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REMEMBERING M.N. ROY ON HIS 119TH BIRTHDAY.
--- by R.M. Pal
M.N. Roy’s 119th birthday falls on March 21, 2006. He began his active revolutionary life at the time of wars and revolutions in the first half of the 20th century. The process of dissolution of empires in Europe started during World War I and concluded after World War II. Even though the allies came out victorious in the war, the imperial powers among them, Britain, France, and the Netherlands among others lost their empires in far-flung colonies in Asia & Africa. A number of ex-colonies proclaimed their independence of foreign domination after World War II. One of the first to become independent was India, which set itself as a model for others. Apart from the collapse of empires and the beginning of the emergence of new nations and states, (what is now called the Third World) revolutions also took place in some countries. According to Karl Marx revolutions were to take place in industrialised countries like Great Britain & Germany. But contrary to his assessment, the first revolution of the century took place in a backward country, Russia, under Lenin’s leadership. Power was seized by the highly centralised Bolshevik Party, which took upon itself the task of radically changing Russian society. It established a totalitarian dictatorship and financed and promoted revolutionary activities / movements abroad, which drew inspiration from the Bolsheviks. A different kind of revolution took place in China after a long drawn out civil war and a war against Japan. Roy was one of the most outstanding personalities during the period.
In the diversity and richness of his revolutionary experience, he had few equals. He took part in revolutionary movements in India, in Mexico, and in the Soviet Union as well as in China. National political leaders like Gandhi and Nehru, and not to mention intellectuals of the time, did not have quite the continental range of his direct political practice and experience. He was also a prolific writer. He wrote in several languages, English, Russian, Spanish, and German and also edited a number of periodicals from 1922 till his death in January 1954. He has left records and statements of revolutionary programme, critiques of Indian traditional political economy and cultural mores as well as personal recollections, some of which show his ideological development from revolutionary nationalism to communism and finally to radical/cosmopolitan humanism. His career illustrates three major phases and aspects of intellectual-cultural history of our age illuminating the subtle and complex interconnection among them.
In an autobiographical statement in a letter to the U. S. embassy while applying for a visa he wrote: I was born as Narendranath Bhattacharya and adopted the name of Manabendra Nath Roy while in the U. S. A. Even as a school boy he was known for his concern for the down-trodden. During his school days he organised a volunteer group which nursed people stricken with infectious diseases like cholera, chickenpox and smallpox and raised funds to feed the starving in times of famine.
The year 1905 was important in Narendra Bhattacharya’s life. His father died in May that year. The partition of Bengal was formally announced in July and put into effect in October. That provoked a countrywide protest. Militant nationalist groups and secret revolutionary societies, some of which were already in existence in 1902, took the lead. They launched ‘Anushilan Samiti’ for the purpose. The Samiti sent Roy to Orissa to organise famine relief work. He was still a student then. On his return he became a member of the inner circle of the Samiti. He was almost simultaneously admitted to the newly started Bengal National College of which Aurobindo Ghosh – later Sri Aurobindo - was the Principal. Roy passed the entrance examination for university studies with distinction and also won a medal. He then studied engineering and chemistry at the Bengal Technical Institute. At the same time he organised a close knit underground revolutionary group in his own village which experimented with the manufacture of explosives and imparted shooting practice to its members in the Sunderbans.
Roy spent the years between 1911-13 mainly in reviving and reorganising the fragmented groups of revolutionaries. After discussions it was decided in 1913-14 that Jatin Mukherjee (Bagha Jatin) would be in command of the underground revolutionaries in Bengal with Narendra as his chief lieutenant. A loose and informal federation of revolutionary groups known an ‘Yugantar’ came into being.
In August 1914 shortly after the outbreak of World War I “Yugantar” established contacts with Indian revolutionary groups in South-East Asia, the U.S.A., and Germany. The British owned commercial company, Bird & Co. at Garden Reach was robbed of Rs. 18,000/- in broad daylight in February 1915. It was the work of Narendra and his group to finance their insurrection plan. He was arrested on suspicion but released on bail; while on bail he absconded. In March of the same year a group called Anniversary of India Independence Committee in Berlin came to Kolkata promising military and financial support of the German Government to revolutionaries in Bengal. In April Narendra, under assumed name of Charles A. Martin, went to Batavia to negotiate with the German Counsel on the subject. From there he proceeded to Shanghai where the German Counsel-General accepted his plan and agreed to arrange for the dispatch of 13000 rifles with four rounds of ammunition for each rifle. The cargo was to be dropped at Raimangal in the Sunderbans.
In June Narendra returned to India to finalise plans and arrangements for unloading and distribution of the expected arms and for completing details of simultaneous uprisings in Kolkata, East Bengal and Orissa. Centres were set up for training cadres in signalling, telegraphy, and guerilla warfare. However, the promised arms did not arrive due to a blunder committed by the German captains of the tanker and the schooner. So Narendra was again sent on 15th August, by Jatin Mukherjee to Batavia to renegotiate with the Germans. In the meantime the police discovered the plans of the revolutionaries. Bagha Jatin was arrested. Jatin was surrounded at his hiding place near Balasore and wounded in the exchange of fire. He died in hospital.
As in 1908, the revolutionary movement in Bengal was virtually crushed in 1915. Narendra, however, continued to believe that with the help of arms from abroad it would be possible to revive and reorganise it. He proceeded to Japan and then to China with a view to negotiate with San Yet Sen and the German ambassador in Nanking for supply of arms. He was advised by the ambassador to go to Germany to get his plans approved by the German imperial staff. He then proceeded to the United States on a forged French Indian passport in the name of Charles A. Martin, a theology student from Pondicherry. After 10 months of highly hazardous travels under various names and disguises in Malaya, Indonesia, Indo-China, the Philippines, Japan, Korea and China, Narendra reached San Fransico on 15th Jan, 1916. The British police were after him. The news of his arrival was published in a local daily. Narendra immediately decamped to Paoalto where he was provided temporary refuge by the younger brother of one of his revolutionary colleagues. He then changed his name to Manbendranath Roy. His host Dhan Gopal Mukharjee introduced him to the president of Stanford University, Dr. David Star Jardan, who was a Fascist with a democratic socialist outlook and to Evelyn Trent, a graduate student at Stanford. Jardan gave his introduction to Gen. Salvador Alvazado, progressive governor of the Province of Yucatan in Mexico.
When Philip Spratt1 came to India Roy wrote a number of letters to Sudhindra Nath Dutta (the great Bengali poet and critic), who was in the Statesman, requesting him to help Spratt in getting a job in the Statesman. I give below an excerpt from Spratt’s letter to Roy in connection with ‘The Marxian Way’.
“I am surprised to find D. P. Mukherjee among the advisors of the proposed periodical ‘The Marxian Way’. I have admired his wide reading in sociology, but found him difficult to pin down to anything definite. I did not like the proposed ‘The Marxian Way’ at first. Way is becoming a cliché and Marxism is narrow. But clichés don’t matter except to aesthetes, and as you interpret it, Marxism is not narrow. I like your statement, and could almost accept it myself. I should certainly not propose any change in it.”
Some of the best writings of M. N. Roy, India’s Message, Philosophy and Practice of Fascism, the Ideal of Indian Womanhood etc. were done in the years 1930-36. He wrote under very difficult circumstances.
As Prof. S. N. Ray, editor of the “Selected Works” and biographer of Roy’s 3rd Volume2, writes in his introduction to volume IV of Roy’s ‘Selected Works’ (published by OUP), “The terrible heat of Bareilly (Roy was lodged in Bareilly Jail for some time) where he was classified as a “B” Class prisoner and allowed to receive and send out only one letter a month. Pandit Nehru noted in his jail diary in June 1933, that though the prisoners were kept in physically ruinous conditions, his spirit kept itself above the harsh and debilitating circumstances and retained his integrity and vigour. I give below a few excerpts from the Volume ‘India’s Message’, and ‘The Ideal of Indian Womanhood’, generally recognized to be as some of his best writings. The excerpts are reproduced from Volume IV of the “Selected Works of M. N. Roy”. Pandit Nehru wrote that the life of one of the bravest and ablest of India’s sons was sliding down hill to the brick. In jail Roy lost weight and developed cardiac trouble. The abscess in his left ear for which he had to undergo operation in Moscow and Berlin began causing him acute pain and he showed symptoms of incipient tuberculosis.
When Roy wrote his Prison diary he was still very much a Marxist, and his preoccupation with the philosophical consequences of modern science was definitely in the Marxist tradition.3 Marx strongly emphasised the close interdependence of theory and praxis. His revolutionary programmes and political economy were inspired and sustained by a materialist-humanist philosophy of which the earliest formulations are to be found in the “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844”, the “Theses on Feuerbach” (1845), and the German Ideology (1845-46) written jointly with Engels. At his death Marx left his manuscripts in a chaotic state. Engels, his lifelong friend and collaborator, survived him by thirteen years, and became the keeper of his archives, editor of several of his manuscripts, and the most authoritative interpreter and expounder of what came to be known as Marxism. It was Engels who provided the most elaborate exposition of the Marxist Weltanschauung in Anti-Duehring. He claimed that the Marxian dialectic was ‘the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society, and with man’s role in both. Engels extended the scope of their system to include nature. He advanced the principle of Marxian dialectics ‘far beyond the categories of human history, in the realms of biology, physics and mathematics’. He did this most elaborately in his work Dialectics of Nature, edited and published posthumously by Ryazanov in 1925 (translated into English by Roy’s one-time colleague Clemens Dutt). The three followers of Marx who had deeply influenced Roy were Plekhanov, Lenin, and Thalheimer; and on this and other issues they accepted Engels as their mentor. Science and Philosophy may thus be seen as a work in the tradition of Engels-Plekhanov-Lenin-Thalheimer.
‘However, though still a Marxist, Roy was gradually becoming aware that the Marxist philosophy required careful re-examination and, on several points, reformulation. Roy’s own understanding of Marxism had matured during the twenties; he was familiar with the contemporary debates among the Marxists over the somewhat heretical interpretations offered by scholarly ideologues like Abram Deborin (who had edited the works of Feuerbach, and the Library of Materialists) in the periodical under the Banner of Marxism between 1925 and 1929 by George Lukacs in Geschichte and Klassenbewusstsein (1923), and by Karl Korsch in Marxisms and Philosophie (1923).’ – from Science and Philosophy – S.N. Ray’s note.
‘For the average educated man, the term philosophy has a very vague meaning, but sweeping application; it stands not only for speculative thought, but also for poetic fancy. In India, particularly, this vague, all embracing sense is generally prevalent. Philosophy is not distinguished from religion and theology. Indeed, what is believed to be the distinctive feature of Indian philosophy is that it has not broken away from the mediaeval tradition, as modern Western philosophy did in the seventeenth century.
Philosophy is older than religion. It is as old as homo sapiens. In the process of the intellectual evolution of man, reason appears earlier than faith. Instinct is the primitive form of reason; at a later stage of intellectual evolution, it still represents the automatic, physiological functioning of reason, which itself is a biological property of higher organisms. In a rudimentary form, it can be traced even in higher animals. Our knowledge of animal psychology is still very inadequate. Nevertheless, sufficient data have been collected to indicate that faith does not enter into the mental make-up of higher animals, in which the presence of intelligence and emotion is clearly discernible. Going a step further in the process of organic evolution, we find absence of faith in the primitive human being. Contrary to the prevalent notion, belief in God and soul is not inherent in human consciousness. It is not human nature to believe in the supernatural. Anthropological investigations have definitely repudiated that venerable dictum. Among primitive races, the notions of God and soul are absent. The earliest form of religion – animism – is preceded by the belief in magical power; and magic does not represent belief in the supernatural. It is not miracle. The faith in magic is the most primitive form of determinism – the crudest conception of nature as an order in which there are laws- effects following causes. The rationalist instinct, expressed in the crude form of determinism called magic, eventually led man to search for the cause of natural phenomena. The earlier stages of spiritual development are marked with the conviction that everything must have a cause. This conviction is the mother of philosophy as well as the science.’ – from Science and Philosophy.
‘Religiosity is not an Indian monopoly. It is more widespread in this country than in others because in no other civilised country the masses are so very ignorant. Ignorance and religiosity are causally connected. Besides, what is called naturally religious temperament, is really a cultivated habit. Therefore, it may persist even in educated people capable of casting off superstitious beliefs if they want to. Nor is it a matter of voluntary choice. It is a psychological phenomenon which has an interesting history. Soul, mind, or personality is not a static entity. Like any other empirical reality, it also has a natural history. At any given moment, it is the sum total of past experience, the major portion of which, however, remains subconscious. Emotional or spiritual life is largely dominated by impressions and impulses buried in the subconscious mind. Hence the mystic nature of the psychic phenomena.
‘About the time that the story of Shanti Devi was widely advertised as a knock-out blow to scientific disbelief in the doctrine of reincarnation, I read in an American periodical the account of a ‘religious experience’. In that case also, the subject was a girl of that accursed land of rank materialism. Nevertheless, the account shows how religious temperament can be cultivated, and the mystic religious experiences result from preconceived notions, being nothing more mysterious than auto-hypnosis. Such experiences are familiar phenomena in India. But they are seldom observed critically and recorded as data for psychological or psychiatric investigation. Superstition reads in them manifestations of the supernatural; and they reinforce the religiosity, not only of the uneducated credulous, but often of the learned skeptic.’
Prof. Ray writes in his introduction to the Indian Womanhood, Roy was certainly familiar with the works of the Bengal’s most popular novelist Sarat Chandra Chatterji (1876-1938). Roy severely criticised the traditional Hindu attitude and behavior towards women, and passionately advocated sexual equality. In his second letter from jail (6th September 1931) Roy wrote enthusiastically about Sarat Chandra’s most controversial novel ‘Sesh Prasna’ (The Last Question) in which the heroine, Kamal outrages everyone by not only talking as an emancipated woman but trying to live like one. ‘How she pulls down all gods – customs and traditions, sanctified through ages, and gives sound lessons to young India which piously follows Tagore and Gandhi. From the next letter (17th October, 1931) we learn that Roy was for a while ‘tempted to translate’ Sesh Prasna which, in his view, ‘is really a landmark in Indian Renaissance. It has set agog the placid and sickening atmosphere of Bengali romanticism and mystic sentimentalism’. He saw Kamal, ‘the Dionysian girl as a bold standard-bearer—no longer of revolt, but of revolution’.
The Ideal of Indian Womanhood may be perceived in this context as a continuation of the spirit of the Indian renaissance, of which the first great figures were Rammohun Roy and H. L. V. Derozio (1809-31). However, Roy’s approach was more radical, his perception having been sharpened by his experiences abroad and his studies of Marx, Freud, Westermark, Frazer, and other modern thinkers. He had noted the similarity between the orthodox Hindu view of the role of women and the ideology of Fascism—Nazism. Besides adopting the Marxist method and overview, he was probably familiar with some of Marx’s specific observations on the exploitation of women in patriarchal and bourgeois societies, subsequently collected and published under the titles Marx on the Question of Women and Women and Communism (1973). The ideal leaves us in no doubt that his view was profoundly influenced by Friedrich Engels’ The origin of the family, private property and the State. He did not mention Mary Wollstonecraft’s vindication of the Rights of Women (1972) or John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1769), a book that had so very greatly influenced young Bankim Chandra and the Brahmo youth of the late nineteenth century. But he had read August Bebel’s Women and Socialism (1883), was a very close friend of the disciples of Rosa Luxemburg (1870-1919), and was a colleague of not a few outstanding women who occupied leading positions in the Comintern in the 1920s, such as, Angelica Balabanoff, Clara Zetkin, Alexandra Kollontai, and Ruth Fischer. Angelica was the Secretary of the Comintern at its foundation Congress, and she subsequently published her fascinating autobiography, My life as a Rebel (1938). Alexandra was successively Soviet Ambassador to Norway and Sweden, and plenipotentiary in Mexico, and she wrote several books, among them, The Social Basis of the Women’s Question (1909), Society and Motherhood (1916), Women and the Economic Evolution (1921), and The Woman Worker and Peasant in Soviet Russia (1921). ---- From The Ideal of Indian Womanhood.
‘It is reported that the other day Margaret Sanger interviewed Mahatma Gandhi, and had a prolonged discussion with him on the question of birth control. Since then, the controversy has been carried on in the press. The opposing arguments are familiar enough. But the interesting point is that the Mahatma disapproves not of birth control as such, but of the use of contraceptives for the purpose. He is of the opinion that married people should abstain from sex, if they don’t want children. He simply brushed aside the complications which will surely result from the proposed practice of married celibacy. He would not admit that this novel method of birth control is a physical impossibility for the ordinary mortal made of flesh and blood.
‘Then, there arises the obvious question – why marry at all? Why does not the Mahatma recommend mass ‘brahmacharya’? Instead of making the curious proposition that each home should be transformed practically into a monastery, why not advise young men and women to become monks and nuns. The answer is not difficult to find. For the Hindu, marriage is a religious duty. But then comes the contradiction : to breed is also a religious duty. According to Hinduism, the object of marriage is to have children. Childless marriage is regarded as a misfortune. If the wife fails to give birth to children, the husband is entitled to marry again. If we are to be guided by strict scriptural injunctions, birth control, even as advised by Gandhi, cannot be legitimately practiced because, that would be violating scriptural rules and social traditions. Yet, Gandhi takes his stand precisely on these grounds. Two questions are involved in the controversy. One about sex: is it sinful, except when performed for breeding? Is it not a physical and emotional necessity, irrespective of the act of procreation? Is it harmful for spiritual (in the broad sense of mental and emotional) development? The other question is about the position of women in Hindu society.
‘Gandhi advises women to resist lustful husbands. (This) assumes that they are free agents. Are they? Does Hinduism permit women to resist their husbands? Moreover, Gandhi’s approach to the problem of sex intercourse has no regard for personal inclination. He looks at it from what he considers to be a religious and moral point of view, the morality being a peculiarly dogmatic brand of his own. Therefore, he advises women to do something which is totally incompatible with their place in society, allotted to them by religion and tradition.
‘Many fables have been fabricated about the exalted position of the woman in Hindu society. There are volumes of legends about it. Even today, lyrics are woven around the fiction. Hinduism is said to concede perfect equality to women. They are granted the status of the goddesses, though of the household variety. Granted that godly status, why should they hanker after worldly rights and privileges? These transitory, and therefore negligible, things are not included in the perfect equality of women in Hindu society. Their lives are consummated in the mystic, indissoluble, union with their husbands. They are above the selfishness of the desire for any individual social or spiritual existence. Love, with them, is not lust, degraded to the level of carnal relations. It is a spiritual passion for giving; their own selves, being the best of the gifts, they lay at the feet of the beloved, who may not reciprocate the passion in a similar way. They love without wanting to be loved. They give without asking for anything in return. They find a pleasure in giving in loving. The Hindu woman is the incarnation of selflessness. No wonder that men should appreciate her virtue and enshrine her in the temple of domesticity, where she enjoys endless privileges, including the bearing of unwanted children. This fiction of a spiritual union gilds the galling chains of chattel slavery.
‘All these fables, fiction, and lyrics, however, cannot make the seeker after truth blind to the fact that the codes of Manu deprive women of all independence. Always, throughout her life, she must be under the protection of some male or other. Protection is an euphemistic term for subordination. As a matter of fact, Manu specifies the periods of a woman’s life, in which she belongs respectively to the father, husband, and the son; and the refrain of the famous code is that the woman can never be independent. The codes of Manu are said to be the treasure house of the highest and noblest social ideals. The bulk of our modern women are still deluded by those spurious jewels. But there are some who are realising the reality of their position. The other day, one of them exploded the bubble of the fondly cherished delusions, and laid bare the lie about the exalted position of the woman in Hindu society.
‘In India, for centuries, the woman’s drama of life has been enacted on a puppet stage crowded with futile, frustrated and tragic characters, and it is a drama that appears to have evolved the highest religious sentiments. Her mute surrender to things as they had been ordained became synonymous with the highest manifestation of feminine virtue and the glory attached to it. The more she bore injustice and wrong without murmur, the more she lived her personal life according to the dictates of primitive proprietary tribalism, the more woman-like, the more virtuous, she was thought to be. For centuries the woman was regarded as a living ware that should belong to some man; so she was married off at the earliest possible opportunity. Once possessed, she went though life as man’s possession – never as a playmate, not even a plaything but just a possession.
‘But the freedom of sex relation on the part of women is no more unnatural than are the forms of society not based on private property. The sex impulse is the only natural thing in this relation. The condition under which that impulse is satisfied is a matter of social convention, and as such must change from time to time in course of social progress.
‘Divorce is condemned on the ground that it is not compatible with the ideal of the Indian womanhood. It was on this ground that Dr. Bhagwan Das denounced the western practice of divorce. The ideal thus is subordination of women to men – an absence, in the case of the former, of the freedom of sex relation which is accorded to the latter. That certainly is not a very noble ideal. Enlightened women, at any rate, can no longer be deluded by it; nor can it be justified, much less glorified, by freethinking men with a sense of justice and morality.
‘While out nationalist leaders wax eloquent about traditional ideals, the reactionary nature of which is palpable to anyone able to distinguish facts from fiction, there are others who have the courage and progressive spirit to take a realistic view of the position of women in Hindu society, and plead for the much-needed improvement.
‘The following, for example, is quoted from a speech by the Maharani of Baroda, who certainly cannot be accused of any feminist extravagance, nor suspected of the insidious spirit of revolt against the Hindu culture.
‘Far from allowing her that equality with man, which in modern society is her natural and inalienable right, the law as it stands, by far the greater part of the country places her at a most unfair disadvantage. According to the Hindu Law, the joint family comprises only the male members; a woman is not a co-partner, but a mere dependent, with no right of ownership in the joint property. Why do you allow yourselves to be manacled and led captive, as it were, by laws which were made for a society which differed from our own as much as chalk differs from cheese? Manu and the rest of them made excellent laws for their own time, perhaps. But why should you take them as final pronouncements? Are they the Will of God? Certainly not. They are statements of men’s thought or their prejudice. Indeed, when I think of the laws they made against women, they seem to write like men who have been bitten by some serpent, so poisonous is their attitude. Their laws seem almost to breathe hatred for us. How can I help thinking so, when the law, from birth to death, makes a woman a subordinate, stifles her, so to say, in the cradle; and then says: thus and thus shall thou live? The word in their mouths mocks us! For, how can a woman live, when she is deprived of any vestige of freedom from the beginning? First, we must bow before our fathers, then, our husbands, then husband’s relatives. Does it strike you as a just state of affairs? Would you tamely sit down under a system of law that does not allow even to call your soul your own? Is that true law or true religion? I do not blame Manu, for after all, it may be that he honestly did his best according to his lights. But those lights burn dim in the twentieth century India.
‘We no longer need dig into the neglected store of ancient wisdom to find the Indian ideal of womanhood. We can find it in the accursed West itself, as represented, for example, by the Germans placed before women the ideals of the Kirche, Kueche, Kinder—respectively meaning, church (religion), housekeeping, and children. Under the ill-fated Republic, the German woman turned their back on these traditional “Aryan” ideals. The lamentable forces of degeneration have been arrested by the Nazis, who have resurrected the Indo-German ideal of womanhood by their characteristic methods. Women have been sent back to the kitchen by the ordinance of the authoritarian State which recognizes no individual right. That is also a striking example of Indian social philosophy, practiced by the avowed enemies of democratic freedom. “Marry and multiply”—that is the order for women, not only in Hitler’s Germany, but also in Mussolini’s Italy. And those are the countries in which the vulgar materialistic features of modern Western civilisation have entirely eclipsed its human values. The warlords require plentiful supply of cannon-fodder. For that purpose, women have been driven out of all other occupations. They must stay at home and breed children.’: From The Ideal of Indian Womanhood.
Science is not all fact, nor is it the product of pure thought, that is, speculation. As Einstein says, “The object of all science is to coordinate our experiences and bring them into a logical system.” Science thus stands on two legs, so to say: experience, that is, observational data, and their co-ordination into general laws. The former is derived from the ‘external world’, while the latter is the contribution of the scientist. Unless the mind of the scientist, equipped with previously acquired knowledge, worked up the raw material of observed facts, there could be no new scientific theories. The previously acquired knowledge was derived from experience, and the new theories create the condition for further advance of out knowledge. Scientific theories are not spun out of the brain of the scientist. He indispensably needs the raw material to work on, with the aid of his skill. In order to coordinate experiences into a logical system, he must have experiences to begin with.
Physics from one end, and biology from the other, have converged on a plane where the term ‘external world’ has lost all meaning. In the light of that great discovery of modern science, the artificial distinction between appearance and reality must disappear.
Now we shall turn to the question: experience of what ? Do we experience the reality or merely the appearance? In view of what has already been said, this question no longer arises. Yet, the philosophical problem, which results from the discoveries of modern physics, is epistemological. Therefore, the question must be examined more closely, on its apparent merit.
The scientists, who deduce a neo-spiritualist view of the world from the discoveries of twentieth-century physics, do not deny that experience is the source of knowledge. But they maintain that the object of our experience is not the external world; that it is our own sensation, and we have no means to ascertain how far our sensations correspond with the objects by which they are produced. In other words, according to them, we experience the world as it appears to us; the reality is never accessible to our cognitive faculty.
In support of this view, it is pointed out that the familiar world of experiences—of colour, sound, taste, touch, smell—is not the world of physics. The world, studied and described by physics, is composed of abstract concepts. It does not know anything about the secondary qualities which affect our senses. Hence, it is concluded that the phenomena we experience have no objective being. They are products of our perception, and as such are only inherent in consciousness. If the direct content of experience, in other words, the categories of consciousness are accorded physical reality, then the world of physics indeed becomes a background of mere metaphysical concepts, illusive shadows.
As a matter of fact, it is maintained by the neo-spiritualist interpreters of the modern physical theories that the object of the investigations of contemporary theoretical physics is a metaphysical something unknowable. That is nothing less than liquidating physics. It is going even farther than the Kantian position. The neo-spiritualists would not concede physical reality even to the ‘thing-in-itself’. They say that modern physics has not only got rid of the concepts of substance and causality, but has reduced the world to a bunch of mathematical formulas. In other works, there is no physical background to the phenomenal world of our experience which exists only in our consciousness. What we experience does not exist for physics; that is to say, it is physically unreal. The world of physics is a mathematical construction. The world of Neumann as well as phenomena has no objective reality. Both are projections of our consciousness. Consciousness is the sole reality. So, the question of knowledge does not arise. Knowledge is not possible. Has science, after several hundred years of ambitious progress, reduced its votaries to this pitiable state?
In order to find out for ourselves what solution modern science offers for the problem by abolishing the arbitrary distinction between appearance and reality, we shall have to look at the world of new physics. And in order to see the picture from a correct perspective, it will be necessary to be guided by the fundamental principles of science and philosophy and to have a clear idea about the relation between the two.
Undoubtedly, modern scientific theories have profound philosophical significance; it is to render the old division of labour between science and philosophy untenable. Science is stepping over the old boundary line. Digging deeper and deeper into the secrets of nature, science has come up against problems, the solution of which was previously left to philosophy. Scientific enquiry has pushed into what is traditionally regarded as the ‘metaphysical’ realm. But there is absolutely no evidence in support of the contention that the latest discoveries of physics negate the philosophical implications of the development of science during the last hundred of fifty years.
Philosophical speculations of individual scientists, when critically examined, are not borne out by the theories of modern science. The decisive factor is not the personal opinion of any scientist, but the logical implication of theories resulting from scientific research in general. The total body of repeatedly verified facts, collected through observations and experiments, is the basis of legitimate philosophical deductions.
One of the essential features of scientific enquiry is disregard for authority. Philosophical views of scientists must be set aside as personal predilections, resulting from their cultural background, when they run counter to the general trend of scientific research. Macdougall is, so to say, the last of the Mohicans of orthodox psychology. Yet, in his famous book Modern Materialism and Emergent Evolution, he writes: “A Newton, a Pupin, a Lodge, may tell us impressively of his religious and moral convictions, but these convictions are not the conclusions to which he is led by his physical research.”
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Notes:
1. Philip Spratt, son of a schoolmaster and a Cambridge graduate, was a leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain. He was sent to India under the directive of the Comintern to help the Communist Party of India (CPI) in 1926. On his arrival he was arrested and the police produced him before the court as an accused in the Meerut Conspiracy Case. He was convicted and sent to jail. After his release from jail in 1934, he did not go back to the UK. He married a woman from a distinguished communist family of South India and settled down in Bangalore. He also worked as editor of a weekly magazine ‘MysIndia’. He joined the Radical Democratic Party (RDP) founded by M. N. Roy and remained its member until its dissolution in 1948. He has written two scholarly books – 1) on Gandhi, and 2) on Hinduism.
He was also a co-author with Roy of the book ‘Beyond Communism’. Roy consulted a number of his colleagues including Spratt while formulating the 22 theses of radical democracy/cosmopolitan humanism. Roy often consulted Spratt on many matters in connection with the brining out of a quarterly magazine ‘The Marxian Way’, later renamed ‘The Humanist Way’.
2. I borrowed the biographical details of M. N. Roy from Prof. Sibnarayan Ray’s introduction to the 2nd volume of “Selected works of M. N. Roy” and other details from his various writings on M. N. Roy. I express my gratitude to Prof. Ray & his publishers.
3. In this connection it will be interesting to note that the Communists left out many important details from the record in the biographical sketch of Roy in the book ‘The History of the Communist Movement in India Vol. I , 1920-33’, a CPI(M) and Leftword publication, which said that Roy was expelled from the Comintern in December 1929. After reading the book, I have found many inaccuracies in it. In the biographical sketch of M.N. Roy, the book says that Roy was expelled from the Comintern but there is no reference to any document to authenticate this There is no mention of Roy as an accused in the Kanpur Conspiracy Case. It is written in the sketch that Roy’s brain was damaged after an accident. What happened is this. Roy met with an accident at Mussoorie and after some time he had an attack of cerebral thrombosis. He fully recovered both from his mental and physical disabilities. He resumed his writing work, in fact he wrote his memoirs which were first serially published in the Amrit Bazar Patrika and then reproduced in his weekly magazine “The Radical Humanist”. (There is a very interesting incident. When Stalin died, the Statesman requested Roy to write an article on Stalin. Roy wrote the article and sent it to the Statesman. A few days later he received a telegram asking him to confirm that the article sent by him had been written by him. ‘Some time later when I went to Delhi I went to the Statesman office and met a senior person in the editorial office, where I enquired why they should have sent a telegram like that. I was told that it had gone round that Roy was seriously ill and that he was not in a position to write any serious stuff. So when they received that article on Stalin, they were a bit surprised and the only way to get it confirmed was by Roy himself,’ wrote Roy. But the CPI(M) would have easily got all information about Roy confirmed by people who knew Roy well. Roy did not die of cerebral thrombosis attack. He died after a massive cardiac arrest.) No wonder, the communists, during their anniversary celebrations did not have M.N. Roy on their agenda. Actually, Roy is an unperson for the Communists in India. Even M. R. Masani’s book on “Indian Communism” will be of greater interest to the general reader in India and abroad because it is not selective.
If the editors had consulted files of the Comintern they would have seen that there is no resolution and no criticism of Roy by the Comintern. The only resolution of the Presidium of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) adopted on 23rd November 1929 stated that “Roy by his own contribution to the Brander Press and his support to the organisation of Brander placed himself outside the rank and file of the Communist International. One of the communist scholars, Purbi Ray, states in a document that after Roy’s exit from the Comintern no Indian ever occupied any influential position in the Comintern. Indian affairs were taken over by the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and Bren Bradley was officially put in charge of Indian affairs despite the presence of Abani Mukharjee and Viren Chattopadhaya in the Soviet Union and their willingness to work for India in the Comintern. There is no mention of Roy being the principal accused in the Kanpur Conspiracy Case. That the book has been written without doing any research is indicated by another comment that the book makes, namely, that Viren Chatto was the leader of the Indian revolutionaries in Berlin. But the book does not refer to any document in support of this statement.
Further, the veteran Marxist leader, Muzaffer Ahmed, (in his autobiography) accuses Roy of not writing anything about Philip Spratt in his memoirs. Muzaffar Ahmed perhaps did not know that Roy’s memoirs ended before the period of Philips Spratt’s arrival in India. In the CPI(M) publication mentioned earlier there is only a cryptic reference to Philip Spratt. There is no detail about the Meerut Conspiracy Case. In fact, Spratt’s essay “Blowing up India” should have been reproduced in the book as part of the documents. One hopes that the CPI(M) with its resources – scholars and finance, will some day bring out a documentary history of the Communist movement in India.