A Communism of Intelligence: Early Communism in Late Imperial India

Abstract:Goswami's essay revisits an infamous legal trial against communists in late colonial India to rethink the rapid "mondialization" of a universalistic ideology in a peripheral locale. How did a creed associated with an implacable universality obtain concrete placement across a highly differentiated capitalist world-order? How might we address the unexpected and ectopic emergence of communism in colonial and peripheral contexts? Rancière's contention of a "communism of intelligence" has particular purchase for colonial and peripheral contexts, and not only because the "masses" the Comintern was addressing were not analogous to the formally similar working classes in advanced capitalist societies. Rather the realization of the "capacity of the incapables" entailed, then as now, a wrestling with actually existing hierarchies or the historical order of imposed and inherited anachronisms. Through a close reading of an infamous legal trial that prosecuted communists for their belief, Goswami argues that the multitudinous pathways of becoming and being a communist in late colonial India underscore the dialectic between equality and the denunciation of "historian's truth."