India: International context that drew many members of a generation to communism | Rudrangshu Mukherjee

The Telegraph, January 19 , 2010

MINDS IN THRALL
There was an international context to Jyoti Basu’s conversion

by Rudrangshu Mukherjee

Come then, companions. This is the spring of blood,
heart’s hey-day, movement of masses, beginning of good.
— Rex Warner, “Hymn’’

Jyoti Basu was the last of a generation. He was best described — for lack of a better description — as a sahib communist. That epithet referred to those sons of affluent families, many of them Westernized, who went to Great Britain, either for higher studies or to the Inns of Court to qualify as barristers-at-law, and then converted to communism. Many of these were from Calcutta: Sushobhan Sarkar, Hiren Mukherjee, Nikhil Chakravarty, Indrajit Gupta, Bhupesh Gupta, Arun Bose, Basu, of course, and others.

Kuruvilla Zachariah, who taught history in Presidency College, once asked Sushobhan Sarkar, one of his dear students, if it was true that Hiren and Nikhil had become communists and that Sarkar too was inclined in that ideological direction. A devout Syrian Christian, Zachariah was pained and bewildered at this ideological turn in the lives of three of his favourite students. He had good reasons to feel that way since there was nothing in the family and educational background of these people to quite explain their attraction to communism and Marxism. Basu’s teacher, the legendary professor of English in Presidency College, Prafulla Chandra Ghosh, would probably have echoed his colleague Zachariah’s sentiments.

One way to clear up the bewilderment is to try and comprehend the international context that drew many members of a generation to communism. It is especially important to do so at this juncture, when the local achievements (or their absence) of Basu are under the scanner. Except for Sushobhan Sarkar, all those who have been mentioned above took to communism in England while they were students there in the late 1920s and the 1930s. The timing is significant.

The entire world, following the Great Depression of 1929, was in a severe economic crisis. To many it seemed that this signalled the end of capitalism. There were millions of people unemployed. Inflation was soaring and there was widespread social unrest. One manifestation of this unrest was the rise to power of fascist parties, first in Italy and then in Germany. In other parts of Europe, too, the spectre of fascism loomed large. In England, which is where most Bengali students went to study, there was a very strong belief among the gentry and the upper classes that Hitler should be appeased and used as a bulwark against Soviet Russia and communism. The Labour government of 1929-31 had collapsed. There were dramatic Hunger Marches against poverty and mass unemployment caused by the closing down of industrial units. Many radical students from Oxbridge participated in these marches and demonstrations. In the second half of the 1930s came the Spanish Civil War, and exceptionally bright young men from privileged backgrounds — Julian Bell, Christopher St John Sprigg and John Cornford to name a few — went out to Spain to fight and die for the cause of liberty.

Indian students from Calcutta and elsewhere in India, when they arrived in London, Oxford or Cambridge, encountered, willy-nilly, this charged atmosphere. In India, they had been exposed to the national movement and, as intelligent young men and women, had realized their own and their country’s subjugated status. In England, they imbibed the promise not only of political freedom but also perceived that there was a world beyond the independence of India.

That world was represented to the youth of the 1930s in England by the ideology of communism. With the onset of the crisis of capitalism, communism appeared to offer an alternative that promised justice and equality. Communism, as one Frenchman, Gabriel Péri, who died in the hands of the fascists, put it, seemed to represent “our singing tomorrows†. Communism in the eyes of the young idealists was synonymous with freedom. In hindsight, it might be convenient to sneer at these ideas, but at that time in the 1930s, in the given context, communism was the only ideology that consistently opposed Hitler and fascism.

Thus, men like Jyoti Basu were drawn to communism and to the Communist Party of Great Britain. The conversion was a product of the context, their own awareness of it and of the influence of certain individuals that they met. Foremost among such individuals was Rajani Palme Dutt (popularly known in communist circles in India and England as RPD), the powerful general secretary of the CPGB. Dutt had a special claim on students coming from India and moving towards communism. He hailed from the famous family of Dutts in Rambagan in north Calcutta. His grand uncle was R.C. Dutt, a member of the Indian Civil Service and author of The Economic History of India Under British Rule. RPD was a formidable intellectual with a first in Greats (as the Classics BA is known in Oxford) from Balliol College. All the young Bengalis who converted to communism in England spoke of the formative influence of RPD. The other communist leaders whose influence the Thirties’ brigade acknowledged were Ben Bradley, Harry Pollitt and James Klugman.

There was thus a combination of factors that affected Basu and his friends and produced their conversion: a particular historical conjuncture, awareness of the international situation and, finally, the influence of particular individuals. There was another factor that is hardly ever spoken about: this was guilt. Their awareness of poverty and inequality ran counter to their own privileged backgrounds. Being a communist and working for the downtrodden was a salve to their conscience.

The conversion brought with it a price tag and this was unquestioning loyalty to the cause of communism (read the Soviet Union) and blind obedience to the party line as laid down by RPD, who ran the Indian communist party sitting in London. The implication of this needs to be spelt out bluntly and without any qualifications. It meant that these men — some of the best and the brightest of their generation — surrendered their minds to the party. They allowed the party to do their thinking for them. If they had doubts they suppressed them. They refused to accept the many brutalities and horrors that communist regimes across the globe unleashed on the poor. Even in the 1930s, they refused to accept that the Moscow Trials were a sham. They embraced communism, like many others across the world, as a new and secular religion with the party as god.

The sacrifice of the self at the altar of the party was not an easy one for some of the young men. It meant that when they came back to India and joined the Communist Party of India — as indeed, Indrajit Gupta, Bhupesh Gupta, Basu and Arun Bose did — they abandoned their life of privilege. They lived among the workers or in party communes or in accommodation provided by the party. Stints in jail were not uncommon. The material suffering was all too evident. Most significantly, what none of them ever spoke about is what it meant for them mentally and psychologically to have surrendered their minds to the party and then suffer an intellectual imprisonment. Jyoti Basu suffered this imprisonment, bursting out only when his party stopped him from becoming the prime minister of India.

What is difficult to understand is not what bewildered Zachariah but why bright minds suffered for so long the illusion of their epoch. Karl Marx declared that his life’s motto had been “doubt everything†. His followers abandoned their privileges and their doubts. Those among his followers who gained access to power and position reclaimed the privileges but not their doubts.