From an occasionally employed, lower middle-class Bengali Muslim intellectual on the borderline of starvation in the city, he was to become the chief accused at the Meerut communist trials started by the colonial government in 1929. What was the road travelled before challenging imperialism ‘from the dock’? In 1913 Muzaffar Ahmad (1889–1973) was just one more individual adrift in the sea of migrants arriving from rural Bengal to Calcutta. His ...
