Decolonization, Anti-imperialism, and the Primacy of Nationalism among Indian Radicals, 1920–50

In the period from 1917-1947 colonial Bombay’s industrial workers engendered a new kind of popular mobilization, one that crucially enabled the final push towards Indian independence. By locating the city’s working-class politics within the larger context of migration and social reform in western India, this paper breaks with Communist Party doxa to suggest an alternate history of the origin of progressive politics and the left in colonial India. As it does so, however, it eschews the near exclusive focus on colonial workers’ subjectivity that has dominated scholarship in recent decades and that tends to naturalize caste and religion as irreducible and thus insurmountable. This paper documents the overlaps between the anti-colonial movement and the international working-class movement to assert that any historical elaboration on the nature of subjectivity in colonial India must account for the role of enfranchisement that was gained through working-class politics. This paper argues that Bombay’s workers compelled nationalist leaders like Gandhi to acknowledge their political agency, irreversibly changing the direction of the independence movement. This working-class movement thrived under the leadership of the Bombay Radicals who were influenced by Marxism and socialism. As their efforts gained results, the Bombay Radicals found themselves threatened by the colonial state, even as they allowed themselves to be systematically co-opted for the project of Indian independence.