The Russian Revolution in British India: Poets and Revolutionaries

The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 brought communism, a profoundly oppositional ideology, to power. Lenin’s merging of "State and Revolution," a dialectical impossibility, resulted in the hybrid political structure where the interests of the Soviet state, i.e. the consolidation of power, modernization and welfare, collided with a universalist ideology that counted neither citizens nor imperial subjects, neither raced nor gendered bodies, but human beings as the basic unit of society. As the Soviet state grew and the Comintern slowly subsumed independent left-wing organizations and intellectuals from around the world within its fold, the original impulses of anarchist, populist, religious and socialist thought, revolutionary consciousness and social behavior, as well as the emotional networks of sympathizers, donors, and fellow travelers that sustained the ecology of the left in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, went underground, emerging intermittently in different global locales in different guises. This was especially true in British India where Bolshevism’s anti-colonial message resonated loudly in nationalist circles, as did the vision of a classless society to replace the Indian structures of class and caste. But two major Indian thinkers, the poet Rabindranath Tagore, and the international revolutionary M. N. Roy, developed powerful critiques of the Soviet revolution and of the Bolshevik model of invincible leadership. They offered instead an alternative model of decentralized, environmentally sound, and democratic development based in Indian villages, drawing sustenance from earlier strands of humanist anarchism and socialism. In my talk I will address the double impact of the October Revolution in creating a global Soviet-sponsored left that collapsed in 1991, and the continuation of other nineteenth century left-wing ideologies that opposed Stalinism and resurfaced after 1991 to challenge the onslaught of globalization.