-political’ in the most radical canons of European
thought. Yet, the stubborn persistence of the peasantry in the social body, and increasingly
visible presence in Indian political life, interrupted linear representations of socio-political
development.332 As Majumdar rightly points out, however, ‘peasant’ was less of an empirical,
objective category, than a master-signifier for social groups and classes (such as tribals,

329
Ibid., p. 209.
330
See Joachim Haberlen, ‘Between Global Aspirations and Local Realities: The Global Dimensions of Interwar
Communism’, Journal of Global History 7: 3 (2012), p. 415.
331
Chakrabarty, ‘Belatedness as Possibility’, pp. 163-176.
332
Majumdar, ‘Subaltern Studies’, pp. 50-54.
115
unemployed, urban poor, etc) marginalized by the process of primitive accumulation, but without
a proper name in political thought. She places this importance attached to the peasantry as part of
the ‘romantic’ search for a non-industrial ‘revolutionary subject’ in the twentieth century.

The framework developed by Majumdar is useful in highlighting the political significance of

processes and social groups that produced the modern political in India through the interruption
of a specific modernity imagined by colonial (and colonized) elites. One of the key contributions
of Subaltern Studies has been its focus on the peasantry as introducing a gap between Europeans
notions of an ideal modern citizenry and the actual practice of modern subjects, a productive
space between imagining and inhabiting modernity. I build on this framework to posit that a
praxis premised on the interruption of capitalist modernity rather than its maturation, the
excluded remainder of the historical process, in this case the peasantry, threatened the
disintegration/transformation of the political order. Consider Josh’s analysis of why the
peasantry provided communists an opportunity to establish a foothold within the political
landscape of colonial Punjab.

The (Zamindara) League stood for the interests of the landlord and the kulaks: the
Chaudhuri used the word zamindar to cover over the entire peasantry, including the poor
and the middle peasantry. The provincial Congress committee was also holding its
conference to defend the interests of the corrupt banis and put forward its own political
program. We wanted to wean away the poor and the middle peasantry…... Our strong
point was that we were against landlordism, and wanted their lands to be distributed
among the landless and the poor peasantry.333

The non-place occupied by the peasantry in existing forms of representations, which had been
‘covered over’ in colonial and nationalist discourse, made it possible for it to become a political
subject. Here, we witness an important similarity between Ghadar Party activities and peasant
revolts that allowed for their simultaneous incorporation into communist thought. Anti-colonial
groups such as the Ghadar Party constructed a transnational, anti-colonial geography exceeding
the limits of imperial sovereignty. As Enseng Ho has argued, this excess allowed anti-colonial
groups to haunt the colonial imaginary, since their ability ‘for geographical mobility often meant
crossing imperial and departmental jurisdictions’ from where they appeared as ‘sophisticated as
empire itself, and enough so to represent a potential threat’.334 The conflagration of peasant
discontent into a political crisis also remained a concern for British officials, who recognized that
the ‘trials and troubles of the Indian peasant are many and he who seeks to ease their lot may
well succeed in not only gaining their confidence but also their blind and unthinking
devotion’.335 Therefore, contrary to the ‘external’ threat posed by Ghadar, the peasantry
represented an immanent excess, whose financial precarity often turned into political defiance,
threatening the internal stability of the Empire.

333
Josh, My Tryst, p. 118.
334
Ho, ‘Empire through Diasporic Eyes’, pp. 210-246.
335
Williamson, India and Communism, p. 153.
116
Colonial anxiety over a fusion between these global and local symbols of interruption triggered
simultaneously a transnational and national operation to contain the ‘threat’ posed by such
groups, with colonial officials vowing to ‘stamp’ them out ‘like the plague’.336 Following from
Agamben, I posit that such excessive figures were at the heart of colonial sovereignty, since their
inclusion into the legitimate body politic could only be realized through the exclusionary gesture
of sovereign violence.337 Such an inclusion through exclusion was not only a response to a
foreign intrusion or an external threat, but was also critical in structuring the internal life of the
Empire, a fact borne by the flurry of ‘sedition’ charges against the leading figures of the National
movement inside India.338 Thus, Josh’s attempts to forge an identity between ‘global’ groups
such as the Ghadar party and ‘local’ agrarian movements stemmed from each’s excessive
presence in imperial categorizations, with their lack of place endowing them with a disruptive
potential in the present.

We see that groups such as the Ghadar party were not merely ‘cosmopolitan,’ a category unable
to explain their political specificity beyond mundane theme of geographical mobility. Instead, we
should view them as part of a political project in fidelity to the disruption of a historically
specific Empire, which could align with other groups (internal or external) that posed a similar
threat to imperial rule. British officials themselves placed these two threats together, condemning
Kirti for simultaneously ‘advocating the organisation of workers and peasants’ and ‘championing
the cause and ideals of the Ghadar conspirators’, in the worse combination of ‘internal’ and
‘external’ threats imagined by colonial authorities.339 Therefore, rather than creating a socio-
cultural homology as a basis for political identification, it was the ability of both the Ghadarites
and the insurgent peasantry to interrupt colonial sovereignty that allowed their adequation in a
shared political project, without posing a logical contradiction.

Loss, Volition and Sacrifice

Yet, the mere interruption of social processes does not allow us access to the historicity of
communist thought, i.e. how a specific politics was imagined, practiced and sustained in a given
historical situation. Instead, we run the risk of reading a particular political interruption in the
colonial world as simply a repetition of similar insurrectionary moments elsewhere in modernity,
whose consequences had already been deduced by European thinkers. We know from Deleuze,
however, that no repetition is innocent of improvisation, even if the novelty appears to be part of
a world constantly repeating itself.340 A repetition of an idea in a novel setting is always also a
movement of an internal loss, displacing its own coordinates to permit the emergence of
unfamiliar elements, even if the lack of an adequate language corresponding to this novelty
cloaks the new inside the vocabulary of the familiar. The peasantry signified a critical new
336
Petrie, Communism in India, pp. 321.
337
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Redwood City: Stanford University Press,
2004).
338
Shruti Kapila, ‘Once Again, Sedition is at the Heart of Defining the Nation’, The Wire (2nd February, 2016),
available at https://thewire.in/22763/once-again-sedition-is-at-the-heart-of-defining-the-nation/ accessed on 4th of
March, 2016.
339
Williamson, India and Communism, p. 160.
340
See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
117
element in Marxism’s repetition in the non-European world which induced a deeper loss than
merely a displacement of the proletariat as a political subject.

The classical Marxist conception of the proletariat was tied to a stagist view of history in which
the proletariat represented the maturation and exhaustion of the capitalist mode of production,
allowing it to embody an epoch-shifting potential to take humanity beyond the present. The
absence of the proletariat as a principal political subject was also a loss of such certainty in the
Big Other of History and its sociologically predictable laws, turning political action into a
creative and productive process tied to the contingency of the historical conjuncture. Thus, rather
than simply an exchange of positions between the proletariat and the peasantry within a shared
conception of History, the erasure of scientific guarantees turned volition into a central aspect of
political subjectivity in anti-colonial thought. I study volition through the trope of sacrifice
which, apart from signalling a confrontation with History through its interruption, allows us to
examine a precise practice through which anti-colonial thinkers, including Marxists, produced
autonomous political ideas.

Let us take an example of the Ghadar party’s elucidation of colonial rule. For the Ghadarites,
participation in colonial institutions represented a process of financial and psychic self-
enslavement for the colonized subjects. Consider the following lines from the first edition of
Ghadar di Goonj, the official newspaper of the Ghadar Party.

The world derisively accosts us: O Coolie, O Coolie. We have no fluttering flag of our
own anywhere. We go fighting to wave the British flag over our heads. This is a very
shameful thing for us. You became slaves to the English nation and disgraceful to the
name of Hindustan.341

The emphasis on shame (as we shall discuss later) is immediately followed by a call to arms to
arrest this subjection by inculcating a spirit of self-abnegation.

Make the platoons aware, why are you sleeping, O swordsmen? Indians won battles in
Burma, Egypt, China and Sudan, Shame on us we that we helped our enemy. This is what
a wretched slave does…... Driving out the British tyrants, we have to brighten the name
of India like bright torch. …... If we remain alive we shall rule and if we die, the world
will sing songs of praise for us.342

In a gesture common to various anti-colonial movements, the Ghadar Party called for an active
distancing from the material and ideological coordinates of imperial rule. The lack of political
institutions expressing the will of anti-colonial organizations compelled groups like the Ghadar
Party to substitute the pursuit of material benefits with voluntary suffering in order to resist
assimilation into the imperial project. In psychoanalytic terms, ‘sacrifice’ was offered by anti-
colonial militants not in the name of universally accepted institutions or a political community,

341
Quoted in Josh, Hindustan Ghadar Party, p. 172.
342
Ibid., p. 191.
118
but instead as an act that brought into existence a new political community.343 In other words,
since there was no institutional or sociological guarantee for the existence of ideals such as
‘liberty’ or ‘nation’, sacrificing in the name of such ideals became the alternative ground for
their production by inscribing them on a suffering body. Thus, anti-colonial movements in India
had to produce the grounds on which to premise their political ideals, with concepts attaining
their sanctity not from a legal regime, but from sacrifices offered by anti-colonial militants in
their name. It is for this reason that Josh elevated the element of self-abnegation central to
Ghadarite subjectivity as the party’s most essential and eternal contribution to communist
politics in the region.

The Ghadar armed struggle was not fought in vain. It left an indelible heritage of
revolutionary spirit and courage in the country. It set a new precedent of selflessness,
self-sacrifice and self-abnegation for the cause of freedom and took it to a new
height...Their martyrdom taught us at every moment of our duty and obligation towards
India’s freedom.344

The appeal of the figure of the martyr in Josh's writings stem from his ability to become a
productive symbol for a regulative idea. Writing in the Kirti magazine, the official organ of the
communist movement of the Punjab, Josh depicted a martyr as the epitome of the revolutionary
subject.

The martyr is far higher than the standard of his time, and his views are far loftier than
those of other people. The people who are tightly bound with the chains of conservative
views cannot understand his lofty flights (of imagination) and independent views…then
comes his turn for execution. Does he become upset on hearing of his death? Does he
begin to cry? Does he make entreaties to save himself? Never. He rejoices, merry-makes,
leaps and jumps and sings smilingly.345

This description of a joyful martyr elevated confrontation with death as a more authentic mode
of existence than mere attachment to life privileged in liberal humanism. But more importantly,
it is the martyr’s indifference to existing temporality that made his actions indiscernible to those
attached to a defaulting present. One may argue that suffering and sacrifice became universal
tropes for political claim-making in colonial Punjab as acts in excess of the present, interrupting
its reproduction. In fact, Marx himself had to be placed within this tradition of conscious self-
abnegation to make him legible in the region’s politics. In a speech on Marx, which could have
easily have extended to revolutionaries from the Ghadar Party, Josh describes Marx as one who
‘suffered’ for humanity.

He had been passing his life in securing bread for the poor people. The German
Government offered to give him the higher posts several times but he refused to accept
them and said that in order to provide happiness in the world it was necessary that some

343
See Dennis Keenan, The Question of Sacrifice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), pp. 33-45.
344
Josh, Hindustan Ghadar Party, p. 271.
345
Ibid., pp. 98-99.
119
 people should be in distress. Happiness cannot prevail over the world unless some
persons become martyrs for the sufferings of the people.346

The transformation of Marx into a colonial, or better still, an anti-colonial militant undergoing
voluntary suffering was part of the larger shift in communist practice in the colonial world,
particularly on political subjectivity. Josh privileged the consciously suffering partisan as a
bearer of revolutionary potentiality, rather than situating the latter in a sociologically deduced
group, such as the industrial working class. In a classical anti-colonial gesture, Josh cloaks his
departure from orthodox Marxism by invoking, if not incorporating, Marx into a new conception
of revolutionary subjectivity. Yet, much like every border, the line separating orthodox from
anti-colonial Marxism also co-joined them. As we have discussed, for Josh, what was at stake
was not a rejection of Marxism as a ‘foreign idea’ to be substituted by indigenous thought, but to
use the particularity of the historical situation, and its attendant cultural and political repertoires,
to produce a new practice of Marxism. The giant shadow of the Ghadar movement and the
persistence of agrarian revolts produced a historically specific communist subjectivity that
overcame the loss of historical certainty through volition and sacrifice. This new dialectic of
Marxism developed in Punjab provides us with a window to re-open Marx’s own oeuvre to
examine repressed elements that resonate with this praxis, as we shall see in the next section.

Encountering Two Geneologies of Shame

We have studied how communism arrived in colonial Punjab as a peculiar encounter between
Marxism and Ghadarite anti-colonialism, resulting in a complex interplay between external
imperatives and internal displacements. Yet, there perhaps appears to be a deeper subterranean
connection between the political practice of the Ghadar Party and Marxism, despite their
production in distinct spatial (and temporal) locales.347 Once again, we look at Josh’s attempts at
fusing these disparate currents to unearth these connections.

For Josh, the history of communism in Punjab, and the history of the Ghadar Party, were an
attempt to continue the work of a deeper undercurrent in Punjab’s collective unconscious, the
revolt of 1857. The uprising and its subsequent defeat aided in securing a special place for
Punjab in colonial administration, while also served as an untapped source of accumulated rage
against the Empire.

According to British authorities themselves, the most important factor which tilted the
balance in favour of British victory was the arrival in time of the Sikh regiments in
Delhi...The Sikh chieftains, in their selfish interests, with their illiterate armies openly
sided with the British rulers and stabbed the revolt in the back…. Even backward areas
heard many rumours and stories current [sic] during those days. It gave a good jostling

346
Quoted in Sharma, Radical Politics, p. 43.
347
My argument is partly informed by Bruno Bosteels’ excellent discussion on the persistence of subterranean
undercurrents in social formations, and their re-emergence through encounters in distinct historical moments. See
Bruno Bosteels, The Actuality of Communism (London: Verso, 2011).
120
 the high and the low [sic]. It aroused feelings of sympathy for the rebels and people were
sorry they did not succeed.348

We see the double movement in which Punjab had been integrated into Empire through the
loyalty of its military regiments and the ruling elite, yet tales of the revolt circulated in colonial
Punjab as a heroic episode of resistance. This interplay between a revolutionary promise and a
haunting betrayal retained 1857 as an unfinished experience in popular memory. Much like the
British invocation of the event each time there were anti-British ‘disturbances’ in order to justify
excessive state violence, anti-colonial movements also had to engage with 1857 as a settling of
scores from the past, as well as to retroactively save its heroic promise by situating it in existing
anti-colonial struggles.349

As discussed earlier, for a militant anti-colonial organization like Ghadar, belief in an onward
march of progress was replaced by the humiliation of participating in a project of self-
enslavement. Shame became the raw material for fueling political and ethical action by militants
in the Punjab. Shame also served as the affective motif through which they mobilized the
revolutionary potentialities of past revolts, such as 1857, which had been obscured by Punjab’s
apparent loyalty to Empire. Ghadar leaders displaced existing codes of loyalty and honor
towards the British state onto the register of anti-colonial shame. In the first edition of its
newspaper, Ghadar di Goonj, published in 1914 and cited almost verbatim by Josh in his works
on the Ghadar Party, the theme of humiliation is deployed to counter-pose the Punjab’s alleged
attachment to Empire.

Are you not ashamed that in times of war you are ordered to the trenches and the British
troops are kept in the rear in security? For all danger to your lives you get only nine
rupees a month and out of this, you have to clothe and feed yourself and save from this
for your family, whereas the British soldier gets three good square meals a day and is
provided with the best of uniforms, besides getting forty five rupees a month and bonus,
etc.350

In a classic example of counter-interpellation, these words were aimed at disrupting the process
of recognition through which colonized Punjabis came to identify with Empire, by emphasizing
the physical separation between Indian and white soldiers in the British military. It is this
estrangement from dominant modes of identification induced by shame that opened up a
separation from colonial ideology, denoting the disjointedness between colonial self-
representation and its actual practices in Punjab. Josh stressed the centrality of Ghadar’s
contribution in the realm of ideology, by ‘reminding Indians’ of the realities of colonial rule.

The Ghadar heroes’ everlasting contribution was that they raised the banner of Ghadar
(revolt) against British slavery and reminded Indians that the motherland was still fettered
in British chains and they had to be broken...And they reminded us that the war for

348
Josh, Hindustan Ghadar Party, pp. 12-13.
349
Condos, 'License to Kill’, pp. 479-517.
350
Quoted in Josh, Hindustan Ghadar Party, p. 191.
121
 independence started in 1857 and carried forward by them in 1914-1915 still remained
unfinished and that it had to be concluded.351

By inducing a consciousness turned against itself, shame had the power to ‘remind’ colonial
subjects of an originary event in which revolt and subjection lay anchored in the same instance.
For Josh, the ‘unfinished’ work of Ghadar, that ‘had to be concluded,’ was continued by the
communist movement in India, which ‘always sought and got inspiration from the 1857 revolt’.
Thus Ghadar’s summoning of 1857 allowed it to become a vanishing mediator between military
revolts against the British and the advent of mass anti-colonial politics in India, tying the two
moments together in a history of continuing rebellion.

Should we view Marxism’s relationship with Ghadar’s history as simply an extension or

negation of Marxist thought, or can it aid us in locating elements within Marx’s oeuvre that
allowed for such belated resonance in the non-European world? I argue that there were, perhaps,
deeper undercurrents structuring Marx’s writings that allowed aspects of his thought to be
incorporated into an anti-colonial subjectivity premised on shame and suffering. In a beautiful
but rather under-studied commentary on German patriotism in a letter to Ruge written in 1843,
Marx highlights the revolutionary potential in shame, if directed at one’s own participation in a
farcical political project, in this case, German nationalism.

The glorious robes of liberalism have fallen away and the most repulsive
despotism stands revealed for all the world to see. This, too, is a revelation,
albeit a negative one. It is a truth which at the very least teaches us to see the
hollowness of our patriotism, the perverted nature of our state and to hide our
faces in shame. I can see you smile and say: what good will that do?
Revolutions are not made by shame. And my answer is that shame is a
revolution in itself... Shame is a kind of anger turned in on itself. And if a
whole nation were to feel ashamed it would be like a lion recoiling in order
to spring.352

It is difficult to miss the resonance between the deployment of shame by Marx and by the
Ghadarite revolutionaries, as if there was a secret knot that tied together the two political projects
and permitted a mutual incorporation. Here, shame is deployed as an ‘anger turned on itself’ in
an act of self-accountability. ‘Shame is in itself a revolution’ insofar as revolution demands a
minimal separation, ‘a recoiling’ from the laws of the world, only in order prepare for subjective
interventions ‘to spring’. Much like the Ghadar party, Marx emphasizes subjective
transformation, rather than an expression of objective relations, as a necessary pre-condition for
meaningful intervention. We are miles away from discussions of teleological laws of History
pre-destined to move towards a revolutionary event, and are instead presented with a

351
Ibid., p. 271.
352
Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans., Rodney Livingston and Gregor Benton (New York: Vintage, 1975), pp. 199-
200.
122
revolutionary subjectivity that is incongruous with fantasies of linear development.353 The
encounter between ‘Marxism’ and the anti-colonial movement compels us to register the
consequences of communist praxis in the colonial world within traditional Marxism, including
making audible the silences within the texts of Marx, a long-neglected task that is finally being
undertaken in intellectual history.354

The Ghadar movement, and its appropriation by communists in Punjab, became one of the many
sites of the encounter that turned Marxism into a theory of rupture from History, rather than
simply an expression of its teleological movement. Josh's appropriation of Marxism not only
overcame the internal impasse of the radical tradition in Punjab, but also aided in restoring to
Marxism its own forgotten legacy, obscured by the positivism dominant in 19th Century Europe.

353
In recent years, there has been an emphasis on recovering the political aspects (i.e. interventions) of marx, rather
than simply viewing him as a scholar of political economy. In such analyzes, Marx is not seen as either a critic or an
enthusiast for modernity, but rather a militant who was actively strategizing to overturn the status quo. It is this
legacy of Marx that became relevant in the non-European world. See Alain Badiou, Communist Hypothesis
(London: Verso, 2009).
, Harry Cleaver, ‘Karl Marx: Economist or Revolutionary?’ in Marx, Schumpeter and Keynes: A Centenary
Celebration of Dissent, eds. Suzanne W. Helburn and David F. Bramhall (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1986), pp. 121-
146, and Daniel Bensaid, Marx for our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique (London: Verso, 2002).
354
I have in mind Bruno Bosteels and Kevin Anderson’s work. See Bosteels, Marx and Freud, pp. 9-128. and
Kevin Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity and Non-Western Societies (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2016).
123
124
 Chapter 6

The Postcolonial Condition: Ranadive and the Search for Authenticity

Introduction

At midnight on the 15th of August 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru proclaimed that India had fulfilled its
‘Tryst with destiny’ by gaining ‘freedom’ from the British.355 This declaration at the twilight of
colonialism in India, and later in much of Asia and Africa, ended a political sequence that began
with struggles against colonial rule, culminating in the crystallization and victory of the
nationalist movement. Yet, the transfer of power to political organizations leading the
independence movement resulted in contradictory sentiments-- a celebration of the ‘nation’s’
triumph against the deferral of its right to exist, yet simultaneously the fear that independence
was merely another name for continuing the rule of the elites. Nehru himself qualified his
congratulatory statement by accepting that the promise of the independence movement was not
realized ‘wholly or in full measure’, alluding to an underlying anxiety that the end of British rule
had not foreclosed political possibilities.

Thus, enthusiasm and suspicion marked the same historical moment, with a split between the
‘nationalist’ current that vowed to begin a process of reconstruction through development, and
the ‘radical’ tendencies that argued that authentic freedom still lay elsewhere.This debate has
been central to subaltern studies, and, more broadly, postcolonial studies, with their emphasis on
the continued reproduction of an elite and subaltern domain in post-independence India.356 This
chapter revisits the moment of independence to interrogate how the communist movement
responded to the transformed configuration of socio-political relations. I argue that the primary
problem confronted by the communist movement was to find new historical referentiality in the
absence of the colonial enemy, in order to develop a strategic axis in an era of decolonization and
the rise of republicanism in India.

I explore these themes through the figure of Balchandra Trimbak Ranadive, the firebrand
communist leader who served as the general secretary of the Communist Party of India from
February 1948 to January 1950. He was eventually removed from the leadership and denounced
as a ‘left adventurist’ for his alleged putschist tendencies, since he called for an all-India
insurgency against the Nehru government soon after independence. During the two-year period
he presided over the party as the general secretary, the membership of the Communist Party
plummeted from 89,000 members to 20,000, as numerous cadres and members of the leadership
were either jailed or killed by the security forces of the newly independent state.357

355
Quoted in Brian MacArthur, Penguin Book of Twentieth Century Speeches (London: Penguin Viking, 1992), pp.
234-237.
356
Guha, Dominance without Hegemony, pp. 1-99.
357
M.B. Rao, ‘Introduction’ in Documents of the History of the Communist Party of India, ed. M.B. Rao (New
Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1960), vol. VII, p. xiv.
125
Despite the almost universal condemnation of Ranadive’s political line358, this chapter posits that
his writings and political practice exemplified the crisis of finding a historical homeland for
communist ideas at the moment of decolonization in India. Therefore, this study considers his
stint as general secretary as a symptom of a larger theoretical crisis in Indian Communism, one
that sheds light on the openness of political debates in post-independence India, but also on the
communist movement’s confrontation with novel questions of sovereignty, violence and
freedom.

Background

As discussed in chapter one, the late 1920s and early 1930s witnessed the complete disarray of
the communist movement in India as a result of a severe crackdown on party activists by the
colonial state, beginning with the Meerut Conspiracy Case (1929) and culminating in the ban on
the Communist Party (1934). In the 1930s, the reconstituted Communist Party of India (CPI),
under the leadership of P.C.Joshi, considered the ‘ultra-leftism’ of the 1920s to be the primary
reason for the decimation of the party organization. The total rejection of the national movement
by the CPI, including its political expression in the National Congress Party, was deemed central
to the party’s alienation from the broader anti-colonial movement. Consequently, the party
leadership was accused of ‘adventurism’ for its decision to take on the combined might of the
colonial state and the national movement, leading to further political isolation.

After its reconstitution in 1934, the CPI changed its oppositional stance towards the mainstream
nationalist movement, particularly the Congress Party, as part of the global ‘Popular Front’
policy supported by the Soviet Union. In Europe, the primary task of this front was to organize
all progressive political forces, including social democrats, in a united bloc against fascism. 359 In
the colonial world, the popular front functioned in the form of an ‘anti-imperialist front’, multi-
class alliance against colonial rule. As part of a detailed strategy outlined in 1936 by R.P. Dutt
and Ben Bradley in their essay ‘An Anti-Imperialist People’s Front in India’, the CPI identified
the National Congress as the united platform for anti-colonial forces in the sub-continent.360
Therefore, communists joined the Congress Socialist Party, a section of the National Congress,
in 1934 as part of the Anti-Imperialist Front, and remained part of this group before the Congress
Socialist Party split from the National Congress in 1940. The CPI experienced steady growth in
membership during this period, in particular the growth of their peasant and trade union fronts,
such as the All-India Kissan Sabha and All-India Trade Union Federation, as well as artist
groups such as the Progressive Writers’ Association.361

Even after officially splitting from the National Congress, the CPI continued supporting the
National Congress as the primary expression of the will of the Indian people. Despite the
divergence between the two groups over support for the British-led war effort during the Second

358
A typical case is Praful Bidwai in his recent book on the history of the Indian Left, in which he dismisses the
Ranadive period as an ‘extremist phase’ in Indian communism. Bidwai, The Phoenix Moment, pp. 1-44.
359
Helen Graham and Paul Preston (eds.), The Popular Front in Europe (Basington: Palgrave Macmillan, 1987).
360
Palme Dutt and Ben Bradley, The Labour Monthly 18:3 (1936), pp. 149-160.
361
Overstreet and Windmiller, Communism in India, pp. 155-171.
126
World War, with the CPI supporting the war under instructions from the Soviet Union and the
National Congress leading a ‘Quit-India Movement’ against the government362, the CPI, under
the leadership of P.C. Joshi, continued to view the National Congress as the principal anti-
colonial force that could lead an anti-imperialist, national government after the end of the Second
World War. Consider the following lines from Forward to Freedom, a political document of the
CPI delineating its vision for a post-war India,

National India led by a national government will be smashing the imperialist fetters
imposed on every department of our national life. In the very process of defending
ourselves, we will be building our economy, we will be imparting national consciousness
to 400 million of our countrymen… National India with her own hands will be shattering
the foundations of British India and creating those of a People’s India. 363

Two points need to be emphasized regarding the above quotation. First, the CPI maintained its
belief in an imminent historical progression after the victory of the ‘People’s camp’ against
fascist forces, which would culminate in a defeat of imperialism in the colonial world. The
second, and more crucial, issue is the proposal of an intertwined revolution. The struggle for a
socialist transformation was traversed by the fight for political independence from colonial rule.
The intersection between the question of national sovereignty and social transformation, and the
role occupied by mainstream nationalists in this configuration, remained a key problematic for
communist thought as colonial India moved towards independence.

As relations between the All-India Muslim League and the National Congress deteriorated after
the end of the war and the question of partition loomed, P.C. Joshi, the general secretary of the
CPI, argued for a ‘United National Front’ of the Muslim League and the National Congress. The
call for national unity amongst the two principal political organizations in colonial India was
aimed at turning the CPI into a vehicle for ‘carrying forward the best in the common traditions of
both the Congress and the League’.364 Yet, it was precisely on the question of supporting
‘bourgeois parties’, such as the National Congress and Muslim League, that Ranadive created a
rupture from the existing political line of the CPI, and the theoretical framework that
underpinned it.

Ranadive joined the Communist Party in 1928, on the eve of mass arrests of communist leaders
across India, and the onset of an era of underground activity for party members. He became
active in the trade union movement, particularly amongst textile and railway workers in Bombay.
Even during the era of the ‘anti-imperialist front’ of the National Congress and the Communist
Party, Ranadive was involved in militant trade union activity, often against business interests
allied with the Congress. In fact, the militancy of Bombay’s working-class activity became a
major strain on the relations between the Congress and the communists after the former formed
ministries between 1937 and 1939, with trade union leaders accusing Congress leadership as

362
Gupta, Communism and Nationalism, pp.187-211.
363
Quoted in B. Ranadive, ‘Report on Reformist Deviation’, in Rao (ed.), Documents of the History, pp. 125.
364
Communist Party of India, ‘For the Final Bid to Power! The Communist Plan Explained’ in People’s Warrior:
Words and Worlds of P.C. Joshi, ed. Gargi Chakravartty (Delhi: Tulika, 2014), p. 140.
127
collaborators and Congress accusing them of being anti-national saboteurs.365 This contestation
between trade unions and the Congress, with its specific vocabulary, was a rehearsal for the
conflict between the communist movement and the National Congress following the end of
colonial rule.

Divine Violence and the Contingency of the Political: 1946-1948

As India moved closer to independence, the CPI, under the leadership of Joshi, continued to view
‘the bourgeois leadership’ as an ally against foreign rule, with the aim of exposing the
limitations of imperialism’s strategy of dividing the Indian people. In a letter on the political-
organizational strategy of CPI, written in February 1947, Joshi asserted that

The main weakness of imperialism lies in the fact that the bourgeois leadership it is using
against us is also the popular leadership, the embodiment of their aspirations, bound by
programmatic pledges, answerable to the people.366

Terming the Muslim League and the National Congress as ‘elder members’ of the ‘family’
whom the CPI ‘respects’ as ‘a younger member’367, Joshi made appeals for unity between the
two parties to strengthen the ‘common voice of all’.368 The end of the Second World War,
however, had transformed the dynamics of India’s political economy, with rising inflation fueled
by the military expenditure. The Indian economy was made more vulnerable by its ‘sterling
balances’. In short, the British government paid for the expenses accrued in India by paying the
Indian government in a sterlings account in the Reserve Bank of India in London, while printing
paper money equivalent to this amount in rupees for circulation in India, pushing inflation to as
high as 179 percent.369 While India witnessed the emergence of a number of ‘hoarders’ and
‘profiteers’ during the war, the economy entered a state of decline as war-related consumption
disappeared, creating a classic crisis of overproduction in the Indian economy. The accumulation
of debt and a slowdown of industrial activity was coupled with rising inflation and consequently
increased economic discontent, particularly since trade unions and peasant committees claimed
that the working people were being forced to pay for the post-war crisis.370

The dire economic situation of colonial India as a result of the war expressed itself in intensified
labour unrest, the number of strikes doubling from 820 in 1945 to 1629 in 1946. As a result of
the developing militancy in the labour movement, the Nehru-led interim government instituted
the Industrial Disputes Act, which placed restrictions on the right to strike by referring the case

365
Claude Markovitz, ‘Indian Business and the Congress Provisional Governments 1937-39’, in Power, Profit and
Politics: Essays on Imperialism, Nationalism and Change in Twentieth Century India, eds. Christopher Baker, Anil
Seal and Gordon Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 487-526.
366
Ranadive, ‘Report on Reformist’, p. 155.
367
Communist Party of India, ‘For the Final Bid to Power! The Communist Plan Explained’,” in Chakravartty (ed.),
People’s Warrior, p. 140.
368
Ibid., p. 142.
369
Aditya Mukherjee, ‘Empire: How Colonial India made Modern Britain’, Economic and Political Weekly 45:50
(2010), pp. 73-82.
370
B. Ranadive, India’s Sterling Balances (Bombay: People’s Publishing House, 1945).
128
to industrial courts. Sardar Patel, the home minister for India, tried to split the trade union
movement by creating the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC) as a rival union to
the communist-controlled All-India Trade Union Congress (AITUC).371 Similarly, famine-
stricken Bengal, witnessed one of the most sustained and militant peasant uprisings in the district
of Tebhagha, where sharecroppers demanded the reduction of the share of landlords from half of
the produce to one-third.372 This movement was followed by a revolt against the nizam (feudal
leader) of Hyderabad. The uprising, known as the Telangana Movement, involved the
participation of almost 3 million peasants, and was crushed in 1951 after a three-year military
operation carried by the Congress government.373

These developments were intensified by the Naval Mutiny of 1946, in which over 10,000 sailors
of Indian origin revolted against living conditions, eventually turning into a broader uprising
against the colonial state when workers in Bombay took strike action to support the striking
sailors. The divergence between the Communist Party and the ‘mainstream’ nationalist groups
began as both the Congress and the Muslim League opposed the strike, while the CPI extended
its solidarity to the strikers. While the revolt was eventually suppressed by the government,
leaving eight sailors dead, it revealed the increasing discontent on socio-economic issues that
could not be contained within the logic of a colonial/anti-colonial binary.374

The emergence of socio-economic unrest on the eve of independence arrived as an unexpected

Event, not because it lacked a basis in objective conditions, but because it lacked a place in the
existing political frameworks of the era. In other words, for political parties in colonial India,
including the CPI, socio-economic unrest appeared as a disruptive force in the smooth march
towards freedom, posing a challenge to the contemporary political logic of anti-colonial forces.
Walter Benjamin’s conception of divine violence is useful for analyzing this sudden upsurge of
socio-political unrest. For Benjamin, a form of violence that escapes the economy of means and
ends associated with legal violence, as well as the dialectic between constituted and constituent
power, is ‘divine’, since it cannot be explained away within the logic of existing sovereign
power. Suspending all moral and ethical judgement, divine violence brings forth the impasse of a
specific conjuncture, without offering a programmatic scheme for overcoming it.375 As Žižek
argues, rather than articulating an alternative, divine violence is a sign that ‘things as usual’
cannot continue since there is a fundamental deadlock within the status quo, and that a rupture
from it would be less violent than perpetuating it, turning heresy into a political virtue.376

371
See Shalini Sharma, ‘“Yeh Azaadi Jhooti Hai!”: The Shaping of the Opposition in the First Year of the Congress
Raj’, Modern Asian Studies, 48:5 (2014), pp. 1358-1388.
372
D.N. Dhanagare, ‘Peasant Movements: Peasant Protests and Politics--The Tebagha Movement in Bengal
(India)’, Journal of Peasant Studies 3:3 (1976), pp. 360-368.
373
J. Roosa, ‘Passive Revolution meets Peasant Revolution: Indian Nationalism and the Telangana Revolt’, The
Journal of Peasant Studies 28:4 (2001), pp. 57-94.
374
Andrew Davies, ‘From “Landsman” to “Seamen”? Colonial Discipline, Organisation and Resistance in the
Royal Indian Navy, 1946’, Social and Cultural Geography 14:8 (2013), pp. 868-887.
375
Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’ in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter
Demetz (New York: Shcocken, 1986).
376
See Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008).
129
Ranadive took on the challenge of clarifying the new situation by building a novel theoretical
practice rooted not in existing ideological frameworks, but in ongoing social struggles,
elaborating their stakes and extrapolating political lessons from them. Criticizing the Communist
Party leadership under Joshi for its ‘right-reformism’, i.e. support for the National Congress,
Ranadive argued that the party’s stubborn attachment to existing strategic frameworks precisely
at a moment when ongoing social struggles were making them redundant, was the primary
obstacle for the party in seizing the novelty present in the political conjuncture.377

It is very strange that this meeting of the central committee which met only two months
after the naval ratings revolt only casually mentions that great event and does not even
care to study the character of the new upsurge, where it is leading, the qualitative change
that is coming over India… the manifesto was written in this strain and though it talks
here and there of a joint struggle, but struggle is the real thing which is absent from it.378

Ranadive became a member of the CPI’s central committee in 1943, a time when the party was
mobilizing support for the British war effort in a gesture of fidelity to the Soviet Union.
However, while Joshi believed that a victory of the Soviet Union in the Second World War
would lead to British withdrawal from India and the formation of an independent government,
Ranadive argued that the colonial government’s exploitation of the country’s resources during
the war had created structural conditions for India’s perpetual dependence on the imperialist
bloc. He criticized the belief that India was progressively moving towards independence, as well
as explicitly hitting at Joshi’s thesis that a section of the bourgeoisie was opposed to imperialism,
and hence could play a progressive role in the given conjuncture.

Formerly, the national bourgeoisie and its leaders had to rely on the masses, masses’
struggles, etc., to secure concessions, share in power, etc., to advance their own interests.
The bourgeoisie was excluded from political power, it had no real opportunity to develop
industries and had no political power over the people. The postwar revolutionary upsurge
forced imperialism to change its strategy, in order to be able to strike at the democratic
forces all the more ferociously… In the new state, therefore, the national bourgeoisie
shares power with imperialism, with the latter still dominant indirectly.379

377
In Moscow, Zhadanov emerged as a major post-war theoretician and an interlocutor of anti-colonial movements.
In a speech, and a subsequent report, to the Cominform meeting (a meeting of nine major communist parties from
around the world) in 1947, Zhadanov argued that since the world was divided into two irreconcilable camps, no
compromise was today possible between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. This was interpreted by Ranadive and
his supporters within the party to mean Soviet support to build an anti-Congress politics in India. See A.A. Zhdanov,
The International Situation: Speech Delivered at the Informatory Conference of Representatives of a Number of
Communist Parties Held in Poland in the Latter Part of September 1947 (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing
House, 1947).
378
Ranadive, ‘Report on Reformist’, pp. 149-150.
379
Communist Party of India, ‘Political Thesis’ in Rao (ed.), Documents of the History, p. 49.
130
Ranadive and Rajesh Rao, leaders of the two principal tendencies against Joshi, argued for
constructing an independent bloc against the Congress government, a ‘front from below’. 380 In
other words, rather than relying on an alliance with the National Congress, these leaders believed
that Congress leadership had integrated itself into global capital, and hence lost its will and
capacity to fight for national sovereignty. The difference between Ranadive’s ‘People’s
Democratic Front’ and Rao’s ‘United Front from Below’ lay in their characterization of the
bourgeoisie (and the rich peasantry) as a whole, and whether India was ready for an imminent
socialist revolution, as will be discussed later.

Ranadive’s characterization of the bourgeoisie as a social group in cahoots with imperialism

should not be reduced to a traditional class analysis of ‘tendencies’ contained within social
reality, as is the dominant trend when studying communist history. In such readings, the
acrimonious debates in CPI after the partition are viewed as divergences over sociological
categories.381

This chapter argues, however, that an analysis based primarily on categories of political
economy, while indispensable, remains insufficient to understanding the political stakes involved
in the CPI’s contestation with and over the National Congress. Rather than being a mere
disagreement over the socio-economic conjuncture of newly-independent India, I argue that the
primary difficulty for communist thought was how to produce a rupture from a fraternal
organization, the National Congress, which was necessitated due to the growing gulf between
popular upheavals and the Congress-led government. Here, I draw on Shruti Kapila’s insightful
work on the trajectory of ‘the political’ in twentieth-century India. Writing on the thought of
Tilak, India’s foremost anti-colonial leader before Gandhi’s rise to the national stage, Kapila
argues that the central problematic for anti-colonial thinkers was not a denunciation of an
absolute Other (such as colonial rule), but the fluid and contingent struggle for creating distinct
political fraternities. Such a community was not based on the identification of a primordial
essence, but was instead premised on the sovereign decisions taken during moments of political
indeterminacy. Such ruptural moments necessitated fraternal violence, since the indeterminacy
of the conjuncture meant that the routine classification of kinsmen and enemies was suspended,
and hence needed to be supplemented by an exceptional moment of violence against one’s own
kin to reconfigure the friend-enemy distinction, before a return to normalcy.382

This framework is useful for studying the communists’ confrontation with the National
Congress, with whom they had been in alliance for over a decade. For Ranadive, the withdrawal
of the British from South Asia was not merely a gain in a progressively linear trajectory towards
freedom, but had to be confronted as a loss of historical referentiality, in the abrupt
disappearance of an (colonial) enemy. If India was no longer formally controlled by the British,
then what antagonisms could produce and sustain politics in post-independence India? More

380
A.A. Zhdanov, The International Situation: Speech Delivered at the Informatory Conference of Representatives
of a Number of Communist Parties Held in Poland in the Latter Part of September 1947 (Moscow: Foreign
Language Publishing House, 1947).
381
Bidwai, The Phoenix Moment, pp. 1-44.
382
Kapila, ‘A History of Violence’, pp. 445-454.
131
pertinently, through what theoretical manoeuvres could communists construct an oppositional
framework to their erstwhile allies in the anti-colonial movement, particularly as popular
movements began contesting the National Congress’ hegemony over the country’s political
imaginary?

The CPI was not the only force confronted by such questions. The shock-inducing violence of
the partition between religiously marked communities, as well as the labour/peasant militancy
from 1946 onwards, pointed to fissures internal to the ‘national’ movement as excessive
elements within this movement. Apart from the ‘Muslim question’ partially resolved through the
partitioning of India, questions of regional sovereignty, class antagonisms and caste contestations
took center stage in national politics. The violence of this period, occurring equally through the
colonial state and its successors in the Pakistani and Indian governments, as well as in the
domain of the ‘popular’ through revolts and communal riots, provided the background to
Ranadive’s engagement with questions of sovereignty, freedom and revolutionary practice. It
appeared, as posited by Joshi, as a disruption of a harmonious development of History, revealing
the contingent nature of politics that escaped transcendental meaning and necessitated departures
from received theoretical or political frameworks. The next section investigates Ranadive’s
thought as a reflection of this disruptive violence, and of the imperative to produce ruptures
within communist tradition to account for the transformed conjuncture.

Seizing the Novelty

At the Second Congress of the CPI in Calcutta in February of 1948, the leadership of P.C. Joshi
came under heavy criticism for his uncritical loyalty to the Nehru government and the party’s
neglect of growing working class discontent since the end of the war.383 The Congress elected
Ranadive as the new general secretary, who had advocated a hardline position towards the
central government, as well as unconditional support for the popular revolts underway in the
country. Ranadive’s principal gesture was his insistence that formulaic conceptions of politics
had become redundant after protests shook the whole sub-continent in 1946. In other words, he
called for an infidelity to existing textual orthodoxy of Indian communism, with transformative
violence displacing sociological predictions for revolutionary change. Claiming that the party
had failed to recognize and respond to the novelty exhibited in these spontaneous uprisings, he
called to register the effects of this unrest within the theoretical edifice of Indian communism.

The end of the war presented us with a new problem. The war was over and our rosy
picture of the automatic liberation of all peoples including India was not realised… At a
time when the Indian people were entering the period of armed conflict with imperialism,
and the bourgeoisie was getting ready to strike a treacherous deal over the heads of
people, we (Communists) assure the people of prospects of immediate peaceful
realisation of Indian freedom.384

383
Rao (ed.), Documents of the History, pp. 1-7.
384
Ranadive, ‘Report on Reformist’, p. 140.
132
Ranadive argued that the contradictions between the national bourgeoisie and imperialism, which
had propelled popular politics in colonial India, had come to an end through a power-sharing
formula between global Capital and local elites, thus positing the exhaustion of the ‘nationalist’
sequence in Indian politics. This logic of postcolonial power is contrasted with the eruption of
popular discontent, manifested in the strike wave that swept the country in 1945 and 1946. The
first ‘Political Thesis’ issued by the Central Committee headed by Ranadive was a bold
statement on the need for situating communist thought under the conditions of popular unrest to
overcome the paralyzing lag between theory and practice.

...despite the compromising, disruptive and anti-struggle policies pursued by the

Congress and League leaderships, the tempo, the sweep and the militancy of the struggle
of the workers and employees in the city, of the peasants and tenant-serfs in the
countryside, of the common people in the feudal-aristocratic states went on rising steadily
in 1945-46… Gandhi’s non-violent India, guarded by the bourgeoisie for more than a
quarter century against militant action, now suddenly resorted to arms… India has never
seen such a sweep; never seen the armed forces collapsing in front of popular pressure;
never seen the working class fight with such abandon and courage. It was the eve of the
total collapse of imperialism.385

Thus, the departure of the British from India was not merely celebrated as a victory at the end of
a bitter anti-colonial struggle, but became a curious case of postcolonial militancy. As discussed,
the key challenge was to find a place for the Indian bourgeoisie, hitherto considered in
contradiction with the colonial order and, therefore, an ally of the communist movement, within
the transformed configuration of postcolonial India. Ranadive called for creating an equivalence
between the former colonial regime and the bourgeoisie represented by the National Congress,
elevating the latter as the principal enemy of the communist movement.

The so-called transfer of power was one of the biggest pieces of political and economic
appeasement of the bourgeoisie which was necessary to strike a deal. This power, putting
the bourgeoisie in control over manpower and resources of a vast territory, though as a
junior partner, was the dream of the bourgeoisie and it has realised it… From the
standpoint of the revolution, all that it means is that henceforth the bourgeoisie will guard
the colonial order. 386

For Ranadive, the outburst of strike action had highlighted a disjunct between the nationalist
leadership and popular aspirations, since the former were forced to take an openly anti-strike
position. This popular upsurge not only interrupted the immediate strategic/tactical framework of
the CPI, but also disrupted the linear notion of progress prevalent within the dominant Marxist
framework. As discussed in previous chapters, since the Second Comintern meeting in 1921, the
question of nationalism overdetermined the fight towards socialism in the colonial world, with
the latter entering the horizon of possibility in the aftermath of territorial independence. While
this framework already marked the displacement of Eurocentric discussions on revolutionary

385
Communist Party of India, ‘Political Thesis’, pp. 32-33.
386
Ibid., p. 31.
133
practice, it nonetheless operated within a teleological conception, since national sovereignty
became the missing link between colonial ‘deformation’ and historical progression. Yet, this
formula, while creating a necessary distance from orthodox Marxism, nonetheless concealed
who held sovereignty over political decisions in moments of political indeterminacy. The years
around independence were one such moment, not only because they were structured by
unprecedented communal violence, but also because of the working class militancy geared
against nationalist forces, which blurred the lines between colonial rule and freedom, as
discussed further below. As communist thought struggled to actualize itself in this concrete
historical situation, Ranadive posited the CPI’s refusal to acknowledge a deep antagonism within
the nationalist bloc as an essential feature of the political theoretical impasse in post-
independence India.

...its [CPI under Joshi] tailism behind the Indian bourgeoisie expresses by saying Indian
freedom will be won if we can successfully resolve our national differences, meaning
thereby that if Congress and League leaders resolve their mutual differences, thus making
Indian freedom totally dependent on the selfish desires of these two bourgeoisie. There is
no perspective of struggle, no call for struggle... Unity of these two parties is made the
sole condition of national freedom.387

Instead of recognizing existing political formations as leaders in the quest for ‘national freedom’,
Ranadive called for creating a ‘divisive unity’, a unity based on struggle and active volition,
which could initiate a break from the contemporary logic and frame an alternative political
possibility.388 The ‘divine violence’ of the years preceding and following Partition not only made
the available prescriptions redundant, it also opened up the possibility of political declarations
hitherto deemed impossible. The principal question that conditioned communist thought in this
period was how to seize this impossibility. Ranadive’s thought existed within this question.

The ‘Interlaced’ Revolution in Postcolonial India

One of the key tasks for the newly constituted Central Committee, under the leadership of
Ranadive, was to build a perspective and strategy while keeping in view the radically shifting
coordinates of Indian politics in the aftermath of independence. This challenge led to a double
displacement in communist thought. First, the lack of a widespread working class presence in the
Indian sub-continent already necessitated the search for a ‘hybrid’ political subject. Second, the
events of 1946 meant that any such subject would need to seize the novelty opened by popular
revolts across the country. It was under the imperative of these two ruptures, one from the
dominant form of global Marxism, and the other from the trajectory of Indian communism, that
Ranadive drew the contours of the strategy for a revolution in India.

As argued in chapter 2, communists in the colonial world contested the orthodox Marxist
conception of the stages of history, in which a country was deemed ‘ready’ for revolutionary

387
Ranadive, ‘Report on Reformist’, pp. 141-142.
388
I take this term from Jodi Dean’s fruitful discussion on the issue of consensus in political organizing, particularly
around Occupy Wall Street. Dean, The Communist Horizon, pp. 207-250.
134
politics based on its socio-economic development, with communist parties in peripheral
countries assigned the awkward task of helping build capitalism. Writing in 1948, Ranadive
called for ‘People’s Democracy’ as the strategic horizon for Indian communism, articulating a
novel understanding of the ‘stages’ involved in communist thought, based on the global division
between two camps (the Soviet Union and the United States), as well as the intensifying labour
struggles across India.

It is therefore impermissible to talk about building capitalism, giving a long period of

development for capitalism, as certain communist leaders have done. It is a throwback to
the old discredited social-democratic conception which wanted to construct a Chinese
wall between the democratic and socialist revolutions... This heightened conflict in each
country, together with the intensified conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat
on a world plane, interlaces the two revolutions more closely, inextricably, and makes it
impossible to win the first without passing over to win the second. It is this deep
interlacing… that underlies the character of the present revolution as people’s democratic
revolution, which emphasises its extreme nearness to the socialist revolution, and at the
same time, sharply demarcates it from the bourgeois-democratic revolution.389

Rather than opting for a neat category from the closet of orthodox Marxism, or accepting
‘politics of waiting’, Ranadive emphasizes the interlacing of different stages to describe the
political possibilities in the here and now. A ‘People’s democratic revolution’ which was nearly
a socialist revolution, and separate from a ‘bourgeois-democratic revolution’, signifies the in-
betweenness in which the CPI’s strategic axis under Ranadive existed. Rather than merely
placing Indian communism in the continuum of global Marxism, the reference to ‘socialist’ and
‘bourgeois-democratic’ revolutions was used as a point of departure for the specificity of the
Indian situation, and consequently, the autonomy of Indian communism. The reference to global
events, in particular the February and October Revolutions in Russia in 1917, which cast a giant
shadow on all discussions on strategy in India, were part of a broader attempt to simultaneously
situate India within the global history of communism, while also insisting on its particular
trajectory that resisted straightforward assimilation into a global narrative of Marxism. Consider
his criticism of party members who sought to create an adequation between the Indian situation
in 1948 and pre-revolutionary Russia:

Both make a mockery of Marxism, by mechanically transferring the class-combinations

obtaining at the two stages of the Russian revolution, to the Indian situation, without
asking whether in view of the fact that three decades [of] revolutionary struggle have
passed since the October revolution, that the second world war has completely altered the
balance of class-forces in the country, there is any chance of the stages getting
intertwined, of class relations getting mixed, of the class combinations of one stage being
combined with the combinations of the next stage… A rigid mechanical expectation to

389
Communist Party of India, ‘On People’s Democracy’, quoted in B. Ranadive, ‘Report on Reformist’, pp. 459-
460.
135
 see in Indian conditions an exact replica of the position of various classes at the two
stages of the Russian revolution leads to comic effects and wrong conclusions.390

This was one of the clearest statements rejecting an evolutionary view of history, positing instead
the presence of combinations, mixtures intertwined in a complex social formation. If not
illuminating the exact nature of class relations, such proclamations at least permanently blocked
the possibility of viewing India as a mere iteration in a global history, whether capitalist or
communist. More radically, such extraction of India out of the stagist view of history meant that
Indian communism no longer had to follow a linear political development. Consequently, India
could not be placed in a temporal hierarchy, as trying to ‘catch-up’ to western communism, but
instead the ‘intertwined’ stages established its contemporaneity with global communism. The
challenge was then to constitute a subjectivity that could dialectically grasp the possibilities
inherent in an uneven and contradictory totality, privileging politics over sociological precision.

If the historical stage of political praxis was unique, then it necessarily followed that the
prevailing configuration of power could not appear as anything other than a complex
combination of sociological elements, lacking precision in available Marxian language. Thus,
under Ranadive, the CPI moved away from its characterization of the ruling hegemonic bloc as
‘feudal-imperialist’ (from which emanated their support to the more ‘progressive’ bourgeois
parties such as the Congress and Muslim League), and instead posited the presence of a ‘feudal-
bourgeois-imperialist’ combine, removing the necessity of a ‘bourgeois-democratic revolution’
and allowing for an intertwining of democratic, anti-colonial and socialist revolutions.

What is the strategy that we have outlined for our stage of the revolution? It is given in a
nutshell in the slogan of a democratic front, which is defined as an alliance of the
working class, peasants, oppressed middle classes, against bourgeois-feudal-imperialist
combine [sic]… Objective: overthrow of the bourgeois government heading imperialist-
bourgeois-feudal combine [sic], completely wiping out survivals of medievalism and
going to the transitional economy through nationalisation… It will be found that the stage
of revolution we are [in] partly shares the characteristics of both stages of the Russian
revolution.391

The complex articulation of disparate ‘modes of production’ into a unified ruling bloc meant that
any rupture from this constellation would face the challenge of successively intertwined
transformations, disrupting any neat classification of historical stages. For example, consider
Ranadive’s elevation of the ongoing peasant revolt in Telangana as signifying communism,
bracketing questions of socio-economic development.

Telangana is another big landmark in the history struggles led under the leadership of our
party. Here we took the struggle to new qualitative heights with exemplary organisation.

390
B. Ranadive, ‘Strategic and Tactics in the Struggle for People’s Democratic Revolution’, in Rao (ed.),
Documents of the History, p. 125.
391
Ranadive, ‘Strategy and Tactics’, Ibid., pp. 248-249.
136
 Circles close to the nizam tremble before the name of Telangana. For Telangana today
means communists and communists means Telangana.392

Communism’s equation with the struggle waged in Telangana resonated with the deeper
undercurrent of subjectivity in colonial India, in which acts, collective and individual, in defiance
of existing authority, became the locus for political action. Yet, while positing that Telangana
became a symptomatic site for revealing both the repression of the Indian union and the capacity
of the masses to resist, Ranadive knew that it would have been an exaggeration to claim that it
represented a general disenchantment towards the Nehru government. If the mode of production
and the transitional program negated the homogenizing categories sought by theorists, then the
development of revolutionary consciousness itself had to be posited as broken, fragmented and
dispersed, necessitating a combination of tactics.

Nevertheless, to start with we have to take into account the uneven development of
consciousness and advance a form of struggle suited to the consciousness of the
participants. This unevenness we must realise is due to the fact that the influence of the
proletariat is uneven. The struggle to isolate the bourgeoisie is the struggle to overcome
this unevenness to bring the masses to the level of the advanced sections.393

The ‘struggle to overcome this unevenness’ was synonymous with the attempts to ‘tear away the
masses’ from mainstream political forces. If the strategic goal of the CPI in this period was to
think through, and innovate upon, the intertwined form of the ‘Indian revolution’, then the
greatest obstacle lay not in the repressive apparatus of the post-colonial state, but in the alleged
ideological attachment of the ‘masses’, the source of revolutionary subjectivity, that is, to
‘bourgeois’ political forces. The next section engages with both the theoretical elaboration of
Ranadive’s critique of national ideology, as well as explores it as the most fundamental impasse
of his politics.

The Search for Authenticity and the Politics of Unmasking

Pedagogical preparation was a central ideological feature underpinning the colonial project in
India. In fact, the primary critiques of the Empire in the early twentieth century were based on
the failure of the colonial regime to live up to its own aims. More hardline political forces
demanding full independence, such as Anushulan and the Ghadar Party, inhabited to the margins
of mainstream political life. Yet, by the 1920s, this polite opposition had turned into an overt
antagonism between the nationalist forces and the colonial regime, with the demand for an
independent nation-state increasingly becoming the primarily horizon for political agitation.
With the removal of the mask of civilization, the rivalry between the colonial government and
the anti-colonial movement was primarily one between the repressive apparatus of the former,
and the ability of the latter to mobilize popular classes against such repression. In other words,

392
Communist Party of India ‘Review of the Second Congress of the Communist Party of India’, in Rao (ed.),
Documents of the History, p. 197.
393
Ranadive, ‘Strategy and Tactics’, p. 260.
137
with a broad consensus on the practice of colonial rule, the question of ‘ruling ideology’ became
a side concern for partisans of the anti-colonial movement.394

As became evident in the previous sections, for Ranadive, the transition from a colonial to post-
colonial state represented a continuum of fundamental power relations, rather than a major
rupture from the past. While terms such as ‘freedom’ and ‘sovereignty’ were part of a shared
vocabulary between the Communists and the National Congress, there was divergence on
whether they had been realized with the departure of the British. In fact, the CPI famously raised
the slogan ‘Ye azadi jhooti hai (This freedom is fake) to demonstrate its point of view that India
had not overcome the shackles of domination with the formal departure of the British. 395 In a
strategic gesture similar to the anti-colonial movement’s deployment of Enlightenment ideals,
Ranadive argued that despite the fact that terms such as ‘freedom’ and ‘sovereignty’ obscured
the continued subjugation of the Indian people, they nonetheless simultaneously provided the
terrain for a political intervention. Consider his scathing critique of both the Nehru government
for its close association with the West, as well as of the ‘ultra-left’ elements within the
communist movement who rejected engagement with such ‘bourgeois concepts’.

If anyone were to use the words freedom, independence, sovereignty, to create illusions
[that] these exist, that the government represents them, to bolster the government, then
it’s opportunism. But when they are used as a weapon of exposing the freedom, of
exposing the steps to tie down India to imperialist strings… they serve the purpose of
rousing the people to fight for and defend national sovereignty and freedom. All such
exposure can only be made in the name of freedom and sovereignty… the people have
the strength to defeat illegal pacts, provided the communist parties discharge their duty
and therefore the Communist Party must clear the way for the people to see the bourgeois
conspiracies clearly and fight them. For this patient struggle is necessary.396

Ranadive argued that the political subject existed in the gap between words and their meanings,
as an excess of possible significations over the terms deployed. If the language of freedom and
sovereignty merely covered over their practical absence, it meant that political action had to be
directed towards amplifying this contradiction and aiding in tearing off the masks to render this
gap visible. Even in this rather simplistic equivalence between the colonial and the postcolonial
situation, Ranadive recognized a fundamental difference between the two moments. Unlike the
final years of colonial rule where the government had lost all popular legitimacy, the Nehru
government carried with it the support of the broadest sections of the anti-colonial movement.
Thus, the possibility of a break with the National Congress opened up by the events of 1946 was
obstructed by the ‘illusions’ about the Nehru government in the popular imagination. Unlike the
open contestation with the colonial state, the post-colonial government, despite Ranadive’s
394
Dipesh Chakrabarty makes a similar argument, emphasizing the direct war-like nature of the contestation
between the colonial state and the anti-colonial movement. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘“In the Name of Politics”:
Sovereignty, Democracy and the Multitude in India’, Economic and Political Weekly 40:30 (2005), pp. 3293-3301.
395
Bipan Chandra, Aditya Mukherjee, and Mridula Mukherjee, India Since Independence (New Delhi: Penguin,
2008), p. 258.
396
Ranadive, ‘Strategy and Tactics’, pp. 386-387.

138
characterization of the latter as a ‘stooge of imperialism’, derived its legitimacy from the anti-
colonial movement itself. For Ranadive, the Nehru government represented ideological glue for
the ‘imperialist-bourgeois-feudal combine’ that displaced the primordial violence of socio-
economic relations that had only intensified since British withdrawal.

In other words, India had entered a regime of masks, one that prevented the clear demarcation of
political cleavages. The arrival of independence after the withdrawal of the British masked
continued subservience to imperialism, the coming to power of a ‘national government’ masked
a government of the bourgeoisie and the exclusion of the masses, and the appearance of political
cleavages within the National Congress masked the consensus on the perpetuation of bourgeois
rule. In a pamphlet written in 1948 and titled ‘Political Thesis’,
Ranadive criticizes those on the Left who separated the present from the colonial era, or
emphasized the ideological differences between Nehru and the more right-leaning Congress
leader, Patel.

Nehru is seen as a fighter against Patel’s policies and almost made to appear as the leader
of the democratic forces. Every verbal opposition of Nehru to Patel is magnified. It is
thus an illusion created that if Nehru’s hands are strengthened against Patel, the
government will be transformed into an instrument of the will of the people.

This estimate of Nehru is anti-Marxist and serves to tie down the masses to the bourgeois
ideology. It must be understood that Nehru is as much of a representative of the
bourgeoisie as Patel is. They both defend the class policies and interests of the
bourgeoisie which is now collaborating with imperialism.397

This homogenizing depiction of political tendencies in post-colonial India had the function of
both marking out an autonomous space for communist praxis, but also critiquing ruling ideology
to break Nehru’s dominance over the ‘trusting masses of our country’.398 Breaking this link
required what Ranadive thought were the existing ruptural tendencies developing across India
that placed pressure on the Congress’ hold on Indian politics. This is why Ranadive posited
‘unmasking’ as the principal task for communists in the post-independence era.

Disillusionment with the policies of the national leadership is rapidly growing among the
people… At this stage the fate of the democratic movement depends on the correct policy
of the Communist Party and of the working-class, a policy which must see the great
strength of the forces of democracy and their weakness in the illusions that the masses
have about the bourgeoisie. To gather that strength through the democratic front, to dispel
the illusions by unmasking the collaborators and to carry forward the program on the
basis of the democratic movement, these are the special tasks of the party of the working
class.

397
Ranadive, ‘Political Thesis’, p. 55.
398
Ibid., p. 56.
139
If colonial ideology envisioned a gradual movement towards freedom and sovereignty, the anti-
colonial movement dismissed this ‘politics of waiting’ as a mask hiding perpetual subjugation of
Indians to foreign rule, and countered it by demanding freedom in the here and now. Ranadive
aimed to import this impatience into the politics of postcolonial India by refusing to accept the
legitimacy of the Nehru government. Concomitantly, it revealed a deeper thirst for authenticity
triggered by the anti-colonial revolts, turning the status quo suspect, but without a clearly defined
criterion for what ‘authentic’ freedom would look like. The utmost challenge was then to create a
political praxis that could simultaneously dispel the ‘illusions’ in the Nehru government and
mobilize the masses for a future insurrection.

The Communist Party must devote utmost attention to winning the masses away from the
influence of the bourgeois leaders through propaganda, joint campaigns and joint
struggles… It is therefore essential that leftists associated with those organisations should
carry on a persistent battle, both inside and outside these organisations, to unmask the
policies of the leadership and win over the masses for the democratic revolution and the
democratic front.399

The positions taken in this paragraph not only had strategic value, but also posed a theoretical
problem for the edifice of orthodox Marxism. In a subjectivity produced by suspicion in the
midst of a transition, sociological knowledge, rather than illuminating political praxis, itself
became suspect. The categories of ‘nation’, ‘freedom’ and ‘sovereignty’ that had sustained the
enthusiasm of anti-colonial revolts and provided them with ideological precision, were rendered
obsolete due to perceived internal corruption. Even the working class, the ‘subject-object’ of
history, had ‘deviated’ from its historical destiny determined by History due to elements that
‘disrupted its political unity’. For if the logic of masks displaced the political content in
independent India, it necessarily followed that such masks obscured the working class movement
itself, producing a gap between the movement’s sociological being and its potential political
project. Consider the document by the Ranadive-led CPI polit bureau, warning against
‘treacherous elements’ within the working class, during the railway strikes of 1949:

These vacillators will mask their treachery by talking about vanguardism, as the Benares
strike-breakers and traitors have done; or they will adopt some other slogan saying strike
is not possible, etc., and make use of bourgeois propaganda in the press which soon will
start propagating that no strike is now possible. With this warning against the vacillators
in our own ranks, all our comrades, party organisations, all comrades working on the
railway front must bend their efforts towards bringing about the strike.400

Overdetermined by the chaos of the transition (colonial to post-colonial), Ranadive’s thought

contained a profound skepticism, even suspicion, of political demarcations formed during the
anti-colonial movement. If the anti-colonial sequence that began in the early 1920s vociferously
denounced the colonial ‘civilizing’ project as an illusion, then the search for ‘authentic’ freedom,
and the subject capable of instituting it, only intensified with the departure of the British from

399
Ibid., p. 79.
400
Communist Party of India, ‘Railway Strike and our Tasks, in Rao (ed.), Documents of the History, pp. 514-515.
140
India. The popular revolts beginning with the Royal Navy Revolt in 1946 exceeded the logic of
the emerging nation-states, revealing political possibilities that were out of sync with ‘national’
politics. The myriad substitutions, displacements, and ruptures were an attempt to seize the
political novelty at once obscured and revealed by the tumultuous events of the era. The means
of obtaining clarity required a dialectical scission of existing terms such as ‘nation’, ‘freedom’
and ‘class’ to separate the ‘fake’ from the ‘authentic’. The impatience inherent in such
subjectivity required internal purging of the communist movement to resist its subsumption to
bourgeois ideology. In other words, the search for the authentic political subject, freed from the
illusions created by the hegemony of masks, had as its shadow an all-pervasive suspicion of
existing reality.

The Collapse of the Ranadive Line

The attachment of the masses to the ‘illusions’ of the Nehru government proved more stubborn
than Ranadive had imagined. Despite the intense chaos created by the revolts in 1946 and the
communal riots in 1947, the CPI found it increasingly difficult to sustain the momentum as the
Congress-led government embarked upon a policy of consolidating its control across the country.
The central government prepared itself to counter the strategy of the communists by isolating
them in the labour movement through a combination of creating a parallel trade union,
denouncing them as ‘traitors’, and using the repressive apparatus of the state to quell their
strongholds. On 26th July 1948, Nehru addressed a labour rally in Madras, one of the focal
points of working class agitation led by communists, issuing a stern warning to the Communist
Party for its antagonistic stance towards the Indian state. Claiming that communists were
committing ‘atrocities in the provinces in the name of economic doctrine’, he stated that ‘if any
group of people wants to declare war against the state, then the state is at war with them’.401

This tone was indicative of a departure from the rebellious Nehru heading the anti-colonial
movement, as well as the polite disagreements between the Congress and Communist leadership
during the Joshi era. Dipesh Chakrabarty has noted how the Nehruvian government began
mimicking the colonial regime on questions regarding the preservation of law and order soon
after independence.402 The same Nehru who encouraged students to take active part in civil
disobedience during the British era denounced left-wing student activism in postcolonial India,
claiming that ‘Students in India have lost any sense of discipline and it is not easy to deal with
them by methods of force and compulsion, though these may have to be resorted to sometimes’.
Moreover, the formation of the Indian National Trade Union Congress in 1947 as a counter to
the communist-led All India Trade Union Congress paid dividends, as by 1949 the membership
of the INTUC stood at 989,983 members against 679,143 members of the AITUC. This was
made possible in no short measure due to government patronage of INTUC, such as its
nomination to the International Labour Organization as India’s representative, coupled with
repressive measures to counter the militancy of the AITUC.403

401
‘Nehru Attacks Communists’, New York Times (July 27, 1948), p. 7.
402
Chakrabarty, ‘In the Name of Politics’, pp. 3293-3297.
403
Sharma, ‘The Shaping of the Opposition’, pp. 1358-1388.
141
Sardar Vallabhai Patel, Nehru’s home minister, went a step further, declaring communists
‘terrorists’ in 1948 for disrupting ‘national reconstruction’. Declaring that the ‘days of strikes
and hartals are gone’, which were needed when India was ‘fighting against a foreign power’,
Patel launched a witch-hunt against communist activists throughout the country.404 Some of the
measures included the banning the Communist Party in West Bengal, launching raids at party
offices in Delhi, Madras and Bombay, while also linking Communists to secessionist elements in
Kashmir and Assam, as well to communal elements in Hyderabad.405 In other words,
communists were elevated to the principal ‘internal’ enemy, a fifth column that owed its
allegiance to foreign powers. The most brutal response of the government, however, was
reserved for Telangana, where the communists had joined forces with the local Congress cadres
to launch an armed struggle against the Nizam of Hyderabad. With the entrance of the Indian
troops to dismantle the Nizam’s authority, the local Congress leadership welcomed the central
government’s intervention and ended its agitation.406 Communists, however, demanded an end to
the feudal relations dominant in the region, and saw the Indian military’s intervention as little
more than a symbolic measure that did not alter existing social relations. Their persistence led to
an all-out military assault directed against the communists, who were dislodged from their
strongholds, and forced to operate as disparate guerilla units in the countryside until 1951, when
the communists officially surrendered to Indian forces.407

The effect of these measures on the morale and the organizational structure of the Communist
Party was immense. The party was placed in an awkward situation in which it had to defend
allegations of foreign subservience, as well as being involved in terrorist activities immediately
after the partition riots, when all mainstream political forces called for peace and stability in the
country. Almost universally condemned in the press, isolated from mainstream political forces,
and facing intense repression from the central government, the infrastructure of the party
crumbled, with the membership dwindling from 89,000 to 20,000. Furthermore, Ranadive was
increasingly attacked from within the party, both from the ‘Left’ Andhra Committee for not
adequately preparing for a ‘people’s war’ and from the ‘Rightist’ Joshi, who claimed Ranadive’s
antagonism towards the Nehru government had isolated the party from the masses, suggesting
that he was mentally ‘deranged’.408 The strategy of overthrowing the ‘bourgeois-feudal-
imperialist combine’ appeared to have decisively collapsed.

During this period, Ranadive was engaged in a bitter confrontation with dissident voices within
the party, often engaging in polemics with party members. Indeed, as many party cadres began
deserting the party, and the Congress-led government strengthened its coercive and ideological
dominance over the political landscape, Ranadive identified the roots of this failure in the ‘lack
of preparation’ among party comrades.409 After positing that nationalist politics masked a more

404
Ibid., pp. 1362-1367.
405
M.B. Rao. ‘Introduction’, in Rao (ed.), Documents of the History, pp. xxi.
406
Roosa, ‘Passive Revolution’, pp. 70-75.
407
M.B. Rao ‘Introduction’, in Rao (ed.), Documents of the History, pp. xiii.
408
P.C. Joshi, ‘Letter to the Central Committee’, Chakravartty (ed.), People’s Warrior, p. 184.
409
One of the first charges levelled against Ranadive by the new central committee constituted after his removal
was that the party was being run by a coterie around Ranadive, and party members were increasingly scared to voice
142
authentic politics led by the ‘party of the working class’, the lack of progress on the political
terrain induced doubts on the authenticity of the party itself. Commenting on the collapse of
certain party units in the face of state repression, Ranadive accused the ‘petty-bourgeois’ class
composition of the party as the main obstacle for successful political action.

The Andhra Committee very correctly stresses the faulty class composition of the party,
the manning of key posts by elements from alien classes as one of the main causes of the
collapse. Our party in Andhra… was paralyzed because it was not based on the really
revolutionary classes and therefore the hesitation and even treachery common to such
elements from other classes affected it.410

In the absence of a criterion for deciding upon the authenticity of political categories, the
semblance of ideology seemed to seep into the revolutionary organizations themselves. The
reason for the failure of communist strategy was not based on a lack internal to the strategy, but
on the fact that the party was not composed of ‘really revolutionary classes’. Thus, the
enthusiasm for novelty that had structured Ranadive’s thought in 1946 paved way for suspicion
as the determining political factor, alleging that the vanguard itself was suspect. It was for this
reason that he elevated the internal struggle against petty-bourgeois elements as one of the
central tasks of the Communist Party.

This petty-bourgeois revolutionism is at the root of the mistakes in Andhra. And it is not
only in Andhra, but in other provinces also where the disease has spread since the session
of the second party congress. Certain petty-bourgeois intellectuals have interpreted the
party line to mean license for left phrases divorced from the actual conditions of day-to-
day struggle or the interplay of class forces… the tendencies represented by all these are
petty-bourgeois revolutionism, which must be mercilessly fought if the party is to
discharge its revolutionary responsibilities.411

The ‘merciless’ fight against petty-bourgeois tendencies was prompted by the increasing
desertions by communists already underway in places like Telangana and Bengal. Purging party
members as a response to dwindling membership made sense only within the logic of a search
for authenticity, where each setback was proof of a further need for unmasking ‘vacillating’
elements within the party. For, if the primary task of the party was to separate the semblance
produced by ideology from the authentic categories of revolutionary politics, the fear that this
ideology had taken root in the party, particularly in moments of a crisis, became a central anxiety
for party leadership.

In Russia, petty-bourgeois revolutionism was concentrated outside the Bolshevik Party--

in the socialist revolutionaries and the anarchists… In India, after the end of petty-
bourgeois terrorism in Bengal and other places, an end brought about by developing a

dissenting views on the fear of being labelled “cowards”. Communist Party of India, “Letter of the New Central
Committee to All Party Members and Sympathisers” in Rao (ed.), Documents of the History, p. 636.
410
Ranadive, ‘Strategy and Tactics’, p. 313.
411
Ibid., p. 319.
143
 mass movement, many of those elements swung over to the party. Remnants continued to
eke out their independent existence, but they themselves had to accept socialism and
appear as Marxists… All this meant that some of the petty-bourgeois elements could not
be fully assimilated and proletarianised, and therefore the tendency to petty-bourgeois
reaction, revolutionism, i.e. neglect of classes and their role, should be strong. In India
therefore, unlike Russia, at present at any rate, petty-bourgeois revolutionism has to be
fought inside the party. It was routed in Bengal when it was outside the party. Inside the
party it assumes Marxian garb and has to be unmasked.412

Thus, the enemy resided within the party, necessitating an internal struggle. For Ranadive,
‘petty-bourgeois revolutionism’ became an imprecise phrase to describe any phenomenon that
neither corresponded to a sociologically determined role of classes, nor to the strategic tasks of
the ‘People’s democratic revolution’. It was a term denoting a ‘divergence’ from the proletarian
point of view as developed by the party, inducing panic over the failure to ‘fully assimilate’ these
tendencies. Suspicion overpowered the search for an authentic politics, turning unmasking into a
process most ferociously practiced inside the party, with differences of opinion deemed to be
‘subjective impositions’ against the objective criterion set by the party. The realm of suspicion
moved beyond the categorization of individuals based on their social origin (although this
criticism was not extended to the coterie surrounding Ranadive himself), to a ‘tendency’ with
particular traits such as ‘impatience’, ‘indiscipline’, ‘betrayal’ and ‘cowardice’. Indeed, the last
trait was invoked obsessively by Ranadive as the party faced increasing repression from the
Nehru government, declaring that party cadres were not sufficiently brave to play the role history
bestowed upon them.

Such denunciations became more pronounced as Ranadive, in March 1949, called for railway
workers to paralyze the Nehru government.413 The move was one of desperation, since the party
had been dislodged from its strongholds in Telangana in 1949, its communication networks had
been disrupted throughout the country, scores of its cadres had been jailed, tortured or killed,
while factionalism had paralyzed the internal life of the party. Moreover, the trade union
movement itself was bitterly divided, with Congress supporters and socialists such as
Jayaprakash Narayan refusing to participate in any trade union activity aimed at overthrowing
the central government. The lack of enthusiasm for his political strategy was interpreted by
Ranadive as a sign of treachery and cowardice, turning criticism into betrayal.

This has been the real problem all along, whether in relation to working-class or kissan
struggles, and the provincial secretary has been shirking it, failing to see it, and some
comrades were attempting to pass on the responsibility for this state of affairs to the
masses. The underestimation of the mass tempo and the failure to keep pace with it,
finding out [sic] excuses not to lead it, are characteristics of a reformist outlook and they
are seen here…The same retreat before militancy of the masses and then running to
methods of individual actions, petty bourgeois revolutionism was in evidence in UP in
Azamgarh, where one of the biggest kissan (peasant) upsurges has been practically

412
Ibid., p. 321.
413
Communist Party of India, ‘Railway Strike and our Tasks’, in Rao (ed.), Documents of the History, pp. 513-541.
144
 sabotaged through vacillation before struggle and running away from it… It is an
instance where in the face of the revolutionary tempo of the masses the petty-bourgeois
leadership really fled away in panic from the mass…414

The last phase of Ranadive’s leadership was completely dominated by the super-ego effect. The
more his strategies failed to win over mass support, the more he blamed the incompetence of his
own comrades, taunting them, making impossible demands on them, as well as launching
widespread purges of dissidents in party institutions. With the failure of the party to mobilize for
the railway strike, Ranadive came under increasing pressure inside the party, as well as
internationally, to quit as general secretary. The Andhra Committee proposed an alternative
vision of the ‘National Democratic Revolution’, whose primary features supported sections of
the ‘progressive bourgeoisie’ and rich peasants, claiming that India was still under colonial rule
and that, hence, the primary fight remained against foreign domination. More importantly,
against the insurrectionary model advocated by Ranadive, the Andhra committee proposed a
‘protracted’ struggle based on the Chinese model, backed by a ‘people’s war’ in the party’s
strongholds.415

Since the Chinese strategy had gained immense prestige in the aftermath of the People’s Army’s
victory in 1949, this new line, advocating ‘national liberation’ was supported by the Cominform
in its journal, advocating the ‘Chinese path’ for colonial and newly independent countries. With
increased government repression, a revolt within the party, and international backing for his
rivals, Ranadive decided to quit as general secretary. Rajeshwara Rao, leader of the Andhra
Committee, took over as general secretary. Ending his tenure as leader of the communist
movement, a dejected Ranadive wrote a ‘self-critical’ report on his tenure and eventually gave a
‘confessional’ speech on 30th May 1950 at a party meeting.

Both in my report and in my speech I could not really and properly criticize myself. My
criticism on [the] organizational part has been criticized as insincere. I accept it.... I have
stabbed the Party in the back. It is an enormous guilt which only those who are guilty of
[it] realize, but on lines given by Vanu I will unmask myself.416

The search for authenticity that began with ‘unmasking’ the Congress and the League, and was
followed by socialists in the trade union movement and ‘petty-bourgeois revolutionism’ in the
Communist Party, finally ended up consuming Ranadive himself. Nothing appeared pristine
enough, not even the vanguard itself that took upon the responsibility of purging the party,
turning the fight against semblance into a nihilist drive towards self-annihilation. In unmasking
himself barely two months after launching an insurrection meant to unmask ‘petty-bourgeois’
elements both within and outside of the party, Ranadive showed his intense fidelity to the

414
Ranadive, ‘Strategy and Tactics’, pp. 342-353.
415
Communist Party of India, ‘Letter of the New Central Committee to All Party Members and Sympathisers’, in
Rao (ed.), Documents of the History, pp. 631-632.
416
B. Ranadive, ‘I Will Unmask Myself’, quoted in Partha, Chaudhry, “I Will Unmask Myself” Liberation 1
(1968), p. 4.
145
communist movement, but also revealed the impossibility of a politics stubbornly attached to the
quest for ‘authenticity’.

Ranadive and the Impasse of Communist Thought

How are we to then think through the rise of Ranadive as an uncompromising leader against the
‘reformist’ but entrenched leadership of the Communist Party, and his sudden fall from grace as
a ‘backstabber’ and an extremist? The existing literature on Ranadive’s time at the helm of the
communist Party in India is bracketed as a moment of ‘fanaticism’ in an otherwise smooth,
‘scientifically guided’ journey of Indian communism. But such analysis misses the fact that
Ranadive’s line was supported by a vast majority of delegates at the Second Congress in 1948,
and more importantly, that Ranadive was not replaced by those who thought he was too extreme,
but rather by the tendency that claimed he was too ‘reformist’ for his refusal to support a
people’s war. Ranadive’s confessions are not of much help either, since while cleansing him of
the past and allowing him to re-enter the party apparatus as a dignified intellectual, they leave the
task of thinking through those turbulent times in a state of suspension. This section aims to shed
some light on the impasse in Ranadive’s thought as internal to the subjectivity produced by the
transition from colonial to postcolonial India.

Since the mid-1930s, communist politics were sustained by affirming a dichotomy between the
colonial state and the anti-colonial movement. The latter was the terrain on which struggles of
workers, peasants and students sought to gain hegemony under the leadership of the communist
party. While Ranadive was apt at discerning that the anti-colonial sequence, in which the party
was firmly allied with the National Congress, had become obsolete with the naval mutiny of
1946, he was unable to delineate the contours of the politics of the emerging nation-state and the
place of revolutionary thought within it. Instead, in search of a neat binary in the aftermath of
British withdrawal from India, Ranadive castigated the ‘bourgeois’ Nehru government as a mere
political replacement of the same socio-economic order.

Therefore, despite some novel interventions, Ranadive continued to operate within a traditional
Marxist conception of History. In his framework, the ruling ideology obfuscated the historical
role of the working class movement by attaching the masses to the Nehru government,
necessitating its ‘unmasking’. This prompted the search for a pure revolutionary subject, freed
from ideology, a process that became self-destructive due to a pervasive suspicion over the
authenticity of all referents expressing this political subjectivity. As the desire to locate a neat
political dichotomy was frustrated by the continued hegemony of the Nehru government, the
writings of Ranadive increasingly acquired a melancholic structure. Alain Badiou has
demonstrated that the search for authenticity and the subsequent process of unmasking existing
reality was a central feature of communist politics in the 20th century. Yet, what lay beneath the
mask was not an authentic category to be mobilized for a ‘truer’ politics, but a gap, a void that
revealed the groundlessness of politics.417 Thus, the search for authenticity could only spiral
inwards, aiming at the referents standing for the pure category, since the former could never fully

417
Badiou, The Century, pp. 48-57.
146
exhibit the qualities of the latter. The flipside of this search for the revolutionary subject was an
endless purge, since only in nothingness could one lay rest to all suspicion of impurity.

Therefore, if the ‘illusions’ about the Nehru government in the popular imaginary were
persistent, they could have been generative of political possibilities. The anti-colonial movement
in India, with its incorporation of popular classes in defiance of legal, civilizational or
pedagogical concerns, had opened up the possibility of a polity that allowed for an autonomous
trajectory of questions such as sovereignty, democracy, and citizenship, i.e. the political
produced historically within the anti-colonial struggle.418 As Shruti Kapila has observed, the
republicanism emerging out of the anti-colonial movement did not permit any closed totalities,
with antagonisms in the social body interrupting homogenizing politics. 419 The category of the
‘people’ (and one can argue, of the proletariat) escaped equivalence with a given empirical
category, opening up novel possibilities to disrupt, and potentially, reconfigure the political
landscape.

Such an analysis transforms politics from an expressive to a creative, productive and contingent
process. Thus, the impasse of communist politics that was revealed in its self-annihilating quest
for authenticity was a result of an expressive view of politics, i.e. the belief that political
practices were manifestations of sociological categories, be they ‘bourgeois nationalism’, ‘petty-
bourgeois revolutionism’ or ‘proletarian viewpoint’. Ranadive’s theoretical and practical
interventions can be seen as an attempt to bridge the gap between the promise of History and the
actual deviations from it in the realm of popular politics, an innovative framework that
nonetheless remained tied to Marxist certainties. He was unable to accept that the political
turmoil during the British withdrawal had not only made anti-colonial alliances obsolete, it had
also made the notion of permanent political binaries redundant, bringing forth what Partha
Chatterjee has recently deemed the ‘spectre of pure politics’, i.e. a politics without guarantees or
a transcendental logic.420

An example of Ranadive’s limitation is his periodization of the historical moment through

invocation of revolts and popular movements of 1946, while simultaneously viewing the events
of 1947 as minor disruptions in the overall trajectory of working-class unity against nationalism
and communalism.

In developing these struggles, special attention should be paid to Muslim workers, and to
reforge the unity of Hindu and Muslim workers. The Hindu and Muslim workers are
divided by the exploiting classes, and in their blindness follow the class enemies. The
exposure of communal politics, of bourgeois politics, how it deceived the masses to
advance the cause of the exploiters, how the exploiters once more join hands to oppress
the exploited, must be sharply brought out... Muslim communalism was a weapon of

418
Chakrabarty, ‘In the Name of Politics’, pp. 3293-3301.
419
Kapila, ‘The Majority of Democracy’, (2015).
420
Chatterjee, ‘Sovereign Violence’, pp. 82-100.
147
 vested interests and the masses were befooled; that the cry of Indian unity and democracy
of accession was a cry for compromise. Thus, working class unity should be restored.421

The events of 1946, with their class character and their militancy, while challenging the existing
trajectory of Indian communism, fit rather neatly into Ranadive’s search for a transcendental
political subject. In such a framework, the historical content of the Indian situation, including
communal unrest, religious and regional assertion, as well as questions of territorial sovereignty,
were disruptions in the emergence of the political subject revealed in the aftermath of the naval
revolt. Yet, much like the unrest in ‘46, the violence emanating from post-partition riots had
suspended the existing political logic, resisting transcendental explanation or a priori moral
judgement. To gain a foothold in the historical situation of postcolonial India, the novel power of
working class revolts had to be tied to the contradictions existing in the conjuncture, including
the conception of the ‘nation’ on which Congress maintained its hegemony.

Ranadive’s discomfort with rupturing from global communist orthodoxy is also revealed in his
refusal to engage with Mao Zedong’s ideas, an issue consistently raised by the Andhra
Committee. Consider his reply to the suggestion of incorporating Maoism within the edifice of
Indian communism, written in December 1948, a month prior to the Chinese revolution.

Firstly, we must state emphatically that the CPI has accepted Marx, Engels, Lenin and
Stalin as the authoritative sources of Marxism. It has not discovered any new sources of
Marxism beyond these. Nor for that matter is there any communist party which declares
adherence to the so-called theory of New Democracy alleged to be propounded by Mao
and declares it to be a new addition to Marxism. Singularly, there was no reference to this
new addition to Marxism in the conference of nine parties. Under these conditions it is
very wrong for a section of the CP leadership to take upon itself the task of
recommending new discoveries, which one of the most authoritative conference of
Marxists has not thought fit to recommend.422

Whether Mao’s concept of ‘New Democracy’ was correct or not is beside the point. The key
issue here is the reification of, and a fidelity to, a certain (European) Marxist tradition, precisely
at a moment when it faced its most radical internal challenge from the Chinese revolution, which
began a new (and eventually, popular) sequence of communist politics in Asia. Mao took the
challenge of forming a new dialectic between popular movements, territorial sovereignty423 and
the contradictions of the social formation.424 Here, politics was not conceived as a linear and
progressive revelation of an authentic political subject, but rather the production of this subject
in, through and beyond a complex historical terrain. For Ranadive, instead, the principal task was
merely an affirmation of the proletarian point of view, while simultaneously guarding it against
the inertia of history. Thus, the task of tying together the moments of ‘46 and ‘47, or of working

421
Ranadive, ‘Strategy and Tactics’, p. 436.
422
Ibid., p. 293.
423
Arif Dirlik, ‘Mao Zedong Thought and the Third World/Global South’, Interventions 16:2 (2014), pp.233-256.
424
See Mao Zedong, On Contradiction (Beijing: Foreign languages Press, 1937).
148
class militancy with questions of territorial sovereignty and social conflict, were subsumed under
a linear, if at times interrupted, progress towards an innate revolutionary subjectivity.

Through this attachment to a transcendental subject, Ranadive sought a complete break not from
History, but from history itself, i.e. the specific genealogy of Indian politics. This was reflected
in his categorization of national or religious politics as ‘masks’ or ‘deviations’, rather than
examining the historical context that allowed for the persistence of such attachments in the
political imaginary. His attempt to suture the wounds opened by the chaos of the post-partition
situation, with communal riots, regional revolts, followed by state consolidation, under the rubric
of a ‘proletarian viewpoint’ was a desperate attempt to provide order to a moment that escaped it.
His reliance on textual traditions became an obstacle in actualizing Communism as a political
project based on the possibilities present in a historically concrete moment, turning textual
fidelity into political infidelity. Thus, by focusing narrowly on the overthrow of the government
in Delhi as the horizon for political action, Ranadive was not too radical, but not radical enough,
since he could not let go of his theoretical certainties emanating from an absolute political
binary. Unable to fully open his thought to the contingency of the political, he remained caught
in the impasse between objective criterion and subjective interventions, between History and
politics.

Conclusion

After the removal of Ranadive from the post of general secretary, the newly constituted central
committee denounced the ‘authoritarianism’ of the Ranadive era, and declared the ‘Chinese path’
or ‘Maoism’ as the new horizon of Indian communism. It declared India to be a semi-feudal and
semi-colonial country, with an armed struggle in the countryside as the most strategic weapon
for the communist movement. The party, however, suffered a major blow when its guerilla units
surrendered to the Indian armed forces in 1951, ending the prospects of the ‘People’s War’
planned by the Andhra Committee. This prompted another change in the communist leadership,
with the moderate Ajoy Gosh ascending to the post of general secretary, a position he held until
his death in 1962.425

The three tendencies represented by P.C. Joshi, B. Ranadive and Ajoy Gosh continued to co-
exist in the party until the early sixties. The splits within the communist movement between the
pro-Congress Communist Party of India, the anti-Congress but primarily urban-based
Communist Party of India-Marxist, and the pro-people’s war Communist Party of India-Marxist-
Leninist (also known as the Naxalites) can be traced from the divisions germinating in the
communist movement in the late forties and early fifties. Yet beyond the distinct socio-economic
analysis through which the differences between each of these tendencies is understood, there
exists a more fundamental question of tying the knot between history, violence, and volition. In
other words, the question that remains is how to suture the gap between popular disruptions and
the genealogy of political subjectivity in India, or put differently, between the emergence of
novelty and its existence within a concrete historical situation. The act of tying together these

425
M.B. Rao, ‘Introduction’, in Rao (ed.), Documents of the History, pp xiv. and Overstreet and Windmiller,
Communism in India, pp. 309-334.
149
seemingly contradictory experiences elevates the centrality of volition in the midst of political
indeterminacy, a challenge that continues to haunt the scientism dominating Indian communist
thought to this day.

150
 Chapter 7

The Subject of Communism: Towards a Conceptual Framework

In this dissertation, we have traced the encounter between Marxism and anti-colonialism as
dynamic and processual, transforming both terms of the divide. The commencement of popular
revolts throughout the colonial world at the end of the First World War coincided with the
Russian Revolution and the country’s search for allies in the non-European world. This search
became particularly pertinent in the aftermath of the failure of working class revolts in Western
Europe and the relative stability of liberal democracies in 1920s, with a concomitant rise in anti-
colonial militancy prompting European communists to seek allies in the non-European world.
Yet, while the intertwining of the national liberation struggles and communist politics remained a
central theme in shaping the political realities of post-World War I geopolitics, it has received
inadequate historical and theoretical explication, particularly in terms of conceptualizing the
consequences of this encounter.

This dissertation has attempted to fill this lacuna through a focus on the specificity of anti-
colonial history in India and its relationship to Global Marxism, resulting in the emergence of
what I have called ‘Indian Communism’. Rather than viewing this term as a closed entity, this
work has posited Indian Communism as a singular process with its own historical specificity,
theoretical and practical innovations, fidelities and infidelities, as well as immanent impasses and
pathologies. By exploring themes such as the place of History, temporality, religion, affect, and
violence in political thought, this work has shown how a focus on displacement, scission and
rupture is more useful in grasping the specificity of communist thought in India, rather than an
emphasis on deficit, reception or imitation in relation to a pristine idea of communism. The
central concept that ties the various thematic issues together is the ‘revolutionary subject’ in
communist thought, understood as the political actor that mobilizes, sustains and eventually leads
the transition to communism. By positing traditional Marxism as fixating on the identification of
a pure subject-object of history, this work has argued for the ‘motley’ and ‘hybrid’ nature of
communist subjectivity, in which an engagement with historically specific and diverse logics of
domination was a necessary pre-condition for actualizing communism into a coherent and
relevant political project.426 The successes, impasses and failures of political thought can only be
analyzed in respect to the challenges emanating from the terrain in which the former is
embedded, which in this case, was the anti-colonial movement in India.

While this dissertation is concerned with the anti-colonial sequence (1920-1951), the previous
chapter demonstrated an acute crisis in historical referentiality for the communist movement in
the absence of the colonial enemy, the partition of India into two independent states, and the
move towards building a postcolonial polity. How do we then analyze the adventure of Indian
communism (now divided into three states, including Pakistan and Bangladesh) in postcolonial
India, including contestations over questions of citizenship, representation, sovereignty, ideology
and violence? More importantly, can the birth of Indian communism shed new light on the

426
For a further exploration on the nature of political subjectivity in the non-European world, see Bruno Bosteels,
‘Twenty Theses on Politics and Subjectivity’, Zinbun 46:1 (2016), pp. 21-39.
151
trajectory of Communist thought, and perhaps permit it to acknowledge its own ‘origin’ in
heresy rather than a straightforward fidelity to textual traditions. While a detailed history of
Indian Communism in the postcolonial period is beyond the scope of this work, I utilize the
rendition of communist thought developed in this work as a possible framework for rethinking
the trajectory of communist subjectivity in South Asia since 1947. In doing so, I explore how the
conflict between Marxism as a theory of modernization and as a rupture from capitalist
modernity shaped communist subjectivity in the non-European world, and how the anti-colonial
sequence can provide us with analytical tools to overcome this paralysis.

Communism in Postcolonial India: A Brief History

We can identify two themes, each with its own epistemological premises, that have structured
much of the debates around communist strategy in postcolonial India. The first revolved around
the exact socio-economic stage of India, determining the political possibilities for the communist
movement. Popularly known as the ‘mode of production’ debate, it generated some of the most
fascinating and bitter antagonisms among communists in India, both within the communist
parties as well as in intellectual circles.427 Despite remarkable variety and innovation, most of
this debate took place within the schema of traditional Marxism, comparing the Indian political
economy to the history of capitalist development in Europe, with the express aim of assigning a
temporality to the Indian revolution. This debate led to the development of a shared vocabulary
around concepts such as ‘bourgeois democratic revolution’, ‘People’s Democratic Revolution’ or
‘People’s Revolution’, delineating the stage of the revolution corresponding to the ‘maturation’
of socio-economic relations, the advancements in industrialization and commodity production,
and the role of imperialism in structuring the social formation.428 Assigning India a particular
temporality then, was critical in formulating the tasks for communists, both in terms of an
oppositional strategy to the prevailing order, as well as the challenges in government.

The second major theme that dominated communist thought in the postcolonial period was the
question of representation and democracy. This became a particularly relevant, and fiercely
contested, terrain since the government of independent India made the bold, or at least unique,
decision of declaring India a republic. India’s emergence as the ‘world’s largest democracy’
presented a conceptual challenge as, in the words of Partha Chatterjee, the Indian polity
embraced electoral democracy while undergoing the process of primitive accumulation, a
process often viewed as a precondition for a successful transition to democracy.429 The successes
and the limitations of Indian democracy have led to diverse responses from communist partisans
and intellectuals; embracing the electoral arena as the primary vehicle for socio-political change,
a combination of ‘parliamentary’ and ‘non-parliamentary’ struggles, and the absolute negation of
representative democracy as inherently incapable of signifying the actually existing struggles of

427
See Hamza Alavi, ‘India and the Colonial Production’, Economic and Political Weekly 10:33 (1975), pp. 1236-
1262, and Jairus Banaji, Theory as History, pp. 349-360.
428
For a review of the debates on the mode of production in India, see M.V. Nadkarni, ‘The Mode of Production
Debate: A Review Article’, Indian Economic Review 26:1 (1991), pp. 99-104.
429
Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, pp. 158-172.
152
dispossessed people, thus insisting on developing a political strategy incongruous with
institutional logics.430

The third, and perhaps the most lively, debate in the current conjuncture revolves around the
tense relationship between a universalizing narrative of ‘class politics’ and the emergence of
social movements rooted in disparate forms of domination emanating from the specific history of
social relations in India. Particularly in the last 30 years, there has been a proliferation of a
number of struggles around resource allocation based on identitarian categories (caste, language,
gender, etc.,) as well as an increasing tendency of the political to intervene in the domain of the
social to rectify historical wrongs.431 This debate, which has both witnessed heated arguments
and produced unprecedented alliances between communists and partisans of these social
movements, once again highlighted the contested nature of the political subject in Marxist
thought, particularly on articulating the relationship between history and practice on the one
hand, and sociological categories on the other.

These three themes have intersected to produce the many splits and alliances among communists
in the 70 years since independence. During the colonial period debates on historical difference in
India prompted rethinking of the place of peripheries, the peasantry, and religion, turning such
sites and figures of deficit into political possibilities. The peasant revolts in Telangana during the
transition to independence, as well as the refusal of influential communist tendencies to reject the
legitimacy of the Indian state, led to brutal military action to suppress dissenting voices (see
chapter 5). This confrontation between the state and subaltern groups meant that the question of
integrating the latter into the national polity through nationalist assimilation or developmental
rationality remained a major challenge for postcolonial governments. In the aftermath of
partition, this question was partially resolved through India’s turn towards republicanism,
opening the doors of electoral politics to subaltern sections of society and thus incorporating
them into the conflicting logic of representation.432 Or did it actually provide a democratic mask
to the ongoing exclusion of the marginalized? Much of the debates hinge on ambiguity regarding
the place of subaltern elements in relation to Indian sovereignty, whether as motors to the
vibrant, even if at times chaotic, life of Indian democracy, or as elements in excess of the
representative order.433

For the communist movement, this question became central in the 1950s and 1960s, as on the
two occasions in these decades when the communists came to power (in the state of Kerala in
1957 and the state of Bengal in 1967), their governments were unceremoniously dismissed by

430
For a review of the various ideological currents within Indian Communism, see Praful Bidwai’s informative
discussion on the subject. Bidwai, The Phoenix Moment, pp. 1-78.
431
See Gail Omvedt, Dalits and the Democratic Revolution: Dr. Ambedkar and the Dalit Movement in Colonial
India (Thousand oaks: Sage Publications, 1994).
432
Shruti Kapila has shown how conflict was central to the Indian conception of republicanism. Kapila, ‘The
Majority of Democracy’, (2015).
433
This ambiguity has generated much debate on the role of subaltern subjects in political claim-making in India.
See Rosalind Morris (ed.), Can the Subaltern Speak? The History of an Idea (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2010), and Ahmed Aijaz, ‘Post-Colonial Theory and the “Post-Condition”’, Socialist Register 33:1 (1997),
pp. 353-381.
153
the central government, reinforcing the narrative of absolute hostility between bourgeois and
communist politics.434 Moreover, the violent repression of peasants, workers and students as a
response to increased militancy against corruption, shortages and inequality, culminating in the
promulgation of the Emergency in 1978, further intensified the debates among communists on
the relationship between violence and representation.435 The two major splits in the communist
movement (1962, 1968) should be read as a combination of the three themes elaborated above,
with violence as the vanishing mediator between them.

This debate was already present at the time of the split in the Communist Movement in 1964
over geo-strategic considerations, such as the Sino-India war and the Sino-Soviet Split, as well as
over the disagreements regarding the role of the National Congress in relationship to
imperialism.436 A tendency in the Communist Party of India viewed the National Congress as
representing the interests of the national bourgeoisie against the domination of monopoly capital
and imperialism. Such a view necessitated the struggle for a ‘National Democratic Revolution’ in
which the working-class builds an alliance with sections of the bourgeoisie, petty-bourgeoisie
and farmers (existing within the National Congress) against encroachments from global Capital.
The Communist Party of India (Marxist), a splinter group of the Communist Party of India that
formed as a result of this debate, held that the Indian bourgeoisie was increasingly integrating
itself within the imperialist bloc, and therefore could not be viewed as a reliable ally. Hence, the
group focused instead on sections of the national bourgeoisie outside of the governmental
apparatus, as well as sections of the working class and the peasantry bearing the brunt of the
state’s developmental agenda. Calling for a ‘People’s Democratic Revolution’, the party
positioned itself in complete opposition to the National Congress government, the big
bourgeoisie, as well as what it viewed as India’s gravitation towards US imperialism.437

While the question of violence maintained a spectral presence in the split of 1964, particularly on
the question of confronting the central government, it became unavoidable with the second major
spit in the communist movement in 1967. As the Congress Consensus from the late 1940s began
crumbling in the wake of food shortages, industrial unrest and accusations of unbridled
corruption and nepotism, the Left engaged in an intense debate on its future strategy, as well as
on the role of violence. This debate was pushed into a full-scale (often violent) battle within the
communist movement was the commencement of a peasant uprising in the area of Naxalbari
(Darjeeling district) in West Bengal. Beginning as a movement of peasants and sharecroppers
against exploitative relations in the countryside, it soon developed into an agrarian revolt against
social, cultural and economic relations in the countryside. Led by Kanu Sanyal, the movement
saw widespread participation of CPM cadres in Bengal, with peasant and middle class

434
Bidwai, The Phoenix Moment, pp.189-264.
435
See David Lockwood, The Communist Party of India and the Indian Emergency (Thousand Oaks: Sage
Publications, 2016).
436
Bidwai, The Phoenix Moment, pp. 1-44.
437
See Ray Sally, ‘Communism in India: Ideological and Tactical Differences Among Four Parties’, Studies in
Comparative Communism 5:2/3 (1972), pp. 163-180.
154
revolutionaries taking direct action to shift the balance of forces dominant in rural India, and by
extension, the rest of the country.438

The ensuing debate between the CPM leadership and ‘rebellious’ sections within the party turned
into the most ferocious disagreement on the question of representation, not least because Bengal
at that time was ruled by the party itself. The logics of governance, in which the CPM was
increasingly enmeshed were diverging from the logic of rebellion, whose most prolific, if not
fanatical representatives, were the militant activists involved in the Naxalbari Movement. The
divide became entrenched as the communist government sided with the police to crush the
insurgency through force, resulting in a split in the party and the formation of the Communist
Party of India (Marxist-Leninist).439 The latter gave ideological adherence to the teachings of
Mao Tse-Tung, and announced a ‘People’s War’ against the Indian state to attain its
revolutionary ideals. While the movement soon collapsed under state oppression and strategic
disorientation, it nonetheless electrified sections of the Indian countryside as well as the middle
classes, a fact that permitted a constant return of the ‘Naxal problem’ in Indian political life.440

It is worth noting the homology between the splits in the Indian communist movement
throughout the colonial and early postcolonial period, particularly as expressed during the
leadership of B.T. Ranadive. At that time, the ‘right’ tendency had argued for a closer
relationship with the National Congress, the ‘centrist’ tendency led by Ranadive called for an
intensification of the parliamentary and non-parliamentary opposition to the Congress, while the
‘Left’ tendency was represented by the Andhra Committee, which had not only rejected an
alliance with the National Congress, but also condemned parliamentary work, calling instead for
a ‘protracted people’s war’ against the nascent Indian state. In other words, the splits in the ‘60s
had opened old wounds, signifying the lack of resolution in communist thought on the key
questions of representation, republicanism and violence.

Communism in Pakistan

The fortunes of Indian Communism in the postcolonial state of Pakistan were rather less
remarkable than its counterpart in the Indian Union. Formed as a separate entity in 1948 at the
Second Congress of the Communist Party of India at Calcutta, the Communist Party of Pakistan
took the task of propagating revolutionary change in territories designated as East and West
Pakistan. Led by the charismatic member of the Progressive Writers’ Movement, Syed Sajjad
Zaheer, the party found itself immediately embroiled in a political battle with the ruling elites of
the newly formed state of Pakistan. Two primary fault-lines structured communist politics in
Pakistan. First, the ‘ideology of Pakistan’, defined in terms of Islam as the unifying glue for the

438
See Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: History of the World’s Largest Democracy (New York:
HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 306-310.
439
Ibid., pp. 306-310.
440
Indeed, by 2009, India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, termed Naxalites as the biggest security threat facing
India, ostensibly eclipsing the threat posed by terrorism. See ‘Naxalism Biggest Threat to Internal Security:
Manmohan Singh’, The Hindu (May 24, 2010), available at http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/Naxalism-
biggest-threat-to-internal-security-Manmohan/article16302952.ece accessed 20th March, 2016.
155
ethnically and linguistically diverse social landscape of the country. Consequently, the second
fault-line was the centralization of power by unelected apparatuses in the state, particularly the
military and the bureaucracy, which made the question of decentralization and democracy central
for communist strategy in the country.441

The late 1940s and early 1950s witnessed the CPP organize a basic infrastructure for Left
politics, such as building up the Progressive Writers’
‘Movement, trade unions, peasant committees and student unions. Since the party was following
the confrontational ‘Randive line’, the government soon designated the party as the primary
threat to peace and stability in the country. This antagonistic relationship was exacerbated by the
Pakistani elite’s gravitation towards the American camp, through both economic as well as
defense pacts, leading commentators to call Pakistan the ‘most allied ally’ of the United
States.442 The increasing repression by the Pakistani state, the stifling of political life through the
‘overdevelopment’ of certain state institutions, and the party leadership’s impatience in gaining
state power, prompted the leadership of the party to discuss a possible coup d’etat against the
government with dissident generals of the Pakistan army in 1951. This seemingly bizarre attempt
by communists to collude with sections of the state to undertake an undemocratic seizure of state
power can be understood within the anti-colonial sequence, in which gaining state power was the
primary task before freedom could be realized. The failure of the coup resulted in the castigation
of communists as anti-islam, anti-pakistan and anti-state, leading to the imprisonment of the top
leadership, and an eventual ban on the party in 1954.443

The party never recovered from this crisis, and remained a marginal underground organization
until its dissolution in 1991. It became part of a number of organizations fighting for regional
autonomy, most remarkably the National Awami Party (NAP), a coalition between ethno-
nationalists and communists, to fight the dominance of the military-bureaucratic apparatus, the
latter comprised mostly of Punjabis. The CPP remained on the margins of Pakistan’s political
life, and it is debatable how much influence rested with communists within this broader
formation. While the party was involved in number of prominent campaigns for regional
autonomy as well as democracy against the intermittent imposition of military dictatorships in
Pakistan, it could not become an electoral or a major oppositional force in the country’s political
landscape, and was invoked more as a spectre by the Pakistani state to discipline its opponents,
rather than as an actual adversary capable of attaining state power.444

Perhaps a major reason for such marginalization was the inability of the communist movement to
articulate a novel theory of political praxis specific to the conditions of Pakistan. This can be best
discerned by the fact that despite making heroic sacrifices in the struggle for democracy in
Pakistan, the movement was hardly able to come up with a satisfactory theoretical edifice to
441
See Atiya Khan, ‘The Vicissitudes of Democracy: The Failure of the Left in Pakistan, 1940-1971’, unpublished
PhD thesis, University of Chicago (2011).
442
Ayesha Jalal, The State of Martial Rule: The Origins of Pakistan’s Political Economy of Defence (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990).
443
See Kamran Asdar Ali, Surkh Salam: Communist Politics and Class Activism in Pakistan, 1947-1972 (Lahore:
Oxford University Press, 2015).
444
Saadia Toor, State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan (London: Pluto Press, 2011).
156
understand its own participation in the movement, or the place of democracy in communist
politics in a country dominated by the coercive apparatuses of the state. Similarly, much
communist thought in the aftermath of the ban of the communist party was focused on the
‘underdevelopment’ of socio-economic relations within the country, and concomitantly, an
underdevelopment of political consciousness. Such characterization of the backwardness of
Pakistani political culture often appeared as a justification for the party’s own inability to gain
popular support in a complex, but hardly unprecedented political setting of authoritarianism.445
Even discussions on the revolutionary potential of the peasantry was rare, and it became central
only when a Maoist faction, led by Major Ishaq, split to form the Mazdoor Kissan Party, as a
continuation of the legacy of the Kirti Kissan Party in colonial Punjab.446

Perhaps the biggest missed encounter after the formation of Pakistan was between the
communist movement and political Islam. As discussed, in the 1920s and 1930s there was a
burgeoning of interactions between partisans of the communist and the Islamist movements due
to their rejection of European empires and a search for new coordinates for establishing a
political community. While the two traditions could hardly be considered completely in sync
with one another, the productive dialogue became absolute enmity, with political Islam
increasingly gravitating towards the ideology of the state, and communism becoming
synonymous with the complete rejection of all traditional political and cultural repertoires. While
‘Islamic Socialism’ became a prominent intellectual current in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it
was associated more with the populist movement of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto than with an overt
relationship to the communist movement, or even to Marxist thought. 447 Perhaps with the fall of
the Soviet Union, and the increasing antagonism between the Pakistani state and political Islam,
there might open space for renewed dialogue between the two political projects, freed from the
rigid demarcations of the Cold War, and in the spirit of adventure, curiosity and novelty that
marked their exchange in the 1920s. The next section explores the theoretical and
methodological lessons derived from the study of Indian communism to examine the production
of communist thought in the twentieth century.

Exploitation versus Domination: A Framework for Future Inquiries

Conceptualizing the history of colonial India requires methodological innovation precisely

because its trajectory violates the normative models prevalent in Western historiography. Such
violations not only arise from the peculiar trajectory of capitalist development under colonial
conditions, but also in its interruption through popular agitation by subaltern groups in Indian
society. The rise of the peasant as a political actor posed an intellectual problem, since much of
theorization of citizenship and political agency was based upon the liquidation of the peasantry

445
We can argue that, far from being an exception, struggle against authoritarian regimes, including those backed
by fascist and imperialist troops, was a common setting for militants of the communist movement in the twentieth
century, from the partisans in France and Italy, to guerilla movements in China, Cuba, and Vietnam.
446
See Iqbal Leghari, ‘The Socialist Movement in Pakistan: An Historical Survey, 1940–1974’, unpublished PhD
thesis, Laval University (1979).
447
Bidanda Chengappa, ‘Pakistan: Impact of Islamic Socialism’, Strategic Analysis 26:1 (2002), pp. 27-47.
157
as the dominant class. India gravitated from this model both for the pivotal role played by the
peasantry (as well as other subaltern groups) in producing the anti-colonial dynamic, thus erasing
the possibility of a neat reliance on sociological categories for political analysis.448

‘Resistance’ was elevated as the central motor for historical becoming in Indian historiography,
preventing its ‘logical’ deduction from sociological processes. The Subaltern Studies Collective
made perhaps the most spectacular and rigorous attempts to place the resistance of marginalized
groups at the center of Indian history. Ranajit Guha’s monumental works titled ‘Dominance
without Hegemony’449 and ‘The Prose of Counter-insurgency’450 aimed to both show the
specificity of colonial rule in India outside of an overarching dynamic of History, as well as the
myriad forms of subaltern resistances incomprehensible from the point of view of colonial
officials and orthodox historians. The task has since been to demonstrate the ways in which
subaltern groups have intervened, undermined and at times overcome the logic(s) of capitalist
development, an endeavour that led to an impressive intellectual output while also leading to
fierce debates among historians.451

These debates have now extended to explanations for the contested nature of citizenship, the
unique public performance of democracy, and the central place for violence in twentieth century
Indian thought. Yet, while there seems to be an agreement on the importance of popular
assertion, we discern a split in Indian political life and historiography into the domains of
exploitation and domination.452 The school of thought most closely associated with Marx (but
also nationalist currents) has often emphasized the prevalence of economic exploitation, and
concerns of political economy more broadly, as the essential elements structuring socio-political
relations in colonial India. On the other hand, intellectuals and political actors who tend to view
domination as generative of Indian political life view cultural, psychic, social and state
apparatuses as critical factors determining the relationship between power and resistance.453

The emphasis on exploitation stems both from the Marxist insight that the fundamental
antagonism of modern society is the relationship between Capital and labour, and from the

448
Majumdar, ‘Subaltern Studies’, pp. 50-68.
449
Guha, Dominance Without Hegemony, pp. 1-99
450
Ranajit Guha, ‘The Prose of Counterinsurgency’, in Selected Subaltern Studies, eds. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri
Spivak (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 45-88.
451
For a brief overview, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘A Small History of Subaltern Studies’, in A Companion to
Postcolonial Studies, eds. Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007).
452
Fredric Jameson correctly argues that contemporary theories of “power” and “resistance” focus all their attention
on forms of coercion, including bodily discipline. There is, however, less focus on the processes of exploitation
marked by a specific mode of production. This schema entails two shortcomings. First, domination and resistance
become ahistorical categories since it ignores the specific socio-economic relations that produce them, and towards
which they aspire. Second, the critique is restricted to bourgeois-democratic demands of inclusion and recognition,
rather than of fundamental transformation of social relations. In other words, domination cannot function as an
analytical category without its insertion into a specific mode of exploitation. As I briefly argue below, the same is
true for exploitation, which cannot reproduce itself without relying on ideologies and apparatuses of domination. See
Fredric Jameson, Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One (London: Verso, 2011), pp. 149-151.
453
For a detailed discussion on the relationship between Marxism and postcolonial criticism, see Ania Loomba,
Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London: Routledge, 2005).
158
Nationalist/Marxist argument that the structuring principle of colonialism was the ‘imperialist’
extraction of resources and labour from the colonies. Rather than relying on the ‘appearances’ of
a given phenomenon, for example colonial development in areas like agriculture, railways, etc.,
such a theoretical perspective insists on deploying abstract categories to reveal the inner logic
and contradictions of colonial extraction that are veiled by appearances. The category of value,
as demonstrated in the recent works of Andrew Sartori and Manu Goswami, permitted this
scholarship to situate economic exploitation at the center of cultural and national imagination,
producing a global antagonism between the colonial and the metropolitan countries, as well as
generating social, cultural and political forms to apprehend this antagonism within colonized
spaces.454

Not only did the writings on imperialism, beginning from the ‘drain of wealth’ theory in the late
19th century, maintain the centrality of economic exploitation in studying colonial rule, but the
same lens was also applied by the remarkably popular and bitter ‘Mode of production’ debates in
Indian historiography. As discussed, these debates took place with the assumption that a correct
diagnosis of the mode of exploitation, defined in terms as diverse as ‘semi-feudal’, colonial and
capitalist mode of production, could provide us insight into the workings of the colonial and
postcolonial systems, while also aiding us in positing an alternative adequate to the specificities
of Indian political economy. While this scholarship has been useful in deciphering processes
often masked by the rapidly changing, and often chaotic, events of Indian socio-political life, it
has had the disadvantage of ignoring what is clearly visible in Indian political life. In other
words, such reliance on deep structures of exploitation at the expense of forms of domination
failed to explain the persistence of caste, religion, gender and region as political categories, since
they could not be assimilated into the universalizing category of ‘value’. This gap between
studying the production and circulation of values, and the processes of social, psychic and
physical domination required both for reproducing relations necessary for value production, led
to a sustained critique of Marxist/Nationalist methods of writing history.

This criticism was directed at the totalizing tendency of such scholarship, for which
contradictions immanent to Capital substituted more historically sedimented forms of
contradictions among the ‘working people’, as well as the importance of specific techniques of
colonial governance. More radically, by failing to take into account the experiences of different
social groups in their concrete manifestation in Indian history, Marxist historians have been
accused of silencing the voices of subaltern groups in history, thus reproducing forms of
domination through their work, despite claims of undertaking a political project ostensibly
geared towards equality in contemporary India.455 The remarkable fame enjoyed by Subaltern
Studies was a testament to this lacuna in Indian historiography, as they situated socially and
politically marginalized groups at the center of historical writing. One of the clearest examples of
the success enjoyed by such endeavours is the spectacular popularity of Ambedkar’s writings in

454
Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History, pp. 176-229, and Goswami, Producing India, pp. 1-30.
455
Aditya Nigam, ‘Secularism, Modernity, Nation: Epistemology of the Dalit Critique’, Economic and Political
Weekly 35:48 (2000), pp. 4256-4268.
159
recent years, turning the question of social marginalization (according to caste, in this case) into
a central theme of political thought.456

The emphasis on forms of domination has coincided with the ‘democratic moment’ in Indian
political life. With the collapse of the ‘Congress Consensus’ in the aftermath of the emergency,
India witnessed a proliferation of social movements asserting caste and regional identity, thus
opening the ambit of political claim-making to new actors on the Indian political stage.457
Despite its contribution to expanding the horizons of historical research, this scholarship has
often bracketed questions of political economy, thus finding it difficult to ground its own
production within larger socio-economic dynamics in society. Moreover, an emphasis on
resisting the myriad forms of domination results in democratic demands for inclusion,
substituting anti-colonial and Communist axioms that called for transforming the very situation
in which political actors were immersed. In other words, the concept of ‘revolution’ that had
invoked and sustained much enthusiasm throughout the twentieth century, was at best viewed as
anachronistic, and at worst, as an essentially misguided project.

Yet, the question of exploitation has neither disappeared in our neoliberal moment, nor has it
stopped impacting the precise form of domination in contemporary societies. Indeed, as many
authors have argued, the new forms of financialized exploitation introduced by neo-liberal
reforms, and the concomitant rise of technocrats in key policy-making decisions, has hollowed
contemporary democracies, with parliaments acting less as representatives of popular will, and
more as implementers of decisions made by unelected bodies of ‘experts’.458 Thus, just as the
lack of attention on disparate forms of domination tends towards a universalizing analysis of
socio-political situations, neglecting the processes of exploitation obfuscates how forms of
domination are overdetermined by the former.459

The relationship between exploitation and domination is a question not limited to debates within
Indian political and intellectual life, but structures much of the debates on the past and future of
emancipatory projects. In the tradition of Western Marxism, this question has arisen in the last
few decades as the tension between the concepts of totality and commonality against the
prevalence of historically produced difference and heterogeneity. A major example of this trend
can be witnessed in the works of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, who have argued for a
simultaneous engagement with various forms of exploitation and domination, where the task of
political practice is to produce a chain of equivalences among seemingly disparate elements.
Such a theory permits various forms of marginalization to both interrupt and propel each there,
rather than stand in a fixed relationship of exteriority or antagonism.460 The critical discussions

456
See Anupama Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits and Politics in Modern India (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2009).
457
Guha, India After Gandhi, pp. 304-374.
458
See James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in
Lesotho (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).
459
For a detailed discussion on the subject, see Louis Althusser, Sur la Reproduction (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 2011).
460
See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic
Politics (London: Verso, 2001).
160
that such theories have generated are testament to the fact that the question of exploitation and
domination remains a vital problem in renewing Marxism as a political project today.

Such theories, however, are unable to grasp the historically specific ways in which exploitation
and domination enable and shape each other. For example, there cannot be an anti-capitalist
struggle without confronting the precise ways in which a multitude is constantly transformed into
docile individual bodies for producing Capital. As Wai Kit Choi has argued in his reading of
labor organization during the Shanghai Commune, the proletariat as a united and coherent
subject can only be established through a recognition and contestation of the uneven terrain on
which working class domination is secured. Rather than merely creating equivalences between
disparate struggles through abstract categories, the very process of psychic and physical
empowerment of historically marginalized groups created the conditions of possibility for
confronting capitalism, since it allowed for a concrete accumulation of working class power,
rather than positing its abstract potentiality.461 Thus, we remain within the problematic aptly
discerned by Althusser in his famous essay on ideology, in which he claimed that the relations of
production are dependent on the institutions of reproduction. In other words, the process of
surplus value extraction presupposes a stable network of hierarchical relations for its smooth
functioning, a condition that is constantly threatened by multiple forms of resistance emerging in
the ideological apparatuses.462

One of the major lacunae of contemporary communist thought in India (and perhaps in much of
the world) is its inability to link the ‘new social movements’ emerging against historically
sedimented forms of domination with Marxist insights into the inner workings of Capital. This
missed encounter is particularly disappointing since the very birth of communist politics in
colonial India was premised on intellectual heresy and tactical improvisations. As argued
throughout this dissertation, political actors in colonial India participated in the global public
sphere of intellectual production by paradoxically keeping distant from the Western political
tradition. In the case of Marxism, I showed how Indian communists highlighted questions of
colonial domination, racial prejudice, religious attachments and the peasantry as potential nodes
for developing a communist politics. Thus, Marxism’s encounter with disparate forms of
domination and resistance were not a hindrance to its actualization, but were a vehicle for its
universalization beyond its site of origin in Western Europe.

While much of official communist politics in India today can be viewed as a retreat from the
possibilities opened up by Marxism’s encounter with anti-colonial thought, there are certain
struggles in contemporary India that reveal the improvisatory nature of Indian Communism. The
encounter between tribal resistance to processes of primitive accumulation and Maoist
conceptions of a People’s War have already produced a singularity in the shape of the Naxalite
movement in India.463 Here the revolutionary subject is neither the industrial working class nor

461
Wai Choi, ‘Revolutionary Shanghai: Rethinking Class and the Politics of Difference through Chinese
Communism’, Science and Society 73:2 (2009), pp. 242-260.
462
Althusser, Sur la Reproduction, pp. 11-42.
463
For detailed commentary on the Naxalite Movement, see Stuart Corbridge and Alpa Shah (eds.), The Underbelly
of the Indian Boom (London: Routledge, 2014).
161
the peasantry, but various tribes simultaneously defending their cultural, spatial, economic and
political rights. This politics takes place in the language of Marxism and through the tactics of
guerilla warfare, but is also aided by civil rights organizations, sympathetic journalists and public
intellectuals. Whatever the merits of such a politics, it nonetheless is influenced by the
communist sequence opened up by anti-colonialism, since it is comfortable in displacing the
sociological coordinates of the revolutionary subject to include figures of deficit such as tribals,
lower castes, women, etc.

The encounters between communist partisans and ‘indigenismo’ has already produced some of
the most successful political projects of the contemporary Left in Latin America, and it perhaps
offers a glimpse into the possibilities opened by the current conjuncture. 464 In India, apart from
the sustained alliance between tribals and communist intellectuals, a renewed interest in
Ambedkar’s ideas and critiques of developmentalism among leftist intellectuals opens the
possibility of novel encounters between Indian communism and popular movements. Yet, what
can the transformations at the level of political economy, and the resistances generated in
response to them, inform us about the future itinerary of the category of the subject? With the
limitations and failures of 20th century communism, has the concept of the revolutionary subject
become inoperative for intellectual and political purposes? Are we supposed to abandon the
dialectical concept of the proletariat, formed in the 19th century as a result of a scission from the
the amorphous category of the ‘people’ from 18th century enlightenment thought, in favour of
broad categories such as the dispossessed, the marginalized, the subaltern? Finally, does the
history of anti-colonial Marxism offer new insights into the current debates in theory (and
practice) on the place of the subject in political praxis?

The Anti-Colonial Sequence and the Revolutionary Subject

This dissertation began by exploring the nature of political subjectivity in late colonial India,
through a discussion of communist militants engaged in the anti-colonial struggle. By engaging
with diverse themes such as the relations between the core and the periphery, the role of religious
attachments, the centrality of the peasantry in anti-colonial thought, and the transition from
colonial to postcolonial society, we aimed to reveal the specificity of ‘Indian Communism’ in
relation to both ‘orthodox Marxism’ and other political currents within the anti-colonial
movement in India. Our focus was on deciphering the nature of the ‘revolutionary subject’ in
Indian Communism, to see how it could relate to and expand our understanding of global
communist subjectivity in the twentieth century. What are the lessons of this history, and how
can it contribute to the burgeoning debates on political subjectivity in contemporary work on
intellectual history?

We defined orthodox Marxism as a specific analysis and practice of politics, arising out of 19th-
century Western European political tradition, with the ‘proletariat’ as the paradoxical element
central to the system’s reproduction, but also the potential agent of its demise. Yet, the radically

464
See Linera Garcia, ‘Indianismo and Marxism: The Missed Encounter of Two Revolutionary Principles’, Monthly
Review Online (January, 2008) https://mronline.org/2008/01/31/indianismo-and-marxism-the-missed-encounter-of-
two-revolutionary-principles/ accessed on 12th October 2016.
162
different conditions in the non-European world placed enlightenment ideas (including Marxism)
into a state of crisis, since they had to respond to questions arising out of a different historical
trajectory. We have seen how historical difference, far from being an impediment to the
development of universal ideas, is its motor.465 Moreover, this difference not only transformed
the political practice of communists in the colonial world, but necessarily impacted the
theoretical edifice of Marxism itself, including reconfiguring the category of the revolutionary
subject. Yet, while Indian Communism developed a new practice of Marxism, India’s
contribution to understanding global communism, particularly on the problem of subjectivity,
remains under-theorized, if not under-explored. How are we then to make explicit on the
theoretical terrain what is implicit in the praxis of Marxism after its encounter with anti-
colonialism? In other words, how do we reconstruct the subject without reference to orthodox
categories of loss and belatedness used to study subjectivity in the developing world, and in
fidelity to the lessons of the anti-colonial sequence?

If politics in the colonial world created a crisis of signification for categories of modern
subjectivity, the fall of the Soviet Union and the concomitant ‘End of History’ sentiment wiped
out sociological certainties that were operative throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Thus, contemporary literature on Marxist theory and history is attempting to develop an analysis
of both the ‘failures’ of the Left in the last century, as well as attempting to renew the category of
the subject adequate to the challenges of the current conjuncture. Alain Badiou has called for
situating communism in specific modes of doing politics, tied to a determinate thought within a
particular historical period. The anti-colonial sequence (that Badiou does not identify) lies
between the Leninist and Maoist modes of politics (1902-1929 and 1929-1967), containing
elements from both.466

The Leninist sequence began as a critique of teleological views of History, in which the
emergence of a revolutionary subject would coincide with the development of industrial
capitalism. The disjunct between History and politics, already exemplified by the colonial
experience but amplified by the First World War, ended the illusion of progress inherent to much
of enlightenment thought, including Marxism. The concept of the ‘vanguard’ party proposed by
Lenin was a response precisely to this impasse in communist thought, where the trajectory of
History seemed to diverge from its supposedly revolutionary destination. This discrepancy was
filled by the concept of the party, with a concomitant development of the themes of discipline
and will as an essential element in suturing this gap.

For Mao, the category of History became increasingly tenuous, if not suspect, as he turned
China, and consequently much of the non-European world, into primary sites for political
intervention. The impossibility of following the trajectory of Europe’s capitalist development
accentuated the break from History, placing the question of volition at the center of political

465
Dipesh Chakrabarty makes this argument powerfully in a recent essay on conceptions of time in Marxism.
Chakrabarty, ‘Belatedness as a Possibility’, pp. 163-170.
466
Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis (London: Verso, 2010).
163
thought.467 This implied that only a violent process of detachment from the logic of accumulation
could open novel emancipatory possibilities, thus framing one of the most popular and maligned
ideas of twentieth century politics, the ‘protracted people’s war’. Rather than merely searching
for the revolutionary subject in a reified sociological category that could overthrow the status
quo, the protracted method called for a precise identification of a contradiction that needed to be
resolved. For both Lenin and Mao, the state had to be both the focus of popular rage but also the
object of desire, since capturing state power became central to communist imagination in the
twentieth century. But whereas Lenin conceptualized the state as a fort to be captured through an
insurrectionary moment in a ‘revolutionary crisis’, Maoism called for a patient struggle to build
‘base areas’ in disparate locales within a national territory, thus simultaneously containing
elements of centralization and dispersion.468

Thus, both Lenin and Mao represent proper names for a new articulation of mass movements,
party, and the state, a relationship very pertinent to the development of anti-colonial thought. For
indeed, the experience of colonial rule as a ‘waiting room of History’ elevated volition and
subjective interventions over objective criterion in political thought. The ‘vanguard’ was an idea
that belonged as much to the ascetic tradition in colonial India as it did to Leninism, a resonance
arising out of a response to the same impasse, i.e. the loss of faith in the teleological movement
of History, and a search for new horizons for a political community. It is perhaps for this reason
that Lenin’s writings eclipsed those of Marx and Engels in their popularity among partisans of
the anti-colonial movement.469 In particular, Lenin’s ideas resonated with nationalist claims that
imperialism had robbed India of its destiny, thus emphasizing the need for overcoming the
divergence between the promises of History and the stifling reality of colonial rule. Moreover,
ideas of violent detachment from History, of building zones of ‘anti-colonial sovereignty’ in a
prolonged and protracted battle against colonial power, were current in groups such as the Ghadr
Party, much before the official entry of ‘Maoism’ into Indian political vocabulary (See chapter
4). Finally, the ‘national state’ as the horizon for socio-economic change remained central to
anti-colonial politics. As Uday Mehta has argued, the concept of a national government for anti-
colonial intellectuals was tied to Jacobin ideas of using the state as an instrument for radical
transformations in the social sphere, ideas consistent with Leninist and Maoist conceptions of
state power.470

What then is specific to political subjectivity in anti-colonial Marxism? Or put differently, did
political agitation in the colonial world in the name of Marxism produce a different genealogy of
the subject? We can grasp both the similarities and the differences in the sequences opened up by
Leninism, Maoism and anti-colonialism if we identify a nodal point that connects these disparate
threads. We have posited the Marxist conception of History as the vanishing mediator in both the

467
Samir Amin, ‘What Maoism has Contributed’, Monthly Review Online (September, 2006).
https://monthlyreview.org/commentary/what-maoism-has-contributed/ accessed on 2nd October 2016.
468
See Alain Badiou, ‘Idea of Communism and the Question of Terror’ in The Idea of Communism 2, eds. Costas
Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2013).
469
See Devendra Kaushik and Leonid Vasil’evich Mitrokhin, Lenin: His Image in India (New Delhi: Vikas, 1970).
470
See Uday Mehta, ‘History and the Social Problem: The Case of India’, in Proceedings of the Seventh Annual
Gilder Lehrman Center International Conference at Yale University (2005), available at http://www.india-
seminar.com/2010/615/615_uday_s_mehta.htm accessed 7th March, 2015.
164
agreements and disagreements among different political tendencies in global Communism,
including in India. Perhaps the most radical contribution of Indian communism to global
communist thought is its abandonment of the very category of History to create new horizons of
political meaning, precisely since an attachment to linear notions of temporality would have
annulled its political energies.471 Much of official Communism in India today, however, fails to
draw the consequences of a political landscape in which the category of History has practically
become redundant in its orthodox rendition, as communist parties continue to pretend that their
own increasing political irrelevance will be overcome through the gradual annihilation of ‘feudal
relations’ in the country. Yet, such reliance on a mechanical view of time not only misreads the
modern nature of the Indian polity (albeit different from modernity’s itinerary in Europe), but
also fails to draw the ultimate Nietzschean lesson of its own political past: that while it continues
to believe in the Big Other of History, it has in practice already killed it, turning its adherence to
teleology into nothing more than nihilist and self-denying attachments.472

If a break from History was the ‘groundless ground’ on which Indian Communism was always
built, this radical de-centering of History now structures contemporary debates on political
subjectivity in European Intellectual History. The post-1968 movement in intellectual production
has grappled precisely with the uncoupling of politics from sociological or objective criterion in
order to examine its own autonomous development, rather than merely as an expression of a
deeper sociological process. This move has turned the focus on the identification and
mobilization of discrepancies in sociological phenomena as the site for political intervention.
Words such as gap, inconsistency, and void have come to denote the new theoretical edifice that
views incompleteness as essential for grasping the political possibilities inherent in any
situation.473 For theorists of radical democracy, such as Laclau and Mouffe, it means the
identification of structural antagonism, rather than constitutional procedures, as central to all
forms of political contestation in democracies.474 For Badiou, an Event reveals the site of a
fundamental inconsistency in a given situation, thus indicating the impossibility of forming a
closed totality. In these new theoretical paradigms, the void of the situation demonstrates a point
of antagonism that is impossible to resolve within the framework of sociological reasoning,
making decisions and subjective interventions the sole vehicles for overcoming a conjunctural
impasse. Defining politics as an exceptional act of creation precisely at a point where routine
procedures fail to reproduce the system, such frameworks aim to produce (partially) consistent
political projects out of the inconsistencies that structure socio-political reality.475

Such displacement in the place of the political in contemporary theory cannot be attained without
a fundamental dislocation in a number of other themes of political theory that was grounded on
the stability of sociological categories. If the ‘correct’ reading of the situation from an objective

471
As argued throughout the dissertation, this abandonment was of a practical nature owing to the improvisations
made by Indian Communists in the anti-colonial struggle. Yet, they have mostly failed to register the effects on this
practice onto the theoretical register.
472
Badiou, The Century, pp. 165-178.
473
Bosteels, The Actuality of Communism, pp. 129-169.
474
Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, pp. 149-194.
475
Badiou, Metapolitics, p. 68.
165
criterion is no longer a valid basis for proposing, let alone committing to, a political project, what
symbolic universe could hold together the utopian hopes of communism?

It is here that the study of communist thought in the colonial world can prove essential in
providing a theoretical and political resolution of this impasse, since the absence of History as
the fundamental pillar of political praxis was not experienced as a loss by partisans of the anti-
colonial movement, but as the very condition of possibility for their politics. Moreover, as we
have seen throughout this dissertation, Indian communism, as one specific example of
Marxism’s encounter with anti-colonialism, aids us in developing alternative concepts for
grounding subjectivity. With volition as the overarching thematic for this alternative
conceptualization, we saw how categories of fiction, sacrifice, suffering, and fraternity play a
critical role in sustaining political commitments. In the case of post-colonial India, the
remarkable stability of republicanism also poses the challenge of articulating subjectivity with
the question of popular subjectivity, a problem that continues to haunt the contemporary Indian
(but also global) Left.

Contemporary political theory must grapple with these themes as it attempts to develop
conceptual clarity out of the despondency and resignation marked by the collapse of
emancipatory projects at the end of the 20th century. Indian Communism, as well as other
communist movements tied with national liberation struggles, is an ideal site for developing new
conceptual frameworks to study political subjectivity in the aftermath of the loss of historical
certainties, a task equally important for advancing critical theory and for renewing emancipatory
politics adequate to the challenges of the contemporary conjuncture.

Conclusion

The task of tracing the history of global ideas remains conceptually challenging, not least
because ‘the global’ is both generated and interrupted by specific histories. While global
intellectual history has often flattened the differences in the reception, production and meaning
of ideas produced in disparate locales as part of a singular logic, the reliance on difference as the
principal epistemology for studying political thought obfuscates the ways in which political
actors engage with global ideologies across time and space. The task is then neither to flatten the
particular under the totalizing logic of the universal, nor to claim the incommensurability of
different particulars, but to think of the two as interlaced in a productive tension. In other words,
it is no longer possible to think of a specific political thought without taking into account the
influences and pressures upon it by processes beyond its immediate site of production. Nor can
we examine global ideologies without their inscription into specific political projects.

In this dissertation, we have studied the transformations and dislocations internal to Marxism as
it encountered the anti-colonial movement in India. We have attempted to develop a
methodological approach that grasps the difference between orthodox Marxism and its iteration
in the colonial India not as unrelated ideological currents, but as a mutually transformative
relationship. I have shown how by holding global Marxism and Indian Communism together, we
not only gain a more nuanced understanding of how these two terms interrupted and shaped each
other, but also come closer to understanding how intellectual production actually took place in
166
the colonial world as a process of scission, rupture and reconstitution. This dynamic between
repetition and discontinuity can be used to study the trajectory of other ideas with global
purchase, including liberalism, conservatism, fascism and nationalism, to move beyond their
provincial origins in Europe in order to gain a more holistic account of their development and
influence in modernity.

There is no doubt that Communist thought provides a unique window into studying the global
production and circulation of ideas due to its spectacular success in the non-European world
despite its ‘origins’ in Europe. Yet, much more work is required to register the effects of this
displacement onto the domains of history and theory if we are to reconstruct the salient features
of twentieth century political thought from the perspective of the global South. Only by
recognizing the non-European world as a central site for intellectual innovation, and committing
to a critical engagement with its history, can we end the perpetual division of labor between
Europe (as the arena for epistemological reflection) and non-Europe (as the place for action and
providing empirical data for European thinkers to develop their ideas). With the end of this
forced division, perhaps we will be able to begin a new beginning, freed from the certainties of
the past, and attentive to a much wider variety of thinkers whose works remain repressed under
the prevailing Euro-centrism of the field of intellectual history. Perhaps, such a beginning will
allow us to view heresies from orthodoxy not as signs of deviation or betrayal, but as dialectical
processes in which negation is a condition for the development of ideas, necessary proof that the
human adventure continues to flourish in the realm of thought.

167
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