Seguimiento del proceso de digestión

Reflecting the eastward shift of Soviet attention, the KUTV (Communist University of the Toilers of the East) had been established in 1921. Its curriculum was tailored to Bolshevik notions of revolution “adapted to Eastern conditions.” Students hailed from all parts of Asia and the traditional dresses they wore made for a colorful mixture. A year after its inauguration, the university had over 700 students from 57 nationalities, who had come to learn the “rudiments of communism.”221

The institution’s main goal was to “train the future […] leaders of the more primitive sections of the [Soviet] Republic.” Ongoing Basmachi resistance in Central Asia had awoken the Bolsheviks to the adverse effects of excessive religious encouragement outside of Soviet tutelage, and hence pan-Islamism was not endorsed. A leading official stated that the “fight [against imperialism] must be carried on in the name of international communism and the right of every people to self-determination, not through appeals to racial and religious prejudice and fanaticism.” Professedly unaware of the close conceptual proximity of the two, the university aimed at endowing its students with the necessary skills to become “leaders in their communities.”222

However, this did not mean that metaphysics were categorically rejected within the KUTV’s framework. Ernestine Evans, a journalist who wrote down her experiences in the young Soviet state in the travelogue Looking East from Moscow, described the KUTV as an undertaking to reconcile the nationalism of the (former) colonies with the internationalist outlook of the ‘Workers’ Country.’223 _{In Soviet practice, this entailed bestowing the}

blessing of revolutionary universalism upon national and cultural particularisms. For example, Zinoviev castigated the double oppression national communities had suffered at the hands of the nobility and the bourgeoisie in Czarist Russia. Yet there was hope, as he claimed that the victorious Bolsheviks had in a couple of months restored what both groups had been destroying for centuries.224

221 _{Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1:269; Persits, Revolutionaries of India, 37. The institution’s full name was}

“Kommunistitscheskii Universitet Trudiaschchikhsia Vostoka”; it is also known as Stalin university: Kaye,

Communism in India, 5.

222 _{All quotes in A. C. Freeman, “Russia’s University of Oriental Communism,” Soviet Russia Pictorial, April}

1923, 74–5.

223 _{P. C. Joshi’s excerpts from the book are with the P. C. Joshi Archive of Contemporary History, Delhi: PCJ}

1920/9, 2. See also Bennigsen and Wimbusch, Muslim National Communism, 110.

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The long-term merits of this avowal may be doubted, especially in view of later, more gruffly nationalist policies. However, Zinoviev’s revivalist thrust also has a claim to communist legitimacy, and informed the three basic principles guiding university life: because of the collective-cultural notions connected to the first two—equality and companionship—they were necessarily complemented by the third: religious tolerance.225 In this light, Kaye’s supposition that most muhajirin “seem to have accepted Roy’s proposals [to join courses at the KUTV] as the only means” to obtain food rations seems misplaced.226 _{Similarly, Ansari’s claim that the “experiments” with the muhajirin had ended}

in failure may be doubted. Even allowing for the fact that many among them “clung to Islam and stubbornly resisted socialist ideas,” his finding assumes a fundamental irreconcilability of the two.227 _{However, their juxtaposition finds little substance in the contemporary}

circumstances. Soviet self-determination, that is, emancipation of collectives and their cultures from the foreign-dominated past and present had superseded the emancipation of classes and individuals from these very collectives and cultures.

Therefore, Ansari’s verdict misses the contemporary horizons of revolution. If anything, the remarkable fact is not that one portion of the muhajirin refused to be drawn into the socialist orbit, but that another did not. Given the émigrés’ background, it is indeed highly probable that not all of them were intrigued by socialist tenets and Soviet advances. However, this is at least as likely to have been a question of class (most were from the middle class) as of religion: As long as it was part of a diffuse conglomerate of national and cultural sentiments of the ‘masses,’ religion tended to be accommodated by the Bolsheviks—in contrast to explicit bourgeois-ness, which entailed social aloofness. It was perfectly feasible for the muhajirin to cling to the Islam of the ‘masses’ and embrace the brand of anti-imperialist revolution the Bolsheviks had designed for the East.

This is also the best approximation to an answer to the question of the kind of ‘communism’ that had led the khilafat radicals to transfer “their fanatical allegiance from Islam to Communism,” as Roy had observed. As he was involved in the running of the KUTV and held classes, he took an active part in the transition process. It was further aided and influenced by a prominent faction among the institution’s staff: Sultangaliev’s Muslim national communists. They left their imprint on the South Asian students, not least among

225 _{Ansari, Pan-Islam and the Making, 535.} 226 _{Kaye, Communism in India, 8.}

227 _{Ansari, Pan-Islam and the Making, 536. M. Naeem Qureshi concurs that most emigrants had found}

Bolshevism “unpalatable”: Pan-Islam in British Indian politics: A Study of the Khilafat Movement, 1918–24 (Leiden: Brill 1999), 226.

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them Roy who, by virtue of his connections to South and East Asia, became the “main channel through which Soviet Muslim national communist ideas were spread to the Third World.”228

A number of the muhajirin joined the CPI after having received instruction at the KUTV. Shaukat Usmani would become a key figure in the first decade of South Asia’s communism. Abdul Majid, besides doing lackluster party work, was later one of the co-founders of the Naujawan Bharat Sabha (Indian Youth League), which he set up together with Bhagat Singh.229 _{Fazl Elahi Malik, aliases Krishnamurti and Qurban, worked closely with Roy and}

became an “important communist agent.”230 _{Along with Feroz al-din Mansur, another future}

member of the Naujawan Bharat Sabha, he was active in the Communist Party of Pakistan in the 1950s, even becoming its general secretary.231 _{Rahmat Ali, alias Zakaria, like Khushi}

Mohammad an erstwhile member of the Indian Provisional Government and the “army of god,” obtained a PhD from the Sorbonne with a study on the subcontinent’s ‘communal problem’ (see chapter IV.2.2). Khushi Muhammad worked as a communist organizer in Europe, became managing director of the Masses of India, the CPI’s organ in the mid- 1920s, and was convicted in the Meerut conspiracy case following his return to India. Both hailed from the “radically-inclined circles of Indo-Muslims intelligentsia” and sported a remarkable track record of Muslim extremism.232

The KUTV remained popular. A 1937 British report estimated that a total of sixty students from the subcontinent had been educated at the institution; the actual number is probably considerably higher. Disappointed radical nationalists, members of the erstwhile Indian Provisional Government, and Ghadr militants from North America enrolled at the KUTV in search of a new revolutionary path. In this manner, Santokh Singh and Ratan Singh, two Ghadrites and future originators of the Punjab communist movement, found their way from the USA to Moscow.233

228 _{Bennigsen and Wimbusch, Muslim National Communism, 111. Innaiah, Evelyn Trent, 21, 113, corroborates}

Roy’s claim to have played an important role in the institution (Memoirs, 553) as a co-founder and director.

229 _{Ansari, The Emergence of Socialist Thought, 80–2; for his further activities see Philip Spratt, Blowing up}

India: Reminiscences and Reflections of a Former Comintern Emissary (Calcutta: Prachi Prakashan 1955),

37–8.

230 _{Foreign/Poll/1927 Nr.668, quoted in Subodh Roy, ed., Communism in India: Unpublished Documents, vol.}

1, 1925–1934 (Calcutta: National Book Agency 1972), 18.

231 _{Ansari, The Emergence of Socialist Thought, 81; Spratt, Blowing up India, 34.}

232 _{Dmitriev, Indian Revolutionaries, 36 (quote); Roy, Communism in India 1:7–8; Persits, Revolutionaries of}

India, 53. Khushi Mohammad returned to Europe after the Meerut Conspiracy Case and was executed during

the great purges in the Soviet Union: Gupta, Comintern and the Destiny, 274.

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Apart from a crew to man the ranks, the Soviet episode had assisted in the establishment of a modus operandi under subcontinental conditions. Clearly committed to adapting to “conditions in the East,” the new party moved in the muddy waters of elements of communism and anti-imperialist religious ideologemes, which converged into the commitment to work for revolution on the subcontinent under anti-British, but not necessarily secular—let alone atheist—axioms.

From spring 1921, the ex-muhajirin returned to India in groups. Most were intercepted at Peshawar and jailed as Bolshevik agents, effectively preventing them from participating in the fledgling communist movement.234 _{Together with the lukewarm commitment to party}

work many exhibited afterwards, this prompted Philip Spratt, a British communist and emissary of the CPGB to the subcontinent, to comment that the muhajirin “were, altogether, a disappointment.”235 _{This does not hold on two counts. First, some of them did indeed}

become important actors in the development of South Asian communism. Second, despite the unsatisfying ratio between hopes and investments on the one hand and concrete political returns on the other, the muhajirin episode was seminal as a testing ground for the integration of radical left-wing and religious outlooks.236