M. N. Roy

Early years Narendra Nath "Naren" Bhattacharya was born on 21 March 1887 in Arbelia, North 24 Parganas, West Bengal, near Calcutta (Kolkata). The Bhattacharyas were Sakta Brahmins – a family of hereditary priests. Roy's paternal grandfather was the head priest of the goddess Kheputeswari in the village of Kheput, Midnapore district. The couple had a total of eight children, including the fourth-born Naren. According to one biographer, Roy agreed with Bankim that true religion was not being cloistered from the world, but working actively for the public good. Vivekananda reinforced this and advanced the idea that Hinduism and Indian culture were superior to anything the Western world could offer. He formed a rationalist group with his cousin Hari Kumar Chakravarti (1882–1963). Members included Satkori Banerjee (Bandhopadhyay), brothers Saileshvar and Shyamsundar Bose, Roy's cousins Phani and Narendra Chakravarti, and Mokshadacharan Samadhyayi, an organiser of the Anushilan Samiti in Chinsura. In July 1905, the partition of Bengal was announced, scheduled to take effect in October. A mass movement aimed at annulling the partition emerged, giving radical nationalists like Roy an opportunity to build broader support. Following his high school expulsion for organising a meeting and a march against the partition, Roy and Chakravarti moved to Kolkata and joined the Anushilans. Barin sent Prafulla Chaki with Charuchandra Datta to see Bagha Jatin at Darjeeling who was posted there on official duty, and do away with the Lt. Governor. On explaining to Prafulla that it was not the right time, Jatin promised to contact him later. Though Prafulla was impressed by him, Barin cynically commented that it would be too much effort for a government officer to serve a patriotic cause. Phani returned from Darjeeling and, fascinated by Jatin's charisma, he informed his friends about him. On hearing Barin censuring Phani for disloyalty, Roy decided to meet Dada but was caught by Barin. The Howrah-Shibpur Trial (1910–11) brought Bhattacharya closer to Jatindra Mukherjee. He also worked closely with Hemchandra Kanungo for a during his time in the Anushilan Samiti at Calcutta, he was inspired by Kanungo's travels in Europe, and he was also impressed by the advanced bomb manufacturing technologies that Hem had brought from Russia. The Hindu-German conspiracy Many Indian nationalists, including Roy, became convinced that only through a revolution would they be able to achieve India's independence from the British Empire. So revolutionary nationalists looked to a rival imperial power, that of Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany, as a potential source for funds and weapons. In August 1914, World War I began, affecting both the UK and Germany. Expatriate Indian nationalists organised as the Indian Revolutionary Committee in Berlin made an informal appeal to the German government to support a revolution in India. Towards the end of the year, the Germans had agreed to provide funding and material to start an uprising against British rule. Roy would not see his homeland again for 16 years. Disgusted but still holding out hope, Roy left Indonesia for Japan, hoping to win Japanese support for their cause, despite Japan's nominal alliance with Great Britain. Efforts to raise money from the German Ambassador to China were likewise unsuccessful. Roy's activities soon drew the attention of the Japanese secret police. He tried to make his way to Peking (Beijing), but he was identified by the British authorities, who detained him. However, he was able to escape jail time due to the British Consul General's ill ease with holding a British subject indefinitely without formal charges. Efforts to raise funds from the German consulate at Hankow resulted in a tentative agreement. However, this plan also failed due to the scale of the commitment, which had to be approved in Berlin according to Admiral Paul von Hintze. Roy decided to search for German funding from the German Ambassador in the United States, before heading to Germany. In an effort to throw the British off his trail, and in an effort to obtain more suitable accommodations for the long trans-Pacific voyage, Roy disembarked from Kobe, Japan. In Kobe, he used a fake French-Indian passport previously obtained for him by the Germans in China. Posing as a seminary student bound for Paris, Roy obtained an American visa, bought a ticket, and sailed for San Francisco. ==Communist movement (1910s–1929)==

During his stay in Palo Alto, a period of about two months, Roy met his future wife, Evelyn Leonora Trent (alias Shanthi Devi). The pair fell in love and journeyed together across the country to New York City. It was in the New York City public library that Roy began to develop his interest in Marxism. His socialist transition owed much to Bankim Chandra Chatterjee's essays on communism and Vivekananda's message of serving the proletariat. Due to the presence of British spies, Roy fled to Mexico in July 1917 with Evelyn. German military authorities, on the spot, gave him large amounts of money. Mexican president Venustiano Carranza and other liberal thinkers appreciated Roy's contributions to the El Pueblo newspaper. The Socialist Party he founded in December 1917 later became the Communist Party of Mexico in 1919, the first Communist Party outside Russia. The Roys lodged a penniless Mikhail Borodin under special circumstances. Due to Borodin's grateful reports, Moscow planned to invite Roy to the 2nd World Congress of the Communist International, held in Moscow during the summer of 1920. A few weeks before the Congress, Vladimir Lenin warmly received Roy. At Lenin's behest, Roy formulated his own ideas supplemented from Lenin's Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and the Colonial Questions. Roy's writings on the colonial question were then discussed in the 2nd World Congress of the Communist International. Roy's writings were published by the International Press Correspondence (Inprecor), the weekly bulletin of the Communist International. Roy served as a member of the Comintern's Presidium for eight years and at one stage was the Political Secretariat, the executive committee, and the World Congress. Commissioned by Lenin to prepare the East—especially India—for revolution, Roy founded military and political schools in Tashkent. In October 1920, as he formed the Communist Party of India, he contacted his revolutionary colleagues who, at this time, were determining allegiances between Radicalism (Jugantar) and Mohandas K. Gandhi's novel programme. Close to the Jugantar in spirit and action, C. R. Das inspired Roy's confidence. From Moscow, Roy published his major reflections, India in Transition, which were translated into other languages. In 1922, Roy's own journal, the Vanguard, was published. This was followed by The Future of Indian Politics (1926) and Revolution and Counter-revolution in China (1930), while he was moving between Germany and France. Leading a Comintern delegation appointed by Joseph Stalin to develop an agrarian revolution in China, Roy reached Canton in February 1927. Despite fulfilling his mission, a disagreement between the CCP leaders and Borodin led to breakdown of communication. Roy returned to Moscow where Trotskyists and Zinovievists were fighting the Stalinists. Here he voted for Trotsky's expulsion from the executive committee of the Comintern. Stalin refused to meet Roy and give him a hearing at the plenum in February 1928. Denied treatment for an infected ear, Roy escaped with Nikolai Bukharin's help, sparing himself from Stalin's anger. Shortly after Trotsky's deportation on 22 May 1928, Roy received permission to go abroad for medical treatment on board a Berlin-bound Deruluft plane. In December 1929, the Inprecor announced Roy's expulsion from the Comintern, almost simultaneously with Bukharin's fall from grace. ==In India (1930–1954)==

Roy returned to India for the first time in December 1930. Upon reaching Bombay, Roy met with Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Bose, the former of whom recalled that despite significant political differences, "I was attracted to him by his remarkable intellectual capacity." Roy's political activity in India proved to be brief as on 21 July 1931 he was arrested in Bombay on an arrest warrant issued in 1924. Roy was allowed neither trial by jury nor defense witnesses, nor was he allowed to make a defense statement. Proceedings were conducted from 3 November 1931 until 9 January 1932 when Roy was sentenced to 12 years imprisonment. Roy also lost several teeth, was frequently feverish, and suffered constant pain from a chronically infected inner ear. Released in November 1936 in bad health, Roy went to Allahabad for recovery. Defying the Comintern order to boycott the Indian National Congress, Roy urged Indian communists to join this Party. Jawaharlal Nehru, in his address at the Faizpur session in December 1936, described Roy as: From the podium, Roy in his speech recommended the capture of power by Constituent Assembly. Unable to collaborate with Gandhi, however, Roy stuck to his own conviction. In April 1937, his weekly Independent India appeared and was welcomed by progressive leaders like Bose and Nehru, however was criticised by Gandhi and the staunch Communists who accused Roy of deviation. ==Personal life and Radical Humanism==

In marrying Ellen Gottschalk, his second wife, "Roy found not only a loving wife but also an intelligent helper and close collaborator." They settled in Dehra Dun. Roy proposed an alternative leadership, seizing the crisis following Bose's re-election as the Congress President in 1938. In Pune, he formed his League of Radical Congressmen. Disillusioned with both bourgeois democracy and communism, he devoted the last years of his life to the formulation of an alternative philosophy which he called Radical Humanism and of which he wrote a detailed exposition in Reason, Romanticism and Revolution. In his biography, ''In Freedom's Quest'', Sibnarayan Ray writes: With the declaration of World War II, Roy (in a similar position as Sri Aurobindo) condemned the rising totalitarian regimes in Germany and Italy, instead supporting England and France in the fight against fascism. He severed connections with the Congress Party and created the Radical Democratic Party in 1940. Gandhi proceeded to lead the Quit India movement in August 1942. In response, the British colonial government imprisoned without trial nearly the entire Indian National Congress leadership. Roy's views clearly differed from the mainstream of the independence movement. According to Roy, a victory for Germany and the Axis powers would have resulted in the end of democracy worldwide and that India would never be independent. In his view, India could only win her independence in a free world. Sensing India's independence to be a post-war reality following the defeat of the Axis powers and the weakening of the British Empire, Roy wrote a series of articles in Independent India on the economic and political structures of the new India, presenting a ten-year plan, and drafting a Constitution of Free India (1944). Roy in his philosophy devised means to ensure human freedom and progress. Remembering Bagha Jatin who "personified the best of mankind", Roy worked "for the ideal of establishing a social order in which the best in man could be manifest." In 1947, he elaborated his theses into a manifesto, New Humanism, expected to be as important as the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx a century earlier. ==Death and legacy==

A planned lecture tour to the United States was canceled on 25 January 1954 due to Roy's death from a heart attack. Beginning in 1987, Oxford University Press began the publication of the Selected Works of M. N. Roy. A total of 4 volumes were published through to 1997, gathering Roy's writings through his prison years. Project editor Sibnarayan Ray died in 2008, however, so the project was prematurely terminated. Noted personalities like T. M. Tarkunde, Govardhandas Parekh, V. B. Karnik, Sunil Bhattacharya, B. R. Sunthankar, Saleel Wagh, V. R. Jawahire and Dr. Nalini Taralekar were influenced by M. N. Roy and his philosophy. ==See also==