First, read the following lines from a New Yorker essay:
When, starting in 1919, Vladimir Lenin convened the first congresses of the Communist International, some Bolsheviks were disappointed by the characters who turned up—old-fashioned socialists, trade unionists, and anarchists, coming with false papers, in disguise, under aliases, and all apparently expecting hotel rooms. The Russian revolutionary Victor Serge observed, “It was obvious at first glance that here were no insurgent souls.” Lenin kept a blinking electric light on his desk to cut meetings short. But one of the arrivals made an impression. “Very tall, very handsome, very dark, with very wavy hair,” Serge recalled. It was Manabendra Nath Roy, an Indian who was a founder of the Mexican Communist Party.
Did you catch that?
One of the arrivals who impressed Lenin was an Indian. And, this Indian was a founder of the Mexican Communist Party!
As one with leftist leanings in my younger phase, I had heard of a name M.N. Roy. But, I had no idea how big he was in the history of Communism.
Who was this M.N. Roy? "Born into a Brahmin family in West Bengal in 1887, he left India in his twenties on a series of missions to secure funds and weapons for an uprising against the British Raj."
Roy was one of the many thinkers from there, which prompted Gopal Krishna Gokhale to put it succinctly more than a century ago: “What Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow.”
Such rich stories were why I was fascinated with Bengal and Calcutta, and when the opportunity presented itself, I left for Calcutta. I am surprised that I didn't fall in love with a Bengali girl!
But, to think is one thing. For a thinker to end up in Mexico and Russia in the early years of the 20th century is completely another. How did M.N. Roy manage to do that?
Roy’s parleys with contacts in Java, China, and Japan yielded almost nothing. In Tokyo, he resolved to press onward to the United States: “I decided to take the bull by the horn, pinned a golden cross to the lapel of my coat, put on a very sombre face, and called at the American consulate.” Disguised as “Father Martin” and having, he said, “reinforced my armour with a morocco-bound copy of the Holy Bible beautifully printed on rice-paper,” Roy arrived in San Francisco in 1916.
Damn, they should make a movie out of this guy's life!
Roy promptly fell in love, got married, and the couple's political activities invited trouble. That is when he changed his name from Narendranath Bhattacharya and became Manabendra Nath Roy.
A name change doesn't fool anybody. The couple fled to to Mexico.
There Roy witnessed a revolution, learned Spanish, and co-founded the Communist Party of Mexico—one of the first national Communist Parties outside Russia. One day, a Russian man from Chicago asked to meet Roy at a hotel: Mikhail Borodin, one of Lenin’s top lieutenants. Before long, he invited him to the Kremlin. It was the start of a journey that led not only to Moscow and Berlin but also to China, where Roy became a leading Soviet envoy during the Chinese Civil War.
Head-spinning!
So, with all these accomplishments, whatever became of Roy? Why did we never read about him in our history textbook?
Roy got disillusioned with the international communist movement.
Shortly after Roy returned to India, in 1930, in a deluded attempt to influence the independence movement, he was arrested and imprisoned by the British. Few people had any reason to remember him once he quit the Communists and became a radical humanist, living out his final years in a cottage in the foothills of the Himalayas.
Aha!
His radical humanism lost against the Gandhian humanism and Nehru's socialism. Like most of us, M.N. Roy too was soon forgotten even when he was alive.
In 1946, Roy established the Indian Renaissance Institute at Dehradun in order to develop the Indian Renaissance Movement.
Roy died of a heart attack on 25 January 1954.
What a life!
