Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 294 pp. US$99.99, cloth. ISBN 9781108481847.
Last week, I came across a photograph published in the Punjabi magazine Preet Lari during the 1970s. Showing Lenin hauling logs among young men, it was captioned: “After the revolution, Lenin engaged in kar-seva for nation building with the people.” “Kar-seva” (literally service through labour) is historically an idea rooted in Sikh ideals of community labor. Its use in this magazine, to propagate socialist ideals through local idioms, confirms the insights of Ali Raza’s Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India, which argues that early twentieth-century Indian communism was shaped by deeply rooted politics, even as it was also inspired by international radicalism. One of the book’s most significant achievements is to challenge the wide-spread notion that communism was “foreign” to the Indian subcontinent, and that the Left was “a proxy of communist blocs” and “an anti-national force” (5). Raza suggests that if we move away from official histories, produced by the colonial state, or even by the communist parties, and view the movement through the lives of ordinary revolutionaries, we will be able to see a communism that is “less rigid, less internally consistent, less party-oriented, less elite-centred and, more importantly, less foreign” (250). This “communism of the everyday” also illuminates the “full humanity” of these ordinary subjects (13).
To this end, the first half of the book reads the memoirs of Naina Singh Dhoot, Sohan Singh Bhakna, “Dada” Amir Haider Khan, and Shaukat Usmani, tracing their journeys through the “revolutionary networks that linked cities and villages in northern India to North America, East Asia, Europe, and the Soviet Union” (4). Such networks shaped their eclectic ideas about communism. Raza also emphasizes how individuals moved between different movements at home and abroad—Ghadar, Khilafat, Lascar, Kirti, and Akali, as well as the Communist Party. Imbibing socialist ideals through the powerful example of the Soviet Union, as well as through these radical movements, they comprehended them in local terms. For example, Shaukat Usmani, one of the founders of the Communist Party, writes that he learnt from people in Central Asia that “Soviet meant Panchayat” (57); Usmani extended the comparison to suggest that “doctrine of communism or scientifically advanced Panchyatism” is more conducive to “the people of the East” because their own conception of life is “primarily social and not individual” (57–58). “In other words,” Raza comments, “the future had already been inaugurated by India. The only task remaining was to infuse a spirit of scientific rationalism in pre-existing forms of social organization” (59). To be clear: Raza’s argument is not that communists were nativists, but rather that “for those who were involved in this project there was little to distinguish between nationalism and internationalism” (113). For some revolutionaries, both nationalism and internationalism became more formally rooted in Marxist literature only later, often in Indian prisons, through other prisoners, or, as in the case of the infamous Meerut Conspiracy Case, when defendants were given access to Marxist texts to prepare their defense.
As Raza notes, for so many communists, “[r]emembrance was a revolutionary act” (19). It is significant that these ordinary men felt that their lives were worth recording. They were probably empowered by a powerful utopianism, a “messianic conception of the world” which, Raza argues, impelled and sustained them. Raza eloquently discusses its anti-colonial implications. Imperial discourse consistently suggested that colonized peoples were not yet worthy of freedom, and placed them “in an endlessly deferred and unrealizable temporal horizon.” But communists “inhabited a revolutionary time in which anything was possible. Not only was a new world within reach, it was well on its way” (15–16). Raza is aware of the potential problems with utopian thinking (including its totalitarian or right-wing appropriations), but insists on its importance for colonized subjects who “yearned to make history, not as supplicants or passive recipients forever destined to play catch-up, but as equals.” Thus, he is interested in recovering utopianism, not as an “idea” but as a “practice and as a lived ethic” (18).
Revolutionary memoirs bear witness to both political events and personal transformations. The memoirs of “Dada” Amir Haider Khan are exemplary in this regard—in Buenos Aires, he met European women who had gone there as prostitutes, which alerted him to the gendered nature of discrimination, and to his own prejudices (48). In Detroit, he was introduced to both African-American and communist activists, and heard a Marxist speech that transformed him into a communist, arousing a fervent desire to visit the Soviet Union. There, he struck up a friendship with Harry Haywood, an African-American comrade, and was exposed to ways of living that further changed his views on matters such as women or nudity. I particularly appreciated Raza’s discussion of how these peripatetic revolutionaries experienced racial discrimination. Sohan Singh Bhakna recalled how American children called out “Hello Hindu Slave” to “Hindi workers,” who were hated by white workers even more than were the Chinese and Japanese. Especially if one interprets their encounters in the light of Frantz Fanon’s writings, Raza astutely observes, “it becomes clear just how deeply Bhakna’s, Dada’s and Usmani’s politics were tied to the personal.” Perhaps because, for these individuals “politics was a harsher affair” than for more elite revolutionaries such as Lala Hardayal, M. N. Roy and V. N. Chattopadhyaya, the former “came to understand this world through their bodies” (64).
The second half of the book details how “communism was woven in through the socio-political landscape of the Punjab” (148). Raza details the intricate braiding of communism with Kirti and Akali politics, and how individuals moved between them. Darshan Singh Pheruman, who is memorialized as a defender of Sikh rights, was once both a Ghadarite and a Kirti agitator, and Sohan Singh Josh, who came into Kirti politics through the Akali movement, later moved away from both into the Communist Party. Tracing such lives, Raza makes the important argument that “the longer history and genealogy of radicalism” can be “partly traced back to the emergence of Sikh communitarian politics in Punjab” (156). His point that “[religion] provided a political vocabulary to those who sought to transform the world, especially those who cut their political teeth in a socio-religious movement” (161) is especially astute; in other contexts, we know, such religious inflections lent a communal or casteist colour to revolutionary politics. These chapters brilliantly capture how multiple histories of radicalism together shaped communism in Punjab, and the capacious vocabularies of the comrades.
It was precisely such fluidity that fueled the colonial state’s perception that “communism” was an incontrollable virus (154). The last two chapters trace the colonial state’s relentless persecution of communists, its ultimately successful attempts to deepen the divisions between communists and mainstream nationalism, and the negative effects of Stalinism upon the movement. While it is widely assumed that the Meerut Conspiracy Case against the communists gave them wide publicity, Raza perceptively points out that it also circulated the government’s charge that communists were anti-national. Shortly afterwards, the Communist Party was banned, as were five organizations in Punjab with no direct links to the Party. Attempts at uniting radicals of different hues were stymied, even as Stalinism hardened the positions and vocabularies of communists themselves. Raza traces the impasses, and contradictions that ensued within the movement, while always linking these to the constant persecutions that continued, after independence, on both sides of the border.
Raza is attuned to the necessity, and the difficulty, of situating ordinary women within these histories; when he evokes examples of their writings and activities, they are mostly drawn from places and times other than the ones he focuses on. And despite his deft positioning of the men’s memoirs, I found myself wishing for more extracts, to get a greater flavour of the “humanity” of the subjects, although it is challenging to amplify individual voices while also narrating a wider history. Revolutionary Pasts provides a deeply moving account of, and an important historical argument about, communism in India. Its insights resonate urgently with the present when, in India, every dissident is locked up on the grounds of being a dangerous communist—an “urban Naxal,” a “Maoist.” Without nostalgia, Revolutionary Pasts recovers radical lineages that are crucial for the future.
Ania Loomba
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia