M N Roy

The Man

M.N. ROY

Biography in HINDI (click here)

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The Prophet of a New Order

AN intellectual of international eminence, M.N. Roy (originally Narendra Nath Bhattacharya) was also an active front-rank partici­pant in a large number of major struggles for social emancipation of the twentieth century.

A leading member of the anarcho-nationalist movement inIndia in the early years of the century, he served revolutionary causes in many parts of the world. As a youngster in the terrorist cell in India he swore a life-long commitment and allegiance to the cause of the country's independence which then, in its immediate aspect, meant driving out the British from India.

During the World War I he engaged in the most dangerous venture of smuggling arms into India. His commitment to the cause of revolution took him to far-off and diverse places like Batavia, Tokyo, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, San Fransisco and the campuses of the universities ofColumbia and Stanford.

He was arrested in New York on the eve of America's entry into the war, but he escaped from there to Mexico in company with Evelyn Trent who became his first wife. In Mexico, in collaboration with Borodin he played an important role in promoting revolutionary movement and founded the first communist party in the world outside Soviet Russia.

Later, at the invitation of Lenin, he went to Soviet Russia and was elected a member of the Presidium of the Communist International during the 'twenties. In 1920, Roy presented what are known as his Supplementary Theses on the National and Colonial Question to complement the Theses prepared by Lenin.

He was also the head of the Eastern Department of the Communist International and of the Moscow Oriental University.

In 1927, Roy went to China as the special representative of the Communist International.

In 1930, he returned to India and, being wanted and hunted by the British Indian police, lived and moved incognito. In the short space of about six months' time before being arrested, Roy succeeded in creating an extensive organization of determined people. He was arrested and tried and convicted for sedition/treason — working to deprive the British Crown of its sovereignty over India — and sentenced to twelve years' imprisonment which was reduced to six years by the High Court.

He was released from jail on 20 November 1936 at Dehradun. Ellen with whom he had kept contact through letters over the years of incarceration arrived in India and they were married on 10 March 1937.

From his release in 1936 until the time of his death in 1954 he was engaged in work of socio-cultural renaissance which alone, in his view, could create proper conditions for the evolution of a free society.

During this period, 19 "56-1954, he continued also as an active political worker, first in the Indian National Congress trying to radi­calise it, and later as the leader of his own Radical Democratic Party which was dissolved in 1948 in consequence of a philosophical reorientation.

Roy's most abiding contribution, thus, is the philosophy of Scientific Humanism or Radical Humanism which he evolved in the course of his crowded life of thought and action.

He founded and edited the weekly (now monthly) the radical humanist, in its initial phase the independent india, which celebrates its Golden Jubilee on the 4th April almost two weeks after Roy's birth centenary on March 21, 1987. He was also the founder and editor of the quarterly humanist WAY, in its earlier phase called the MARXIAN WAY.

Amongst the numerous books he wrote those recognised at home and abroad as being of a momentous character are, Materialism, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in China, Russian Revolution, New Humanism, New Orientation, and Reason, Romanticism and Revolution.

He was also the Founder-Director of the Indian Renaissance Institute lodged in his own residential premises at 13 Mohini Road, Dehradun. One of the main purposes of the Institute was "to undertake a study of Indian culture and to revaluate old values in the light of modern knowledge and experience… to examine all current problems and traditions of thought and behaviour with a critical and scientific attitude; and to spread the spirit of Enlightenment, Humanism and search for truth." It was in Ellen's words "the power-house of ideas". A friend, the well-known British historian, Guy Wint described it as "the little Goshen of India".

Roy is generally accounted a failure. It all depends on what norms one applies to judge success and failure. It is true that much lesser men than Roy have achieved what generally passes for success. Roy himself has somewhat wistfully remarked that things had been slipping through his fingers. But that was in about the penultimate phase of his career when he still looked upon power as the necessary means to social and political change. He managed later to transcend that orientation and rose above success and failure, victory and defeat and good and evil. He became a truly disinterested, spiritually free man.

Even if he was a failure, his failures, whatever their nature, were not due so much to either his being wrong in his crucial judgements, or to his being out of touch with realities, as has often been alleged, but to the fact that he was generally far, far ahead of his times, of his surroundings and of his contemporaries. As Tarkunde has well said, "prophet of a new order, he (Roy) could not be the leader of the old". That is the meaning of what is accounted as Roy's failure.

In another sense, Roy's own vision precluded success, for as one of his perceptive commentators observes elsewhere, his success would have meant the end of history and the cessation of time. And neither can have a stop. Roy's ideas, themselves part of history, will ever serve as the fountain source of energising inspiration for life.

Degree of approximation, a perennial process, rather than the perfection of the realised vision, an event essentially dated, is the fulfilment of Roy's dream, call it success, call it failure.

He has done his mighty bit; now the inheritors of his legacy are on trial.

His Thought

Some Basic Ideas

MAN is the archetype of society.

*      *      *

Rising OUT of the background of the law-governed physical nature, the human being is essentially rational. Reason being a biological property, it is not the antithesis of will. Intelligence and emotion can be reduced to a common biological denominator.

MAN need not be afraid of cold immensity of the law-governed universe, because he is part of it, and its laws are working also in him. Its law-governedness functions in him as rationality. And man has the advantage over all other parts of the Universe of being endowed with intelligence which enables him to know these laws and be conscious of his own innate rationality.

THE supreme importance of man results from the fact that in him the physical process of becoming has reached the highest pitch so far. Humanism thus ceases to be a mystic and poetic view of life. Harmo­nised with humanism, materialist philosophy can have an ethics whose values require no other sanction than man's innate rationality.

MAN is essentially a rational being.   His basic urge is not to believe, but to question, to know.

"man is the measure of everything." The development of the individual is the measure of social progress.

if social progress is measured by technological development and the consequent increase of productivity of human labour, means further effacement of the individual, intellectual regimentation and standard­ization of human creativeness, then that is progress on the reverse gear.

quest for freedom and search for truth constitute the basic urge of human progress.

freedom is progressive disappearance of all restrictions on the unfolding of the potentialities of individuals as human beings, and not as cogs in the wheel of a mechanised social organism.

freedom is not an abstract ideal. For the masses of people in India as well as in other countries, it has a definite connotation. It means freedom from all sorts of wants, privations and disadvantages, which often render their daily life a drudgery.

FOR creating a new world of freedom, revolution must go beyond an economic organization of society- Freedom does not necessarily follow from the capture of political power in the name of the oppressed and exploited classes and abolition of private property in the means of production.

A GOOD society can be created only by good men. A rational society, a moral society only by rational and moral men. Since the poten­tialities of goodness and reason are in every human being, they can be developed.

THE alternative to parliamentary democracy is not dictatorship but organized democracy.

TO MAKE democracy effective, power must always remain vested in the people, and there must be ways and means for the people to wield the sovereign power effectively, not periodically, but from day to day.

PHILOSOPHY of New Humanism starts in everything from man and his needs. The beginning is man; man is the original constituent of society, as citizen is the basic unit of state. Man created both as means of his freedom.

MATERIALISM does not preclude the appreciation of what is called the higher aspects of human life. It only maintains that all the so-called spiritual aspects of man's life do not transcend this world, but are inherent in man as a biological being. In proportion as man develops intellectually, his knowledge broadens, the higher values inherent in man, the capacity of taking interest in other things than the physical existence, the cultivation of finer sentiments, arts, science, etc. become more and more possible.

Morality must be referred back to man's innate rationality. Only then can man be moral spontaneously and voluntarily. Reason is the only sanction of morality, which is an appeal to conscience; and conscience in the last analysis is nothing mystic or mysterious. It is a biological function on the level of consciousness.

Secularism is not a political institution; it is a cultural atmosphere which cannot be created by the proclamation of individuals however highly placed and sincere.

IN the last analysis, education of the citizen is the condition for such a reorganization of society as will be conducive to common progress and prosperity without encroaching upon the freedom of the individual.

His  Work

Some Opinions

Fragments of a Prisoners Diary • India's Message

As a twentieth century Voltaire, he has made at his best a scathing criticism of religious mode of thought buttressed on superstition and faiths.

AMRIT BAZAR PATRIKA, Calcutta

This book is a classic by every test.

deccan herald, Hyderabad

Reason, Romanticism and Revolution

He has written just the kind of book humanists need just now to stimulate their own reliving and re-thinking of the past....In every sentence, borrowed or his own, Mr. Roy re-lives the past, not with the exuberant make-believe of the story-teller but with the passionate intensity of the philosopher at grips with the problems of his own time, for whom all history is contemporary history.

the plain view, London

Revolution and counter-Revolution in China

(This) is an original contribution of high calibre towards the understanding of the "riddle of China", as it lays bare the present socio-economic problems in the light of past history and provides a perspective and a guide for the future. The book is more than a study of contemporary China; it draws important lessons therefrom... a remarkable combination of historical and cultural knowledge dialectical analysis and personal observations.

international journal, Toronto, Canada

Whether autobiographical or not, his narrative achieves a high standard of factual impartiality. He does not conceal his views; indeed he argues them at length. But the historian is never lost in the propagandist.

the times(Literary Supplement), London

New Humanism

He has blazed a new trail...the book should be read by every student of contemporary history.

NATIONAL STANDARD, Bombay

New Orientation

The book is of live interest and it vibrates with democratic ideals and any reader who takes this book will not leave it reading from cover to cover.

the coimbatore times, Coimbatore

The Russian Revolution

One of the best political minds in Asia changing its attitude to Russia.

MANCHESTER GUARDIAN, London

Materialism

It will make idealists sit up and think...the students of philosophy will find it a veritable storehouse of knowledge.

the hindu, Madras

Science and Philosophy

Rich in thought and inspiration, shall help tremendously the cause of rationalism and humanism.

THE CALCUTTA REVIEW, Calcutta

Fragments of a Prisoner's Diary: Letters from Jail

thisbook is of remarkable interest. The interest is threefold. It presents a panorama of the great Leftist movements in Europe, which rose to prominence during and after the first World War…… Its second interest is its lurid, but in my opinion, truthful analysis of the mind and the impossibilities of our political leadership. Nowhere have Mr. Gandhi and Gandhism been subjected to such scorching criticism as in this volume; but I don't suppose they will shrivel up….

In this field of criticism, intended to be fruitful and good, though bound to be unpleasant, Mr Roy displays a power of insight and analysis and bold frank expression which even those who feel annoy­ed will have to admire. I wonder if he can succeed in shocking the Hindu mind into realism and rationalism. He is an iconoclast in the land of idols..…

Thirdly, the book is a revelation, unconscious, true, unvarnished, of one of the most remarkable personalities of contemporary India, perhaps the most remarkable. From hints and incidental statements we can gather that in body Mr Roy has been all over the world, not as a tourist, but as a participator in movements, surface or under­ground, which aim at a Leftist renovation of the world, her face restored to socialist freshness and smiles and after removing the tear furrowed capitalistic wrinkles....

If any person makes a collection of all the books mentioned in these letters from jail, it would make a complete, dynamic library of modernism in many of its branches, both thought and life.

Sir C. Ramalingam Reddy

In memory of late Shri S. N. Munshi, space donated by Mrs Savitri M. Nigam, Lucknow.

Appreciations

Indeed, impressive though he was as a speaker, he never uttered a word merely to create an effect; and he could be assertive only because he was absolutely truthful, according, of course, to his own lights.

These are not the qualities of a purposeful politician who, even when no opportunist, cannot afford to forget expediency; and it is difficult to call M.N. Roy a saint, since at least in the popular mind the concept of saintliness is based on rejection of much that makes life pleasurable. He had little use for such emasculated ideal; and the good life he wished to see established on earth is a full life, a life, integrated like his own, in which both mind and body receive their just dues. Inevitably, therefore, he was widely misunderstood in India where virtue has long been either cloistered or compartmental....

Sudhindranath Dutta

First philosopher of modern India.

It is not enough to say that Roy was a great intellectual. He was also a man who had the courage of his convictions and the courage to act according to them. Galileo contributed much to thought but he shrank back from his convictions when danger to his life threatened him. But Bruno gave his life for his convictions. We have to respect Roy because he gave his whole life for his convictions.

Tarkateerth Laxman Shastri Joshi

In his youth a mathematician of repute, he sacrificed his career to the struggle for India's independence from Great Britain. Exiled from India, he sought refuge in the US, where he helped organize an Indian independence movement of his fellow-countrymen in exile during World War I…… Always of a philosophical and thoughtful turn of mind, in his last years he became the outstanding figure in a movement which he called Radical Humanism, and was still engaged along with a number of younger disciples in a philosophical re-examination of his New Humanism……

Bertram D. Wolfe

…. There was a good deal of difference between us and yet I felt attracted towards him by his remarkable intellectual capacity.

Jawaharlal Nehru

…… He rose far above politics and got at universal human values, and this, I fear, is an accomplishment he did not share with many, either in Asia or in the West……

It is my conviction that his influence upon the present is necessarily limited. Neither India nor the rest of the world is suffi­ciently advanced to appreciate or benefit from what Roy stood for in the latter years of his life. There are too many undemocratic democrats among us, and too many illiberal liberals, and unpeaceful pacifists, and unchristian Christians. We are not yet ready to honor meaningfully this truly human humanist. The proper time will come, but meanwhile those of us who seek to overtake M.N. Roy have yet a long and toilsome journey.

Robert C. North

…… Yet he was great, and his life was not a failure- His greatness was the rarest kind of achievement, the consistent maintenance and development of his own living inwardness, his Shelleyan fire, his resistance to world's slow stain and all that poisons or suffocates the living centre of personal being…… The master passion of his life was the urge for freedom…… This freedom was for him an empirical fact, a psychological urge at the root of every man's personal being, and at the same time it was a cosmic fact, the evolutionary striving, just as man's rational nature answered to and was derived from the law-governed Universe…..

H.J. Blackham

As a token of his philosophical consistency, he once disbanded his party. What many of his friends consider as the one great mistake of his life, I see in it the incomparable achievement of an ingenuous philosopher of whom both the Eastern and the Western traditions ought to be proud.

Agehananda Bharati

CONGRESS socialism has been less social and more political in its ways of thought and conduct. The communists seem to be rather echoes than voices. Royism is sui generis. Not that I agree with all of what Roy says- I am I, and he is he- But his message, for he is after all a philosopher turned politician, deserves consideration in and by the widest commonalty of India, and all those who think that man is man for all that, and that the pure light of our essential humanity should not be stained and deflected too badly by the many coloured dome of race, creed, caste, and religion and class. For, it may be conceded that man is slightly older than all the religions and nations now racing for power to devour each other; that man is nature, while the rest are mere history, and perhaps moonshine, here now, there tomorrow, and nowhere day after, and that we should serve man as man, making life better, more beautiful and more happy.

Of course,  Roy will not  succeed.   Nobody will.   For,  then history will cease, and time disappear, which they certainly won't.

Dr. Sir C. Ramalingam Reddy

CONTACT with the world and the erudition he had acquired in the course of his long Odyssey had in the meantime crystallised in his mind a course for the revolution in India which was shaping itself under Mahatma Gandhi's leadership and the inspiration of the national genius. In 1936, he was talked about as a possible leader of the nation; had he consented to a compromise in his ideology and convictions he might have pulled on with the Congress and shared the honour and glory which it won later. But his rationalism was too unbending, his rejection of the via media too irretrievable, to allow him to take a step that was not justified by his inner light.…. His unshakable conviction in his own judgment and his superiority to the temptations of an easy leadership make him out as a man of rare integrity.….

Hindustan Standard, Calcutta

If liberalism and rationalism survive in India,  Sri Roy should  be periodically remembered as one of their most distinguished champions.

Manchester Guardian, London

To have been associated with the great Lenin himself and lived through a mighty and world shaking revolution should itself be something of an achievement, but to have been associated with revolution in four countries and be the founder of a new philosophy has been given to only one man—Manvendra Nath Roy.

Free Press Bulletin, Bombay

His was a sophisticated mind, patiently tolerant of confused men but for ever tearing at confused thinking. His lifelong fight was with ideas, not with men, a mature intellectual stance which was naturally misread by most of his contemporaries.

The Times of India, New Delhi

Radical Humanist / Independent India

Philosopher, activist Earl Bertrand Russell, just then coming out in admiration of his courageous articulation in behalf of sense and reason, took time off to write to the Radical Humanist on the occasion of its Silver Jubilee emphasising how pressing and urgent, more pressing than ever, was the need for "articulate radical consciousness" if the world was to be saved from its threatened annihilation.

Our journal, which in its twin incarnations—the Independent India and Radical Humanist—ce]ebrates on 4 April 1987 its golden jubilee, has consistently served as the undaunted vehicle of the "articulate radical consciousness". It's history in a way has been "coincident with the history of political thought and political action of contem­porary India".

Whatever the degree of openness, freedom and democracy the country to-day can boast of, not a little of it is due to the strident voice of constructive dissent that has been of this journal's right from the days of the nonage of the nationalist movement to the darkest days of the late Emergency.

The history of the journal is somewhat longer than the chrono­logy of the golden jubilee suggests. Its real chronology goes back to 1931. As Independent India it first came out in 1931 soon after Roy's clandestine return to the country. It was started with little capital but with lot of determination in a most adverse environment. Soon after Roy was arrested, the journal had to cease or rather suspend publication.

Within about six months of Roy's release from Jail, the Independent India resumed publication and its first issue came out on April 4, 1937 from Bombay. But there were no more resources in 1937 than there were in 1931. It was a miserable capital of four hundred rupees (Rs. 400'-) scraped together by Maniben Kara and V.B. Karnik—those indefatigable, ever optimistic foster parents of the journaHhat the venture was launched and has continued virtually uninterruptedly to its golden jubilee. This is no place to recount

All the heart-breaking vicissitudes the journal has passed through. It is a tribute to the spirit and inspiration of the Founder-Editor that it still goes on under the momentum that he imparted.

Independent India started with the message which is still green : "Independence is not enough; it is only the means to an end— freedom through genuine democracy".

There soon grew around Independent India a movement of people's freedom, drawing inspiration from its message and the con­crete programme for realization of freedom formulated in its first editorial which can still serve, by and large,.as the agenda for the country. It called for the radical transformation of Indian society, a task which still awaits dedicated work notwithstanding the rhetoric of our passage to the twenty-first century. Political change was even then seen as a necessary means to historically overdue social trans­formation.

During the dangerous years of war, which faced it within barely two years of its start, the Independent India carried on a fearless campaign against the fascist tendency of nationalism, and at the same time elaborated the idea of Radical Democracy as the politics of post­war world.

As the days went by, event following event, experience deepen­ing and enlarging, Radical Democracy developed into Radical Humanism, party broadened into a movement. The journal changed its name from Independent India to Radical Humanist.

The story of this transformation may be best tcld in the words of the editorial explanation of the change :

"India having attained national independence, from the general point of view, independent India is no longer an ideal; it has become a reality, and that reality is so very different from the picture drawn in the first issue of this weekly, that it can no longer retain the old name without misleading and creating confusion. Therefore, it assumes a new name which will more truly describe its new role.

"Experience has influenced our ideas. We have moved away from Marxism to Radicalism, from formal democracy to Humanism, from internationalism to Cosmopolitanism.

"But the basic urge of the movement has remained constant. It is the quest for freedom. The Radical Humanist will give expression to that urge.

"The Radical Humanist will not appeal to the masses: its endea­vour will be to awaken and quicken the urge for freedom in indivi­dual men and women in whose experience alone freedom can become a reality. And free msn alone can constitute a free society."

In the years following the passing away of Ellen Roy, who was a host by herself, problems upon problems piled up and went on multiplying—problems of all sorts.

The way out was seen in reducing the frequency of the journal. It was turned from weekly to monthly. Tarkunde who had mean­while shifted from Bombay to Delhi took over the responsibility and also provided much of the wherewithal.

The journal continued and to-day, in its fifty-first year, it is still at the crease—no mean achievement when one considers how some of its well-provided, almost resource-smothered, contemporaries went the way of morning grass, withered at eve. Even the great Nav Jivan, the great organ of the "Father of the Nation", which wanted neither men nor money, did not long survive its great founder and vanished into thin air.

This comparison should not be just a matter for self-gratulation. It should serve as a sobering thought- Can those who call themselves Radical Humanists rest on their oars?

AGENDA FOR THE COUNTRY

The Programme Outlined in the First

Editorial of the INDEPENDENT INDIA

• Establishment of   a genuine democratic State, a government of the people, by the people, not for the people.

• Removal of obstacles to nation's prosperity, which can result only from rapid growth of modern mechanised industry.

• Introduction of measures which will guarantee the cultivator of land inalienable possession of the entire product of his labour minus a specified contribution to the national exchequer.

• Abolition of all privileges and institutions which militate against the establishment of democratic freedom and constitute un­necessary burden on national economy and therefore are antagonistic to general welfare.

• Adoption of measures calculated to transform hoarded wealth into productive capital, and to guarantee distribution of newly created wealth so as to expand production and thus to quicken national productivity.

Issue dated 4 April 1937

Radical Humanist Independent India

Some Opinions

. . .I will not refrain from expressing my warm appreciation for what "The Radical Humanist" has done this far and my sincere desire that it may in future as in the past consistently further the cause of humanity which is. . .the cause of maturity and freedom in an organised world.

Dr. J.P. Van Praag Former Chairman, IHEU

. . .Especially I may note, you have achieved a maturity and a confi­dence that Humanists in other lands are still seeking. May your light ever brighten ! May it illumine, not only in India but far beyond, both those who still live in the mists of mythology and those who live on the hard facts of materialism…

Gerald Wendt

…This journal has put forward its humanist views with clarity and I hope it will continue this work in the years to come.

Jawaharlal Nehru

His weekly continued to spread his ideas in the midst of most difficult and trying circumstances. His books were appearing one after another. This indeed was a great achievement for a revolutionary thinker in a backward land dominated by tradition like India.

S.K.K. (a Congressman)