M. N. Roy

Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism

Kris Manjapra

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000083644
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

This is a work of South Asian intellectual history written from a transnational perspective and based on the life and work of M.N. Roy, one of India's most formidable Marxist intellectuals. Swadeshi revolutionary, co-founder of the Mexican Communist Party, member of the Communist International Presidium, and a major force in the rise of Indian communism, M.N. Roy was a colonial cosmopolitan icon of the interwar years. Exploring the intellectual production of this important thinker, this book traces the historical context of his ideas from 19th-century Bengal to Weimar Germany, through the tumultuous period of world politics in the 1930s and 1940s, and on to post-Independence India.

In this book the author makes a number of valuable theoretical contributions. He argues for the importance of conceiving the 'deterritorial' zones of thought and action through which Indian anti-colonial political thought operated, and advances a new periodisation for Swadeshi on this basis. He also argues against viewing 'international communism' of the 1920s as a single monolith by highlighting the fractures and contestations that influenced colonial politics worldwide.

A fresh and insightful perspective on the history of India in the interwar years, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students of the modern history of South and East Asia, America and Europe, and to those interested in anti-colonial struggles, Communist politics and trajectories of Marxist thought in the 20th century.

1
The Swadeshi Avant-Garde

M. N. Roy’s Memoirs (1964) can be read as a piece of expressionist art.¹ It recounts repeated breakages of time flow, in which new ideas and new time intrude. Roy repeatedly ‘discovers new meaning’, announces ‘lands of hope’ to which he travelled in pursuit of the nationalist cause, and reports his ‘rebirths’ along the way.² The path of anti-colonial struggle and self-discovery through foreign worlds did not create a Bildungsroman of stadial change reaching ultimate culmination, but rather a discontinuous and fragmentary narrative of pregnant expectancy and unforeseen crisis events. Roy narrates his autobiography as a continual explosive encounter with the new, not unlike classic works of Central European literary Expressionism, such as Ernst Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia (1918) or Hugo Ball’s Flight Out of Time (1927).³ These features of Roy’s autobiography — the focus on temporal rupture and on the encounter with the foreign — were standard to the Bengali avant-garde milieu in which he grew up.

Manabendranath Roy (1887–1954), born Narendranath Bhattacharya to a Brahmin family in the West Bengal village of Kseput, grew up in the context of increasingly radical anti-colonial politics. By the late nineteenth century, radical resistance movements against the British began to be organised in Calcutta. First came the enhancement of European dominance in… the Calcutta Corporation with the Amendment Act of 1899, passed to ‘give the Europeans a general and adequate security’ in matters of commerce and industry.⁴ Then the partition of Bengal, first proposed by Viceroy Curzon in 1903 and enacted in 1905, divided Bengal between a Western Hindu and an Eastern Muslim province in the interest of a ‘diminution of the power of Bengali political agitation’.⁵ A violent insurgency of unprecedented proportions, the Swadeshi Movement, arose, lasting from 1903 till 1917. It marked a new era of politics and thought with implications for decades to come.⁶

From his youth, Roy was closely associated with some of the most powerful figures of radical Swadeshi politics and thought. He studied at the new Bengal Technical College with the young Swadeshi educationalist, Benoy Kumar Sarkar, disciple of Satish Chandra Mukherjee.⁷ It is likely that, as a young man, Roy undertook social work and trade union organisation in villages alongside Swadeshi labour activists. He was mentored by Barindrakumar Ghosh, the revolutionary leader and brother of Sri Aurobindo. Roy soon became a lieutenant to perhaps the greatest Bengali Swadeshi insurgent, Jatin Mukherjee.⁸ For a number of years, Roy plotted heists of armouries and gun shops (‘dacoities’), constructed bombs and attempted to assassinate British colonial officials.⁹ From 1903 to 1915, between the ages of sixteen and twenty-eight, Roy was active in the Calcutta revolutionary underground.

The young M. N. Roy, like many of the madhyabitta (middle-class) high-caste Hindu youth of his day, also pursued the ascesis of dharma.

Illustration 1.1 Roy as a Swadeshi revolutionary in 1910.

Source: Sibnarayan Ray, In Freedom’s Quest: Life of M. N. Roy, vol. 4, Part 2. Used with permission.

Practising yoga, abstaining from sexual activity and reading the Gita formed central features of the daily discipline of the Swadeshi revolutionaries.¹⁰ The anti-colonial nationalist struggle in these years was often framed in religious terms. Swadeshi radicals believed themselves to be involved in pracesta (righteous striving).¹¹ They wanted to attain swaswata Bharat (eternal India).¹² They viewed the possible loss of their lives for the cause of national freedom as an aspect of sadhana (the spiritual journey).¹³ Yet, far from simply representing the deployment of ‘religion’ in the pursuit of political ends, spiritual sensibilities reflected both the increasingly deterritorial social experience of the time, as well as the desire to break out of the dominant colonial framing of universal time and global space.

‘Deterritoriality’, as a term of art, received inconsistent glosses by Deleuze and Guattari, the very theorists who coined it.¹⁴ My reading of ‘deterritoriality’ follows from their discussion in A Thousand Plateaus (1987), in which the ‘deterritorial body’ is defined as a system of ‘waves and intensities’ co-produced along with the formation of bounded political forms.¹⁵ Under the conditions of a global and interconnected economy of unprecedented scale since the seventeenth century, territorial entities of the modern era are localisable in bounded space and often take the form of nation-states, while deterritorial ‘bodies’ are fields of waves or vectors always on the way to somewhere else, circulating across state borders and in supranational communities of value and belonging. But the ‘de–’ in ‘deterritorial’ is not privative. It does not suggest that which is antithetical to bounded national space. Deterritoriality and territoriality play together in a dialectic in the modern era, suggest Deleuze and Guattari. ‘The territorial assemblage’, they point out, ‘implies a decoding and is inseparable from its own deterritorialisation’.¹⁶ This has led scholars to speak of modern processes of ‘de/reterritorialisation’.¹⁷

In the specific example of anti-colonial nationalism, the co-production of territorial politics, aimed at achieving a free Indian nation-state, and deterritorial politics, aimed at forging transnational communities of affiliation and solidarity, has received scholarly attention.¹⁸ By invoking the deterritorial register of anti-colonial politics here, I seek to challenge the priority granted to ‘home politics’ and to territorial aspiration in the study of anti-colonial nationalism.¹⁹ In fact, the nationalist system lived through the political missions and interpretive actions of globally dispersed actors as they travelled. And the objectives and anticipations of deterritorial anti-colonial nationalism often exceeded territorial frames. The inhabitation of medial spaces and interstices by Indian anti-colonial activists, travelling beyond boundaries and seeking fusions with foreign worlds, had its own ontological status, and was not simply en route to territorial form.

By the 1890s, in the prime colonial cosmopolis of Calcutta, it was common for individuals from diverse classes to have had some experience of foreign travel, or to know someone with stories of life abroad — whether he or she be coolie, lascar, free labourer, hajj pilgrim, student or bhadralok tourist. Beginning in the 1830s Calcutta was a hub port for the travel of indentured labour out of and into India.²⁰ The circulatory travel of Bengali elites going to Britain rose from the late 1860s onwards, especially with the rise of Indians in the colonial administration and with the increasing place of Indian professionals in the legal and higher education systems, positions that assigned great status to accreditation in the imperial metropolis.²¹ From 1840s onwards, expanding greatly after the opening of the Suez Canal, Calcutta also became one of the major cities for the hajj pilgrimage by ship to Mecca, Medina and Karbala.²² By the late nineteenth century, the polysemy of the term ‘nation’ in Bengali discourse, which in the writings of a nationalist author such as Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay could refer to ‘all the races of India’, or to ‘the Hindus’, or to the ‘the Bengalis’,²³ could also refer to a notion of a ‘greater India’ comprising the home population and the diaspora. An article in the Calcutta Modern Review of 1907, for example, blatantly declared: ‘hundreds of well-to-do families, Hindu in every sense of the word, [are] found in regions as distant as South America and Oceania. It is they who in their humble way form what I call Greater India outside the limits of our motherland’.²⁴ Meanwhile, the celebrated Bengali editor, Ramananda Chatterjee, began publishing his journal Prabasi in 1897, whose title (Prabasi can be awkwardly translated into English as ‘those Bengalis living away from home’) addressed a greater Bengali community living both inside and outside the territorial bounds of Bengal.

A new kind of political thought crystallised in the context of deter-ritorialisation at the turn of the century in Bengal, of which M. N. Roy’s writings are an expression. What may be termed the ‘Swadeshi avant-garde’ emphasised deterritorial notions of space and new notions of time. When Manabendranath Roy travelled abroad in 1915, initially in search of ammunition and funds to support the Swadeshi movement, first to ports in southeast Asia, then on to the United States and Mexico and then on to Germany and Russia, he had already embarked on an avant-garde project of travel, aimed not at reconfirming the extent routes of Indian voyage through the empire, but at remaking the map of the world through the agency of travel itself.

The Swadeshi Movement

Partha Chatterjee has advanced the penetrating argument that the anti-colonial era began with the turn towards an inner domain of cultural autonomy and the rejection of Western modes, a process whose roots stretch back at least to the 1860s, with the rise in stature of the tantric saint Ramakrishna, and the gradual acceptance of his mystical message by urban elites.²⁵ The partition of 1905 was less a cause than an occasion for the expression of long-simmering anti-colonial discontent. Secret societies in the Calcutta and Dacca undergrounds constructed bombs and hurled them at colonial officers. These samiti conducted raids of government munition depots, and destabilised the municipal corporations through acts of banditry. Meanwhile Swadeshi industries and storefronts were established, in which foreign goods were boycotted and locally manufactured goods sold. Urban Bengalis began wearing homespun fabrics.²⁶ Rabindranath Tagore and Aswini Kumar Datta started campaigns for village education, as Kshitimohan Sen and Dinesh Chandra Sen recorded the Baul folk songs of the countryside to teach city dwellers about the riches of authentic Bengali village culture. The Dawn Society under Satish Chandra Mukherji pioneered programmes for ‘national education’ in opposition to Viceroy Curzon’s project, begun in 1899, to reassert the ‘central authority and government control’ over Calcutta University.²⁷ Meanwhile, Aurobindo Ghosh and Taraknath Palit headed the Swadeshi universities established in 1906, the Bengal National College and the Bengal Technical College.²⁸ And this rise of nationalist educational institutions attained culmination in 1914 with the fou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Acronyms
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Swadeshi Avant-Garde
• 2. Marxist New Time
• 3. The Transformations of M. N. Roy
• 4. Criticism and Incarceration
• 5. Interstitial Politics
• 6. Radical Humanism
• Epilogue
• References and Select Bibliography
• Index