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.
In the eyes of the underground, European imperialists, after the mayhem of the First World War, also appeared ripe for overthrow. When the Prince of Wales toured the Raj in 1921, protests erupted and he wearily bagged a pair of drugged panthers furnished by a local zoo. In the interwar years, anti-colonialists shook the confidence of the Europeans by organizing strikes across Asia—from the Dutch sugar factories of Java to the British plantations of Assam. The shrewder French, British, and Dutch colonial officials knew that the business of empire could not go on as before, and ideas of reform percolated through European capitals. The British Empire made it easier for its indigenous subjects to become civil servants. The French colonial administration in Indochina poured vast sums into schools to promulgate the Roman script for writing the Vietnamese language—a fateful development, as it facilitated the work of revolutionary networks. The more empires tried to cultivate loyal subjects capable of working in the colonial bureaucracy, the more they produced frustrated, overeducated, dangerous students, who coördinated across borders.
One of them, known in the underground as Nguyen Ai Quoc, is now famous as Ho Chi Minh, the founding father of modern Vietnam. He was the son of a Confucian scholar who held a minor post in the Hue imperial court. As a young man, Ho rebuffed offers from hard-line Vietnamese revolutionaries to join them in Yokohama, where they plotted the overthrow of the French colonial empire with Japanese assistance. Instead, as his biographer Pierre Brocheux details, he travelled on a mail ship as a cook’s assistant and wound up in Paris, where he worked as a journalist, joined socialist groups, and helped found the French Communist Party. “He had a Chaplinesque aura,” a French comrade recalled. “Reserved but not shy, intense but not fanatical, and extremely clever.” Ho maintained that, for the peoples of Indochina, equal citizenship with the French was only a matter of time. In his journalism, he could even appear like a French patriot, complaining, in a boxing report, that Anglicisms—le manager, le round, le knock-out—were contaminating his adopted language. He believed that, if European socialists better instructed workers about the colonial situation, they would come to the aid of their comrades in the colonies.
A more spectral figure in Harper’s gallery is Tan Malaka. Born into the matrilineal Minangkabau nobility of Sumatra, in the Dutch East Indies, he went to study in Holland in 1913, and was impressed by the austere manners and morals of the working-class family he lodged with. Both Ho and Tan Malaka quickly became disillusioned with the reformist currents in Europe. Along with the unmistakable racism that any colonial in Europe experienced, Asian radicals were also tracked by a pervasive system of surveillance maintained by imperial intelligence departments. Legions of spies and double agents generated thick police dossiers, detailing everything from a subject’s romantic encounters to personal tics. (Somerset Maugham, who worked in British intelligence, found much fodder for his fiction here.) In addition, political prisoners churned through imperial prison systems that were kept largely out of view of the press. By 1901, the British housed twelve thousand convicts on the Andaman Islands, in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Thousands of men and women died in colonial jails and prison camps, but these places also became informal universities for the very ideological indoctrination they had been built to prevent. Revolutionaries traded knowledge, formed friendships, taught courses, and smuggled out tracts.
As disappointment with Western liberals and socialists mounted, the members of the Asian underground made their way to Moscow. M. N. Roy, recalling his first visit, wrote, “Lenin leaned forward on the desk and fixed his almond-shaped twinkling eyes on my face. The impish smile lit up his face. I felt completely at ease, as if I was accustomed to sitting by the desk, not in the presence of a great man, a powerful dictator, but in the pleasant company of an old friend.”
But fierce arguments ensued about how best to spread the Communist revolution. Many Bolsheviks were still convinced that the future of the revolution lay in Germany and in an industrialized Western Europe. They were sticklers about history following the expected Marxian timetable. Roy and Tan Malaka agreed that the Bolsheviks had misread the ground in Asia. “Europe is not the world,” Roy declared. After failed Communist uprisings in Germany and Hungary, in 1919, they considered the war for Communism in the West to be already lost. Tan Malaka argued that the best bet for international Communism was in Asia, where the colonial project, by accelerating exploitation, had created the conditions for revolt.
Another point of disagreement was Islam. Lenin held that Islam, like any religion, was a form of despotism, and that it had been co-opted by the ruling classes of Asia. When Tan Malaka arrived for the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, in 1922, he tried to educate the Bolsheviks about the lived reality of Islam. He stressed its value as revolutionary kindling and the need for Communist parties to coöperate with Muslim groups. The Comintern had already squandered an alliance with Sarekat Islam, a powerful nationalist movement in the Dutch East Indies. Islamic organizations, Tan Malaka declared, had the potential to unite workers from Java to Bengal in a single cause.
Ho Chi Minh arrived in Moscow in 1923, disguised as a Chinese businessman. He was too late to meet Lenin, who died shortly after his arrival, though he did make it to the funeral, at which he developed frostbite. While attending meetings at the Stalin school, he urged the administration not to group Asian students by country—it was not good internationalist practice. The poet Osip Mandelstam described him as “a man of culture,” adding that “it could very well be the culture of the future.”
Like Roy and Tan Malaka, Ho insisted to his Russian hosts that Asia was the next ground zero of world revolution. In the early nineteen-twenties, the Soviet Union started to make its greatest revolutionary investment abroad in China, in the power struggles resulting from the fall of the Qing dynasty, in 1912. The Chinese nationalists had been unable to consolidate the Chinese Republic they declared and were busy fighting various regional warlords. The Comintern saw an opportunity for a coalition between the nationalists and their Communist rivals, and Moscow sent money, materials, and advisers. Ho Chi Minh, Tan Malaka, M. N. Roy, and Mikhail Borodin all made trips to the nationalist stronghold of Canton, as did young Chinese Communists including Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai.
The Chinese Communists were instructed to work with their rivals, the nationalist Kuomintang, to secure China’s sovereignty. Roy disagreed with this strategy, and argued that Communists had to maintain their integrity, lest their cause be taken over by bourgeois collaborators like Chiang Kai-shek, or, in India, Gandhi and Nehru. (For Roy, Nehru, the product of a British private-school education, was simply “the Harrow boy,” and Roy’s wife claimed that “Mr. Gandhi had become an unconscious agent of reaction in the face of a growing revolutionary situation.”) Stalin, who was consolidating power in Moscow, sent Roy to save the Communist-nationalist pact, but in 1927 it failed, and the first phase of the Chinese Civil War began. Chiang Kai-shek instigated a bloody purge of Communists and Mao retreated with a small force into the Jinggang Mountains, on the border of Hunan and Jiangxi. For the Soviets, the outcome was bitter confirmation of China’s backwardness, whereas for Mao, holed up in the wilderness, it seeded mistrust of the Kremlin, which culminated, in the nineteen-sixties, in the Sino-Soviet split. Mao considered Roy a fool and remarked that Roy stood just to the left of Borodin—“but he only stood.” There was irony in the statement, as Mao, by giving up on an alliance with the nationalists and putting all his chips on a peasant rebellion, was in fact following a policy that Roy had pressed the Kremlin to pursue globally for years. Roy was a Maoist before Mao.
Not long afterward, Roy and Tan Malaka fell out with the Comintern. Meanwhile, Ho used his time in Canton to make contacts with Vietnamese revolutionaries there who would help him form the Vietnamese Communist Party.
By the mid-thirties, where Harper’s account winds down, all seemed lost for the Communists in China and the Asian underground more generally. It took until the lead-up to the Second World War for the tables to turn again. Harper’s book ends on a mournful note: “For the underground, there is a particular cadence to this loss, a grief for that which people were unable to build.” He recounts the fates of this early generation of Asian anti-colonialists, most of whom ended their days in despair or worse. In the nineteen-forties, Tan Malaka returned to Java, after a twenty-year absence. Few of the younger nationalists there would likely have realized that the man writing a magnum opus on dialectical materialism on the outskirts of Jakarta was the revolutionary of legend. After the war, while trying to organize resistance to the returning Dutch Army, he was killed by a rival anti-colonial faction. He was buried in an unmarked grave at the base of Mt. Wilis, in East Java. Shortly after Roy returned to India, in 1930, in a deluded attempt to influence the independence movement, he was arrested and imprisoned by the British. Few people had any reason to remember him once he quit the Communists and became a radical humanist, living out his final years in a cottage in the foothills of the Himalayas. Stray visitors to his home were struck by the photograph of Stalin on his mantelpiece.
Ho Chi Minh was a rare figure in the underground who exceeded his wildest expectations. Harper does not really account for this spectacular outcome, and Sidel’s more analytical book is helpful on this ground. Sidel shows how Ho was able to achieve more enduring success than his counterparts elsewhere in part because he could draw extensive support from both nationalist and Communist revolutionaries in China. The Vietnamese nationalist groups were more divided, and their natural patron, the Vietnamese entrepreneurial class, had long been subordinated by Chinese and French capital. Ho, besides being more disciplined and single-minded than either Tan Malaka or Roy, simply had much less fierce local competition. Returning to Indochina, he took control of a patient campaign that ejected the French.
Already, by the late twenties, Harper writes, “there was a sense of the passing of an old guard and the rise of new leaders, more dogmatic thinking and iron party discipline.” This picture more closely corresponds with contemporary Asia, whose Communist heritage is often hard to discern beneath nationalist currents. Even as the Communists prevailed in Vietnam, they were quickly embroiled in a long war with another Communist regime, in Cambodia, exploding the notion of “the great family of socialist nations.” China, meanwhile, fought with the Soviet Union on its border. The current government has made a point of repressing its Muslim and Tibetan populations and cranks up its jingoism every year. In Indonesia, by the mid-sixties, a revolutionary regime had been ousted by a military clique and leftists were being purged in a series of massacres that left hundreds of thousands dead.
All this might lead one to believe that nationalism was always the main driving force in postwar Asia, no matter how Red it once appeared. But some underground figures, like Mao and Ho, never neatly separated their nationalist sentiments from their Communist convictions. Harper and Sidel help us to see that the underground’s record of internationalism and its promise of equality still haunt these post-revolutionary states. There are flashes of such ideals in China, where the Communist Party presents its redoubled effort to rein in the nation’s business class as the fulfillment of its revolutionary mandate, and in Indonesia, where the urban poor protest against an entrenched oligarchy, mostly expressing their discontent, as Tan Malaka foresaw, in the idiom of Islam. In jail in Hong Kong in 1932, Tan Malaka told an interrogator that his voice would be “louder from the grave than it ever was while I walked the earth.” ♦