International conferences are notoriously difficult to organize, all the more so when the aim is global revolution and the world’s empires oppose your agenda. When, starting in 1919, Vladimir Lenin convened the first congresses of the Communist International, some Bolsheviks were disappointed by the characters who turned up—old-fashioned socialists, trade unionists, and anarchists, coming with false papers, in disguise, under aliases, and all apparently expecting hotel rooms. The Russian revolutionary Victor Serge observed, “It was obvious at first glance that here were no insurgent souls.” Lenin kept a blinking electric light on his desk to cut meetings short. But one of the arrivals made an impression. “Very tall, very handsome, very dark, with very wavy hair,” Serge recalled. It was Manabendra Nath Roy, an Indian who was a founder of the Mexican Communist Party. When ducking imperial authorities, he used a method described by a comrade: “If you want to hide revolutionary connections . . . you had better travel first class.”
Roy had cut an unusual path to Moscow. Born into a Brahmin family in West Bengal in 1887, he left India in his twenties on a series of missions to secure funds and weapons for an uprising against the British Raj. During the First World War, a group of Indian anti-imperialists wanted the Germans to open a second front against their common enemy. But Roy’s parleys with contacts in Java, China, and Japan yielded almost nothing. In Tokyo, he resolved to press onward to the United States: “I decided to take the bull by the horn, pinned a golden cross to the lapel of my coat, put on a very sombre face, and called at the American consulate.” Disguised as “Father Martin” and having, he said, “reinforced my armour with a morocco-bound copy of the Holy Bible beautifully printed on rice-paper,” Roy arrived in San Francisco in 1916. He met with a radical Bengali poet in Palo Alto, and promptly fell in love with a Stanford graduate student named Evelyn Trent, an acquaintance of the university’s former president, David Starr Jordan, who took pride in cultivating anti-imperialists on campus.
Roy and Trent moved to Manhattan, where British and American agents, investigating a “Hindu-German conspiracy,” shadowed Roy as he met Indian anti-colonialists and immersed himself in the Marxist canon in the New York Public Library. After a brush with the New York police, the pair fled, in 1917, to Mexico, which was in the midst of a popular upheaval. There Roy witnessed a revolution, learned Spanish, and co-founded the Communist Party of Mexico—one of the first national Communist Parties outside Russia. One day, a Russian man from Chicago asked to meet Roy at a hotel: Mikhail Borodin, one of Lenin’s top lieutenants. Before long, he invited him to the Kremlin. It was the start of a journey that led not only to Moscow and Berlin but also to China, where Roy became a leading Soviet envoy during the Chinese Civil War.
If M. N. Roy is remembered today, it is as one of the more flamboyant international Communists active between the wars. But his globe-spanning trajectory was typical for thousands of young radicals who emerged from the cracks of European empires in Asia early in the last century. In “Underground Asia” (Harvard), Tim Harper provides the first comprehensive look at this dense web of resistance. The Asian underground laid long-burning fuses across great distances—attacking colonial officials, organizing strikes, founding schools, plotting insurrections, and raining down tracts and pamphlets.
Recruits for the underground came from the villages of the Punjab and Bengal, from the kampongs of Sumatra and Java, from the cities of China; they drove across the Gobi and took steamers across the Baltic; they slipped in and out of Weimar Berlin, Tokyo, Shanghai, Canton, Paris, and New York City. In Malay, they were known as the orang-orang pergerakan—“movement people.” Many of them had studied or worked in Europe, where they got a taste of a civilization whose terms they sought to challenge. But they struggled to form parties and lacked weapons, ammunition, and other material resources. Revolutionary scavengers, they picked up whatever they thought was useful, and flirted with any force—from pan-Islamism to an expansionist Japan—that seemed pitted against the European powers. For them, the Soviet Union was a beacon: the Bolsheviks had not only cast off centuries of traditional rule, transforming Russia from an agrarian backwater into an industrial power; they were also internationalist pioneers who seemed to have escaped the straitjacket of narrow, European-style nationalism.
Harper, a historian of Southeast Asia, is best known for “Forgotten Armies” (2004) and “Forgotten Wars” (2006), two extraordinary volumes, co-authored with the late Christopher Bayly, about the unwinding of Britain’s Asian colonies during and after the Second World War. The new book, covering the first three decades or so of the twentieth century, serves as a prologue to the previous ones and is, if anything, more ambitious—concerned not only with the shape that Asia took but also with roads not travelled. Scores of crisscrossing characters and groups sometimes threaten, in their sheer number, to capsize Harper’s nimble storytelling, but this overabundance is part of the book’s strength, allowing us to see the contingent nature of many outcomes. Reading “Underground Asia” is like being privy to a historical particle accelerator, watching as revolutionary agents smash up against different imperial oppositions. Many members of the underground faded from memory or became unmentionable, having wasted away in colonial prison cells or been killed in anti-colonial infighting. A handful of others—Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong—emerged as the founding fathers of nation-states, whose faces now grace public squares and banknotes. Harper insures that none of this feels predestined. Instead, we see a host of threadbare gamblers crowding the tables, a few of whom eventually walk out with vast winnings.
The story of the Asian underground has rarely been told, because no one has had much incentive to tell it. Victorious anti-colonial nationalists in Indonesia and India had little interest in underscoring their debts to an earlier coterie of ghostly figures, many of whom had been their bitter rivals. In the era of globalization, many historians preferred a narrative in which colonialism itself—fostering trade and cosmopolitanism in Asia’s port cities—brought about the conditions that allowed anti-imperial consciousness to flourish. Others shied away from questioning the purity and the grassroots bona fides of the national revolutions, even if many of the uprisings were kindled by men and women who might have been disappointed by the patchwork of nations that Asia became. Harper avoids these pitfalls by taking a more capacious and clinical approach. He reads the colonial intelligence files on his protagonists against the grain. The result provides an unexpected key to understanding contemporary Asian politics.
Many accounts of the history of the modern nation-state still begin with the French Revolution. But, ever since Benedict Anderson’s classic book “Imagined Communities” appeared, in 1983, Latin America and Asia have assumed a central place in the study of nationalism, and it is probably no accident that some of the most influential scholars of revolutionary change—Anderson, Clifford Geertz, and James C. Scott—have been students of Southeast Asia, the most politically heterogeneous region of the world. Anderson argued that, since most members of any nation are unlikely ever to encounter one another directly, nationalism relies on the ability of the populace to imagine the nation as a whole, and that its spread in modern times was therefore fuelled by the proliferation of newspapers and other media. These allowed for “long-distance nationalism,” diasporic solidarities that could leap over international borders—or that today exist online.
Anderson, though of the left, was not keen to oversell the role of Communism in the independence movements of Southeast Asia. Writing early in the Reagan Administration, as the United States hardened its stance toward the Soviet Union, he was wary of feeding the old Cold Warrior line—that the anti-colonial revolutions of the postwar decades were really just bogus insurrections orchestrated by Moscow. Instead, Anderson and his generation of scholars saw nationalism in Asia as the work of, on the one hand, élites who were educated by colonialism and then turned against it, and, on the other, mobilizations by peasants and urban youth, whose national consciousness merely needed to be stirred.
In “Republicanism, Communism, Islam” (Cornell), a new book that complements Harper’s account, the political scientist John Sidel, a student of Anderson’s, adds fresh background to this picture. Sidel thinks that the nationalist revolutions of Asia can be fully explained only if we understand how activists profited from older, non-colonial forms of organization that their societies provided. In the Dutch East Indies, these were the Islamic schools that Communists and nationalists built upon; in China and Vietnam, there were Confucian networks to draw on.
Nonetheless, members of the Asian underground were defiantly modern. They hung around cafés and cinemas. Women wore their hair in bobs and stashed bombs in their purses. Other explosives arrived inside commentaries on common law. Typewriters were as treasured as pistols. Harper writes that the revolutionaries “experienced Asia as a series of smaller regions, each with its own customs, its own lingua franca and secret knowledge.” But they shared the belief that there was no returning to a pre-colonial golden age. In the traditional rulers of Asia, the underground saw little but surrender and sordidness. By the early twentieth century, the princes of India and the sultans of Malaya had long since become adjuncts of British colonial power—the price they paid to maintain their ceremonial roles. As French Indochina was established, the Emperor Hàm Nghi was deposed and sent to Algeria, where, in 1904, he married the daughter of a French magistrate. In Bali, two years later, when Dutch soldiers shelled the court of a local king, he staged a puputan, a ritual last stand, in which he and his entourage emerged from the palace and threw themselves, singing, into machine-gun fire.
