M.N. Roy
This is an excerpt from V. 1 of “In Freedom’s Quest: a Study of the Life and Works of M.N. Roy (1887-1954)” by Sibnarayan Ray. It is a mind-boggling account of how Roy became the founder of the Communist Party of Mexico, starting with his ties to an expatriate American community that included Carleton Beals and Mike Gold, the famous creator of “proletarian novels”. Later on, Roy would found the Communist Party of India and then become the architect of the Comintern’s policy on national liberation movements. There’s fascinating material on Roy’s contacts with Michael Borodin, the Bolshevik leader whose original name was Mikhail Markovich Gruzenberg, born into a Jewish rabbinical family in Yanovichi near Vitebsk in Byelorussia in 1884, and who had joined the Bolsheviks in 1903. I am making sure to inform my friend Bedo Pain about this story in the hope that the director of “Chittagong” might be persuaded to make a biopic about M.N. Roy, arguably one of the more compelling figures on the left in the entire 20th century.
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For while they had been working on their plan with the Germans, the Roys had made many friends in Mexico. These included not only members of the German diplomatic colony and Mexican government officials, but also a number of Mexican intellectuals and leftwing political leaders, and a group of American radicals who had taken refuge in Mexico to avoid the draft in their own country. Almost from the time of his arrival Roy had been captivated by the warmth and friendliness of the Mexicans (qualities which I found unchanged when I visited there more than fifty years later in search of material for this book). In refreshing contrast to the United States, Mexico was almost completely free from racial prejudice. Among his early Mexican friends and acquaintances were the editor of the local daily, El Pueblo (The People), who had invited him to write articles on India for his paper; the emancipated woman editor of La Mujer Moderna (The Modern Woman) who had been private secretary of Carranza before he became the President of the Republic; Don Manuel. Speaker of the Camera de los Deputados (Chamber of Deputies); Ignazio Santibanez, – leader of the local Socialist Party; Maestro Casas, the Rector of the University and an admirer of Kant, Voltaire and the French Enlightenment, at whose request he later gave five lectures at the University; Enrique Guardiola, a teacher of Spanish from whom he learnt the language well enough not only to write but also to speak it fluently; and Jose Alleny Villa Garcia, son of an eccentric Englishman and an aristocratic Mexican lady with strong radical leanings. His German friends included an old philologist, Dr. Gramatsky and his wife, who at his invitation came to live with the Roys at their house in CoIonia Roma till the middle of 1919 and who taught them French and German; von Schoen, the Counsellor to the German Ambassador, and his American wife whose salon was a meeting place of the local intellectuals; and a young woman painter who not only did a portrait of Roy but taught him to appreciate art and develop a taste for classical European music.
The American radicals were a somewhat different breed. Temperamentally anti-establishment they included pacifists, “wobblies” and anarcho-syndicalists, socialists of all shades, “slackers”, bohemians and adventurers. Roy had already had his first glimpses of American radicalism at Stanford and New York; now after America’s entry into the war, Mexico had become a great gathering place of the draft-dodging refugees. Among the friends he made here were Maurice Becker, poet and cartoonist; Irwin Granich, novelist; Henry Glintenkamp, painter and cartoonist; and Carleton Beals, footloose journalist — who had all been regular contributors to The Masses, edited by Max Eastman. With Granich (more well known as Michael Gold) his friendship became quite close and lasted a long time. Beals wrote about Roy years later in his book Glass Houses (1938) in which he curiously misnamed him as Rabindranath Roy.” Another intimate friend who later attended the Second World Congress of the Communist International under the alias Frank Seaman but came to be more widely known by his other alias, Manuel Gomez, was Charles Francis Phillips. He and his wife Elinore had escaped to Mexico after evading arrest for organizing pacifist demonstrations on the campus of the Columbia University. In 1964 Phillips under the name of Gomez published a detailed interview in Survey in which he, among other matters, gave his recollections of Roy and Borodin in Mexico. It contained a few lapses and inaccuracies, but is a useful source of information.
At the Roy’s house in CoIonia Roma these friends would meet frequently where they were provided with excellent Mexican dishes by Maria, “a healthy and handsome pure-blooded Mexican woman”, who looked after the household. Roy had also acquired “a splendid brown Alsatian … who slept on the floor by my bed just across the open door.” From the balcony of their house they could see in the distance the twin volcanic peaks of Popocatepetl and Ixtacchihuatl – the latter looking like a sleeping woman lying on her back. The view fascinated Roy, and years later, as he wrote movingly in his Memoirs, the memory of the “Sleeping Woman” haunted him.”
To this home then the Roys returned after having decided to give up the hopeless quest for Chinese arms. But although Roy’s own notion of a revolutionary struggle was already beginning to undergo significant changes, and although he would soon plunge into the vortex of Mexico’s turbulent politics, deep in his heart he was still primarily preoccupied with India’s independence. But before he could find an alternative approach and method, he felt that he had to formulate the Indian case more clearly both to himself and to Evelyn and their friends. He had already tried his hand at writing in New York, and as his first exercise in Spanish he had translated the “Open Letter to Wilson” under his Mexican teacher’s supervision. He now returned to the task of developing and articulating his arguments (the invitations from El Pueblo, and from Maestro Casas provided the opportunity), and during 1918 he published several books, pamphlets and articles. One of these was La Voz de la India, which besides the translation of the “Open Letter” also included two other pieces — a detailed critique of a book El Despertar de la India (The Awakening of India) by an anonymous author who had sought in it to justify the British rule in India; and a shorter essay to answer the question “Why do the Indian soldiers fight for England?” (Por que los soldados indios luchan por Inglaterra?) In the first piece he again stressed the disastrous material consequences of the British exploitation of India — the growing frequency of famines; the reduction of India into a supplier of raw materials to Britain and a purchaser of finished British products; the rise in the average cost of living; the economic drain caused by “Home charges”; the restrictions on indigenous manufactures and the monopolies and protections enjoyed by the British; and the heavy burden imposed additionally to meet the cost of the war. It also argued that the railways in India were intended to defend the British empire and to serve British interests; that while during the Hindu–Buddhist and the Muslim periods education in India was widespread and of a higher order, under British rule less than 2 percent of the population received primary schooling and scarcely 0.003 percent went to any university; and that Indians had no effective voice or representation in the administration of their country.” The second piece pointed out that because of the almost universal poverty in India caused by British rule, many Indians were forced to join the British army for a living; that “all the positions of responsibility and true command are held by the British”; that Indian soldiers were sent abroad under false pretences to be used as cannon fodder in various battle fronts; and that whenever they tried to rebel, they were ruthlessly penalized by the British. It also indicated that a good part of the Indian army was provided by the Princes of the native states who were totally dependent on the British even when they were ignominously treated by their protectors.’ India was thus a great prison full of slaves (una gran prision Ilena de esclavos), and “the situation will remain the same until the heroic endeavours of her sons are crowned with success — the revolution, helped by the support and sympathy of the other nations who sincerely love freedom.”
Roy’s next work published from Mexico in 1918 which I have been able to find is La India su pasado, su presente y su porvenir (India her Past Present and Future). In its flyleaf it mentions three earlier publications “by the same author”: La Voz de la India (already discussed); Carta Abierta al President Wilson (the “Open Letter” which was presumably first published as a separate pamphlet and then included in La Voz); and El Camino para la paz, duradera del Mundo (The Road to Durable World Peace). I have not been able to trace so far a copy of the third of these publications, but from the account given in Roy’s Memoirs it consisted of the “Open Letter” and a “longish chapter on the origin of the Monroe Doctrine and its development in practice during nearly a hundred years”.” According to the summary provided in the Memoirs, the new chapter offered a historical interpretation of the financial penetration and domination of the countries of South and Central America by the U.S., and made a plea to the former to regain their independence by putting an end to the U.S. dominance. It thus marked the beginning of Roy’s commitment to a revolution which went beyond the confines of the specifically Indian context.
La India was a more ambitious work than La Voz; it ran to 198+v pages and consisted of a preface, an introduction, nine chapters and five appendices (the latter devoted to sets of statistical figures showing the non-representative nature of the British government in India, India’s low per capita income compared to other nations, its staggering death-rate, the extremely low public expenditure on primary education, and the high incidence of famines in India under British rule).” In the preface Roy acknowledged the valuable help which he had received in the preparation of the book from his “illustrados amigos“, Senor don Jose G. Montes de Oca and Senor don Enrique Guardiola. The introductory chapter stressed India’s unity in diversity and briefly explained how from a fusion of Dravidian and Aryan cultures India developed a tradition which was tolerant and non-aggressive, which respected differences while believing in the unity of the universe, which offered alternative ways of realizing within individual consciousness the ultimate identity of the microcosm and the macrocosm, and which dealt with repeated invasions and conquests by gradually integrating the invaders and conquerors.” After this the first chapter gave a brief resume of Indian history from the earliest times to the pre-British period in which, among other matters, special emphasis was put on the material progress and prosperity of India under both Hindu-Buddhist and Muslim rule, the provisions made in traditional Hindu social theory on the duties and obligations of the king, the economic and political cooperation between the Hindus and the Muslims which existed before “Aurangzeb’s religious fanaticism and despotism” began to provoke widespread rebellion, the barbarous state of Europe compared to India during the middle ages, and the cunning and unscrupulous methods used by the British to establish their dominance at the time of the disintegration of the Mughal empire.” Chapters two to seven gave a systematic critique of British rule, elaborating all the arguments already briefly made in La Voz, but with greater precision and much more factual documentation. Britain’s Indian administration was shown to be unrepresentative, despotic, monopolistic, and based on the practice of racial discrimination (Chapter 2), but again the main stress was on Britain’s systematic and ruthless destruction of India’s economy and exploitation of India’s resources for Britain’s material benefit (chapters three, four and five). The hollowness of the British claim to have provided India with modern education was exposed in chapter six, while chapter seven dealt with the treatment of Indian labourers in South Africa, and the preposterousness of describing the British empire as “a federation of free peoples.” ” In chapter eight Roy gave a brief account of the Indian nationalist movement indicating why the hope of the Moderates to achieve India’s freedom through piecemeal reforms with the consent of India’s alien rulers was altogether unrealistic, and why radical nationalists like himself believed that “the only way out was a bloody revolution even though it appears almost hopeless in the present circumstances”.” The ninth and concluding chapter showed how the British had been trying to defeat the nationalist movement by playing the Muslims against the Hindus and how neither the earlier Morley-Mint° reforms nor the recently published Montagu-Chelmsford Report offered anything of substance to the Indians; and it reaffirmed the conviction that “India will be free, whether the English liked it or not”. India’s freedom would “assure true liberty to the whole world, putting an end to the attitude of superiority assumed by Europe”.
In writing La India Roy again showed hardly any influence of Marx. There was no concession here to Marx’s thesis regarding the “Asiatic mode of production” nor to his view of British imperialism as being “the unconscious tool of history” in bringing about a fundamental revolution in India.” Nor was there any clear perception of conflict of class interests within Indian society. Roy who had been since 1907 a revolutionary activist par excellence proved himself in this book to be a no less consummate ideologue of radical nationalism. However, his stress on the economic aspects of colonial rule was significant as were his preoccupation with the problem of poverty and his freedom from the common Hindu prejudice against the Muslims. Besides, Marx’s Europe-oriented approach to the non-western world would always remain a problem even with convinced Marxists in later decades. La India was published in December 1918; by then Roy was already occupied with his second plan and actively involved in Mexican politics. Mexico had achieved independence in 1821 after nearly three hundred years of Spanish Colonial rule, hut the problems bequeathed by the Spaniards had continued to plague the country. The most serious of these problems were the enormous powers and privileges, both material and spiritual, enjoyed by the Catholic church; the system of hacienda or landlordism of a semi feudal type which gave no rights or protection to the cultivators and blocked all possibilities of agricultural development; and the institution of military overlords who fought among themselves to impose personal dictatorship. Two of the leaders of the war of Mexican independence, Hidalgo and Morelos, had struggled unsuccessfully against the church and the hacendados. Immediately after independence, a new and even more formidable problem had been introduced by the interventionist policy of the United States which wanted to bring Latin America under its hegemony. In 1845 Mexico had been forced to cede its province of Texas to the United States; the war which followed was disastrous at the end of which the U.S. also annexed California and the vast territory between it and Texas by imposing on Mexico the humiliating Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848. In the 1860’s the country found an inspiring leader in Benito Juarez but the French intervened and imposed its nominee, Archduke Maximilian of Austria, as Emperor of Mexico. Maximilian was eventually overthrown and killed, and from 1867-1872 Juarez as President of the “restored republic- tried hard to modernize and democratize the country’s polity and economy. But Juarez’s death in 1872 marked the end of these efforts; and four years later Mexico fell under the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz which lasted until 1911. During the period of the porfiriato or Diaz dictatorship, not only did the church and the hacendados reestablish their power and privileges, but large concessions were made to the United States as regards investments in railways, mines, plantations and industries.”
Diaz was overthrown by Francisco Madero in 1911, but before the latter could take Mexico back to the path of Juarez he was overtaken by Coup d’etat and assassinated by General Victorian° Huerta in February 1913, with the connivance of the U.S. Ambassador Henry Lane Wilson.” Then began a struggle for power which saw the emergence of Venustiano Carranza, who had been a supporter of Madero, and who now tried to provide Mexico with a stable constitutional government. In 1915, Carranza’s government was recognized by the United States, but when Carranza declared his opposition to the U.S. concessions in Mexico he immediately incurred American hostility. Carranza sought to create a broad base of support for his government, and in December 1916 called a constitutional convention at Queretaro. The Constitution of 1917 which confirmed Carranza as the President of the Republic had several radical features (which it owed largely to Francisco Mujica, elected chairnian of the Committee on the Constitution). The most important among them were Articles 3, 31 and 130 which committed the state to a secular system of education, and abolished all privileges and special powers of the church; Article 27 (the lengthiest in the Constitution) which prohibited church ownership of real estate except for strictly religious purposes, voided all previously granted concessions to foreign governments and investors for the exploitation of Mexico’s natural resources, established state control over water and underground wealth, and provided for the liquidation of the latifundia and redistribution of land among the actual cultivators; and Article 123 which gave protection to wage-earners and declared the principle of minimum wages.”
The Constitution was, of course, more a declaration of basic principles than anything else, since its enforcement required a strong and committed government which Carranza did not possess. Carranza had inherited enormously complex problems; although an ardent nationalist, by inclination he was no radical; he had few friends but many enemies. Among his opponents were Pancho Villa, the bandit chief, who in spite of repeated defeats was still quite active in the northern state of Chihuahua (he was murdered in the summer of 1923); Emiliano Zapata, the legendary leader of a peasant rebellion, who until his assassination by a treacherous ally in 1919, would be a threat to the stability of the government; the organized church which had the backing of the Catholic establishment in the U.S.; the powerful British-American oil interests which sought to subvert the Article 27 of the Queretaro constitution; and finally General Alvaro Obregon who had the support of the U.S. government as he was prepared to restore the concessions which had been made under the Diaz dictatorship.” Moreover, by mid 1918 the war had begun definitely to turn against the Germans in Europe leaving the U.S. free to resume its interventionist policy in Latin America.
Roy’s initial motivation in getting involved in Mexican politics was to promote anti-Americanism so that this would divert the resources of the U.S. from the allied battlefronts in Europe. He soon found that the anarcho-syndicalists were not very interested in supporting Mexican nationalism against the U.S. He now turned to the socialists and other radicals to organize a broad-based movement which would oppose the U.S. and support the Carranza government on the understanding that the latter would try to make effective the radical principles of the Queretaro constitution. Ignazio Santibanez had already introduced him to the executive of his small Socialist party; he now proposed to it the holding of a socialist conference in Mexico. With what was left over from the funds provided by the Germans shortly after his arrival in Mexico he not only offered to bear the entire costs of the conference but also bought the Socialist party a printing press so that its organ, Lucha de los clases, could be converted into a regular weekly of eight pages.
Through Don Manuel, the Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, Roy then met again Carranza, and persuaded him to support his efforts and to agree to “a programme of legislation for the protection of labour, particularly against exploitation by foreign imperialist capital”76 He also won over Plutarco Elias Calles, a popular socialist leader in Sonora, who later in 1924 would himself be elected President of the Republic:17 Meantime he had met General Alvarado to whom he had an introduction from Dr. Jordan of Stanford. Alvarado was planning to bring out a daily, El Herald° de Mexico, which would have an English section with Roy’s friend Charlie Phillips as editor of this section. Roy planned with Phillips to use this section for the expression of socialist views, and his articles on American imperialism in Latin America were first serialised here before they were brought out in the form of a book under the title El Camino.
Roy now drafted a manifesto for the projected socialist conference to which delegates were invited from the different States of the Republic, and from a number of Latin American countries. The conference met in Mexico city from August 25 to September 4, 1919, and adopted a constitution according to which the reorganized party was to be called El Partido Socialista Regional Mexican°. Besides Roy and Evelyn the leading figures of the conference were Santibanez, Don Manuel, Francisco Cervantes Lopez, Plutarco Calles, Juan Baptista Flores, Jose Garcia and his brother Roberto, and two American radicals, Charles Phillips and Irwin Granich. The last two organized a demonstration of local industrial workers in support of the reconstituted Socialist party, and managed with the assistance of their friend, John Reed, who had returned to New York after six months in the Soviet Union, to get a message to the conference purportedly sent by the newly founded Third International but actually composed by Reed in New York.” The conference elected an organizing committee with Roy, al companero Indio (the Indian comrade), as General Secretary and Jose Garcia as his assistant. The committee was charged with the re-organization of the Mexican Socialist party, and with making preparations for a Regional Socialist International for Latin America.
The proceedings of the conference, however, did not altogether go without opposition. Roy wanted the re-constituted party to he broad-based; he and his Mexican colleagues were particularly keen to draw into it Luis Morones, who had already founded in 1918 the Confederation Regional Obrera Mexicana (CROM), a federation of labour unions. Morones at this stage was known to be backing General Obregon against Carranza.” Roy’s plan was to draw him away from Obregon and his supporters in the U.S. and to secure his collaboration in the proposed anti-American front This was, however, strongly opposed by Lynn Gale, an American radical, who had escaped from New York to Mexico in 1918, and who ran a journal called Gale’s Magazine.’ For various reasons Roy and Gale had taken a strong dislike to each other — according to Roy, Gale was a neophyte to Indian spiritualism and theosophy who had pressed on him to secure a subsidy from the Mexican government for his (Gale’s) pacifist propaganda, a demand which Roy had flatly refused; while according to Gale, Roy was an Indian nationalist whose conversion to socialism was altogether superficial” — and the conference helped to bring this into the open. Roy had the support of the majority in the conference, and since Gale persisted in his opposition he was expelled from the reconstituted party. Later Gale started a Communist party of his own, founded a periodical El Comunista, and even tried to send an emissary, Keikichi Ishimoto, to the Congress of the Communist International, but his efforts met with no success.” His group was not recognized by the Comintern.
After the conference Roy’s first task was to organize branches of the Socialist party in the various states of the republic. In this he was assisted by Calles with whom he travelled north to Sonora (which was the home base of both CaIles and Obregon), stopping on the way in the silver mining states of Aguascalientes and Durango. The trip, however, proved to be short, as Calles became Minister of Labour in the Carranza government, and Roy returned to the capital city where he soon thereafter met Michael Borodin, one of the top Bolsheviks from the Soviet Union, who had recently arrived in Mexico under the assumed name of Brantwein.”
Borodin (whose original name was Mikhail Markovich Gruzenberg) was Roy’s senior in age only by a few years. He was born into a Jewish rabbinical family in Yanovichi near Vitebsk in Byelorussia in 1884, and had joined the Bolsheviks in 1903. To avoid arrest he had escaped to the United States where before the Russian revolution he had been running with his wife a progressive preparatory school in Chicago. After the revolution he was entrusted by Lenin to organize communist activities in the U.S. and Latin America. In 1919 he was sent to the U.S. with Tsarist Crown jewels worth about a million rubbles to provide with part of its sale proceeds financial support to the Soviet Trade Delegation in Washington, and with the balance to underwrite revolutionary work in the new world. On the way, however, he was forced by circumstances to leave the jewels with an Austrian migrant in Haiti, and after eluding the American police who were hot on his heels he eventually managed to reach Mexico in September without any money or any local contacts.”
Once there Borodin soon found out about the newly reconstructed Socialist party from the English section of El Heraldo, contacted its editor Charles Phillips, and through him got in touch with the new General Secretary of the party. Roy took a strong liking to Borodin — besides being a revolutionary of exceptional intellectual sophistication and wide experience Borodin also possessed a striking physical appearance (he was, according to one description, “a man with shaggy black hair brushed back from his forehead, a Napoleonic beard, deep-set eyes, and a face like a mask”)” — and they soon became very close friends. Borodin stayed with the Roys at their house in CoIonia Roma and was introduced by them to Carranza. During the next two months while the Roys provided Borodin with hospitality and with funds to help out his stranded wife in Chicago and the Soviet Trade Delegation in Washington. Borodin explained to the Roys the intricacies of Marxism and succeeded in converting them fully to the communist faith.” He broke down Roy’s resistance to the philosophy of materialism, introduced him to the dialectics of class struggle, made him realise that political freedom had little significance without the content of economic liberation and social justice, and strengthened his newly developing conviction that the struggle for freedom to he successful had to be international and not confined within national or geographical boundaries.
After a great deal of discussion it was decided that they should try to form a Communist party out of the reconstituted Socialist party of Mexico. Roy then called an extraordinary conference of the Socialist party to which he submitted for approval the Manifesto of the Fint World Congress of the Communist International. With support from Don Manuel he succeeded in winning majority agreement, and the Socialist party renamed itself as El Partido Comunista de Mexico. The plan was that the party would subsequently sponsor the Latin American Bureau of the Comintern whose main immediate task would be to organize resistance to American imperialism.” Borodin who, in the meantime, had been provided with facilities by Carranza to contact the West-European Bureau of the Comintern through the Mexican legation in Holland, immediately sent Lenin his report of the conference.. He was instructed to bring Roy with him as a delegate to the next world congress of the Comintern which was scheduled for July 1920.
It was not altogether easy for Roy to decide to leave Mexico to which he had developed a strong attachment, but Borodin persuaded him to accept Lenin’s invitation with the argument that revolutionary movements, whether in Mexico or in India, were parts of a global struggle which constituted the programme of the Communist International. Besides, with the Comintern backing his efforts he would be able to work more effectively for a revolution in India. Jose Allen now took over as General Secretary of the new Communist Party. Borodin was the first to leave for Europe with Charles Phillips accompanying him; the Roys were to follow shortly afterwards: they were to meet in Berlin before going to Moscow. In November 1919, after two and a half years in what he later called “the land of my rebirth”, Roy left with Evelyn from the port of Veracruz on board the Spanish transatlantic liner, Alfonzo XIII, carrying with them Mexican diplomatic passports provided by the President, in which their names were given as Senor and Senora Roberto Alleny Villa Garcia. Roy’s new alias was borrowed from the name of Jose Allen’s brother, and the Roys would continue to use this passport in Europe till their break-up in 1925. Their departure from the house in CoIonia Roma was kept secret for a while by getting Carleton Beals to come and live there during the months of November and December. The precaution was necessary to escape the attention of the British Secret Service.
The years in Mexico wrought in Roy several significant changes and developments. Ever since the Chingripota political robbery at the age of twenty he had been on the run, frequently changing his hiding places while working as an underground revolutionary, later crossing thousands of miles by land and sea under different aliases in South-East and East Asia and the United States, sustained by a single passion and his extraordinary daring, intelligence and integrity. In Mexico for the first time he had a home of his own where a woman who adored him and shared his ideals brought him new insights and experience of happiness. Although even in Mexico the British and the American intelligence were still after him and there was no dearth of hazards in the country’s turbulent politics, he had here the support and friendship of not a few men and women in high places including the President of the Republic and the Rector of the University. (Carranza would be overthrown and treacherously murdered while trying to escape, a few months after the Roys’ departure from Mexico.) He was in a new milieu where radicalism did not exclude enjoyment of life’s gifts and many refinements. When he had left India he was a political ascetic with strong puritanical taboos and an intense distrust of western civilization. During his early months in Mexico his local friends used to call him “the melancholy philosopher from India” who was impervious even to the charm and festive atmosphere of las Chinampas or “floating gardens” on Lake Xochimilco and Lake Chalco. But gradually in Mexico he “learnt to appreciate the good things in life”, not only good food and wine, but also music, the fine arts and literature, the beauty of the landscape and the delights of refined recreational activities, stimulating conversations and intellectual pursuits. He acquired new languages, Spanish, German and French; was taken by his friends to listen to Pablo Casal’s music and the majestic voice of Caruso and introduced to the subtleties of the game of chess; and discovered the rich intellectual and literary heritage of modern Europe represented by the works of men like Cervantes, Kant and Voltaire. That the newly developing epicureanism did not make him mentally or physically corpulent is borne out as much by the impressive record of his activities as by the recollections of his associates. To Carleton Beals, he was a person of “boundless energy”, while Charles Phillips remembered Roy during his Mexican years as “tall, slim, elegant and sombre, deadly serious…, very brilliant, a fascinating personality”. Even the Director of Criminal Intelligence, Government of India, had to report that “M.N. Roy won a considerable reputation for himself … by his Communism in Mexico.”
Although India was and would always remain his main concern, Mexico made him into a cosmopolitan in his outlook and sympathies. If he was disillusioned with the Indian revolutionaries abroad, the loss was more than compensated by the friendships he formed in Mexico with local socialists and intellectuals, the German men and women of culture, and American radicals and Bohemians. Evelyn, Casas and Borodin opened to him the intellectual achievements of European civilization, and the Biblioteca Nacional was’ a great source of self-education. Borodin, in particular, helped him to outgrow his cultural parochialism. Not only did his “lingering faith in the special genius of India” begin to fade during his last months in Mexico; he also began to grasp the universalist implications of class struggle and of the dialectical processes of history. He “still believed in the necessity of armed insurrection”, but he “had also learned to attach greater importance to an intelligent understanding of the idea of revolution. The propagation of the idea was more important than arms.” To this propagation he would now increasingly turn his energies having at last discovered in Mexico his literary-intellectual talents in addition to his earlier talent in organizing underground revolutionary activities.”
