Author: Hiranmay Karlekar
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: January 22, 2004
Sunday, January 25, will be the
50th death anniversary of one of the most outstanding Indians of the 20th
century, MN Roy. The story of his life is the stuff of legends. Born on
March 21, 1887 as Narendranath Bhattacharya, he became involved in the
revolutionary terrorist movement for India's independence and a close associate
of the revolutionary, Jatin Mukherjee or Bagha Jatin. During World War
I, when Germany was Britain's principal enemy, he left (April 1915), under
the assumed name of Charles A. Martin, for Batavia, and from there to Shanghai,
in quest of German arms for Indian revolutionaries. The delivery of the
arms, however, was bungled. Nevertheless, in August, 1915, Bagha Jatin
again sent him abroad to seek arms from the Germans. He went to Japan,
China and then to the United States- which had not yet entered the war
as an ally of Britain and France- in the hope of travelling to Germany
from there. Reaching San Francisco on June 15, 1916, he moved to Paulo
Alto and, there, to evade British intelligence, changed his name from Charles
A Martin to Manabendra Nath Roy, which he retained till the last.
In October that year, he went to
New York where he became friendly with Lala Lajpat Rai and several American
radicals but had to flee to Mexico in April 1917 after the US joined the
war against Germany and he felt he was in danger of being arrested as an
enemy agent. After yet another attempt to send German arms to India had
failed, he decided to stay on in Mexico and seek to further the cause of
India's freedom from there. He learnt Spanish, began writing fluently in
that language, made friends with American and Mexican intellectuals and
scholars, and became a confidante of the President, Venustiano Carranza,
who had assumed power after the revolution of 1911. He became the general-secretary
of the Socialist Party of Mexico, a close friend of the Communist International's
(Comintern's) emissary to that country, Michael Borodin, who arrived in
March 1919, and the founder of the Communist Party of Mexico later that
year.
Personally invited by Lenin, he
arrived in Moscow via Spain and Germany in May, 1920, to attend the Second
Congress of the Comintern. The Supplementary Thesis to Lenin's Theses on
The National and Colonial Question, which he presented, created a stir
and was accepted, with some amendments, along with the great Russian revolutionary's.
This as well as his contribution to the Comintern's proceedings, marked
him out as the principal Marxist theorist on Asia. Moving to Tashkent,
he next became instrumental to forming a Communist Party of India in exile
in October, 1920, and followed it up by establishing the Communist University
of the Toilers of the East in April, 1921. His India in Transition, published
in 1922, came to be regarded as a Marxist classic.
Roy became a candidate member to
the executive committee of the Comintern's Fourth Congress in 1922, becoming
its full member and a candidate member to the Presidium at its Fifth Congress
in 1924. In 1926, he was elected as a full member of the Presidium, and
a member of the Comintern's Secretariat and the Orgburo, at the Sixth Plenum
of the Comintern's executiv
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
was itself torn between votaries of cooperation with the Kuomintang and
of armed peasant struggle against the latter from the countryside, respectively.
Roy supported the second course, which was being expounded by leaders like
Mao Zedong while his old friend, Michael Borodin, favoured the first.The
Kuomintang, however, had changed a great deal since the death of Dr Sun
Yat-sen in 1925 and Chiang Kai-shek, who had succeeded him, was rigidly
anti-Communist. The massive massacre of Communists he organised in Shanghai
in April, 1927,ut paid, for several years, all talk of cooperation between
his party and the CCP.
Presented with the development and
a thoroughly unrealistic directive from Stalin calling for support to the
peasants' armed struggle as well as reinforcement of the leadership of
the Kuomintang by leaders thrown up by it, Roy realised that he could do
little to influence events in China, which he left. Meanwhile, the power
struggle within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union between Stalin
and his opponents like Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, had reached a critical
point. Though Roy was not directly involved, he did not support the Comintern's
official line on China. He remained a member of the Comintern's Presidium
as late as its Ninth Plenum in February, 1928, but knew that his independence
had cost him Stalin's support and that, like that of many other communists
who had not fallen in line with the Russian leader, his own life might
be in danger. He fled Russia after attending the Ninth Plenum. He neither
attended the organisation's Sixth Congress in July, 1929, nor endorsed
the extremist line it took. He stayed on in Berlin to complete his classic,
Revolution and Counter Revolution in China and then decided to return to
India despite the danger of being arrested by the British.
In India, he was traced by British
intelligence, spent a little over five years in prison and on his release
in 1936, plunged into political activity again. He joined the Congress
and became a member of the AICC but fell foul of its established leadership
for his strong criticism of Gandhi's policies. Leaving the Congress in
1937, he formed the League of Radical Congressmen in 1939, which later
became the Radical Democratic Party. He supported the British during World
War II, holding that Nazism and Fascism posed the biggest threat to humankind
at that juncture and that the war would so enfeeble England that, even
if victorious, it would have to give Independence to India. He was right
on the first count, and has proved prophetic on the second.
Shortly afterwards, growing increasingly
disenchanted with the Communist movement in the world and Marxism as an
ideology. Roy formulated the philosophy of Radical Humanism. The Humanism
of the classical Greeks and later exponents like the 19th Century German
philosopher, Ludwig Feuerbach, put human beings at the centre of the universe,
its basic message being most eloquently encapsulated in the Greek Sophist
Protagorus' celebrated aphorism, "Man is the measure of all things." Also,
it proclaimed the sovereignty of human reason, and freedom to be the principal
end of all human activity. Roy's seminal contribution embodied in his New
Humanism and the classic, Reason, Romanticism and Revolution, was to explain
human rationality in terms of the law-governed nature of the universe manifesting
itself in the form of the laws of thought functioning at the level of intelligence
and will. Also, stating that the quest for freedom and search for truth
constituted the basic urges of human progress, and calling humankind the
archetype of history, he traced the latter as a continuous process of expanding
human freedom through the constant widening of the area of knowledge.
While all this makes Roy the most
important humanist of the 20th century, his philisophy of freedom, read
with Freud, Jung and the Frankfurt School, offers a libertarian weltanschauung
to a world which continues to be menaced by fanatical creeds.
==========================
Title: Busting the Roy myth
Author: Prafull Goradia
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: January 28, 2004
Apropos the article, "Relevance
of MN Roy" (Jan 23), by Hiranmay Karlekar, it is not widely known that
Roy was anti-Hindu. He had a pathological dislike for the Hindus. A careful
reading of his Selected Works edited by Sibnarayan Roy (OUP), would reveal
the prejudice. To quote: "Hindu superciliousness towards the religion and
culture of the Muslims is absurd. It insults history and injures the political
future of our country. Learning from the Muslims, Europe became the leader
of modem civilisation. Even today, her best sons are not ashamed of the
past indebtedness. Unfortunately, India could not fully benefit by the
heritage of Islamic culture because she did not deserve the distinction.
Now, in the throes of a belated Renaissance, Indians, both Hindus and Muslims,
could profitably draw inspiration from the memorable chapter of human history.
Knowledge of Islam's contribution would shock the Hindus out of their arrogant
self-satisfaction.
Unfortunately, Roy was not even
handed in his contempt. He had a soft comer for Islam and admired the religion
and its culture. In 1930, he had named himself Mahmood. Whether he talked
of the value of Islamic contribution on the basis of his knowledge or out
of his hatred of Hinduism, is a matter of conjecture. Take another quotation:
"The Mohammedan power was consolidated in India not so much by the valour
of the invaders' arms as owing to the propagation of the Islamic faith
and the progressive significance of Islamic laws". If Islamic laws were
so progressive, one wonders why the Muslims of India have willingly allowed
the sharia to be replaced by laws introduced by the British e.g. the Indian
Penal Code, Law of Contract etc. Only Muslim laws of succession and marriage
have been preserved as a separate code applicable to the Muslim community.
Succession rules differed even within the ummah.The Khojas and the Memons
followed their own distinct traditions until 1937 when the Shariat Act
overruled them and compelled all Muslims to obey common rules regardless
of their willingness or otherwise. The freedom to marry any number of times
subject to not having more than four wives at a time, was the major reason
coming in the way of a uniform civil code for the whole country. And, of
course, the liberty to divorce a wife by pronouncing talaaq three times.
Yet, MN Roy was impressed by the progressive significance of Islamic laws.
Elsewhere, he says: "Even as a religion,
Hinduism bears the stamp of backwardness. Rigorous monotheism is the highest
form of religion. Monotheism is faith in one personal God or Allah without
ever hoping to meet him except presumably after death. The Hindu concept
otparam atma is far more rational. All living beings form the universe
and their individual souls orjeevatmas are parts of the total soul. Which
means that all individual living beings are part or partners of the divine.
There is no personal God in Hinduism. His tirade against the nationalists
was a continuation of his anti-Hinduism. As emphasised by Maulana Muhammad
Ali of the khilafat fame, the Muslims were supranationalist. The communists,
on the other hand, were internationalist. That largely left the believing
Hindus on the side of nationalism. In his view, a proletarian revolution
was the answer for India and not nationalism which was confined to the
bourgeoisie. Roy overlooked the fact that a revolution would merely lead
to the replacement of London by Moscow. He was equally against patriots
and called patriotism as smacking of reaction which produces Gandhis and
Aurobindos.
