Book Review

Ali Raza, Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India, New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2020, 287 pages, Rs 995

Ali Raza’s book under review, Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India, is a significant contribution to the history of the communist movement from a South Asian perspective in the era of inter-war internationalism. This is an attempt to write the history of the Left from the ground up, which addresses the gaps left by official histories written by the colonial state and communist parties in our understanding of revolutionary pasts. The book enriches our understanding of the communist movement in South Asia through the lived experiences of seemingly ordinary political actors who inhabited it. By drawing upon a wide array of archival sources, biographies and memoirs of itinerant South Asians like Naina Singh Dhoot, Shaukat Usmani, ‘Dada’ Amir Haider Khan and Sohan Singh Josh, Raza illuminates the ‘intermediate histories’ or the ‘communism of everyday’ in the subcontinent.