The Bolshevik Menace: Colonial Surveillance and the Origins of Socialist Politics in Calcutta

Abstract

This article examines the impact of the anti-Bolshevik surveillance network created by the colonial state on the urban political milieu of Calcutta during the late 1910s and the early 1920s. The first socialists in Calcutta (1921–24), predominantly Muslims, emerged from the ranks of urban intellectuals and political activists. The article argues that the state's insistence on labelling various social and political segments, including early socialists, as political tools of Moscow demonstrated its inability to grasp the local responses to an international current. It is shown that despite enforcement of various strategies, which tried to anticipate and prevent the spread of socialism, the colonial state failed to counter the emergence of the left in the city.