At the outset, it makes sense to write a mainstream biography of two important figures of the Indian Communist movement, especially given the relatively spare mainstream material on both the quixotic revolutionary known as Virendranath ‘Chatto’ Chattopadhyay, and the much more recognised M.N. Roy: father of the Communist Parties in both Mexico and India, and scrappy participant to the very end in political struggles across the ideological and geographical span of the 20th century. It is in the twinning of the two that the questions begin to emerge. Kavitha Rao’s newest book, Spies, Lies and Allies takes us back and forth across the early to mid-20th century, tracing the life of the two firebrands in parallel. The organising logic seems to be as follows: These were both remarkable men in their own right, whose written work and political organising had large consonances even as they rarely ever overlapped across their careers. And there is, indeed, much here of interest in thinking about their own revolutionary projects, these admirable failures, to those of us engaged in our own recursive attempts to steer this world towards happier times. Yet remarkable and compelling as their stories may be, there is an unsteadiness to this juxtaposition, an awkwardness of movement in how we jump cut across these men and their respective trajectories, which clash only once, however consequently, around 1920 in the Soviet Union. There, as in life, Roy emerges the more successful of the two. There have been other books written on Chatto and Roy before: Rao acknowledges her great debt to Nirode K. Barooah and Sibnarayan Ray’s respective biographies of the two. Hers is by comparison a more modest undertaking, to make accessible the story of two figures unsung to various degrees in the broader, well-peopled pantheon of Indian nationalists and revolutionaries. To compress both lives into two hundred is a task Rao pulls off only fleetingly. The pacing is brisk, moving nimbly across the early decades of their lives with admirable assurance. Yet the book and its author seem to bear the rigour of its production perhaps too openly. The prose often buckles under the weight of its own archival material: Too many endless quotes, and often heavy on names and bureaucratic detail. Over time, Rao’s transparent prose veers much too close to textbook-like tedium. It is a good thing the material speaks for itself. Even amidst the gruelling internecine sniping of communists around the world, counterarguments to counterarguments and committee meetings of varying import, there is much to savour in the scrappy, resilient fire of both these men, which leaves in their wake figures ranging from Bagha Jatin in Bengal to Savarkar in London and Lenin in Soviet Russia. Their steam powers this book to the finish line; a painful, often frustrating but frequently thrilling micro-history of the Indian left. Spies, Lies and Allies: The Extraordinary Lives of Chatto and Roy By Kavitha Rao Westland pp. 272; Rs 499
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