21st October 2016
Suchetana
Chattopadhyay, who teaches at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, has been
producing some of the most important work on early Communist history. Her first
book – An Early Communist: Muzaffar Ahmad in Calcutta, 1913-1929 (Tulika- http://mayday.leftword.com/book/an-early-communist/9788189487935/,2011),
traces not only the early life of
Kakababu but also the world of colonial and radical Calcutta. The book
was reviewed when it came out by Vijay Prashad in Frontline (http://www.frontline.in/navigation/?type=static&page=flonnet&rdurl=fl2818/stories/20110909281807500.htm
). Most recently, Chattopadhyay has contributed an essay for our own new volume
– Communist Histories (http://mayday.leftword.com/book/communist-histories/9789380118338/).Her
project in this volume is in the early M. N. Roy and his activities in Bengal
before he left for the Americas. It is a captivating article about a young man
trying to break away from his roots, being pushed by colonial suffocation
towards some form of action, and then, of course, decamping for the United
States and Mexico where he gets influenced by Marxism into Communism. Here,
Prof. Chattopadhyaya tells the LeftWord Books blog about her work:
Could you tell us
a little about your book on Muzaffar Ahmad?
My book on
Muzaffar Ahmad, based on my doctoral research, dealt with the social origins of
communism in Bengal and Calcutta (Kolkata). By delving into the little-known
convergence of the world of impoverished Bengali Muslim intellectuals and
working-class protests against capital and empire of the late 1910s and the
early 1920s, this was an attempt to grasp the urban roots (with hidden rural
compulsions) of early communism in a region where movements based on
Marxism-Leninism as an internationalist current of social liberation has left
an indelible imprint on local society. I have situated Muzaffar Ahmad
(1889-1973) in an urban milieu turned upside down by world war (1914-18) and
the impact of the Bolshevik Revolution (1917), and comparable to tendencies
visible in other colonial/semi-colonial metropolitan centers from Cairo to
Shanghai. By taking his early life from 1913 to 1929 as a frame, I have offered
an understanding of the times and the changing contours of social and political
activism in the city which propelled Muzaffar Ahmad and others towards a
politics of class, a space beyond dominant political identities of nation and
community. In the process, I have also offered a social interpretation and
detailed history of Workers and Peasants Party (1926-1929), the first socialist
organization in Bengal and open association of the banned Communist Party of
India (CPI). In this sense, the book is a partial biography of an early
communist from the colonial world, a history of the early communist movement in
Bengal, an account of the panic-driven character of imperial surveillance on
early communism in India and a conscious exercise to recover an aspect of the
city which is unknown, neglected and suppressed in mainstream historical
treatments of Calcutta.
What drew you to
write about the early M. N. Roy?
The work on
Muzaffar Ahmad and early communists in Calcutta made me turn towards M.N. Roy.
Roy and Muzaffar Ahmad enjoyed a vigorous correspondence during 1922-1923, the
crucial factor which landed Muzaffar in jail and secured his conviction in
Kanpur Bolshevik Conspiracy Case (1924), alongside S. A. Dange, Shaukat Usmani
and Nalini Gupta. The M. N. Roy he came to know from the incriminating letters
was very different from the original Naren Bhattacharya, a nationalist
revolutionary who had left the shores of Bengal in 1915. Subsequently, he had
reached California, made his way to Mexico where he helped found a communist
party and joined Communist International as its representative. Roy had shed
the name and politics of Naren Bhattacharya along the way. Naren Bhattacharya
was making his way in and out of Calcutta in the early 1910s. This covered the
immediate pre-war period when Muzaffar migrated to the city. Sometimes they
lived in and traversed the same neighbourhoods or streets. Though their everyday
lives and material conditions were similar, Muzaffar and Naren were unaware of
each other since no political or social thread could connect them. Yet,
post-war radical convulsions in the social milieu of activists and
intellectuals, made them ‘discover’ each other. Muzaffar recalled having met
Roy only once. By this time, Roy’s work in the Comintern and the emigre CPI was
firmly behind him. Though virtual strangers, an anonymous yet compelling
political bond had existed between them during the early 1920s. This made the
prospect of digging up the ‘pre-history’ of their correspondence, by examining
the social milieu of Naren Bhattacharya on the basis of unexplored archival
records and relevant secondary literature, all the more enticing.
What are you
working on now?
My current
research is related to some of the themes that have emerged from my previous
work on early communism, colonial surveillance and Calcutta. I am currently
writing a book on the last stretch of Komagata Maru’s journey and its impact on
Punjabi Sikh worker-activists in Bengal from 1914 to 1947. I have recently
written on the connections between Muslim slum-dwellers facing eviction,
populist pan-Islamist campaigners and the dissemination of the notion of an
anti-colonial jihad in Calcutta of the 1910s. I am hoping to explore this topic
further and incorporate it into a wider research I am undertaking on the social
history of everyday life in early twentieth century Calcutta. I am also
planning to write on the emergence of early communists in India and emigre
communists from India in the years immediately following the Bolshevik
Revolution. Of special interest to me is the panic they generated in British
and other empires of capital and the nature of ‘intelligence-gathering’ on
them.
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