Evelyn Trent Was One of America’s Great Revolutionaries
Best remembered as the partner of Indian revolutionary M. N. Roy, Evelyn Trent deserves to be recognized as a major figure in her own right. The Californian activist was a pioneering anti-colonial feminist who helped initiate India’s communist movement.
Rebels hold rifles in Revolutionary Mexico, where Evelyn Trent helped found the Mexican Communist Party. (Library of Congress / Corbis / VCG via Getty Images)
In the history of the US left, Evelyn Trent (1892–1970) is a shamefully neglected figure. If known at all, she is merely remembered as the American wife of the dashing, globe-trotting Indian anti-colonial revolutionary M. N. Roy.
Active at a critical conjuncture in the 1920s, Trent helped found the communist parties of Mexico and India. She trained Indian anti-colonial militants in Soviet Central Asia and was an inaugural instructor at the University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow. She also participated in the international communist women’s movement.
Though she was not a prolific writer, what little she did write was smuggled into colonial India and widely circulated in India’s early communist underground. Yet despite her accomplishments, M. N. Roy made no mention of Trent in his well-known, stylistically masterful Memoirs. Roy’s erasure of Trent infuriated his communist contemporaries in India, who remembered her as one of the founders of their mass movement.
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