Due to the CPI’s initial neglect, there are few communist references to the composition, outlook, or even the role of the proletariat proper before the later 1920s. Roy had contented himself with categorically declaring that the working class that had shed all remnants of caste mentality. Although their “ignorance” prevented the workers from assuming a more prominent role in national politics, workers would soon become the one “relentless and
463 Sinha, The Left-Wing, 49. For a eulogizing biography of Baptista see K. R. Shirsat, Kaka Joseph Baptista:
Father of Home Rule Movement in India (Bombay: Popular Prakashan 1974).
464 Quoted in Kumar, Communist Movement in India, 87.
465 Sinha, “World of Workers’ Politics,” 1033. See also Lieten, Colonialism, Class and Nation, 71. 466 All quotes in Chattopadhyay, Communism and Bengal’s Freedom, 139.
467 Ibid. Just a few examples: In 1896 and 1897, there were riots among Calcutta workers around the issue of
cow-slaughter: Sarkar, Modern India, 62. On 11 and 12 April 1925, Amritsar was shaken by riots between Hindu and Muslim workers: Home/Poll/1925 Nr.125. Among the Ledo coal miners, severe communal conflicts were common in the early 1930s: Home/Poll/1931 Nr. 18/VI “Fortnightly Report,” 42. The question of the relation of vertical caste loyalties to horizontal organization in trade unions remained relevant long after the period under review; on the example of Coimbatore, see E. A. Ramaswamy, “Trade Unionism and Caste in South India,” Modern Asian Studies 10 (1976):361.
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uncompromising revolutionary force.”468 Reports from communists on the spot indicated
that there was still some way to go:
Ill-paid, ill-clad as they are they cannot but fall an easy prey to these missioneries [instigators of communal riots], who promise to adjust their economic apparatus. And quite ignorant of the historical role they have to play, they think that the key of their poverty’s solution lies within the reach of these emissaries of God.469
It is mostly retrospectives detached from events on the ground that muster more enthusiasm, “knowing the working class to be the standard-bearer of socialism” and trusting in “its capacity to play the leading role in the national revolutionary struggle.”470 Gopalan seconded that in the face of miserable conditions, the worker “resists committing suicide only because, unknown even to himself, there are germs of a revolutionary sense in him.”471
Dogmatic ontology superseded empirical experience in ‘mature’ Marxist analysis.
Properly grooming these germs in a “revolutionary sense,” however, was problematic with regard to the communist vanguard no less than the workers themselves. While not entirely implausible, Chandavarkar’s assessment that the communists “satisfied themselves that caste and religious identities were simply manifestations of false consciousness shortly to be subsumed by the emergence of the real thing” oversimplified matters.472 It
presupposed a binary distinction between a unitarily areligious communist avant-garde and a “backward” working class, which does not hold in the face of both inclusive communist practice and the individual activists’ own situatedness. For example, in a 1929 speech A. A. Alwe, President of the Bombay-based communist Girni Kamgar Union (“Red Flag,” GKU), attributed his success in laborious grass-roots mobilization efforts to god’s help, “for which I am thankful.”473
Moreover, communists were involved in conducting trade union business along communal lines. If the January 1929 demand of the Transport Workers’ Union of Bengal, a WPP-affiliated radical union, for granting leave on “official religious holidays” seems innocuous, British reports record the case of the Kirti Dal, a Sikh-only trade union from Calcutta. It closely cooperated with the WPP in Bengal and counted Abdul Halim, a core
468 Roy, India in Transition, 115. See also “Constructive Programme,” Vanguard, 15 May 1922; “Answer to
Our Critics,” Vanguard, 1 September 1922; “India and the World,” Vanguard, 1 October 1922; and “Prepare for the Fight,” Vanguard, 1 November 1922 (quote).
469 Letter from Usmani to Roy, 22 April 1923, NAI-KCC File IV, 60.
470 Bhalchandra Trimbak Ranadive, “The Role Played by Communists in the Freedom Struggle of India,”
Social Scientist 9 (1984): 13.
471 Gopalan, In the Cause, 54.
472 Chandavarkar, “From Communism to ‘Social Democracy’,” 102.
473 “Mr. Alwe’s Reply to Jhabwala,,” Kranti, 20 January 1929, in Meerut Conspiracy Case—Defence Exhibits
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member of the Calcutta CPI unit, among its leaders.474 In other instances, communists were
not so much agents as reproducers of communal separation. Founded in 1932 in Ahmedabad, where the Gandhian Ahmedabad Labor Union (ALU) dominated the labor scene, the CPI-supported Mill Mazdoor Union consisted almost exclusively of Muslims who had not been absorbed into the largely caste-Hindu ALU.475 The congruity of communist peasant and worker unions in South India with caste and religious groups has been diligently researched.476
These practices derived equally from biographical preformation and conscious tactical ‘deviations,’ both nourished by the quiet conviction of doing the right thing as expressed by Rajani Palme Dutt’s apodictic statement that trade unions contained the seed of communism. It is possibly for this reason that nuisances such as religion or caste were virtually absent from statements of communist labor unions of the time, including the WPPs. An example among many, the Red International of Labor Unions’s (RILU) Indian section’s 1927 outline of a constitution for an independent subcontinent covered labor, education, political rights, and social security, but had nothing to say on caste or community formation.477 The All-India WPP’s 1928 Manifesto reproduced Roy’s 1922 Program for the
Gaya Congress verbatim on the religious question, demanding freedom of worship and the separation of religion and state. Next to doctrinal class ontology, there are also signs of pervading insecurity and helplessness: A draft AITUC statement on the Nehru Report and its contested handling of communal representation recommended that “probably the best solution of the communal problem is to ignore it.”478 The lone contemporary communist to
explicitly demand a “guarantee of certain common rights of humanity, such as the abolition of caste […] discriminations” in his draft of an agenda for trade unions was a foreigner— Spratt.479
474 On the Transport Workers’ Union of Bengal’s letter see P 489, Meerut Conspiracy Case, 1929–32,
http://dspace.gipe.ac.in/jspui/handle/1/5994, 129. See also Sarkar, Modern India, 62.
475 Subodh, Communism in India 1:302, 393.
476 See, for example, Kappadath Kannan, Of Rural Proletarian Struggles: Mobilisation and Organisation of
Rural Workers in South-West India (Delhi: Oxford University Press 1988), 94–125; chapters 1–3 in Mammen, Communalism vs. Communism; and Robin Jeffrey, “Matriliny, Marxism and the Birth of the Communist Party
in Kerala, 1930–1940,” Journal of Asian Studies 38 (1978): 138–40.
477 Dutt, Modern India, 115–6, PCJ CPI 1926/73A; on the RILU’s program, see Sinha, The Left-Wing, 133. 478 “Draft of Statement by the Trades Union Congress on the Nehru Committee’s Report and Constitution,” in
Meerut Conspiracy Case, 1929–32, http://dspace.gipe.ac.in/jspui/handle/1/5994, 341 (quote); “Manifesto of
the Workers’ and Peasant’s Party of India ,” in Meerut Conspiracy Case, 1929–32,
http://dspace.gipe.ac.in/jspui/handle/1/5994, 23. On the Nehru Report, see Sarkar, Modern India, 261–4.
479 Philip Spratt, “Draft of Proposed Statement ‘Labour and Swaraj,’” in Meerut Conspiracy Case 1929–32
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Obviously, the proletariat’s spiritual affiliation continued to vex the communists, and challenge them to confront it, even by way of adapting their political and social vision to it.
Kranti (“Revolution”), the organ of the Bombay WPP, in July 1927 recounted a speech of
the Madras Trade Union Congress’s president, Narayan Rao Joshi. He underlined that the working class had “no religion, caste or nationality or anything.” Rather, increasing the power of worker organizations and improving economic conditions counted as the workers’ “religion.”480 In the same spirit, Narayan Malhar Joshi, leader of the AITUC’s reformist
wing, averred that the proletarian class was the workers’ caste. Yet, such categorical declarations could not do away with unwelcome identity patterns demanding to be recognized and addressed, if only to prevent the worst. On the occasion of Muharram 1927,
Kranti issued a call to the “Musalman and Hindu people” to preserve communal peace, and
emphasized that the WPP welcomed “people of all religions.”481
The WPP’s 1928 guidelines for trade union functionaries pointed to the outlook prevailing even among the ‘vanguard’ by demanding that “all leading Trade Unionists etc. must be freed from communalism [.…] In particular, all Party members must […] themselves do no religious propaganda of any kind.”482 Frontal attacks on religion and
traditional culture, on the other hand, were delicate enough to be outsourced. Addressing the WPP’s 1928 Youth Conference, Bombay WPP President D. R. Thengdi boldly urged the next generation to take up the task which he and his ilk had apparently shirked:
The youths’ movement should start a campaign, a veritable crusade against all injustices, barbarities and malpractices, such as Untouchability, Child Marriage, caste system purdah, sex inequality, prohibition of widow remarriage etc. It should challenge and attack whatever is reactionary and decadent in social conceptions and institutions [….] It should declare a war on all communal movements which split the Indian People on un-historic [!] communal lines.483
In view of this deferral of a task that was as complex as it was essential, the eventual declaration of war between Hindu and Muslim workers should not have come as a surprise.
480 “What is the Religion of the Worker?,” Kranti, 30 July 1927, in Meerut Conspiracy Case—Defence
Exhibits from Kranti, on http://dspace.gipe.ac.in/jspui/handle/1/6008, 83–4.
481 “Workers’ and Peasants’ Party. Message to the Musalman and Hindu people,” Kranti, 16 July 1927, in
Meerut Conspiracy Case—Defence Exhibits from Kranti, on http://dspace.gipe.ac.in/jspui/handle/1/6008, 68.
482 “Elementary Course,” in Meerut Conspiracy Case 1929–32 Defence Statements,
http://dspace.gipe.ac.in/jspui/handle/1/6007, 478.
483 “Manifesto of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Party to the Youth Conference,” in Meerut Conspiracy Case,
139