An Anti-Colonial Icon

Roy was an anti-colonial icon of the mid-twentieth century. From his origins as a young insurgent in Calcutta in the 1910s to his roles as a founder of the Mexican Communist Party and a high-level Comintern leader in 1920s Moscow, Roy exemplified the internationalist left in extreme times.

Among Roy’s renegade intellectual breakthroughs was his rebuttal of Vladimir Lenin’s claim, in his 1920 “Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions,” that workers’ revolutions across the colonial world would convey, like aftershocks, the seismic force first generated by revolution in the West. Roy, penning his own “Supplementary Theses” (1920), instead envisioned a “mutual relationship” between toilers located across the colonies and the West, and identified the tectonic role of anti-imperial struggle in shifting the balance of the whole world. Some years later, in his innovative and bold history of the revolutionary process in China (Revolution and Counterrevolution in China), published in 1930, Roy eviscerated Eurocentric orthodox Marxist assertions about a supposed despotic “Asiatic mode of production.”

However, the beginning of the murderous Stalinist purges at the end of the 1920s almost killed Roy and compelled him to return to India in 1930, where he was sentenced to twelve years of imprisonment by the British imperial regime. He became known for what the scholar Sudipta Kaviraj called his “remarkable failures” and his ultimate lack of political salience on the Indian political stage. Roy himself thematized his failures as part of his biography. As he wrote in his 1946 work New Orientation, “If there is one failure or two defeats, you may say they are due to mistakes. But if you have a whole series of failures, you simply cannot close your eyes to it.”

Yet while he may have failed in political mobilization, he excelled in critique. Roy’s analyses of culture, society, and politics of the 1930s and ’40s provide insights into the international formations of fascism and their instances in the Global South. He developed critical thinking about the future of fascism, not as an epigone of Western styles of thought but rather as their bellwether.

Roy saw the varieties of fascism (not just German, Italian, or even Russian, but also Indian) as locally differentiated styles sharing a global form. Long before the bloody Partition of India in 1947, he warned that postcolonial independence, drawing perverse energy from the preceding era of imperial rule, would turn fascist because of Hindu nationalism, mob rule, and the cooptation of the state by dynasts and super capitalists. Fascism would live on in the postcolony.

In Roy’s voluminous writing about Indian fascism in the 1940s, he argued that the world was in the midst of a civil war between the forces of autarky, on one hand, and those of federalization, on the other; between elite colonialist interests seeking to erect dividing walls and democratic anti-colonial people’s movements striving to break them down.

The key contribution of Roy’s critical analysis — and the insight that made him so unpopular and politically irrelevant back in his day — was his assertion that the shoot of fascism in India had grown from the soil of Gandhism and the politics of the Indian National Congress and would continue to grow in mainstream Indian postcolonial nationalism.

Seen from today’s perspective, the fascism promulgated by Narendra Modi’s regime draws its force not only from a fringe offshoot of the paramilitary Hindutva Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), but also from the deeper taproot of mainstream political styles in India that go all the way back to the cult of the Mahatma, the appeal to ideas of Hindu cultural and spiritual exceptionalism, and the practices of instrumentalized mass mobilization by elites.

It was Roy’s consistent view, sounding as perverse today as it did back then, that Gandhi’s paternalist mass movement and Congress dynasticism would condemn independent India to recurring confrontations with a homegrown Indian strain of fascism, and with the colonialist impulses of the postcolonial state.

Drawing the Line

The reigning nomos of the earth of the 1940s emerged from more than a century of imperial warmaking, which was the condition of possibility for the globalization of the modern nation-state form. British imperialist wars across South Asia after 1857, for example, marked a new resolve to draw the line of imperial domination, and to use fresh military and juridical technologies to execute and appropriate across the space it enclosed.

These events, beginning in South Asia with the War of 1857, unleashed a global frenzy that next crescendoed across the Caribbean and Africa between 1865 and 1910, where all kinds of old and new techniques were put to work by the European imperial powers. Lines of all varieties — amity lines, colonial lines, cadastral lines, civil lines, hamletting lines, treaty lines, cartographic lines, partition lines, not to mention concentration-camp lines — were drawn, redrawn, and superimposed many times over across Asia, Africa, and the entire colonial world.

As both Roy and Aimé Cesaire noted at the time, what then transpired between 1914 and 1945 — the rise of fascism and totalitarianism — was the continuation onto European soil of what European empires were doing across South Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa, as well as the indigenous world.

The lines drawn in the 1950s era of decolonization — as in the preceding period of fascism — were carved inside the state too, as much as on their outer, contested boundary limits. Postcolonial statecraft of South Asia grew out of violent appropriation from subordinated castes, indigenous peoples, racialized groups, and minoritized ethnic communities. In this sense, according to Roy’s analysis, postcolonial South Asia, perhaps in more heightened fashion than in any other part of the world, was constituted through the drawing and redrawing of such lines of appropriation, and this made it extremely susceptible to postcolonial fascism.

Roy, who was himself of a Bengali upper-caste family, wrote about the ways that casteist Hindu patriarchy placed women and sexual minorities “outside the line” and subjected them to appropriation, domination, and abjection. Under the conditions of British rule, as the state remained in the hands of a foreign overlord, Indian patriarchy redoubled its manipulations and delineations of the realm of sexuality.

For Roy, majoritarian culture did not serve as a kind of inner space in which a measure of anti-colonial freedom was maintained. Instead, he contended, nationalist cultural politics in India served as little more than an intimate microcosm for the nomos of the earth.

Roy viewed Gandhi’s cultural politics as the quintessence of this. As he wrote in one of his merciless eviscerations of Gandhian patriarchalism, “The profession of spiritualism commits Gandhians to the vulgarist, most brutal practices of materialism. . . . Spiritualist dogmas hide antidemocratic counterrevolutionary tendencies of orthodox nationalism.” He went on, “Indian fascism may even be nonviolent.”

In Roy’s view, the vulgar materialism of “spiritualist” ideologies relied on ahistorical categories of identity and authenticity, and on the delineation of social hierarchies (i.e., the role of the woman, the role of the “harijan,” the role of the ethnic or communitarian Other, the role of the upper-caste patriarch). These rigidly enforced identity lines sought command over the historical dialectics of human experience and conspired to stabilize systems of social domination.

Prescient Hyperbole

Roy’s twelve-year period of imprisonment under British rule was reduced to seven, running from 1931 to 1936, and he subsequently worked to set up an Institute of New Thinking in the Indian town of Dehradun. It must be said that his analysis during these later years focused less on particular political events and strategies and more on the critique of political forms. Perhaps it became more hyperbolic too.

Yet what might have appeared as Roy’s hyperbole in the 1940s, as he issued warning after warning about the rise of Indian fascism in and through mainstream postcolonial politics, today seems increasingly prescient, with the endurance of Modi’s India. In fascist regimes, elites attempt to coopt, coerce, and frighten the people, using the mechanisms of democracy itself to this end, turning segments of the people into masses, and the masses, eventually, into a mob.

However, the people, in the diversity of their social needs, identities, and desires, may exceed and ultimately dispel the hold of the mob. Roy hoped for this outcome in 1946, even before South Asian democracies were born.

At the time of the Indian Constituent Assembly, that great conclave of December 1946 when a people’s democratic system that could avoid the Partition of India and Pakistan was still possible, he advocated for the formation of “people’s committees,” in which “power will not be captured by a party, but by those committees, which will constitute the foundation of a democratic state.”

In his last years, he developed what we can describe as an anti-Aristotelian and anti-Communist theory of the people: not as requiring leadership; not as needing education so as to be reared into democratic freedom; but as an inherently critical and political multitude, acting, diversely, out of the urgency of basic needs and innate desires. According to Roy, the greatest bulwark against mob rule in India was not an enlightened leader, vanguard, or political party, but the irrepressible and irreverent life of the diverse people themselves.

After independence, in 1950s Dehradun, he established a philosophical movement known as Radical Humanism, which pursued cross-cultural insights from the writings of Anaxagoras, Pythagoras, Gautam, the Sufis, and others. Those insights set human beings within a larger cosmic balance of forces of which they might recognize themselves as planetary emanations, witnesses, and participants, rather than as archons who draw lines of domination and appropriation.

As India enters Modi’s third term, another moment of contingency arises. As in other nation-states worldwide, alternatives to a fascist future are a matter of urgent struggle. In India, these alternatives to mob democracy all point in the direction of the as-yet-unrealized promise of a people’s democracy. The coin of Roy’s critical perspectives in the 1940s and ’50s redeems its value today as we watch what transpires next, where colonialist and fascist lines confront what Roy invoked as “the human urge to revolt against the intolerable conditions of life.”