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Acharya Narendra Deva Fought to Make Socialism Integral to the Freedom Struggle

Qurban Ali

February 19 marks the 69th death anniversary of great socialist leader, Acharya Narendra Deva. The day after his death in 1956, then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru said in the Rajya Sabha:

“The death of Acharya Narendra Deva is something much bigger for many of us and, I think, for the country than just the passing away of an important person. He was a man of rare distinction – distinction in many fields, rare in spirit, rare in mind and intellect, rare in integrity of mind and otherwise. Only his body failed him. I do not know if there is any person present here in this House who was associated with him for a longer period than I was. Over 40 years ago we came together and we shared innumerable experiences together in the dust and heat of the struggle for independence and in the long silence of prison life where we spent. …There is the public sense of loss and there is the private sense of loss and a feeling that somebody of rare distinction has gone and it will be very difficult to find his likes again.”

Early life

A doyen of the Indian socialist movement, a scholar and teacher, an educationist and an ardent nationalist, Marxist and freedom fighter, Deva was born on October 31, 1889, at Sitapur in Uttar Pradesh. He belonged to a middle-class Hindu Khatri family from Sialkot in Punjab (now in Pakistan) but living in Faizabad.

After an early education in Sanskrit, Deva joined Muir Central College, Allahabad, in 1906. While there, he read Prince Peter Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary and Mutual Aid, A.K. Coomaraswamy’s Essays in National Idealism, stories by the Russian author Ivan Turgenev, Johann Kaspar Bluntschli’s The Theory of the State, and Life and Writings of Joseph Mazzini in six volumes. He also read a lot of nihilist literature from Russia.

After graduating, he went on to Queens College Banaras for a masters in Sanskrit under Dr Arthur Venis and Professor Harry Norman, both of whom left a deep impression on his mind.

He also studied Pali, Prakrit, German and French. He had an MA degree by 1913 and an LLB by 1915.

Deva was being slowly drawn into the politics of Lal-Bal-Pal. As a result, he took a vow of swadeshi. During the non-cooperation movement in 1920-21, he quit he practice of law and joined the Kashi Vidyapeeth. In 1926 he was appointed the principal, and it was from this time that ‘Acharya’ became a permanent prefix to his name.

Deva had followed the Russian Revolution and subsequent events with great interest, but it was only after he came to the Kashi Vidyapeeth that he took up the study of scientific socialism or Marxism, as it was called, in all seriousness. Another subject in which he was deeply interested was Buddhist Philosophy and he continued to study and teach it whenever he got the opportunity. From 1921 onwards until he left the Congress party in 1948, he was a member of the UPCC and also the AICC.

Imagining a socialist future

A group within the Congress comprising Nehru, S. Srinivasa Iyengar, Subhas Chandra Bose, Zakir Husain and others was unhappy with the traditional Congress line. They formed the Independence for India League to press the Congress to adopt independence as its goal. The League established its branches in various provinces. Deva did not seem hopeful about the League’s future. In spite of the shortcomings he pointed out, the League was effective. Its opposition to Dominion Status made some dent in the Congress policy.

The Congress in Calcutta in December 1928 passed a resolution that if within a year the British government did not grant Dominion Status, it would pass a resolution demanding complete independence at its next session. This it did in Lahore in 1929. It also passed a resolution launching a struggle to achieve complete independence. India was in revolt. Deva played a leading role in organising the people for the coming struggle. He moved from place to place, explaining the meaning of ‘complete independence’ and propagating the use of the spinning wheel as a symbol of swadeshi.

After the Second Session of the Indian Round Table Conference held in September 1931 failed to find a solution and M.K. Gandhi returned empty-handed, no-rent campaigns had begun in the UP. Deva joined the campaign. He was arrested on October 16, 1932 and sent to Banaras District Jail, from where he was released in June 1933.

In 1926, Deva drew up a socialist agrarian programme with Sampurnanada under the aegis of the UP Congress Committee (UPCC) and sent it to the All India Congress Committee (AICC). Nehru got the AICC to accept this programme in 1929. At the1931, the Karachi session of the Indian National Congress set ‘socialist pattern of development’ as the goal for India. Nehru, who drafted the Karachi resolution, writes in his autobiography that its origins were in the UPCC resolution of 1929.

Deva was one of the leading theorists and founder of the Congress Socialist Party in India in 1934, the party of which Jayaprakash Narayan was the first general secretary. Deva remained one of the party’s top leaders for as long as he lived. His democratic socialism renounced violent means as a matter of principle and embraced satyagraha as a revolutionary tactic.

Delivering the first presidential address at the foundation conference of the CSP on May 17, 1934 in Patna, Deva said:

“Socialism has come to stay in this country and is daily gaining strength and prestige inside the Congress as well as in the country. The social foundation of this new school of thought which has appeared within the Congress is the democratic intelligentsia. Outside the Congress among its adherents are representatives of workers and to a much smaller extent peasants who constitute the real revolutionary elements of an anti-imperialist struggle. As a matter of fact the working class is the vanguard while the peasants and the intelligentsia are only its auxiliaries.”

Deva fondly remembered Nehru, who was in jail at the time, and said Nehru had inspired them to found the CSP within the Congress party:

“Friends, we are founding today the first cells of the socialist movement within the Congress in the absence of our great leader, Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru, our task has become extremely difficult. We do not know how long we shall remain deprived of his valuable advice, guidance and leadership. I am sure he will hail with delight the birth of this new party within the Congress and that he will be watching our progress with keen interest from behind the prison bars. Let his great example stimulate and inspire us during the period of his incarceration and let us march forward with the assurance that the cause we represent will triumph in the end.”

From the beginning of his public life, Deva had taken a keen interest in the problems of the kisans (peasants). On April 11, 1936, representatives of kisan organisations met in Lucknow. Thus was founded the All India Kisan Sabha.

Deva was a Marxist, but he did not believe that only the workers could be the vanguard of a revolution. In a country like India, he believed that the peasants could also play a revolutionary role. Mao Tse-tung also held similar views.

In 1936, Nehru invited Deva to be member of the Congress Working Committee and he continued there up to 1938. Deva was also elected the president of the UPCC the same year, a position he continued to hold till January 1938. In 1937, he was elected to the UP Legislative Assembly but, despite great pressure, refused to join the cabinet as the CSP was not in favour of such participation.

Deva was an eloquent speaker and spoke against communalism which had plagued Indian politics and finally led to the partition of the country. He favoured not only the protection of minorities but also wanted the majority community to make them feel justly – and generously – treated.

During the AICC meeting in Bombay on August 7-8, 1942, when Gandhi moved the ‘Quit India’ resolution and gave the slogan of “Do or Die”, Deva also spoke. Gandhi and the members of the CWC were arrested in the wee hours of August 9, 1942. Gandhi and his entourage were kept in the Aga Khan Palace in Poona, and CWC members in the Ahmednagar Fort. Deva was in detention at Ahmednagar till 1945, along with Nehru, Maulana Azad and others.

During his detention, Deva devoted himself to literary work. He translated Abhidharmakosa, an important work on Sarvastivada, which he had begun in the Banaras District Jail in 1932-33, from Poussin’s French version into Hindi. This was his magnum opus, published after his death is his monumental work on Buddhist religion and philosophy in Hindi entitled Bauddha Dharma-Darshan, running into 616 pages. He also helped Nehru with his book The Discovery of India.

Breaking from the Congress

In 1948, after independence, the Socialist Party decided to secede from the Congress. Deva and 11 other members of his party resigned from their seats in the UP assembly, to which they had been elected on Congress tickets, arguing that they no longer had a moral right over these seats.

While resigning on March 30, 1948, Deva made a memorable speech in the UP assembly. He said:

“Separation is always painful and sad. Our separation from the Congress has been no less painful to us. But in the lives of institutions and individuals there are moments when they have to give up their dearest possessions for the sake of those ideals and objectives which they cherish. We are leaving today our ancestral house with a sad and a heavy heart, but we are not relinquishing our claim to our inheritance. It is not material goods to which we advance our claim. This treasure consists of ideals and noble objectives…. We have no false pride in us; we know our limitations and we are conscious of our shortcomings. All that we want to say is that we shall try to prove ourselves worthy of our heritage…. We shall always try to avoid personal attacks and will not enter into any such controversy. We shall always be guided by Mahatma Ji’s teachings.”

Thus ended his more than three-decade relationship with the Congress. Deva and 11 others who had resigned from the assembly contested the by-elections caused by their resignations. The elections were held in June-July 1948. The Congress was determined, from the beginning of the election campaign, to somehow to defeat the socialists.

Much against his will, the Congress had put up Baba Raghavdas, a prominent Congressman from Gorakhpur, to oppose Deva. It was believed at the time that Raghavdas’s religious affiliations, no his political standing, led to his nomination from Ayodhya. Deva was depicted as an atheist and anti-religion. It was alleged that leaflets entitled ‘Rama-Ravana Samvad’ were distributed among the voters and there were also posters to the effect that to defeat ‘Ravana-roopee’ Deva, the people should vote for ‘Rama-Roopee’ Raghavdas.

Deva kept his cool at the time, but years later reacted to the Congress’s actions:

“Was it not said against me in the 1948 by-election that I was an atheist and that on this ground the elector should not vote for me? Was it not highly improper to do so, especially when it was claimed that ours was a secular state? I derive malicious pleasure from the fact that the gentleman who said this has the misfortune to adorn in his old age the durbar of a non-believer, of one who is neither pious in the religious sense of the word nor God-fearing. Was it not said that both Sanskrit language and Indian culture stood in grave peril if I was returned by the electorate? Was it not said, again, that I had betrayed the Congress by leaving it at a critical juncture in its life’s history? Was this the speech of a democrat or of a demagogue of the worst type? Was not Gandhijis spirit invoked and Ramchandra’s help solicited to secure my defeat? Did not a prominent Congress worker make women voters take oath in a temple to vote against me? Did not a prominent Congress leader take the cards from many of my women voters and send them away by falsely telling them that they would be placed in the ballot box?”

Deva lost the election by a margin of 1,312 votes. Raghavdas got 5,392 votes and Deva polled 4,080.

In April 1952, Deva was elected to the Rajya Sabha from Uttar Pradesh. He was re-elected in April 1954 for a six-year term. His desire to shape centres of higher learning, and pressure from friends and authorities, finally made him accept the vice-chancellorship of Lucknow University in October 1947.

A nationalist Marxist

Deva was a staunch Marxist, but his Marxism was not a set of rigid formulations. It was to him a method of analysing and studying social phenomena which can yield widely differing conclusions depending on the environment.

To him Marx was a great democrat and a great humanist, and the way his teachings were being distorted and misapplied by his communist followers was a matter of great sorrow and disappointment.

Deva’s specific contributions to the socialist movement in India can be summed as follows. In the first place, he helped to make it an integral part of the national struggle for freedom. Second, he realised from the very beginning that no socialist movement could succeed in India without the active participation of the peasantry, and in all policy statements and programmes formulated by him land reforms were given their due importance. Third, he never tired of emphasising that socialism was not merely an economic issue but a great cultural movement.

Deva advocated the abolition of poverty and exploitation not just through his belief in the Marxist materialist dialectic, but especially on moral and humanistic grounds. Furthermore, he insisted that “without political democracy social democracy was a sham”.

He represented a rare synthesis of certain qualities which would ordinarily appear to be incompatible. He was an ardent believer in a national identity and integration despite being a Marxist. He was deeply interested in ancient Indian history and culture. On the question of language, he said “those who desired to speak in Hindustani should be permitted to do so”. In fact, he himself spoke in elegant Hindustani in the UP assembly.

Deva passed away at Perundurai, Erode in Tamil Nadu on February 19, 1956.

(Qurban Ali is a trilingual journalist who has covered some of modern India’s major political, social and economic developments. He has a keen interest in India’s freedom struggle and is now documenting the history of the socialist movement in the country. Courtesy: The Wire, an Indian nonprofit news and opinion website. It was founded in 2015 by Siddharth Varadarajan, Sidharth Bhatia, and M. K. Venu.)

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Sarojini Naidu: A Poet, Patriot and Pioneer

Praveen Davar

Today, February 13, marks the birth anniversary of Sarojini Naidu.

We record our homage and deep admiration for the womanhood of India who, in the hour of peril for the motherland forsook the shelter of their homes and, with unfailing courage and endurance, stood shoulder to shoulder with their men folk, in the frontline of India’s national army to share with them the sacrifices and triumphs of the struggle.

– Congress resolution passed on January 26, 1931

The history of the freedom movement is replete with the sacrifice, sagacity and courage of great men and women. This struggle which gained momentum in the beginning of the 20th century threw up stalwarts like Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhash Chandra Bose, Sardar Patel, Maulana Azad, C. Rajagopalachari, Dadabhai Naoroji, Lokmanya Tilak, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Madan Mohan Malaviya, Motilal Nehru, C.R. Das, Lala Lajpat Rai and many more.

But it was not a men’s movement. Many women played a proactive and prominent leadership role which became most visible when Annie Besant was elected President of Indian National Congress (INC) in 1916. However, it was the emergence of Mahatma Gandhi on the national scene and his unique method of mass mobilisation – the non-cooperation movement (1920), salt satyagraha (1930) and the Quit India Movement (1942) – that helped women discover themselves and play a leading role in the independence movement. One such woman was Sarojini Naidu, who rose through the ranks to become the president of INC in 1925 at the young age of 46.

She was born in Hyderabad on February 13, 1879. Her father, Aghorenath Chatterjee, originally from East Bengal, was a brilliant scientist as well as a poet in Urdu and Bengali. Her mother, Varda Sundari, was a renowned singer and wrote her own lyrics in Bengali. Sarojini passed the matriculation examination when she was only 12, standing first in the Madras presidency. However, her love for poetry came in the way of achieving any degree, despite being sent to London and Cambridge for higher studies. She wrote afterwards how she inherited the poetic instinct from her parents. “One day when I was eleven, I was sighing over a sum in Algebra; it wouldn’t come right; but instead a whole poem came to me suddenly. I wrote it down. From that day my poetic career began. At thirteen, I wrote a long poem, Lady of the Lake—1,300 lines in six days.”

Sarojini Chattopadhyaya (maiden name) married Govindarajulu Naidu in 1898 after returning from England and settled down in Hyderabad. The marriage became a landmark in social reform as inter-caste marriages were almost unknown at the time. Sarojini was deeply influenced by the Hindu-Islamic culture of her town and gave expression to it in her poems. Some of her collection of poems which took the English world by storm were The Golden Threshold, The Feather of the Dawn, Bird of Time and The Broken Wing. Few of her poems were also translated into French. Sarojini’s innate longing for the ‘rapture of song’ could not prevent her from being drawn into the social and political life of the country.

It was Gopal Krishna Gokhale, the leader of the moderates, who persuaded her to step out of her ivory tower. She met Gandhi and Nehru at the Lucknow session of the INC in 1916, and developed friendship with Rabindranath Tagore and C.F. Andrews. Earlier, at the INC session in Bombay (now Mumbai), Sarojini recited the following poem composed by her:

Awaken, O Mother! Thy children implore thee,

who kneel in thy presence to serve and adore thee!

The night is a flush with a dream of the morrow,

why still dost thou sleep in thy bondage of sorrow?

Awaken and serve the woes that enthrall us,

and hallow our hands for the triumphs that call us.

Sarojini was deeply troubled by the rift between Hindu and Muslim communities. As much as Hindu culture she admired Islamic culture and Muslim way of life. At the 1916 Lucknow session of the INC, she played a notable role in bringing about cooperation between Congress and the Muslim league under the guidance of Lokmanya Tilak. Her friendship with Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Ali brothers made the Tilak’s task much easier.

She wrote that Lucknow sessions of INC and Muslim League marked a new era and inaugurated new standards in the history of modern Indian affairs. Hindu-Muslim unity became a passion in Sarojini’s life mission. Addressing the seventh All India Women’s Conference, she declared: “No Indian could be loyal to the country and yet be narrow and sectarian in spirit… No matter whether it was temple or mosque, church or fire shrine, let them transcend the barriers that divide man from the man.”

In July 1919, Sarojini went to England as a member of the deputation of the All India Home Rule League, where she pleaded for the rights of women. In 1924, Sarojini visited Kenya, South Africa and East Africa as a Congress delegate and inspired Indian settlers in these colonies to fight for their rights non-violently.

In 1925, she was elected president of INC, inspiring women to join public life. She was the second woman president of INC after Annie Besant, but the first one of Indian origin. In her presidential address, Sarojini declared, “No sacrifice is too heavy, no struggle too great, no martyrdom too terrible, that enables us to redeem our Mother from the unspeakable dishonour of her bondage….in the battle for liberty, fear is the one unforgivable treachery and despair the one unforgivable sin.”

Sarojini took a leading part in the salt satyagraha of 1930 and was sent to jail. In 1931, she accompanied Gandhi to London for the Second Round Table Conference. She was imprisoned for the third time during the Quit India Movement and was put in the Aga Khan Palace along with Gandhi. After India became independent, she became the first woman to be appointed as a governor. On March 2, 1949, she breathed her last at the Lucknow Raj Bhawan.

Mourning her death, Sardar Patel, then deputy prime minister and home minister, recalled her great contribution in the freedom struggle and said, “She represented in her person the grim determination and the heavy sacrifices of Indian womanhood. She strode the stage like a heroine and never wavered in her faith in India’s destiny and in the ultimate success of that miraculous weapon (nonviolence) which was Bapu’s gift to India.”

Nehru, in his homage, said, “Here was a person of great brilliance – vital and vivid. Here was a person with so many gifts, but above all some gifts which made her unique. She infused artistry and poetry into our national struggle…she represented in herself a rich culture into which flowed various currents which have made Indian culture as great as it is.”

Naidu desired that her epitaph should be: “She loved the youth of India”. Perhaps it may be more fitting to say of her that the youth of India loved her. Nevertheless, this would be an inadequate epitaph according to her biographer C.D. Narasimhaiah: “For not only the youth of India but everybody in India loved her – and was charmed by her.”

(Praveen Davar is a columnist and author of Freedom Struggle and Beyond. Courtesy: The Wire, an Indian nonprofit news and opinion website. It was founded in 2015 by Siddharth Varadarajan, Sidharth Bhatia, and M. K. Venu.)