The seventh chapter, ‘A Dream Deferred’, explores how the dream and utopian promise of interwar internationalism faded during the upheavals of the Second World War and a violent decolonization. The Left in India was forced to choose between internationalism and nationalism. Through the lives and politics of those involved in this fateful choice, I examine the CPI’s position with respect to the ‘People’s War’ waged by the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany and the demand for Pakistan by the All India Muslim League (AIML). As its political choices narrowed in the run-up to independence, I trace how the communists’ internationalist loyalties placed it in a mutually acrimonious relationship with the presumptive heirs of the Raj in India and Pakistan. In a far cry from its heyday in the early years of the interwar period, when there seemed little to separate internationalism and nationalism, the manifold possibilities imagined by Communist Internationalism seemed at an end in the devastation wrought by Partition.

The fifth chapter, ‘Entangled Histories’, starts from the question of erasure. I examine how the memorialization of revolutionary pasts in India and Pakistan has erased a history of entanglements between the Left and other political and intellectual strands. Specifically, I take the case of Darshan Singh Pheruman, remembered today as a martyr who gave his life for the Sikh Panth. Through his life, I examine how the Akali movement, a Sikh socio-religious political movement in the 1920s, blended in with the communist movement in the Punjab. These intersections provide a reminder of how ideas did not observe strict ideological boundaries, boundaries that only seem unbridgeable in nationalist and communitarian erasures of revolutionary pasts. This chapter offers a portrait of the relative fluidity between ‘communist’, ‘communitarian’, and ‘nationalist’ politics of the interwar era. In doing so, it sketches an era of political possibilities that later gave way to a bitterly contested and fractured landscape with hardened political and ideological boundaries.

The third chapter, ‘Break with the Old World’ uses memoirs, intelligence accounts, and hitherto unused sources from the Comintern archives, to follow the journeys of Indian revolutionaries to and through Moscow. For revolutionaries from the colonized world, Moscow offered support, sustenance, and a vision for a liberated future. It was also a site of wonder and amazement, where a new world and a new human was being inaugurated. For those who learnt their communism in the Soviet Union, Moscow was both a physical embodiment of a break with History and a vision of a utopic world within reach. Through the lifeworlds (Lebenswelt) of ‘Moscow graduates’, I trace the history of the varied and multilayered engagements between the Communist International (Comintern) and communist groups in India from the heady and millenarian days of the Leninist moment to its calamitous Stalinist successor.

The second chapter, ‘Travellers, Migrants, Rebels’, traces Indian networks that forged a radical anti-imperialist politics in the diaspora. These networks later fed into the development and evolution of the leftist movement in British India. Through the lives of key figures, I trace how networks of radicalism emerged and thrived in the global arena. Along with networks of labourers, migrants, and lascars, I focus primarily on the Ghadar and the Khilafat movements. Through these circuits and the figures involved in them, I sketch how an itinerant life provided a foray into revolutionary politics and was in turn intimately connected to a revolutionary ethic. In doing so, I also examine an oft-neglected question of how political radicalism was deeply wedded to distinct spaces and spatial imaginaries. In tracing how ideas and lived experiences – and thereby intellectual and social histories – were co-constitutive of each other, I chart the antecedents of the communist movement in British India.

The next chapter, ‘This Time Is Ours’, looks at a regional expression of leftist politics. I examine how the politics and ethics of communist internationalism acquired a distinctly regional flavour through a case study of the Kirti Kisan Party and its successors in the Punjab. Partly financed, supported, and constituted by the Ghadar Party, the Kirti Party was the most prominent communist network in British Punjab. Alongside the Communist Party of India (CPI), it was also the only communist group in India to have direct relations with the Comintern. Not only is this chapter an attempt to move beyond CPI-centred histories of the Left, it is also an examination of how intimately communism was woven in with localized idioms. At the same time, it is also a reminder of how deeply local politics was tied to global developments and the politics of Communist Internationalism. In tracing this trajectory, I explore what communism meant to those involved in it. I also explore the kinds of ethical subjects inaugurated, in person as much as in imagination, by the communist movement in India.

In the Epilogue, ‘Utopias Lost’, I provide a brief overview of what decolonization and ‘independence’ meant for a partitioned Left on both sides of the Radcliffe line. For many, not much had changed. If anything, both post-colonial states persecuted communists with an equal, if not greater, alacrity than their colonial predecessor. The freedom that had been attained was not the freedom that many had imagined and fought for. This was the starting point for communist politics in both India and Pakistan. Using the communists’ social–economic, political, and ethical conceptions of a post-imperial and post-national azadi (freedom), I ask what revolutionary pasts have to offer us in our present moment when the spectre of parochial and exclusionary nationalism seems to be on the ascendant in South Asia and beyond. At the very least, I argue, a history of the Left encourages a re-envisioning of ethical possibilities and subjectivities in modern South Asia. In doing so, the Left also provides a salutary reminder of how it was, and still is, an essential and integral part of the cultural, social, and political fabric of South Asia. As Overstreet and Windmiller argued in Communism in India, no understanding of Indian history since the First World War is possible without an examination of the communist movement and its relation to world communism and Indian nationalism.

The sixth chapter, ‘Red Scare’, examines how the British Raj dealt with the communist threat. Viewed merely as a proxy of the Soviet Union, communist movements were relentlessly persecuted by the state. In an examination of the colonial state’s evolving response to the communist movement through an analysis of ‘conspiracy cases’ and other legislative, executive, and coercive mechanisms, I trace how the colonial state was instrumental in casting ‘communism’ and leftist politics in the subcontinent as essentially alien to India. Central to this argument was the way that ‘communism’ had been imagined by the state. Viewed from its very inception as ‘unnatural’ and ‘foreign’, and frequently likened to a ‘virus’ that could spread controllably if left unchecked, the state’s approach to communism provides significant insights into not just the nature of the state but also how it viewed the Indian political sphere. More importantly, it also shows how the state’s arguments were later appropriated by the nationalist movement and other forces inimical to the Left to delegitimize the latter’s politics. I argue that it was the Colonial State that was instrumental in fracturing the Left and its alliances with the other political movements. This explained in large measure how the Left came to be excised from histories of national liberation.

The introductory chapter, ‘Revolutionary Pasts’ , begins with an overview of twentieth-century schemes aimed at remaking the world order, and specifically, the project of Communist Internationalism. I situate my work within recent scholarship on twentieth-century internationalisms and transnational approaches within South Asian historiography. In doing so, I explore the ways in which revolutionary pasts suggest new methodological and conceptual approaches in transnational history writing. The second section is a detailed meditation on the archives through which the Left speaks. At stake is a broader methodological question of how revolutionary pasts can be traced through the archival grain. These methodological questions in turn invite a reassessment of how the Left has been written about. They also suggest new approaches in excavating its intellectual, social, and political history. Lastly, I provide an overview of the following chapters and how they are threaded together through the central arguments of the book.