MN Roy and the first communist party of India: Formation

Abstract

The ideologies of Marx and Marxism influenced Manabendranath Roy considerably. He became one of the foremost Communist intellectuals professing Marxian Socialism in India during the colonial period. While doing so he was averse to the Gandhian concept and vision of socialism. The effort in this paper is to relook in to and revisit Manabendranath Roy’s involvement with Communism and how that culminated in the establishment of the Communist Party of India in 1920. While discussing Roy’s involvements with the Socialist and Liberation movements, there has also been an effort to search for earlier motivations and inspirations behind Roy’s later involvements in the socialist movements in India and abroad.