Thread by @Anuraag_Shukla

Reading about MN Roy makes me wonder how he could not achieve the same revered status Marx & Lenin have among Indian communists?

In 1915, he scoured South East Asia for ammunition & funds as a lieutenant in one of the most powerful anti-colonial insurgency networks of Bengal.

By 1920, he had reached Moscow as a delegate to the Second Congress of the Communist International. His 1920 ‘supplementary theses on the colonial question’ are included in official communist publications as an addendum to Lenin’s own official writings on the subject.

Roy helped found the Mexican Communist Party and was a leading Comintern envoy to the revolutionary attempts in Germany in 1923 and China in 1926–27. He was briefly a member of the Frankfurt School, collaborated with Max Horkheimer in 1930.

When M. N. Roy was imprisoned in India in 1931, an international campaign for his release drew the support of Nehru, Albert Einstein, and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) founder, Roger Baldwin.

Upon his release from prison, he was, for a time, seriously considered for the post of president of the Indian National Congress, and went on to form the Indian Federation of Labour (IFL), one of the most important Indian trade unions of the war years.

If MN Roy was a star in the internationalist firmament: writing a treatise alongside Lenin; plotting communist revolutions across continents, and collaborating closely with some of the most iconic intellectuals of Europe and India, then why do so few people know his name today?

Sudipta Kaviraj has remarked that what is most interesting about Roy was his ‘remarkable failure’ as one who had all the makings of a major Indian leader, but who fell, media res, into obscurity.

~ Excerpts from MN Roy: Marxism and Colonial Cosmopolitanism by Kris Manjapra