The book, to be released in the first quarter of 2006, is the culmination of the author’s research for more than a decade on one of the most debatable and sensitive issues concerning the history of the Left and communist movement in India. The opening up of the Comintern archives in Moscow in the 90s has now made it possible for the scholars to have the first glimpse of how the destiny of the Communist Parties of’ the world in the inter- War period was defined by politics inside the Comintern which, in turn, was predominantly shaped by the struggle for power inside the Soviet Communist Party after Lenin’s death. With the accessibility of the Comintern archives a massive literature has emerged in the West (primarily in Russian and German, besides English), leading to a reinterpretation of the understanding of Comintern as a historiographical problem in the light of these new sources. The book, based on these materials (archival and non-archival), provides for the first time an entirely new analysis of Comintern’s impact on the shaping of Indian communism and argues about the alternative possibilities of the Left and communist movement in India in the light of documents which were suppressed or unknown till now. This reinterpretation of the role of Comintern (1919-1943), which masterminded the beginning and shaping of communism in India, will contribute to a refreshingly new understanding of the problems, complexities and crisis that communism in India has encountered in its long history.

Besides the Comintern archives, the book is based on materials from the archives of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which include the papers of Rajani Palme Dutt, Harry Pollitt, Ben Bradley, the stenographic records of the Central Committee, Politbureau and the Party Congresses of the CPGB, all relating to the links between the CPGB, India and Comintern, papers from the Public Records Office, UK and the Private Papers of Horst Krueger in Berlin.

The book has the following chapters.
Chapter I: Comintern : the new historiography.
Chapter II: The colonial question and India in the Lenin era: 1919-1923.
Chapter III : India and the East in the period of’ “Bolshevization“and”Third Period" : 1924-1934.
Chapter IV : The Indian question in the era of United Front and War: 1935-1943.
Chapter V: Comintern and the Indian revolutionaries in Russia.
Chapter VI: Indian communism: Dialectics of real and a possible history.

Sobhanlal Datta Gupta (b.1948)- Surendra Nath Banerjee Professor of Political Science in Calcutta University , India, has an abiding interest in the history of Marxism and Marxist theory. He was Visiting Fellow, Institute of Oriental Studies, Moscow (1995), Research Professor at Asiatic Society, Calcutta (1996-1998), DAAD Scholar, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Bonn (1996), Visiting Scholar, Centre for Modem Orient. Berlin (1998), Visiting Scholar, Manchester University (2002) and Visiting Scholar, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (2003- 2005). Currently working on the newly discovered Prison Manuscripts of Nikolai Bukharin. He can be contacted at sobhanlal dataone.in Telephone: (0091)-(033)-24403338 (Home).

For all commercial information about the book please contact

Sole Distributor of the book:
Sreejoni
6/2H Naktala Road
Kolkata-700047, India
e-mail: bookshopping sreejoni.com

http://www.sreejoni.com/