Imperial Subjects in the Soviet Union: M.N. Roy,Rabindranath Tagore,and Re-Thinking Freedom and Authoritarianism

Abstract

The compelling trope of ‘Russia and the West,’ or to be more precise, ‘Russia Under Western Eyes,’ has produced a vast and significant body of literature. This has helped in the political framing of the twentieth century as a world divided between the democratic and market-based nations of the West, and the dictatorial and state controlled countries in the Soviet East. Simultaneously, it has served to bury, blunt, and otherwise obscure perspectives from the colonized world on the East–West dichotomy. An analysis of the travel writings of two important Indian visitors to the Soviet Union, M.N. Roy and Rabindranath Tagore, shows that Europe’s imperial subjects filtered their impressions of Soviet authoritarianism through their own experiences of repressive Western imperialism, thus charting a new global map of political freedom. Roy and Tagore’s writings, powered by both their colonial and Soviet experiences, make a significant contribution to the twentieth-century intellectual debates on moral freedom, individualism, and authoritarianism.