Saumyendranath Tagore

Saumyendranath Tagore (October 08, 1901–September 22, 1974), son of Sudhindranath Tagore, grandson of Dwijendranath Tagore, and grand-nephew of Rabindranath Tagore, was the leader of the Revolutionary Communist Party of India, and the first translator of The Communist Manifesto into Bengali.

Tagore passed matriculation in 1917 from Mitra Institution in Kolkata and graduated with honors in Economics from the Presidency University in 1921. In 1920, he had joined the "Nikhil Bharat Chatra Sammelan" ("All-India Student Conference") in Ahmedabad. In those years he befriended Muzaffar Ahmed, who later would be one of the founders of the Communist Party of India.

After Tagore joined the Workers' and Peasants' Party (WPP) in April 1926, he began mobilizing the jute mill‐workers of Bengal to form the Bengal Jute Workers' Association. His effectiveness as a trade union activist and his success at winning revolutionaries over to the WPP attracted the eye of British colonial officials. In order to avoid arrest, Tagore left for Europe in May 1927. There, he met international communist leaders and by June was in Moscow, where he presented reports on the situation in India. In July/August 1928 Tagore attended the 6th Congress of the Comintern as a delegate for India.

Tagore differed with the Comintern on the ″Colonial Question″. Later, he came to favor Leon Trotsky's theory of "Permanent Revolution" over Joseph Stalin's notion of "Socialism in One Country". He also came to oppose the Comintern's "Popular Front" strategy in the 1930s, regarding it as a betrayal of proletarian revolution.

In 1934, Tagore formed the Communist League of India, which was rechristened the Revolutionary Communist Party of India in 1942.

Tagore's revolutionary activities led the German government to briefly arrest him, and British authorities to ban a number of his works. After returning to India, he was arrested a number of times by the British colonial administration and served sentences of between one year (1940-1941) and three years (1942-1945)

MIA Note: The texts below that are marked with an asterisk are courtesy of Charles Wesley Ervin. Digital copies of original printed materials deposited in the Charles Wesley Ervin collection, 1927-73, at Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California.