Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Echoes and Intersections I 139
superstitious or traditional approach to political mobilization.
The paper approved me CPI role in the independence
struggle, championing its constituency of workers, peasants,
and "the underdog" even while often criticizing the
party and its actions.30
In 1922, Lotvala was responsible fo r the first-ever
publication of the Communist Manifesto in IndiaY In mat
same year, a section of the English and Marathi printing apparatus
was set aside as the Labour Press, on which Shripat
Arnrit Dange put out one of the first Marxist weeklies in
India, me Socialist.32
The Labour Press also published a ramer eclectic
Socialist Series ranging from Kropotkin's "An Appeal
to the Yo ung" to Karl Kautsky's "Working Class:' to
Paul Lafargue's "Religion of Politics" and Delisle Burns's
"Politics of Oil." Through his Liberty Publications, Lotvala
issued pamphlets on scientific socialism to augment "the
meagre sources of knowledge and scientific socialism available
to the English-educated intellectuals of those days."33
Lotvala supported Dange's study and writing until 1929,
when Dange was tried and jailed in the Meerut conspiracy
case, which by rounding up India's most prominent leftist
activists put the whole movement back for several years.
By the early 1930s, Latvala had evolved into a
Trotskyist. During his annual sojourns to London, he lent
his aid to this faction while shunning previous associates;
Stalinism, he had decided, was a betrayal of Marxism and
socialism, and a danger to world revolution. He staunchly
opposed the policies of Stalin's regime, denouncing as
"worthless propaganda" all the "literature emanating from