![]() ![]() After a brush with the New York police, the pair fled, in 1917, to Mexico, which was in the midst of a popular upheaval. Roy and Trent moved to Manhattan, where British and American agents, investigating a “Hindu-German conspiracy,” shadowed Roy as he met Indian anti-colonialists and immersed himself in the Marxist canon in the New York Public Library. He met with a radical Bengali poet in Palo Alto, and promptly fell in love with a Stanford graduate student named Evelyn Trent, an acquaintance of the university’s former president, David Starr Jordan, who took pride in cultivating anti-imperialists on campus. In Tokyo, he resolved to press onward to the United States: “I decided to take the bull by the horn, pinned a golden cross to the lapel of my coat, put on a very sombre face, and called at the American consulate.” Disguised as “Father Martin” and having, he said, “reinforced my armour with a morocco-bound copy of the Holy Bible beautifully printed on rice-paper,” Roy arrived in San Francisco in 1916. But Roy’s parleys with contacts in Java, China, and Japan yielded almost nothing. During the First World War, a group of Indian anti-imperialists wanted the Germans to open a second front against their common enemy. Born into a Brahmin family in West Bengal in 1887, he left India in his twenties on a series of missions to secure funds and weapons for an uprising against the British Raj. When ducking imperial authorities, he used a method described by a comrade: “If you want to hide revolutionary connections . . . It was Manabendra Nath Roy, an Indian who was a founder of the Mexican Communist Party. “Very tall, very handsome, very dark, with very wavy hair,” Serge recalled. But one of the arrivals made an impression. ![]() The Russian revolutionary Victor Serge observed, “It was obvious at first glance that here were no insurgent souls.” Lenin kept a blinking electric light on his desk to cut meetings short. When, starting in 1919, Vladimir Lenin convened the first congresses of the Communist International, some Bolsheviks were disappointed by the characters who turned up-old-fashioned socialists, trade unionists, and anarchists, coming with false papers, in disguise, under aliases, and all apparently expecting hotel rooms. International conferences are notoriously difficult to organize, all the more so when the aim is global revolution and the world’s empires oppose your agenda. ![]()
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