Revolution and the freedom struggle

Revolutionary Pasts

Author: Ali Raza

Publisher: Tulika Books

Pages: 287

Price: Rs 995

Ali Raza’s book Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India is a must-read if you are curious about people who put their lives in danger to liberate India from British rule. It focuses on communists whose contributions often go unsung in official narratives about national heroes that circulate on Independence Day and Republic Day.

The author is an Associate Professor of History at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, where he works on the social, intellectual and anti-colonial history of modern South Asia. His interest in the subject is driven by his encounters with leftist activism in Pakistan, and the subsequent desire to trace its antecedents in British India. He asks, “What was this past that was never acknowledged in the textbooks I read, a past that remained alive only through the stories one passed on to another?” His scholarly enquiry is as relevant for India as it is for Pakistan given that state persecution of communists is common to both nation states.

In this book, you will meet communists who questioned the idea of freedom propagated by the Indian National Congress. They saw it as a party that protected the interests of capitalists and landlords. These revolutionaries suspected that the demand for swaraj would lead to a situation wherein the white bureaucracy would be supplanted by brown sahibs. They knew that the concerns of peasants, workers, and other oppressed people would be left behind.

Dr Raza writes, “I cover a period of four decades — from the eve of the First World War to the immediate aftermath of decolonization…I chart the intellectual and political journeys of key individuals in revolutionary networks that linked cities and villages in northern India to North America, East Asia, Europe and the Soviet Union.” He focuses on those who “do not feature prominently in scholarly histories of communism or the Left in South Asia”. He is interested in migrant workers, exiled dissidents, peasants, religious mendicants, and lascars, Indian seamen providing cheap labour on European and American ships while facing racism.

The Ghadar Party, previously called the Pacific Coast Hindustan Association, and made up largely of Punjabis living in North America, appears prominently in this book. You will read about Sohan Singh Bhakna, Lala Hardayal, Santokh Singh, and Rattan Singh, among others. In this book, you will also meet Sattar Khairi and Jabbar Khairi, two brothers from Delhi who attended a meeting of the executive committee of the Soviet, where they spoke in Urdu and “congratulated the leaders of the Russian Revolution on behalf of 70 million Indian Mussulmans”, then asked for Russian assistance in “freeing Indians” from the British Raj.

The author devotes several pages to “Dada” Amir Haider Khan, who was born in northwest Punjab, travelled to Bombay (now Mumbai), worked as a lascar on ship decks, became a naturalised citizen of the United States, went to aviation school, got introduced to African-American political activism in Detroit, and made up his mind to go to the Soviet Union —a place that assumed centrality for revolutionaries who wanted political and military training.

Dr Raza explains “the allure of Moscow” by pointing us to the institutional support that was available for budding communists showing up from India and other colonised places in the world. He writes about the Institute of Oriental Studies that was founded in Moscow in 1920, and the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV) founded a year later. Khan, who studied at KUTV, found it an eye-opening experience because he had never lived with people “of so many diverse races and nationalities”. Students belonged to different age groups and had different levels of educational attainment. Some of them were illiterate.

Was it a utopia where everyone was welcome? No. There were rigorous entrance examinations and personal interviews. People from privileged backgrounds were sent back. A man named Hazara Singh Hamdam was asked to pack his bags and leave when “he let slip that his father owned 30 acres of land.” Khan made the cut after he was able to give satisfactory responses to all the questions about his socio-economic background, parents’ occupation, education, his involvement with political activism, and why he left the US. 

This book also challenges the notion that India’s freedom struggle was primarily a nonviolent one. Revolutionaries from India who went to KUTV learnt how to use rifles, pistols, machine guns, revolvers, and hand grenades. They were taught map-making and military tactics. One of these students was poet Sarojini Naidu’s younger sister Suhasini Chattopadhyay. After returning to India, she became the first woman to join the Communist Party of India.

Thankfully, the author does not fall into the trap of romanticising communist history. He points out that “class trumped gender”; as a result, the issue of women’s emancipation never acquired the kind of importance that it should have in leftist discourse. He also talks about communists who ratted out their comrades while being investigated by colonial authorities, and communists who were so fed up of being delegitimised by the colonial state and the Congress that they resorted to religious idioms to make their ideas accessible. What an irony!

The reviewer is a Mumbai-based writer who tweets @chintanwriting