However, Roy’s mistakes cannot be attributed entirely to his doctrinaire Marxism. Rather, his Marxism may be explained as part of a desperate search for an ideology, which was in turn prompted by a quest for a new identity. The identity that Roy sought in the critical period of his youth, was that of an urbane, cosmopolitan type, entirely at home with western civilization, fully equipped to appreciate and assist in its historical forward movement. Yet, he required as well an ideology that would allow him to criticize those aspects of western civilization which were responsible for the subjugation of his own people. The ideology must serve to liberate him from the sense of inferiority instilled by imperialism and at the same time arm him in his struggle for the liberation of India. Marxism suited this purpose exactly. His total affirmation of Marxism, therefore, followed immediately after his total rejection of nationalism, and from this there emerged his total denial of Gandhi as a lasting political force in India. In this sense, India in Transition offers a clear example of an intellectual determined to reject his tradition. Not only Gandhi, but also extremist leaders like Tilak and Aurobindo, who only five years earlier had commanded Roy’s allegiance, are now dismissed with contempt as examples of “petty-bourgeois humanitarianism.”74 For the next ten years, until his imprisonment in 1931, Roy struggled to affirm himself in his new identity as an international Marxist revolutionary.
Throughout the twenties, as Roy rose to the peak of his authority in the Comintern, he refined and elaborated the view of Gandhi he had set forth in 1921. A series of excellent articles and pamphlets by Roy and his first wife Evelyn were devoted to Gandhism. In One Year of Non-Cooperation, for example, the Roys distinguish five “grave errors” or “great defects” of Gandhism. The “most glaring defect” is the absence of an intelligent program of economic reform. Next, there is Gandhi’s “obstinate and futile” emphasis on social harmony instead of a frank recognition of the real necessity of class conflict. Then, they find a senseless “intrusion of metaphysics into the realm of politics.” The revolt against the British Raj, they emphasize, “is a question of economics, not metaphysics.” Further, they deplore Gandhi’s reactionary view of history, his desire “to run from the Machine-age back to the Stone Age.” Finally, they criticize the total lack of any revolutionary quality in Gandhi’s approach to social change; they see only a “weak and watery reformism, which shrinks at every turn from the realities of the struggle for freedom.”75 The entire critique is made with exceptional clarity and forcefulness, and it, together with other writings by the Roys on Gandhi, represents the most incisive communist criticism of him during this period.
For a variety of reasons Roy fell out of favor with Moscow, and in December 1929 he was officially expelled from the Communist International. He reacted by persuading himself that he could seize control of the revolutionary movement in India and a year later he returned home. He was soon arrested and he remained a political prisoner of the Raj until November 1936. These five hard years in jail witnessed a substantial change in Roy’s ideology and this eventually had its effect upon his view of Gandhi.
While in prison, Roy, like Gandhi and Nehru, read and wrote voluminously. His three volumes of “prison diaries” refer often to Gandhi. Indeed, it might be argued that there is no better index to the extent to which Gandhi’s presence dominated the Indian scene than the jail reflections of his harshest critic.76 Roy had apparently inherited from his early nationalist experience and brahmanical background a moralist’s predilection for seeing the world in categorical terms of right and wrong. Gandhi shared with Roy a strong taste for moralizing expressed in a dominant concern for the moral values of society. Eventually, in his Radical Humanist phase, the moralist in Roy prevails, just as it always had prevailed in Gandhi, and Roy abandons Marxism because he finds it devoid of ethics. However, even as early as the thirties, a first glimpse of the way in which Roy’s moral outlook erodes his Marxism can be seen in his prison diaries. This appears in his reflections on the two concepts of freedom and revolution. Both of these ideas were to become key themes of Radical Humanism, and the basis of their later development is found here, in the diaries.
When Roy wrote about freedom and revolution as an orthodox Marxist in the twenties, he conceived them as economic categories. Freedom would come with the necessary changes in the economic mode of production, and revolution would be achieved through a violent seizure of power by the Party and the masses. Swaraj meant no more than independence from British rule. Now, in the thirties, Roy begins to perceive other dimensions in these two ideas. In regard to freedom, he says that his aim is to “indicate the way to real spiritual freedom offered by the materialist philosophy.”77 For the first time in Roy’s writings, the supreme goal of “spiritual freedom” is distinguished from the lesser aims of “political freedom, economic prosperity and social happiness.”78 It is significant that Roy, a Marxist, by using the term “spiritual freedom” departs from Marxist language. Yet, he does not adopt either Gandhi’s or Tagore’s use and meaning of swaraj. This is presumably because he considers himself not only a critic of Gandhi but also outside the Hindu tradition that both Gandhi and Tagore personify. Moreover, a significant change in Roy’s concept of revolution is evident in his increasing preference for the term “Indian Renaissance,” which means for him a “philosophical” and “spiritual” as well as economic revolution. His concluding essay, “Preconditions of Indian Renaissance,”79 in the second volume of the jail diaries emphasizes the need for a new philosophical and moral outlook in India.
The above analysis of Roy’s prison diaries is not meant to suggest that a reader of these volumes in the thirties, with no possible knowledge of the way Roy’s thought would develop, could have perceived the affinities between Gandhi and Roy that eventually appeared. However, since these ideas can be found in the diaries in embryonic form, it is apparent that Roy’s movement toward a Gandhian way of thinking did not occur overnight. What did occur was a long and painful intellectual journey in which Roy gradually yielded, point by point, to the force of an ideological tradition until substantial similarities with Gandhi and with earlier Bengali nationalists were established. Moreover, if it were not for Roy’s untimely death, the journey toward reconciliation with Gandhi might well have continued further.
If there was a long-term movement in Roy’s thinking about freedom and change that drew him closer to Gandhi, there were also sharp contrasts between these two men during the 1930s and 1940s. The ruthlessness of Roy’s attack on Gandhi in the diaries reaches a climax in an essay entitled “India’s Message.” The critique begins with a contemptuous dismissal of Gandhism as a political philosophy. Far from positing a philosophical system, Roy finds in Gandhism only “a mass of platitudes and hopeless self-contradictions” emerging from “a conception of morality based upon dogmatic faith.” As such, it is religion not philosophy; and a religion that has become politicized and thus serves as “the ideological reflex” of India’s “cultural backwardness” and “superstition.”80
Roy’s attack on Gandhi in 1922 was largely content to write Gandhism off as a medieval ideology at the mercy of inexorable economic forces. Now, a decade later, Roy concentrates on the moral virtues that Gandhi idealized and refutes them at length. Roy argues that “admirable virtues” like “love, goodness, sacrifice, simplicity, and absolute nonviolence” when preached to the masses by Gandhi only serve to emasculate them. Overthrow of the ruling classes becomes impossible, and the result can only be “voluntary submission of the masses to the established system of oppression and exploitation.”
The worst of Gandhi’s tenets is his “cult of nonviolence,” the “central pivot” of his thought, “holding its quaint dogmas and naive doctrines together into a comprehensive system of highly reactionary thought.” Far from serving any noble purpose, ahimsa in politics only tends to support the forces of violence and exploitation. “Therefore, those who preach nonviolence [to and for]… the exploited and oppressed masses, are defenders of violence
in practice.” If Gandhi’s nonviolence were practiced, capitalism would remain entrenched and “the Juggernaut of vulgar materialism” would emerge triumphant. “Love, the sentimental counterpart of the cult of nonviolence, thus is exposed as mere cant.” Finally, Roy asserts that Gandhi’s values are based on “blind faith” and offer only “the message of medievalism” that idealizes “the savage living on the tree.” In this way Gandhi inhibits real progress, which Roy sees in terms of the “dynamic process” of “modern civilization” that “must go forward.” For Roy, then, the light is in the West: in the forces of rationalism, technology, modern science, and “an economy of abundance.”81 Roy maintained this latter position until the end, and it will always distinguish him sharply from Gandhi.
Soon after his discharge from prison, Roy decided that the sole route to political success in India lay in cooperation with the Congress. This meant a much more conciliatory attitude toward Gandhi. Subhas Bose had opposed Gandhi in the Congress with some initial success, but Roy, unlike Bose, had neither mass appeal nor a strong regional base of power in Bengal. Therefore, Roy made a brief but futile attempt to rise in the Congress through cooperation with the Gandhians. His article of this period entitled “Gandhiji, A Critical Appreciation” reflects this spirit of conciliation. He begins with the claim that “I appreciate Gandhiji’s greatness better than any of his ardent admirers.” Gandhi, he says, is a great “political awakener” of the masses and the highest tribute that one can pay him “would be to regard and respect Gandhiji as the embodiment of the primitive, blind, spontaneous spirit of revolt of the Indian masses.” While Roy does mention, incidentally, that Gandhism may in the future come to stifle the revolution rather than promote it, he concludes that at present “let us admire, respect, and properly appreciate him for the great services that he has rendered to the struggle for freedom.”82 This article does not present a sincere statement of Roy’s view of Gandhi at this time. As his personal correspondence shows,83 Roy regarded Gandhi in this period as his arch-enemy, who should be destroyed as quickly as possible. The significance of this “critical appreciation” by Roy lies in its indication of the extent to which Roy, in his effort to influence the Congress, was prepared to compromise his real view of Gandhi as a hopeless medieval reactionary. In the months ahead, Roy made a desperate attempt to gain power, but he failed miserably. No single factor was more responsible for this than his utter inability to come to grips, not merely with Gandhi, but with the nationalist culture that Gandhi represented and to which Roy remained so much an outsider.
In 1946, Philip Spratt, a close associate and strong admirer of Roy wrote an appreciative foreword for Roy’s latest series of speeches, which were published under the significant title of New Orientation. Spratt reviewed Roy’s position on Gandhi and then concluded: “Roy was highly critical of Gandhism from the very start, in 1920, and has never altered his opinion…. Yet it is true, I think, that he has failed to make his criticisms intelligible to the Indian reader. His approach to Gandhism seems that of an outsider, an unsympathetic foreigner. He has never tried to get under the skin of the Mahatma or his admirers and see where that extraordinary power comes from.”84
This remark constitutes a good indication of the nature of Roy’s difficulties with Gandhi during a generation of observation and criticism. Yet, at the moment of Spratt’s writing, significant changes were occurring in Roy’s thinking about the nature of power and freedom, revolution and history, politics and leadership. And with this fundamental reassessment of basic issues, which Roy called his “New Orientation,” there followed a change of view of Gandhi.
Several factors influenced Roy’s sweeping intellectual reappraisal in 1946. First, Roy’s Radical Democratic Party, established in opposition to the Congress, was resoundingly defeated in the Indian general elections held throughout the country in the spring of 1946. If the historical importance for India of these general elections was to demonstrate that the Muslim League represented the Muslims and the Congress the Hindus, then their importance for Roy was to show that his party, given the nation’s polarization, represented no one. It meant the end of his political career. A second factor that affected his thinking concerned the direction and behavior of the world communist movement under Stalin. The brutal aspects of Stalinist leadership were becoming clear; Roy had long been under attack from the Communist Party of India and neither practical nor theoretical reconciliation with Communism was possible. Roy expressed the nature of his dilemma in stark terms when he told his followers that they must beware of “two psychoses” prevalent in India, those of Communism and nationalism. “Radicalism,” he declared, “is not camouflaged Communism. We shall have to get over the major nationalist psychosis as well as the minor Communist psychosis, if we believe that we have something new to contribute to the political thought and practice, not only for our country, but of the world as a whole.”85
An ideologist abhors nothing more than a moral vacuum, or what Roy liked to deplore as the “moral cultural crisis”86 of his time. For this suggests basic uncertainty over the Tightness and wrongness of fundamental moral values, and it is the element of moral certainty that the ideologist seeks above all else. In this respect, Gandhi was no less an ideologist than Roy; but whereas Gandhi had achieved certainty on such matters during his experience in South Africa, Roy underwent a series of such crises, the last and most serious in 1945–46. The final phase of his life, from 1946–53, represents a period of gradual resolution in which Roy delved deeply into his personal resources, trying to form a coherent pattern of thought to meet the demands before him. Roy, while trying to purge himself of the “nationalist psychosis,” nevertheless moved far away from Marxism into a way of thinking significantly akin to Gandhi.
On August 16, 1946, while Roy, residing in Dehra Dun, was appraising and reappraising his New Orientation, and Gandhi was busily commenting on Nature Cure from Sevagram, there occurred in Calcutta unprecedented communal riots (to be discussed in chapter 5). These events had a profound effect upon Roy’s view of Gandhi.
Gandhi’s reaction to the Calcutta killings, unlike that of Nehru or Jinnah, was to perceive immediately the disastrous social implications and then to act courageously, in an attempt to quell the violence. Just as the Amritsar massacre twenty-seven years earlier had shocked Gandhi into realizing the injustice of the Raj, so the Calcutta killing forced him to see the abyss of violence within his own society. The ensuing fifteen months, culminating in his assassination, contain some of the finest hours of his entire career. During this period, he scored two brilliant triumphs for his method of satyagraha in his Calcutta and Delhi fasts against communal violence. Less dramatic than these, but equally impressive, were his “walking tours” in Noakhali and his ingenious use of the prayer meeting to restore trust in a series of strife-torn villages. These final acts moved nearly everyone in India to a higher appreciation of Gandhi’s greatness. Roy in this case was no exception.
“What changed Roy’s attitude [toward Gandhi],” writes Philip Spratt, “was Gandhi’s campaign against the communal massacres, which came at the time of his own final disillusionment with Communist political methods.” Spratt observes the similarity in Roy’s and Gandhi’s mutual opposition to partition, and the common spirit of their response to the communal riots. He remarks that on hearing the news of Gandhi’s assassination, “Roy was deeply moved…henceforth a new respect for Gandhi showed in his writing.”87 There was indeed a striking change in Roy’s attitude toward Gandhi following the assassination. In two articles of February and April, 1948, entitled “The Message of the Martyr” and “Homage to the Martyr,” Roy sets forth for the first time the extent of his ideological agreement with Gandhi. He now discovers that Gandhi’s revivalist nationalism was neither the essential nor the greatest element in Gandhi’s teaching. “Essentially, [Gandhi’s message] is a moral, humanist, cosmopolitan appeal…. The lesson of the martyrdom of the Mahatma is that the nobler core of his message could not be reconciled with
the intolerant cult of nationalism, which he also preached. Unfortunately, this contradiction in his ideas and ideals was not realized by the Mahatma until the last days of his life.” In Gandhi’s final phase, what Roy repeatedly calls the “moral and humanist essence of his message” appeared, and it is precisely this which is “needed by India never so very urgently as today.” Thus, Indians can do justice to their Mahatma when they learn “to place the moral and humanist core of his teachings above the carnal cult of nationalism and power-politics.”88
There are those who argue that Roy’s tributes to Gandhi after the assassination were merely sentimental outbursts, entirely inconsistent with the main line of his thought. This argument is mistaken for several reasons. First, when Roy was attacked by some of his readers for calling Gandhi a humanist and cosmopolitan, he admitted that he had written the article while “deeply moved” by the crime, “in an emotional state.” But then he went on vehemently to defend his position, deploring the “insensitivity of the logical purists” who attacked him, and refusing categorically to retract a word that he had written. Gandhi, he insisted in this later article, “sincerely wanted politics to be guided by moral considerations,” and his “endeavour to introduce morality into political practice was the positive core of Gandhism.”89 This made Gandhi, like Roy, a humanist. A second reason why this argument is mistaken has already been seen: glimpses of Roy’s movement away from Marx and toward Gandhi can be found as early as in the prison diaries, and are clearly manifest two years before the assassination in the ideological changes of his “new orientation.”
Finally, far from Roy’s tribute to Gandhi being a sporadic outburst, his changed attitude takes a permanent form in his later writings: a “new respect” for Gandhi now infuses his thoughts.90 This can be seen clearly in an article Roy wrote on Gandhi a full year after the assassination. In this piece, Roy pays respect to “the immortality of his [Gandhi’s] message” and then sums up the significance of Gandhi’s thought in these remarkable words: “Practice of the precept of purifying politics with truth and nonviolence alone will immortalize the memory of the Mahatma. Monuments of mortar and marble will perish, but the light of the sublime message of truth and nonviolence will shine forever.”91 The passage signifies a radical departure from Roy’s earlier denunciation of Gandhi. Equally important, though, is the relationship Roy suggests here between the values of truth and nonviolence on the one hand, and the goal of purifying politics on the other. For the formation of this conceptual relationship indicates a nexus of ideas in Roy’s mind familiar to Gandhi’s way of thinking, especially on the themes of politics and power, and the relation of the means to the ends of action.
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