Towards Communism: 1917 and the Muhajirs from India Adrift in Central Asia

Before the emergence of a communist party and movement, there was the tendency. Several routes converged to constitute early communism  within India and its support abroad. They were represented by muhajirs turned communists who established an émigré party under M.N. Roy’s guidance at Tashkent in 1920; the Indian political exiles in Berlin who formed a ‘group’; the Ghadar revolutionaries who turned left while active in the regions stretching from North America to Eastern Asia to India, and intellectual-activists within India, drawn to labour strikes and anti colonial mass upsurge in the post-war years. All were initially attracted to the anti imperialist programme of the Russian Revolution. They were especially sympathetic since Britain, as the colonising power, actively intervened to sustain the Russian civil war in a climate of war-fatigue after the formal conclusion of the First World War.