Bengal Terrorism and Marxist Left- Aspects of Regional Nationalism in India, 1905-1942 (An Old and Rare Book)

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This book is a survey of the terrorist movement in Bengal from 1905 through 1942, with primary emphasis on the period of the 1920's and 1930's when many terrorists were becoming converted to Marxist ideology. Specifically this study seeks to assess the importance of the terrorist movement and the terrorist conversion to Marxism in the overall nationalist movement, to explain the processes of this conversion to Marxism, and finally, to explain the failure of the terrorists-turned-Marxists to unite into a single party of the left. While the primary focus is on Bengal in the 1920's and 1930's the pre-1920 terrorist movement has been summarized and some attention has been devoted to terrorism in other parts of India.

An important feature of West Bengal politics in the years immediately following independence was the proliferation of small, independent leftist parties. Virtually all of these parties drew some or all of their membership from the terrorist groups first organised early in the twentieth century. This fact raises the questions how and why these conversions from terrorism to some form of leftism took place. In their memoirs and in inter- views with the author, former terrorists have generally credited the intellectual appeal of Marxism with motivating their con- versions. But while intellectual attraction was important, other factors perhaps had equal or greater influence. A review of the background of this political transformation should bring these factors to light and provide new insights into the nature of the terrorist and Marxist aspects of Bengali nationalism.

This study seeks to assess the relative importance of both the terrorist movement and the terrorist conversion to Marx- ism in the overall nationalist struggle. It seeks more specifically to explain the process by which many members of the militantly Hindu terrorist organizations adopted a new and atheistic Marxist ideology. And finally it seeks to explain why these terrorists-turned-Marxists did not form into a single revolutionary party of the left but formed a variety of weak and impotent rival parties.

Before World War II, there were four serious outbreaks of terrorism in Bengal, each associated with an important episode in the county-wide nationalist movement. Although these out- breaks were markedly different from one another, each also displayed a similar pattern of development. An outbreak characteristically began with the formation or reorganization of parties determined to attack the British raj in India by violent means. Overt terrorist activity would follow when some event the Partition of Bengal, World War I, the Gandhi-led Non-Cooperation Movement in the early 1920's, or the Civil Disobedience Movement in the early 1930's-precipitated conditions of popular agitation. The British responded to each of these outbreaks with special legislation, preventive arrests, and detentions, effectively ending open activity, but the terrorists in jail and in detention camps planned and reorganized for the next outbreak when some new event in the nation-wide anti-imperialist struggle would provide the opportunity. It is therefore evident that terrorism was an expression of Bengali nationalism which cannot be considered outside of the context of the larger all-India nationalist movement.