Editorial Note, Jul-Aug, 2019

In the lead article of the current number of Social Scientist Suchetana Chattopadhyay provides a detailed and fascinating account of the early efforts to build a Communist Party in India, which interestingly began almost immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution. A group of pan-Islamist students opposed to British imperialism went out of Lahore in ‘British India’ to Afghanistan and beyond. The travel of these muhajirs through Central Asia, which had come under the sway of Bolshevism by then, exposed them to communist ideas. This led many of them to renounce the identitarian politics of pan-Islamism for the revolutionary politics of communism. It led to the formation of an Indian Communist Party under the leadership of M.N. Roy at Tashkent in 1920.