ABSTRACT
Manabendranath Roy (1887–1954) was a Marxist philosopher, an Indian nationalist, and an anticolonial cosmopolitan. To the extent that being a ‘revolutionary’ is an actor’s category, the term applied to Roy. He thought of himself in such terms. He was blacklisted as one of the British empire’s most wanted ‘seditionists’ in the 1920s. This was due to his long history of anticolonial activities, beginning with swadeshi ‘guerrilla warfare’ in Calcutta and across the Bay of Bengal, followed by high-profile communist activities in Mexico, Central Asia, India and Europe. The politics of ‘partisans’ rose up inside different imperial constellations around the world in the early twentieth century, and was characterized by guerrilla tactics and irregular warfare against standing state armies. In southern and eastern Asia, Indian, Filipino, Indonesian, Malay, Vietnamese and Chinese undergrounds arose in an interconnected fashion in the early twentieth century, and M N Roy, searching for firearms and bomb-making materials, made his way to the United States across the Pacific Ocean in 1915, travelling a zigzag path. 1
