The Indian Marxist who debated Lenin on colonial revolution
"You are so young! I expected a grey-bearded wise man from the East." — Lenin's first words to the 27-year-old Indian revolutionary upon meeting him at the Kremlin, 1920.
Bengali Marxist. He debated Lenin on the colonial question at the 1920 Comintern Congress and founded the Mexican Communist Party (the first outside Russia) as well as the CPI. Expelled from the Comintern, he served six years in British prisons before turning to Radical Humanism.
Career Timeline
- 1917Co-founded the Socialist Party of Mexico, soon transformed into the Mexican Communist Party
- 1919Founded the Mexican Communist Party, the first communist party outside Russia
- 1920Presented supplementary theses on the colonial question at the 2nd Comintern Congress, debated Lenin
- 1920Founded the Communist Party of India (Tashkent group) in exile
- 1922–1929Member of the Comintern Executive Committee and Presidium; secretary of the Chinese Commission
- 1929Expelled from the Comintern for siding with Bukharin's Right Opposition
- 1931–1936Arrested by British colonial authorities, imprisoned for 6 years on conspiracy charges
- 1940–1948Founded the Radical Democratic Party; supported the anti-fascist war effort
- 1947Published the New Humanism manifesto, articulating his Radical Humanist philosophy
The 1927 China Mission and the Stalin Telegram
In early 1927, the Comintern dispatched Roy to China to stabilize the First United Front between the left-wing Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party. After Chiang Kai-shek's April Shanghai massacre, only Wang Jingwei's left-KMT government in Wuhan remained. Roy argued for immediate agrarian revolution; Borodin, the veteran Comintern agent, prioritized preserving the Wuhan alliance. On 1 June 1927, Stalin's telegram arrived with contradictory orders: support peasant land confiscation while simultaneously backing the Wuhan KMT. Convinced he could persuade Wang Jingwei, Roy showed him the secret telegram. Wang realized Stalin had marked him as an 'unreliable general' for liquidation, promptly reconciled with Chiang Kai-shek, expelled Soviet advisers, and unleashed a purge of communists. The First United Front collapsed; an estimated 140,000 perished in the ensuing White Terror. Roy was blamed for this indiscretion, lost all standing in the Comintern, and was formally expelled in 1929.
Radical Humanism: Beyond Marxism
Roy's five years in British colonial jails (1931–1936) became a period of philosophical transformation. Supplied with books by his future wife Ellen Gottschalk from Germany, he produced roughly 3,000 pages of 'Prison Manuscripts': nine volumes re-examining Marxism from first principles. Roy rejected economic determinism, reformulated materialism in light of modern physics and biology, and argued that ideas and culture play an autonomous role in history. A philosophical revolution, he concluded, must precede social revolution.
After his release Roy rejoined the anti-colonial movement, but broke with Congress in 1940 to found the Radical Democratic Party. During World War II he broke with Gandhi by supporting the Allies against fascism, arguing that Indian independence could only be won in a free world. In rapid succession he published Beyond Communism (1947) and the New Humanism manifesto (1947), articulating his mature philosophy. The manifesto's '22 Theses on Radical Democracy' established individual freedom and reason as the foundations of social order, charting a 'third way' rejecting both bourgeois parliamentary democracy and Soviet communism.
Roy's humanism conceived the human being as a free, rational, and ethical agent, and defined genuine democracy not as periodic voting but as a social order in which ordinary people control the conditions of their own lives. In 1949 he renamed his journal The Radical Humanist and led the Indian Radical Humanist movement. Elected a vice-president of the International Humanist and Ethical Union in absentia in 1952, Roy died of a heart attack in 1954. His thought left a lasting mark on India's rationalist and secular intellectual tradition.