CHNN 22, Spring 2008 - School of Social Sciences

and less optimistic about the prospects for an autonomous communist party, were squeezed out.
The second moment was after the Sixth Congress when the potentially fruitful experiment with
Workers and Peasants Parties was choked on the orders of Comintern. The third moment came
with the move away from sectarianism in 1934-35, when confusion over whether ‘class against
class’ had or had not been superseded meant that the CPI was slow to adjust to the new geometry
of the popular front and remained wracked by sectarian quarrels for too long. The fourth moment
came in 1942, when the CPI became dangerously isolated from the nationalist movement at the
very moment when the latter was preparing for its greatest push against imperialism: the Quit
India movement.
The historical account the book gives of the debates at each of these moments is detailed, nuanced
and convincing. However, the strong form of the counter-factual claim – not simply that other
things were argued for, but that they could have worked better – is not defended in detail or at
length. The alternatives are allowed to speak in their own words rather than analysed in depth, and
their feasibility therefore remains a matter for speculation. There is also, perhaps unavoidably,
some remaining mystery over exactly why each of the alternatives was dismissed. The pattern of
forces at each of the four key moments is arguably very different. It is too simple, and out of line
with the complex historical exposition offered in earlier chapters, to lay the blame entirely at one
door. The Workers and Peasants Parties, for example, were being criticised from multiple
directions before Comintern pulled the plug. True, the Comintern created confusion in refusing to
admit where ‘class against class’ had gone wrong, but the CPI had arguably become a selfsustaining
producer of sectarianism by this point. The CPGB too, which Professor Datta Gupta
suggests usually acted as the Comintern’s agent in Indian matters, invariably to poor effect,
deserves a more mixed verdict. There is plenty of evidence of its failure to make an issue of India,
even when it was handed one on a plate as it was over the Meerut prisoners. But much of that
evidence comes from the auto-critiques of the CPGB itself, and from the carping of its political
opponents. This suggests a more complicated explanation of the difficulties than simply the
Eurocentrism of the party, real though this doubtless was.
So the book does, as Professor Datta Gupta hopes, succeed in its aim ‘to make the documents
speak’. Whether the documents are sufficient to provide a ‘mirror of history’ into which Indian
communism can gaze for certainty seems more doubtful. But this is to say no more than that the
book is a provocation to think harder about the paths taken and not taken by communism in India.
Nick Owen, Department of Politics, University of Oxford
Notes
1. Sobhanlal Datta Gupta, ‘The Comintern and the Hidden History of Indian Communism’, paper delivered at The
Comintern and the Colonies: A Communist History Network seminar, Manchester, November 2002, CHNN, No 13:
http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/chnn/CHNN13HHI.html
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