Alliances from Above and Below

Abstract

This chapter concerns the campaigning of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and its attempt to recruit British workers in solidarity with the Indian anti-imperialist struggle in the 1920s and 1930s. It begins by distinguishing three possible obstacles to a mass anti-imperialism in Britain: compromising interests, low salience, and poor political articulation. It argues that the first two were largely indeterminate – they had no single, directional implication for anti-imperialism – and that the weight of explanation must fall on the third, which was more determinate. It then examines the inter-relationships between four groups of political actors: the Communist International, the Indian émigré revolutionary groups directed – or in rivalry with – the Bengali revolutionary M.N. Roy to whom Comintern initially assigned its Indian work; the Communist Party of India (CPI) founded by Roy in October 1920, and the CPGB itself which was given first informal and from 1925 to 1934 formal responsibility for communist work in India. In each case it explores the strengths and weaknesses of their political work. It identifies the relationships between Indian and non-Indian actors as the key explanation, and the main difficulty in these relationships as the tension between communist internationalism and Indian nationalism’s commitment to self-directed and self-reliant national struggle. Terms such as sympathy, help and solidarity, the chapter argues, are not neutral: they define distinct, uneven relationships between those who act and those who benefit which are sometimes (not always) problematic.