Where at the end of the previous
part we detailed the arrest of Tan Malaka a former teacher and founder
of Struggle Union and Murba Party colonial governments did not always
agree on who were the most dangerous persons or how far they would bend their
rule of law to assuage their allies' fears. The arrest tested this on 6 June
1931 in Hong Kong of a ‘Sung Man Cho.’ The man stayed in a small apartment on
Nathan Road in Kowloon, a popular haunt for local business travelers, leased
under the name T. V. Wong, and traveling on a Chinese republican passport. A
‘niece accompanied him,’ ‘Li Sam’, who was arrested and detained with him. The
press soon reported what the police well knew: that Sung was Nguyen Ai Quoc. An
elaborated pantomime unfolded. Under questioning, Sung denied his true identity
and claimed instead to be a Chinese businessman from Guangdong. The arresting
officers of Joseph Ducroux from Singapore, and members of the Sûreté from
Saigon, traveled to Hong Kong to hold a secret conclave. Swayed by the French
government's argument that if Quoc were at liberty, he would be a threat to all
European possessions in Asia, the colonial secretary in London agreed that he
should be deported to French Indochina. At this time, the Yen Bai Mutiny
leaders' executions and summary killings of Nghe Tinh rebels were still
underway. However, a Vietnamese comrade in Hong Kong got word to a sympathetic
English lawyer, Frank Loseby, who took on the case. The funds forwarded for the
defense by International Red Aid and the League Against Imperialism were a rare
public demonstration of the reach of the Comintern. With consummate artistry,
Quoc seized the opportunity of a banishment inquiry hearing to make the charge,
in calm and fluent English, that he had been interrogated by the French Sûreté
in a British prison. The circulation of the old surveillance photographs from
his Parisian days had alerted him to their presence in the British colony.
Loseby then made an application for a writ of habeas corpus.1
The legal position of the Hong Kong government was
weak. There were no legal grounds for Nguyen Ai Quoc’s arrest, nor his
irregular extradition for a non-extraditable offense. The Hong Kong government
would have been happy to allow the French to pick him up as he tried to leave
Hong Kong. But Quoc claimed the right of refuge as a political offender and
demanded to be deported to a place of his own choosing. During the hearing,
which began on 31 July 1931, much was made of Quoc’s arrest and interrogation
irregularity. Still, ultimately, in mid-September, the court dismissed the
application and upheld a deportation order. Loseby was granted permission to
appeal to the Privy Council in London. Throughout the case, there was a
creative ambiguity as to his identity. No one believed that ‘Sung Man Cho’ was
who he said he was. Like Tan Malaka in Manila, he deliberately provoked and
confused the court with contrary claims regarding his identity as a Chinese
businessman and as a Vietnamese patriot. In July 1932, the British government's
counsel, the socialist Stafford Cripps, advised his clients to settle the case
before it reached open court. It was, Cripps argued, better to let Sung Man
Cho, upon whom the French had no legitimate claim, go on his way than face an
incendiary case involving the prisoner of conscience Nguyen Ai Quoc. Under the
terms of the deal, Quoc was allowed to leave on his own terms. The problem
remained as to where he might go. There seemed to be nowhere that was willing
to take him, and Quoc trusted no one. He announced that he would travel to
England but only got as far as Singapore and was turned back to Hong Kong. Then
it was reported in the Daily Worker and elsewhere that Quoc had died. He had
succumbed in the British prison hospital to tuberculosis that had afflicted him
for so long. Meanwhile, a man in traditional scholar’s dress, who had been
lodging at the Chinese YMCA in Kowloon, boarded a ship for Shantou. This was
the night of 25 January 1933, lunar New Year’s Eve, a time for family and
fireworks, and no one noticed he had left, nor the connivance of British
officials in his departure.
Before his departure, Nguyen Ai Quoc spent eighteen
months in prison on Hong Kong Island and in hospital. By his own admission, he
was well treated. But, on his arrest, his lodgings and his possessions were
seized and photographed. They passed to the Sûreté, and into their extensive
archive of Quoc, itemized down to every fragment in his notebooks: jottings for
articles, coded lists of contacts, lists of names, of the sailors mostly, who
were the real connecting threads of the vast conspiracy. For all the talk of
Russian gold's profligate spending, Quoc recorded his expenses in meticulous
detail. There was evidence of intense subterranean industry; his typewriter was
photographed as found in mid-sentence of an article on ‘Indochina May First
biggest in the world.2 The exhibits were a tableau of the solitary life of the
underground. At this point, Quoc had been traveling almost constantly for
twenty-three years, and of all the ports of call on the way, he had stayed
longest in Hong Kong. He was almost entirely cut off from his home region. His
father had recently died; his brother and sister had been released from French
custody but were closely watched, and his contact with them by letter was very
sporadic. It was said that the wife he left behind in Canton came to Hong Kong
to see him. He had written to her sometime earlier, with formal affection.
Besides the ‘niece’ arrested with him, there was another female companion in
Hong Kong, Nguyen Thi Minh Khai. She played a major role in party
communications and was arrested before him and extradited to China. Of the
‘niece,’ little was said publicly at the time. She was Ly Ung Thuan, the wife
of a Vietnamese comrade, also an active member of the organization.3 She claimed Chinese nationality and was quietly
allowed to depart. Minh Khai and Ly Ung Thuan were at once further evidence of
the relative invisibility and ubiquity and tenacity of women revolutionaries in
Asia's struggle.
A few weeks after the arrests in Singapore, Shanghai,
and Hong Kong, on 21 July 1931, the police in Bombay raided a flat in Wylie
Street. It had been staked out by plain-clothes men sleeping on the street for
some time—their quarry, a ‘Dr. Mahmud had eluded them for weeks, and there had
been several failed attempts to seize him. In truth, they had been searching
for the man – whether under the names of ‘Reverend Martin,’ Mr. White or M. N.
Roy – on and off for over twenty years.
For Roy, the impotence of exile had become too much.
Upon his return to Moscow from China in 1927, he had fallen from favor.
Stalin’s displeasure was not yet fatal, but he was now in full control: Trotsky
was in exile, and Borodin was in the wilderness. In early 1928, with Louise
Geissler and Russian friends' help, Roy crossed the Soviet border, in secret,
at night. He returned to Berlin, the city where he had been happiest. ‘Had I
been in the least, even indirectly, guilty of any treacherous act,’ he wrote,
‘I would not leave Moscow with my head on my shoulders.’4 Nevertheless, he
immediately set to defending himself, principally in a book, Revolution and
Counter-Revolution in China, which ran to 689 pages when it eventually saw
publication.5 Louise Geissler faded from his life, though not from Indian
affairs: she acted as the companion for the wife of Jawaharlal Nehru, Kamala
when she sought medical treatment in Switzerland, and their daughter Indira.6
In Berlin, Roy began a relationship with Ellen
Gottschalk, the daughter of a US diplomat of German origin. She was born in
Paris in 1904, grew up mostly in Cologne, and on leaving home at a young age
became active in the communist movement, and later with the German opposition
and Roy’s circle in Berlin, where they met in 1928.7 During this period Roy’s
reputation came under constant attack. In his absence from Moscow, delegates
from India denounced him at the Sixth World Congress of the Comintern in 1929
as a person completely unknown in India’. For his advocacy for the united front,
he was declared a ‘rightist opportunist’; the following year, he was expelled
from the Comintern and denounced as a renegade.8 In Berlin, he lived with other
outcasts, including his old friend August Thalheimer. In mid-November 1930,
against the advice of all his friends and after an idyllic holiday with Ellen
in Merano, Italy, he left for India. He traveled as a Muslim, Dr. Mahmud,
through Istanbul, then Iran, arriving in Karachi on 11 December. For once, he
was about two months ahead of the police.
He returned to a charged political atmosphere. In
March 1930, Congress launched new civil disobedience; the second wave of
terrorism continued in Bengal and Punjab and reopened the question of how the
Raj should be resisted force. Gandhi’s spiritually inspired, village-based
self-sufficiency vied with a vision of an industrial future favored by
Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Chandra Bose, and the Congress socialists. Roy was
determined to shape these debates. Initially, the circles of young radicals he
met in Bombay and elsewhere did not know who he was, but the British police who
tracked him were obvious that his presence was a catalyst to a growing band of
supporters. However, a brief visit to the United Provinces brought home to Roy
the limits to what he could achieve without an organization and unable publicly
to reveal his identity. In March 1931, he met secretly with Jawaharlal Nehru
and Subhas Chandra Bose at the Congress convention in Karachi to encourage them
to draw up a minimum social and economic program. But the attacks on him in
Moscow soon followed him to India and helped speed his capture.9 The
underground was already on trial, at a fresh conspiracy case at Meerut begun in
March 1929. This was the product of months of harassment and surveillance – a
high-stakes ‘cat and mouse game’ through the streets of Calcutta and Bombay –
involving not only the Indian leadership – the recidivist S. A. Dange, Shaukat
Usmani and Muzaffar Ahmad and others – but also British activists who had
arrived to assist them in Roy’s absence.10 In a strange repertory of
oppression, the policeman who had mastered the hunt for ‘Fat Babu’ and Roy from
1912, David Petrie, again played a key role. Roy was not brought before the
court in Meerut, although he was constantly present in evidence exhibits.11 He
was thrown into the district jail in Kanpur in a resumption of the conspiracy
trial there, at which he had been listed as ‘absconded’ some seven years
earlier.
The documents captured in the June raids in Shanghai
carried within them fragmentary details of the Comintern’s fresh mission to
India, by way of China's revolutionary road to Burma that Roy, as ‘Revd
Martin’, had tried to open in 1916. This time they featured an agent codenamed
‘Thomas.’12 Tan Malaka, too, had tired of his
isolation near Xiamen and had drifted up to Shanghai. After over four years of
estrangement, as ‘Thomas,’ he was drawn back into the orbit of the Comintern,
or at least the fringes of it. His movements in this period left few traces. By
his own account, Shanghai heralded a reawakening. As was his habit, he
gravitated to the city's fringes, the settlements of the new arrivals, places
of constant transit, where he lived as a Filipino. Tan Malaka saw a city in
transition, torn apart by frequent violence, ever more defined by gangsterism,
rackets, and the international politics of exclusion. But, in the midst of the
poverty and turbulence of everyday life, he was inspired by the solidarities he
found, which reaffirmed his faith in a new Asia.13 But, when Alimin finally
caught up with him in a room in Shanghai’s Zhabei district, he found that Tan
Malaka’s health had collapsed. A substantial sum of money was made available
for his treatment. Both Alimin and the Comintern, it seems, were unaware of Tan
Malaka’s new party, PARI, and his heresy in the intervening years.14 But by
this time, Shanghai was no longer a refuge: on 28 January 1932, the city was
engulfed by war. Tan Malaka was witness to the Japanese incursion that marked a
new phase of imperial aggression, and he lost what little he owned.
On the run once again, Tan Malaka traveled to Hong
Kong. In October 1932, he was grabbed one night in the street close to his
hotel in Kowloon. The police of six nations had a claim on him. Officers
traveled from Singapore to interview him and to tell him of his close friends
they had arrested there. His case followed a similar pattern to that of Nguyen
Ai Quoc, but initially in secret. Failing to contact Quoc’s lawyer, Frank
Loseby, Tan Malaka managed to get in touch with the radical Independent Labour
Party leader, James Maxton, who on 14 March 1933, somewhat belatedly, asked in
the House of Commons about his whereabouts.15 Sympathizers in the Netherlands,
without news of their former parliamentary candidate for four years, took up a
campaign against his extradition to the Indies. But by this time, Tan Malaka
was long gone. As with Quoc, the local authorities had no grounds on which to
hold him, and in the end, they had little choice but to let him go. Both men
had argued ‘that there was no safer place for them the world over than just
where they were, in the Gaol in Hong Kong.’ Only the ‘loosely guarded’ door to
China remained open to them.16 In February 1933, Tan Malaka outlined his case
to Madame Sun Yat-sen and her China League for Civil Rights. Thrice imprisoned
by three colonial regimes, under the ‘secret agreement’ between them, he now
stood on a precipice:
It was as if I was facing a bridge of hair, over which
the Moslem has to pass in the day of judgment, to reach the end, the heaven
where the houris, the maiden[s] are dwelling with big, round eyes as of doves …
Beneath the inferno I stand in the British jail. At the end of the hair, the
bridge was Shanghai, not with the houris' big dove-like eyes, but with the
Settlement police's eagle-like eyes. The end might be worse than the British
jail. Again I must stop. The way or ways of my escape has to remain in the
open.17
The letter was addressed from South America, but it
was posted from Manila and delivered not to Madame Sun in Shanghai but straight
into the Dutch consul's hands. Tan Malaka was lying low once again, very ill,
in rural Fujian province, with a family with connections to the Philippines –
his final, fragile link to the world abroad.18 The revolution was now a waiting
game.
THE ORCHESTRA AT THE WORLD’S END
Had Tan Malaka fallen into the Dutch's hands, his
likely destination, along with 1,308 of over 4,500 people sentenced for their
part in the uprisings in the Netherlands Indies and many of their families, was
a forest clearing 280 miles upstream on the Digoel River in West Guinea. This
region was seen by some Europeans as the final frontier of empire: a new
Transvaal, a ‘New Australia-New America’ of future white settlement. But for
Asians, it marked the uttermost boundary of the Indies, the extremity of Asia,
and, for many who were sent there, the end of the world itself.19
The first internees began to arrive in early 1927.
Among them was Aliarcham, who had briefly led the PKI on its path to revolt. He
was one of the first to die there. Boven Digoel was a harsh, malarial
environment. Beyond the camp's cleared area lived forest peoples who had no, or
very little, contact with other human beings. Tales of their savagery were
embellished to keep the new arrivals confined to camp. In practice, some of the
forest peoples came to the camp to work and observe the ethnographers who
formed part of the Dutch garrison. But for most settlers, the trees held only
terror. Most were townsmen and townswomen from regions of Java where the
forests had long disappeared. Very few of those who tried to flee found their
way overland to the nearest border: the Australian-administered territories of
Papua and New Guinea. Those who did were returned promptly into Dutch custody.
Boven Digoel was not, strictly speaking, a prison. The
only fences were those built around the small garrison. The governor-general,
Jonker de Graeff, opposed capital punishment and had angered expatriate opinion
by refusing to confirm death sentences. To him, the camp was an expression of
mercy: a far outpost of ethical imperialism, with better street lighting and
medical facilities than many settlements of Java itself. The government’s
stated intention was that those sent there would be allowed to live reasonably
freely. Or, as Mas Marco Kartodikromo paraphrased it when he heard of it from
his prison cell in Java: ‘Look at this, Indonesian people! These Communists in
Boven Digoel cannot organize their own community, and their situation is one of
chaos.’20 To Mohammad Hatta, now returned
from his sojourn overseas, ‘the ethical-coax-policy of Governor-General de
Graeff is, in essence, ethical force’:
His ‘ethics’ conveys that he has purposely selected
one of the unhealthiest spots in the archipelago, where malaria and cholera are
prevalent, as a concentration camp for his political adversaries, who,
notwithstanding the Indian penal provisions that were worded as pliably as
possible, could not be prosecuted under the law.21
There was constant, one-way traffic into the camp. It
became an Indies in miniature, as the first internees from Java were joined by
Sumatrans and others, including supporters of Tan Malaka’s PARI organization,
trawled in from across Asia. Dutch officials distinguished between the
‘recalcitrant,’ the ‘half-hearted’ and the ‘well-meaning.’ But, these
categories ran into each other in practice. More significant was the separation
between the main settlement, Tanah Merah, named after its infertile ‘red
earth,’ and the Tanah Tinggi, the ‘higher land,’ which was a place of
punishment, of banishment beyond banishment. Later, non-Communists, Islamists,
and ‘intellectuals’ were sent to Boven Digoel. In 1935, Hatta himself was to be
banished there.
Boven Digoel was termed an ‘isolation colony’ to keep
the contagion of political belief at bay. But it was not entirely adrift from
the world. It was serviced by Chinese river traders, a small administration
with its co-opted officials, and many spies. When Mas Marco Kartodikromo
arrived in June 1927, he described the settlement in letters to a Javanese
newspaper in shackles. Each person was given a space of two square yards to
sleep and another to store their belongings; one small mosquito net, a small
mat, a small sheet, a blunt cleaver, an ax head, hoe and spade, all without a
handle, and a fortnightly food ration of rice, beans, dried fish, rancid meat,
salt, sugar, and tea. In official parlance, the settlers who were willing to
work’ were paid for their manual labor; others were given only a small
allowance and, it was believed, had less prospect of eventual return. Some of
the internees brought their families; children would be born in Boven Digoel. But
it was no place for family life. There were six or seven men to every married
woman, and tales of promiscuity soon circulated back into the world. The
stories were true, wrote Mas Marco, and might be true anywhere, but Boven
Digoel was ‘a pocket-sized place that does not match the number of its
inhabitants. It is also the case that a situation like that is deliberately set
up to cause harm.’22
The camp had no chroniclers: it was home to some of
the most educated and luminous Indonesians of the age. They launched publishing
and translation and set up language schools. The few visitors to Digoel were
taken aback to hear so much Dutch and English spoken. In the evenings, jazz, a
cinema show, and an orchestra, a gamelan modeled by a court musician from Solo,
Pontjopangrawit, who was among the first batch of detainees. Its bonangs, or
rows of gongs, were improvised from various tin cans and, eventually, iron food
drums. Later arrivals from Sumatra brought the instruments for an orkes Melayu
for Malay opera. Journalists reported all this from Java and the Netherlands as
further evidence of the return of normal time.23 But as conditions
deteriorated, morale dissipated, monotony and ennui took a heavy toll, and this
activity was more a way of simply keeping going. Mas Marco kept writing until
an article dated 9 December 1932. At its close, he shifted from Indonesian, the
language he had done so much to shape, to Dutch, perhaps that his voice might
reach the Netherlands too:
Reader, here I stop this history. This is just one
history, just one fairy tale, just one 'sprookje,' just one strange event where
civilization ends on society's fringes. O you, intellectuals and nationalists,
we ask that you be mild in your judgment on us exiles, the rubbish of your
society, the political exiles in Digoel. To you Indonesians, we address these
words. Contemplate for what we have struggled and suffered. Remember what we
have sacrificed for Mother Indonesia.24
He died in March 1932 from malaria. There is a
photograph of him, near the end, with his wife, emaciated, barely recognizable.
Boven Digoel marked the grotesque, bitter death of ‘ethical’ imperialism. In a
century of exile, Boven Digoel was one of its cruelest manifestations: internal
to the Indies but irretrievably distant. But in colonial Asia in the 1930s,
such places multiplied, a premonition of the new camps opening in Europe. The
British penal settlement of the Andamans was recommissioned in 1932 for political
prisoners. Poulo Condore, off the coast of Cochinchina, expanded to receive the
communists arrested in the Nghe Tinh uprisings. Some prisoners seized the
opportunity to claim an education they would or could not complete as free
subjects, or, indeed, living an underground existence. In prison, the
Vietnamese communists perfected their cell-like organization techniques,
propaganda, newspapers, and political classes. By this time, some of the
warders were themselves implicated.25 Even in China, where most of the captured
senior communist leaders were swiftly executed, those who survived, or were
arrested later, were given a measure of preferential treatment, particularly
given their high profile in the eyes of the world, and as penal reform became an
important aspect of the Kuomintang’s modernization program. Chen Duxiu wrote
and received visitors in Longhua jail in Shanghai after his arrest and his
thirteen-year sentence in 1932. But this was a rare case, and Chiang Kai-shek
intervened personally to forbid warders to pass on news of political prisoners.26
In Kanpur jail, M. N. Roy was first permitted to write
to Ellen on 11 August 1931. He was allowed one page, and, as always, replies
were infrequent and tortuously slow to arrive:27
I am lodged in a quiet country-town jail as an
‘A-class prisoner’ – a distinction that entitles one to ‘comforts’ including
about 60 pfennigs worth of food a day. You can imagine I should remember the
restaurants and cafes of Berlin for food and drink, if for nothing else … In
this letter, nothing much can be written about. We can talk about the weather.
It is already two weeks that I am in. I am arrested in connection with a case
that took place seven years ago – at the time of the fatal Fifth World Congress
[of the Communist International]. The Government does not seem to be in a hurry
about the trial. It is uncertain when it will begin, and it will surely drag on
and on when it does begin. So I must settle down with something serious to do.
First, I must prepare the defense, which I shall conduct personally. Then, I
shall utilize the time ‘to improve my mind’ if the wherewithal is available.
Good books are not easily available. Could you ask August [Thalheimer] to
suggest some suitable books? They should preferably be in English; otherwise,
there will be difficulty in getting them. They must be procured abroad and sent
straight to me in jail. At last, I have a permanent and very safe address.
Everything will reach me. Do send me from time to time some intellectual food.
It is sporadic in this country.28
The presence of the censor at his shoulder left little
place for intimacy. It was sought through discussion of books, and in Roy’s
yearning for news of the cosmopolitan life he had led for so many years: the
cool autumn in Berlin; its sociability – the ‘Café am Zoo,’ the ‘Jester’ and
the ‘Gerold am Knie’krug of Muenchener at the Wilhelmshallen’ – New Year and
champagne at Kempinski’s, Rhineland in the spring, St Moritz in high summer.29
Remembering their final holiday together, the Alps became a vision of Utopia:
‘I don’t think the new world of ours will be a large Merano,’ he told Ellen,
‘but certainly we shall see to it that it is better than this miserable one.’
He missed ‘grand music’ and was haunted by the memory of Paul Robeson’s
spirituals. He doubted he would ever see Europe again.
The first package of books arrived in mid-October
1931: a fresh copy of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Friedrich
Albert Lange on materialism, and novels, ‘to make up for my negligence of
childhood.’30 Roy was scathing, for the most part, of the literary production
of India, although he admired Sarat Chandra Chatterjee’s, Shesh Prashna (‘The
Final Question,’ 1931). He enjoyed most the detective novels of S. S. Van Dine,
featuring the dilettantish, polymath detective Philo Vance: ‘I might have been
someone like him if I were an idly rich, and escaped being someone else.’31 He
filled his letters with long reading lists, confident that friends in Europe
and America would subscribe to his education. His study plan sustained him for
many years. He began with a history of materialism, ‘to prepare the ground for
a materialist interpretation of Indian religion, philosophy, and culture.’32 By
December, he finished a long essay on the historical role of Islam. Most of
these writings were later published. But, as Roy concluded, ‘Jail is not a
university … Prison cells or barracks are not expected to be studies.’33
Roy received a sentence of twelve years. His defense
had rested on Raj's illegitimacy, not a refutation of the detailed evidence of
his activities and intentions. It was harshly measured against the other
sentences at Kanpur and was later reduced to six years. Over this stretch of
time, the prison was a constant battle for status and one’s health.34 In early
1932, Roy was in the Central Prison at Bareilly, downgraded by the sentencing
judge to ‘B Class’ status. ‘B Class’ prisoners, Roy observed, were not allowed
handkerchiefs. He resorted to wiping his nose on his sleeve, telling Ellen,
‘like the President of USSR.’ Roy used his letters to justify to friends in
Berlin his decision to return: ‘I did not lose my head.’ ‘To work in India, one
must be an Indian, having regard for the Indian mentality.’ But his experience
of everyday India in jail life showed how far he had traveled away from it. In
October 1933 in Bareilly, Roy acquired a companion in his cell. He found little
sympathy for him:
Really, the chap is harmless, after all. He simply
cannot be anything but himself – the product of a decayed civilization awaiting
a much-delayed burial. This country needs a Kemal Pasha, to begin with, to chop
off the ridiculous tufts on the heads; to make the wearing of fierce mustaches
punishable as a culpable homicide; to drive the pampered, idle, gossiping, but
outrageously maltreated women out in the streets to work down their fat or cure
their anemia, and to free themselves from the malignant curse of suppressed
passion; to prohibit the chanting of rigmarole in a language which few
understand; and to do many other similar things.35
These defiant musings disguised the deterioration of
his health. News of it came to Ellen in the form of a note inserted by the
prison superintendent, for her to confine her letters to ‘light and domestic
matters.’36 There were cruel rumors in the British press that he was living
comfortably in Burma. Roy was only allowed to write to say he was better. In
Europe, Ellen, and, in America, Roy’s ex-wife, Evelyn, marshaled international
support for his appeal as it traveled, in vain, to the Privy Council in
London.
Roy lived the watershed moments of these years as much
as he possibly could. He felt the rise of fascism keenly. His books and papers,
stored in a publisher’s cellar in Berlin, were seized when the Nazis came to
power, and Ellen had to flee to Paris. Like Tan Malaka, he saw the colonial
situation as a premonition of fascism. He had arguably witnessed in China a
foretaste of what was to come. ‘There is not one patented brand of Fascism,’ he
told Ellen. ‘It may have different forms and come in devious ways.’37 He
followed the deepening schisms on the left and the purges in the Soviet Union.
In a coded way, he asked about ‘the Sentimental Dutchman,’ Henk Sneevliet, now
a follower of the Lion’, Trotsky.38 Roy had already experienced at first hand
the suspicion and denunciations of spies, saboteurs, and Trotskyites. Now the
Comintern was simultaneously a witness, a participant, and a victim to the
Great Terror.39 Foreign communists were especially vulnerable: on one list of
executions during the purges, eighty-three of the victims had an address at the
Hotel Lux.40 Roy’s old rival Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, ‘Chatto,’ was
executed in 1937; so too was Roy’s nemesis Abani Mukherji, by then a professor
of political economy at Moscow University. In the spring of 1934, Vera
Vladimirovna ran into her ‘Li Annam,’ Nguyen Ai Quoc, on the staircase of the
Institute of World Politics and Economy. They exchanged addresses, but they did
not meet again; it was too dangerous to draw attention to their shared past.41
Quoc had only recently returned to Russia; his standing at this time was very
unclear. Like Roy, he fully expected to be held accountable for his part in
China and Southeast Asia's failures. He was investigated but left unpunished.
Unlike Roy, he had not set himself up as an oracle. As Vietnam sank lower in
the priorities of the Comintern, and the Comintern loomed lower in the
priorities of the Soviet Union, he survived when many others did not, sidelined
as a mature student at the Stalin School.42
These dark years were a time of stasis, isolation, and
estrangement. Roy had few visitors: friends were either in jail themselves or
unable to travel for days to see him. He began a series of discussions with
leaders of the Indian National Congress. On his early release in November 1936,
he was met at the prison gate by Congress supporters, feted and garlanded as he
traveled to a Congress meeting at Faizpur. There he was elected to its
governing body and welcomed as a veteran of the freedom struggle by Jawaharlal
Nehru himself, who offered his homes in Allahabad and Delhi for his
recuperation. After all, Roy was, as Subhas Chandra Bose later remarked, ‘a
popular and attractive figure with a halo around his name’. It seemed that his hour
had come. But as Roy stepped out of the shadows, many within Congress,
particularly on the left, feared that his ‘Royists’ would establish a secret
party within Congress, as Roy had attempted to do from Berlin ten years
earlier. Some refused to believe he was a nationalist at all.43 Roy, launching criticisms at all sides, did
little to disabuse them. Despite their cordial relationship, Nehru concluded
that Roy would demand a ‘complete break with the past’ and ‘utterly out of
touch with India's realities today.’ For twenty years, Roy had had little
opportunity to experience them truly. His most steadfast commitment had been to
a struggle on a global plane. He had broken entirely with the Hindu patriotism
of his Swadeshi youth in Mexico in 1917.44 Gandhi, for his part, would have
nothing to do with Roy and his anti-religion: he saw Roy as ‘enemy number one’.45
Across colonial Asia, in normal times, the only
possible open national politics was more tempered, less international, and far
less than the ‘compete break with the past’ proposed by the likes of Roy. In
1937, Tan Malaka left his rural isolation in Fujian province and travelled to
Singapore. He noted a growth of ethnic enclaves on the island and contrasted it
to his earlier sojourn in 1927 when Singapore seemed to be a more open,
inclusive urban landscape.46 In the inter-war years, faced with the growing
policing of movement and the hardening of territorial boundaries, the massive
flows of people that had dominated Asian history for a century or more began to
ebb. Colonial sociologists of empire reported greater ethnic tensions and more
segmented, ‘plural’ societies. The persecution of Bolshevism impacted equally
on the politics of open, democratic socialism. It rendered any politics across
ethnicity, on class lines, more difficult, if not impossible.47 It also worked
to discredit and to limit the possibilities of an outside alliance. In these
conditions across Asia, more territorial, more exclusive, ethnic and religious
nationalisms expanded to fill the breach in this absence. In China, although it
never entirely shed its ‘left,’ nor its technocratic reforming goals, the
Kuomintang turned decisively away from social revolution to become a more
corporatist, conservative, and martial entity.48 In Indonesia, although Sukarno
himself was arrested, tried, imprisoned and spent most of the 1930s in prison
or internal exile, the open political field was dominated by his populist
Partai Nasional Indonesia and its successor, Partindo, and their insistence on
‘Indonesia’ as the basis of the political community.49 In Vietnam, communism
had to compete in the countryside with synthetic and revivalist religious
movements such as the Cao Dai and the Buddhist millenarianism of the Hoa Hao.50
And yet the closeness of things far away, and the
allure of global influences, endured. As colonial censorship hardened, the
legend of the underground was perpetuated through fiction and film,
particularly in ‘wild literature.’ In the Netherlands Indies, roman picisan
(‘ten-cent,’ or pulp fiction) and roman Politik were hugely popular; around 400
such titles were published between 1938 and 1942 from provincial towns such as
Medan, Bukittinggi, and Solo. They were set in a futurist, subterranean world
of trickery, evasion, and betrayal. One popular series, authored by Matu Mona,
featured the Padjar Merah Indonesia, or the Scarlet Pimpernel of Indonesia. The
tales were set in a thinly disguised parallel universe of the Indonesian exiles
in Europe, the Soviet Union, Bangkok, Singapore, Manila, Shanghai, and
elsewhere, and featured characters such as ‘Mussotte,’ ‘Aliminsky’ and
‘Darsonov.’ The Pimpernel himself was a man of multiple aliases and magical
powers, whose clandestine international organization allowed him to appear at
crucial moments to challenge injustice and reveal the truth. He was also in
very poor health. The stories betrayed an uncanny knowledge of the secret
movements of Tan Malaka and added to the existing myths of his shape-shifting
powers, sexual abstinence, and global friendships. The preface of the second
book told of how Matu Mona drew inspiration for the story at the Raffles
Library in Singapore, a known haunt of Tan Malaka. The books were a gateway to
an ‘anti-world’ where the fictive and non-fictive were in constant interplay.51
This sense of plots real and unhatched or awakening slumber was palpable and
evoked the ‘just king’ older millenarian expectation. In Java, as Japanese
influence reasserted itself, it heralded the fulfilment of the prophecy of the
twelfth-century King Joyoboyo: that the rule of the white man would end with
the coming of the dwarfish yellow men who would reign as long as ‘a maize seed
took to flower’.52
1. This paragraph and the next are based on Dennis J.
Duncanson, ‘Ho-Chi-Minh in Hong Kong, 1931–32’, The China Quarterly, 57 (1974),
pp. 84–100 and documents collected by the Ho Chi Minh Museum and published in
an English edition ed. by Lady Borton and Trinh Ngoc Thai, The Legal Case of
Nguyen Ai Quoc (Ho Chi Minh) in Hong Kong, 1931–1933 (Documents and
Photographs), Hanoi, National Political Publishers/Ho Chi Minh Museum, 2006.
2. These artifacts are to be found in ANOM, Indo
HCI/SPCE 365.
3. William J. Duiker, Ho Chi Minh, New York, Hyperion,
2000, pp. 198–9, 207.
4. M. N. Roy, My Experiences in China, Calcutta,
Renaissance Publishers, 1945, p. 53.
5. M. N. Roy, Revolution, and Counter-Revolution in
China, Calcutta, Renaissance Publishers, 1946.
6. Sonia Gandhi (ed.), Two Alone, Two Together:
Letters Between Indira Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, 1922–1964, New Delhi,
Penguin Books India, 2004, p. 95.
7. Sibnarayan Ray (ed.), The World Her Village:
Selected Writings and Letters of Ellen Roy, Calcutta, Ananda, 1979, pp.
1–46.
8. M. N. Roy, Memoirs, Bombay, Allied Publishers, pp.
581–3
9. E.g. Government of India, India, and Communism, pp.
162–9.
10. Suchetana Chattopadhyay, An Early Communist:
Muzaffar Ahmad in Calcutta, Tulika Books, Delhi, 2011, pp. 217–24, at p. 219.
11. For a contemporary account see Lester Hutchinson,
Conspiracy at Meerut, London, Allen & Unwin, 1935. See the collection
edited by Michele L. Louro and Carolien Stolte, ‘Introduction: The Meerut
Conspiracy Case in Comparative and International Perspective’, Comparative
Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 33/3 (2013), pp. 310–15.
12. The UK National Archives
(henceforth TNA), FO1093/92, ‘The Noulens Case’, 7 March 1932, p. 36.
13. Abidin Kusno, ‘From City to City: Tan Malaka,
Shanghai and the Politics of Geographical Imagining’, Singapore Journal of
Tropical Geography, 24/3 (2003), pp. 327–39. This article has been for me a
seminal influence.
14. Harry Poeze, Tan Malaka, pp. 414–17.
15. House of Commons Debates, 14 February 1933, vol.
274, cc. 835–6W.
16. TNA, FO 372/2913, William Peel, Governor of Hong
Kong to Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, 16 August 1933.
17. Letter from Tan Malaka to the China League for
Civil Rights, February 1933, in Poeze, Tan Malaka, p. 572.
18. Tan Malaka’s own account of these years is rich in
local color, but sparse in most other respects, Tan Malaka, From Jail to Jail,
vol. 11, pp. 53–90; Poeze, Tan Malaka, pp. 447–50.
19. This account draws on seminal work by Takashi
Shiraishi, ‘The Phantom World of Digoel’, Indonesia, 61 (1996), pp. 93–118, and
Rudolf Mrázek, Sjahrir: Politics and Exile in Indonesia, Ithaca, NY, Cornell
University Press/SEAP Publications, 1994, pp. 129–53; Rudolf Mrázek, ‘Boven
Digoel and Terezín: Camps at the Time of Triumphant Technology’, East Asian
Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal, 3 (2009), pp.
287–314.
20. Mas Marco Kartodikromo, ‘Community of Exiles in
Boven Digul’, in Tineke Hellwig and Eric Tagliacozzo, The Indonesia Reader:
History, Culture, Politics, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2009, p. 275.
21. Greta O. Wilson (ed.), Regents, Reformers, and
Revolutionaries: Indonesian Voices of Colonial Days, Selected Historical
Readings, 1899–1949, Honolulu, University Press of Hawaii, 1978, p. 139.
22. Mas Marco Kartodikromo, ‘Community of Exiles in
Boven Digul’, pp. 276, 279.
23. Margaret J. Kartomi, The Gamelan Digul and the
Prison Camp Musician who Built it: An Australian Link with the Indonesian
Revolution, Rochester, NY, University of Rochester Press, 2003; Rudolf Mrázek,
‘Thick Whisper and Thin Victory: Concentration Camps’ Contribution to Modern
Acoustics’, Social Text, 33/1 (122) (2015), pp. 1–25.
24. Mas Marco Kartodikromo, Pergaulan Orang Buangan Di
Boven Digoel, Jakarta, KPG, 2002, pp. 177–8.
25. Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille: A History of
Imprisonment in Vietnam, 1862–1940, Berkeley, University of California Press,
2001, esp. pp. 200–239.
26. Frank Dikötter, Crime, Punishment and the Prison
in Modern China, London, Hurst, 2002, p. 2901.
27. My reading of these letters has been informed by
Kris Manjapra, ‘The Impossible Intimacies of M. N. Roy’, Postcolonial Studies,
16/2 (2013), pp. 169–84.
28. M. N. Roy, Fragments of a Prisoner’s Diary,
vol. III: Letters from Jail,
Dehra Dun, Indian Renaissance Association, 1943, pp. 1–2.
29. Ibid., p. 22.
30. Ibid., p. 6.
31. Ibid., p. 12.
32. Ibid., p. 26
33. Ibid., p. 21.
34. For context see Taylor Sherman, State Violence and
Punishment in India, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 93–110.
35. Roy, Fragments of a Prisoner’s Diary, p. 70.
36. Ibid., p. 21.
37. Ibid., p. 37.
38. Ibid., pp. 54, 49.
39. W. J. Chase, Enemies within the Gates?: The
Comintern and Stalinist Repression, 1934–1939, New Haven, CT, and London, Yale
University Press, 2002.
40. Brigitte Studer, The Transnational World of the
Cominternians, Basingstoke, AIAA, 2015, p. 137 and passim.
41. Vera Vladimirovna Vishnyakova-Akimova, Two Years
in Revolutionary China, 1925–1927, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press,
1971, p. 229.
42. Sophie Quinn-Judge, Ho Chi Minh: The Missing
Years, 1919–1941, London, Hurst, 2003, pp. 200–219.
43. John Patrick Haithcox, ‘Left Wing Unity and the
Indian Nationalist Movement: M. N. Roy and the Congress Socialist Party’,
Modern Asian Studies, 3/1 (1969), pp. 17–56.
44. Kris Manjapra, M. N. Roy: An Intellectual
Biography of M. N. Roy, New Delhi, Routledge India, 2010, pp. 151–61; the
quotation from Nehru is at p. 152.
45. Haithcox, ‘Left Wing Unity and the Indian
Nationalist Movement’, p. 45.
46. Tan Malaka, From Jail to Jail, vol. II, pp.
102–12.
47. My thinking on this has been shaped by Sumit K. Mandal,
‘Transethnic Solidarities, Racialisation and Social Equality’, in Mandal and
Terence Gomez (eds), The State of Malaysia: Ethnicity, Equity and Reform,
London, Routledge Curzon, 2002, pp. 49–78.
48. For a recent summary see Brian Tsui, China’s
Conservative Revolution: The Quest for a New Order, 1927–1949, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2018.
49. For the triumph of this concept see R. E. Elson,
The Idea of Indonesia: A History, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008.
50. For the latter see Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Millenarianism
and Peasant Politics in Vietnam, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1983.
51. Noriaki Oshikawa, ‘“Patjar Merah Indonesia” and
Tan Malaka: A Popular Novel and a Revolutionary Legend’, in Takashi Shiraishi
(ed.), Reading Southeast Asia: Translation of Contemporary Japanese Scholarship
on Southeast Asia, Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2000, pp. 9–39.
52. For this see Peter Carey, ‘Myths, Heroes and War’,
in Peter Carey and Colin Wild (eds), Born in Fire: The Indonesian Struggle for
Independence: An Anthology, Athens, Ohio University Press, 1986, pp.
6–11.
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