In much of the thinking of the Socialist and Communist Left in the 1920s and 1930s, anticolonial liberation was connected to the development of the struggle for international Socialism. If the Russian Revolution inaugurated an international belief in the possibility of “non-Western” and underdeveloped nations to successfully conclude revolutionary processes, then anticolonial activists across the world sought to find ways of replicating this in their own countries, of engaging the fight against imperialism and strengthening the movement for Socialism at the same time. This was not only aspirational but theoretical, as the international Communist movement organized under the Comintern regularly debated whether it was possible to overthrow imperialism in the colonies without also unleashing the collective power of the proletariat and the peasantry. This became the source of inspiration for much of the radical thinking in India, in particular, where a number of Socialists and Communists attempted to understand how the processes that would liberate the nation from colonialism might also inaugurate a whole series of dynamics, resulting in a more egalitarian society. In so doing, Indian leftists were sometimes inheriting and sometimes inventing new theoretical tools in order to understand the process by which the radical reorganization of production by the direct producers might be possible. They did so under great strain - with the repressive apparatus of the British colonial government highly sensitive to any signs of Bolshevik activity - but were ultimately unable to develop the organizations or the social forces that might have led to different conclusions than the compromised solution that was the negotiated independence signed between the leaders of the Indian National Congress, the Muslim League and the British government.