‘Spies, Lies and Allies’ by Kavitha Rao: Chatto & Roy’s grand ambitions, and failure

There is always a cynic in a Bengali adda who will lament that though his people have spawned thousands of revolutionaries, none could aim accurately, shoot straight or light a prairie fire. The cynic will then hurl his emptied earthen clay cup of tea — an act called peekay phut — for the minor explosion it makes and startle the dog peeing at the streetside lamppost. That is how little frustrations are exorcised.

Virendranath Chattopadhyay and MN Roy — Chatto and Roy in Kavitha Rao’s ‘Spies, Lies and Allies: The Extraordinary Lives of Chatto and Roy’ — would rank high in that legion of ‘magnificent failures’ in the land that launched a thousand aborted revolutions.

But that is precisely why their romanticism endures. Their insurrections may have failed but the scale of their imagination, their globalism or internationalism, their travels around the world, their trained or self-taught education, their meetings with world leaders from China and Japan through Russia, Germany, Sweden to Mexico, their multiple affairs of the heart and the loins is the stuff that ignites possibilities across households in stories passed down from grandparent to grandchild.

Virendranath Chattopadhyay (1880-1937) was a brother of Sarojini Naidu, who once disowned his anarchism. Born and educated in an illustrious family in Nizam’s Hyderabad, he was sent to London to prepare for the Indian Civil Service, then at being a bar-at-law. He failed and became a revolutionary. But his failure in the examinations was not the reason he turned to militant nationalism. He was killed in Stalin’s purge in a gulag in Soviet Russia in 1937, but his death was not known till 1991 when the KGB’s archives were opened.

The tall, dark and handsome MN (Manabendranath) Roy was born Narendra Nath Bhattacharya (1887-1954) in a humble family in a village north of Calcutta where his father was a Brahmin priest. He traversed the gamut of ideologies, helped establish the communist parties in Mexico and India, met Lenin and Sun Yat-sen, drove the global communist project Comintern, the Communist International, flirted with Gandhi and the Congress, which he found too soft because they were at one time agreeing to Dominion Status, short of full Independence, founded a new ideology called Radical Humanism, and died a recluse in Dehradun. He is survived by a nightclub after his name in Mexico City.

Their lives ran in parallel, though it is not known if they met and coordinated. They had mutual acquaintances, the girlfriend of one had a fallout with the other, and were deeply influenced by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. At the core of their ideology was the question of what kind of Independence did India seek: merely an overthrow of the British, that would replace the white rulers with the brown businessmen and zamindars as the ruling class, or a genuine socialist revolution that would make Independence more substantive for the emaciated Indian peasant?

In her research, carried out mainly at the British Library, Rao found material that gives evidence of Hindutva founder Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s influence over, and interaction with, Chatto in London. This was the Savarkar before being sentenced to the Andamans’ kalapani, from where he wrote repeated mercy petitions to the British. (Not one of the hundreds of Bengali revolutionaries, who were also sentenced to the Cellular Jail in Port Blair, wrote mercy petitions, preferring isolated death by torture instead).

There are two things that stand out in the profiles of the two main characters — and hundreds of others — in Kavitha Rao’s exploration of their lives. First, their dares. They were constantly hounded by the British police and were moving from place to place, were caught, had narrow escapes but returned to their efforts to garner international support for Indian Independence. This also sheds light on one of the many aspects of the Indian Independence struggle — violent revolution was an option that was not always anathema even if it has been obscured by flat histories dominated by Gandhi-Nehru and the Congress.

Second, the fallibilities of the men in their personal lives. Chattopadhyay and Roy consorted with American and European women. The story that stands out is of Agnes Smedley, a journalist-activist who lived with Chatto; they fell out and she later went to China to report on Mao Tse Tung’s Long March and the Communist Revolution. Both men expected the women in their lives to feed and support them. Rao says somewhat charmingly that “they were revolutionaries on the streets and reactionaries between the sheets”.

The story that Kavitha Rao has woven is not really an easy one for the modern Indian, shaped as the mindset is with textbook histories that tamp down on imagining internationalist projects in the first half of the 20th century. And that is why it is an important read. The monopoly of the narratives of modern Indian history does not lie with any single ideology. We contain multitudes.

— The reviewer is a senior journalist

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