00:00Did you know a Bengali militant was one of the key founders of the Communist Party of Mexico?
00:07Mexico is in the news again. After the killing of El Mencho, one of Mexico's most feared drug lords,
00:12violence erupted across parts of the country.
00:14But a century ago, Mexico was also a site of global upheaval.
00:18And the conflict then was not about narcotics, it was about revolution.
00:22And in the middle of that revolution stood a man from Bengal.
00:25His name was Monobendronath Roy.
00:27Born in 1887 in Arbelia, in undivided Bengal,
00:31a young Monobendron was drawn into underground revolutionary networks,
00:34trying to overthrow British rule in India, not through speeches, but through arms.
00:39In 1915, he became involved in a plot by Bengal revolutionaries to smuggle weapons into India.
00:45The plan failed.
00:46But Roy did not give up.
00:48He traveled across East and Southeast Asia, trying to secure arms.
00:52Nothing worked.
00:52But by 1916, he landed in San Francisco and it was there that he reinvented himself.
00:58And then comes the unexpected turn.
00:59He moved to Mexico.
01:01Now this is just after the Mexican revolution.
01:04Just after the Bolshevik revolution in Russia.
01:06The world was vibrating with the idea that empires could fall and workers could rule.
01:11In that charged atmosphere, Roy helped found what became the Mexican Communist Party.
01:16One of the earliest communist parties outside Soviet Russia.
01:19Think about that.
01:20An Indian anti-colonial militant, unable to get guns for Bengal,
01:24ends up shaping left-wing politics in Mexico.
01:26Roy's intellect soon took him further.
01:29He traveled to Moscow, impressed Vladimir Lenin,
01:31and was placed on the executive committee of the Communist International, or the Comintern,
01:36the body that aimed to coordinate global revolution.
01:39But Roy was never a blind loyalist.
01:42By 1929, he broke with the Comintern over the policies of Joseph Stalin,
01:46the revolutionary who had once embraced global communism,
01:49now rejected what he saw as authoritarian distortions of it.
01:53He tried to return secretly to India.
01:55The British arrested him.
01:56He spent years in prison.
01:58After his release, Roy joined the International Congress.
02:00But even there, he refused to follow the crowd.
02:03During World War II, he argued that defeating fascism was a higher immediate priority
02:07than pressuring Britain for independence.
02:09It was an unpopular stance.
02:11And then, after India gained independence in 1947,
02:14Roy did something few revolutionaries do.
02:17He abandoned communism.
02:18He became a founder of what he called radical humanism,
02:21a philosophy blending socialist concerns with liberal humanitarian values.
02:26He died in 1954 in Teradol, far from Mexico, far from Moscow.
02:31A century ago, Mexico drew revolutionaries dreaming of remaking the world.
02:35Today, it battles criminal empires, fighting to control it.
02:39History does not move in straight lines.
02:41Sometimes it moves from revolution to carton rule.
02:45And sometimes it carries a man from Bengal all the way to Mexico and back again.
02:49That's what you think.
02:50I'm Manish Anikari.
02:51Thank you for watching The Culture Project on Mo.
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