Chapter 2 - The Memoir and Anticolonial Internationalism in M.N. Roy

Summary

Chapter 2 highlights the understudied literary genre of the memoir. I focus on the writings of the peripatetic activist-intellectual Manabendra Nath ‘M.N.’ Roy. Exploring his diverse engagements with early twentieth-century Black radicalism in the United States and anticolonialism in Mexico, the Soviet Union, China, and Germany, my reading of Memoirs ‘1964’ illuminates how literary form negotiates the politics of anticolonial internationalism. Roy contributed to the debates of the Communist International, famously differing with Vladimir Lenin on the “National and Colonial Questions.” Roy also posited the imbrication of race and caste through his critique of cultural nationalism in India. An icon of the interwar era, Roy’s formulations in India in Transition ‘1922’ complicate both Euro-American universalism and the influential paradigm of decoloniality that favors postcolonial nationalism in terms of its cultural difference from the West.