The exiles of history

Somerset Maugham writes in his story, Guila Lazzari, on Chatto, "He is the most dangerous conspirator in or out of India. He's done more harm than all the rest of them put together. You know that there's a gang of these Indians in Berlin; well, he's the brains of it. If he could be got out of the way, I could afford to ignore these others."

- AMRITESH MUKHERJEE

What are the true markings of an extraordinary life? Must it reshape the world like Gandhi, endure like Curie, or provoke like Marx? Must it mirror the ideals of a nation, or is its extraordinariness defined in spite of that? History tends to reward lives that fit the stories a nation wants to tell. Kavitha Rao's Spies, Lies and Allies is less interested in celebrating greatness than in excavating complexity.

It chronicles the twin lives of Virendranath Chattopadhyaya (Chatto) and Manabendra Nath Roy—restless, ambitious, politically brilliant—who were ultimately discarded by the nation they imagined in more expansive terms than it was ready for. From Berlin salons to Soviet safe houses, from Mexico's leftist circles to Zurich's radical presses, Chatto and Roy moved with the velocity of revolution. The two men negotiated with anarchists and communists, joined international conspiracies, founded revolutionary cells, edited journals, shipped arms, debated global leaders, and birthed philosophies.

Ms Rao reconstructs two complicated lives—animated by ideas, fractured by ego, distance, and ideological drift. Far more than revolutionaries, Roy and Chatto were cosmopolitans, shaped by the intellectual currents of their time, their political thought drawing as much from European modernity and Marxist theory as it did from anti-colonial sentiment. In that sense, they belonged to the global 20th century more than to the Indian nationalist canon.

That alone might explain why they were written out of it.