A tale of two revolutionaries from Bengal

Kavitha Rao revives the forgotten legacy of two extraordinary freedom fighters in her new book 'Spies, Lies and Allies'

- Sujaan Mukherjee

The centenary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in 2020 occasioned a flurry of newspaper articles and social media posts recalling the organisation's early days. An editorial on M.N. Roy (1887-1954), published in Anandabazar Patrika, spoke about a visit to his ancestral village of Kheput in the (West) Medinipur district of West Bengal. Roy, who had founded the Communist Party of India in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, had returned to Kheput briefly in 1939 with activist and anti-colonial feminist, Evelyn Trent, his wife. The editorial lamented that although a local youth club had erected a humble monument in his memory a few years ago, its subsequent neglect accurately reflected the general indifference towards Roy's legacy.

My dip into the newspaper archive was prompted by Kavitha Rao's recent book, Spies, Lies and Allies: The Extraordinary Lives of Chatto and Roy, where she paints vivid portraits of Virendranath Chattopadhyay (1880-1937) and M.N. Roy, two extraordinary lives that ran parallel through times of hope and turbulence. I wanted to think through two premises that animate Rao's project: first, that "Chatto" and Roy were, in scholar Sudipta Kaviraj's words, "magnificent failures"; second, that they are forgotten figures.

Without lapsing into vague relativism, what could be the parameters for defining success or failure in these realms? And how do we identify the public—or indeed publics—which remembers, forgets and re-learns about such figures from history?