Comintern and the Destiny of Communism in India: 1919-1943 : Dialectics of Real and a Possible History

After the opening of Moscow’s Comintern archives and the archives of the Communist Party of Great Britain in the 1990s, this is the first full-length study of the impact of the Communist International (Comintern) on the shaping of Indian Communism. Based on materials collected from these once forbidden archives, the book also takes into consideration the private papers of Horst Krueger in Berlin, a whole range of inner-party documents and the new Comintern historiography (primarily Russian and German, apart from English) that has developed in the west over the last one decade. It provides a refreshingly new analysis of the decisive role of Comintern in the making of Indian Communism and throws light on many documents which were suppressed or unknown till now. This reinterpretation of the role of Comintern presents a challengingly new understanding of the problems, complexities and crises that Communism in India has encountered in its long history.