Onward to Tashkent: Indian Revolutionary Exiles in 1920s Central Asia

In September 1920, the Congress of the Oppressed Peoples of the East opened in Baku. It convened twenty-two Asian nationalities, as well as Soviet party leaders and representatives from European communist Parties. The Congress’ main purpose was to formulate a common policy against imperialism in Asia. Fourteen Indian delegates attended this gathering, roughly half of whom belonged to the Indian Revolutionary Association in Tashkent. Several of these delegates were (self)-exiled revolutionaries with long histories of anti-imperialist activism. Abani Mukherjee, for example, had come to the Soviet Union through the offices of Dutch communist S.J. Rutgers, whom he had met in the Dutch East Indies. Yet others had been on the way to Turkey to help restore the Caliphate but found themselves redirected to Tashkent, and from there to Baku.  

This paper examines Indian revolutionary routes through 1920s Soviet Asia. Some aspiring revolutionaries formulated visions of an Asian future based on variations on the communist model. The short-lived Tashkent School and the University of the Toilers of the East were centers where such visions were formulated and shared. Others saw Soviet interest in and support of Asian anti-imperialist movements as an opportunity to further their own agendas for a post-imperial world order. But regardless of these revolutionaries’ motivations for moving to Soviet Asia, their movements and actions were invariably interpreted by British Indian intelligence as directed solely from Moscow. This caused a highly diverse group of mobile activists, ranging from trade unionists to pan-Islamists and Pan-Asianists, to be classed as communists, and to have their actions monitored and analyzed in that light. An analysis of Indian revolutionary agendas and British anxieties over the locations and resources they used, will shed light on the various ways in which Soviet Asia functioned as a space for revolutionary anti-imperialism in the 1920s.