ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the archives of the People’s War, the weekly newspaper of the Communist Party of India (CPI) from 1942 through 1945, in order to recreate the late colonial vision of a possible “Soviet India”—in all of its optimism, ambition, and hubris. By examining the impact of Soviet visual culture on young Indian radicals, this chapter spotlights the importance of the communist newspaper in the late colonial world: as a technology knitting together a multi-racial and multi-lingual community of anticolonial activists into a coherent, internationalist public, and as a ‘leitmotif’ of the communist imagination, from Lenin to the Indian Left.
