The impossible intimacies of M N Roy

Abstract

Manabendranath Roy (1884–1954) was a Marxist philosopher, an Indian nationalist, and an anti-colonial cosmopolitan. M.N. Roy ended up imprisoned in India for six years from 1931 to 1936, in the midst of the greatest colonial counterterrorism campaign ever organized by the British Raj. Aged 36 when he entered prison in 1931, he had already engaged in anti-colonial guerilla warfare in his youth during the swadeshi insurgency, 1903–1915. In subsequent years, up to his arrest in 1931, but especially during his prison years, Roy embarked on a long-term project to rethink and revise his own understanding of revolutionary action. Roy came to see the chief exponents of revolutionary action as “deviant” Indian women whose intimate relations transgressed the bounds of the traditional Hindu family. This essay studies the radical feminist currents in M.N. Roy's prison writings, and interprets his broader revolutionary project as a pursuit of “impossible intimacies” that transgressed the cultural bounds both of empire...