Manabendra Nath Roy Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Manabendra Nath Roy (1887–1954), popularly known as M. N. Roy, was a Bengali Indian revolutionary, philosopher, political theorist, activist, and exponent of the philosophy of radical humanism. Born as Narendra Nath Bhattacharya, he became a militant nationalist at the age of twenty and was jailed thrice before the age of twenty-three for actions against the British colonial government in India. He adopted the name of Manabendra Nath Roy as an alias to escape arrest by the authorities.

In 1915 Roy left for Japan and China in search of arms and support, traveling under various names and disguises, until he reached Mexico, where he founded the Communist Party in that country. At the invitation of Russian political leader and revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, Roy left for Moscow. In the newly formed Soviet Union, he became a major figure in the communist organization Comintern as an expert on colonial nations and as a major theorist in Marxism. After Lenin’s death, Roy fell out of favor with new Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and fled to India.

In India Roy was arrested by the British authorities and jailed for six years. While incarcerated he wrote manuscripts in which he examined the causes for the degeneration of Marxism into Stalinism. He blamed German philosopher Karl Marx’s collectivism and materialism for the betrayal of socialist ideals in the Soviet Union. He tried to explore a way to synthesize liberalism and Marxism on the one hand and materialism and idealism on the other to create what he called radical humanism. Parts of these prison manuscripts have been published in such works as Fascism (1938), The Historical Role of Islam (1939), Materialism (1940), and Science and Philosophy (1947).

Roy continued to refine his ideas in Beyond Communism to Humanism (1946) and Reason, Romanticism, and Revolution (1952). He attacked both individualism and collectivism and advocated instead a cooperative democracy or a loosely structured polity of self-governing units in the model of Switzerland, with the rights of recall and referenda serving to temper state aggrandizement. It would be sustained by a cooperative economy that was neither capitalistic nor communist but communal. To achieve such a just society, Roy called for a cultural revolution that would instill love of freedom, equality, and mutual respect among the masses. He dismissed political parties as front organizations for special interests and favored small bands of radical democrats who would serve as leaven for transforming society. In line with this thinking, Roy disbanded the Radical Democratic Party he had set up in 1941 and invested all his energies thereafter on the Indian Renaissance Institute, which functioned more as a think tank. It did not survive Roy’s death in 1954.

Bibliography:

Bhattacharya, Gouriswar. Evolution of the Political Philosophy of M. N. Roy. Calcutta: Minerva, 1971.
Glover, D. C. M. N. Roy: A Study of Revolution in Indian Politics. Calcutta: Minerva, 1973.
Karnik,V. B. M. N. Roy: A Political Biography. Bombay: New Jagriti Samay, 1978.
Ray, Sibnarayan, ed. M. N. Roy: A Symposium. Calcutta: Renaissance, 1959.

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