The danger comes from the east, coloured red. Having brought down the tsar in Russia, the Soviet communists are now looking outwards with a grand plan. Vladimir Lenin has already discarded the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 ^[1] and is calling on the Asian people to overthrow their colonial oppressors. Just two years earlier, he’d announced: “England is our greatest enemy. It is in India we must strike them hardest.”

The Bolsheviks now have operations in India to “penetrate the existing nationalist movement.” Meanwhile, the British already have a lot to contend with. Indian nationalists are clamouring for swaraj. The country is convulsed by workers’ strikes. There are periodic violent attacks on British officials. India’s Muslims are seething over the dismemberment of Ottoman Turkey. Bombay is a tinderbox, waiting to be sparked.

At the centre of Lenin’s plans is one man: Manabendra Nath Roy.

This “second tournament of shadows” ^[2] will be substantively conducted in the murky world of secret agents and surveillance. In the colonies, communists mostly operate undercover. Intelligence systems and spy craft, developed to tackle Indian revolutionaries operating in Britain and around the world, will now deepen.

Activists and agitators are increasingly mobile across the seas, seeking to forge alliances, stoke revolutionary fervour, and conduct anti-British propaganda with support from Moscow.

A century on, the nationalist and revolutionary movements of this time are well documented. But one vast arena remains relatively unexplored: the surveillance and intelligence operations that the British deployed against communists and other dissidents.

Here is one fascinating thread of that mostly hidden history. While Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah and other national leaders represented overt resistance, M.N. Roy posed a covert menace. He became the primary target for British intelligence. This is the story of how the Empire cast the dragnet for this enigmatic man, whose extraordinary web of agents, collaborators, lovers and enemies made him the central, shape-shifting figure of an existential threat.

Roy was soon arrested in consequence, this time in New York. ^[3] He jumped bail to escape with his newly-wed wife Evelyn to Mexico, assuming the false name Manuel Mendez. US Military Intelligence records reveal that he was a wanted man at the time. He was well-received in Mexico, where a decidedly anti-British government assured him that he was “free and safe here.”

Autumn 1917. Mexico City. The tall, charismatic M.N. Roy was safely ensconced in his new surroundings. He had started Spanish lessons and befriended diplomats, businessmen, journalists, intellectuals, bohemians and artists. He gave up vegetarianism, abstention from alcohol, and discarded the Brahmanical shackles that came in the way of worldly pleasures. He was transforming from a militant Indian nationalist to a cosmopolitan, radical, intellectual aesthete. As he wrote later, “Mexico was the land of my rebirth.” The dwija Bengali Brahmin from a village was now a “twice-born heretic.” ^[4]

1917 was also the year of the Russian Revolution, which tilted the balance in world affairs. The Soviets wasted no time in setting up the Communist International, or Comintern, to take its ideology beyond Russia. When its emissary Mikhail Borodin travelled to Mexico in October 1919, he met the fiery Indian revolutionary.

The friendship and mentorship of Borodin aided Roy’s political transformation. With his approval, Roy helped establish a splinter Mexican Communist Party with “six members and a calico cat.” ^[5] Soon, there followed an invitation to meet Lenin in August 1920 for the Second World Congress of the Comintern. An exchange of written drafts and the Roy-Lenin debates on the colonial question set the stage for Comintern’s policy towards India, which, importantly for Roy, included the facilitation of major resources. ^[6] He became the point man for Russia’s plans for India despite the efforts of fellow revolutionary Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, or Chatto, to gain favour with Moscow. ^[7]

17 October 1920. Tashkent. ^[8] The Communist Party of India was born under the auspices of the Comintern. At that point, it comprised of émigrés: many of the first recruits were muhajirin, those who had voluntarily moved to Afghanistan to protest British action against the Turkish Caliphate. ^[9]

In Tashkent, Roy started running a military school for Indian revolutionaries. ^[10] Several graduates also joined him in Moscow, to train at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (KUTV). With funding from Comintern, Roy brought together a group of radical activists across India: S.A. Dange in Bombay, Muzaffar Ahmad in Calcutta, Singaravelu Chettiar in Madras, Ghulam Hussain in Lucknow and Shaukat Usmani (who travelled back from Tashkent) in the United Provinces. As his influence grew, Roy went on to become a full voting member of the ECCI, the Eastern Commission, and in 1923, he was elected to the Comintern Presidium. (His Comintern career peaked in 1926).

To the British, Roy’s command of the fledgling Indian communist movement was clear. In India, an enigmatic figure using the pseudonym Satyabhakta was claiming that the Indian Communist Party (ICP) had been formed on 1 September 1924. Satyabhakta had sent out invitations to the first ever conference of Indian communists to be held in Kanpur in December 1925.

But the majority of delegates at the Kanpur conference were Roy’s associates, who were deeply suspicious of the unknown organiser’s intentions. They rejected Satyabhakta’s opposition to alignment with the Comintern, prompting him to leave his own conference in protest.

Roy’s CPI gained the upper hand and decided to relocate to Bombay to aid liaison with the Comintern. Roy was convinced Satyabhakta was a spy and that the ICP was a creation of British intelligence. ^[11]

The British had, over the years, developed a well-entrenched intelligence network in India. As early as June 1919, the Viceroy Lord Chelmsford had written to Secretary of State Montagu, saying:

All authorities concerned are alive to the importance of intercepting Bolshevik agents and literature…But with our vast frontier we must rely in the main on the evil being tapped at its source by means of intelligence systems at all chief centres of Bolshevik activities.

The security infrastructure was now paying off. Returning émigrés from Tashkent had been arrested on suspicion of being Bolshevik agents and were tried as part of the Peshawar Conspiracy case of 1922. Between May 1923 and March 1924, most of M.N. Roy’s Indian associates were arrested and tried under the Kanpur Bolshevik Conspiracy case of 1924. Roy himself was named an absconding accused.

Getting to and operating in India had become truly dangerous. Revealingly, a Home Department memorandum of that time indicated that the best intelligence had come from “members of the organisation itself.” The dragnet laid out for Roy was working.

Frustrated by the constant interception of his letters via post despite cover addresses, Roy had taken to recruiting “lascars”, or seamen. He would send a letter in three different ways, hoping that one would reach the recipient. Ajudhiya Prasad (arrested in the Meerut Conspiracy) travelled as Abdul Hamid numerous times between England and India and “played an active part in the establishment of communications.” A letter found on the former Ghadarite and seaman Amir Haider Khan or “Dada,” provided “detailed instructions which seamen, used as messengers, should adopt to make sure that their letters reach the right hands.” Several letters of Spratt mention other letters brought by sailors, and those sent back for “elder brother”, a code for Roy, via Colombo or Madras.

The communications used code and ciphers. Spratt, Bradley and others often used a system for which the key was a poem taken from the classic poetry compendium Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. The letter writers commonly used invisible ink, as well as a transposition code that interpolated the names of places and people. Fascinatingly, “the letters were frequently written in a cryptic manner resembling a sort of grotesque correspondence between two clergymen: there are references to the Church and Methodists and the Y.M.C.A (which all refer to various aspects of the work in India).”

Roy’s letters were “an unfailing source of information of proved accuracy as to the movements of men, money and literature.” ^[15] From as early as October 1920, the British believed that Comintern subversion in India was backed by Moscow and was a greater threat than in Britain. The Home Department’s Intelligence Bureau, then headed by Colonel Cecil Kaye spearheaded the anti-Bolshevik operations and shared information with London. The mandate was to use “every step necessary to checkmate them.” ^[16]

A 1924 report claimed that successful infiltration of communist circles had a lot to do with the “incompetence of Roy and his Indian agents,” many of whom were “greedy opportunists lacking in scruples.” British intelligence had penetrated Roy’s network and ‘turned’ some members. ^[17] (Roy himself was accused of misappropriating funds by some of his Indian associates, but counter-narratives suggest this was a ploy by British intelligence to sow differences in the cadre.) ^[18]

By this time, British secret services back home had gone beyond just surveillance and infiltration. An egregious instance of this was the public outrage caused by the “Zinoviev Letter” in 1924, ^[19] which appeared to show that the CPGB had received instructions from Moscow to lobby British Labour Party sympathisers. According to the letter, Moscow sought support on a proposed Anglo-Soviet treaty, propaganda with the armed forces, and “generally to prepare for the coming of the British revolution.” But skulduggery was afoot. The letter was a fake; part of a false flag operation.

These methods may have also been put to use in Bombay. Inspector Derojinsky, an officer of Russian origin who had joined the Foreign Branch of the Bombay Police in April 1923, would later face accusations of planting evidence in relation to Benjamin Bradley’s arrest. There were suggestions that the Assembly Letter, too, was a concoction. The courts ruled otherwise in both instances.

Through all this, the hunt for Roy went on unabated. The enterprising Richard Keith Hampton, a fellow officer of the Foreign Branch, had committed himself to the task of weeding out suspicious elements in the city. He acted on tips from informers, surveilled suspects and was not averse to using his son and wife for cover.

Hampton appeared to have conducted surveillance on a key figure who would unwittingly provide regular intelligence on Roy: Suhasini Nambiar. Nambiar, the first woman member of the Communist Party of India who had attended the Toilers University in Moscow, had arrived in Bombay with Lester Hutchinson.

The vivacious and strikingly beautiful Suhasini lived in the northern suburb of Khar with her sister Mrinalini; both younger siblings of the famous poet and nationalist leader Sarojini Naidu. ^[20] Their residence and Suhasini’s workplace in Bombay proper were cover addresses for clandestine communications between activists in Europe and associates in Bombay. Roy regularly addressed letters to them.

In April 1927, Hampton thought he had netted the biggest catch.

On 24 November 1930, Roy said goodbye to Ellen at Verona railway station. With stops in Istanbul, Baghdad and Karachi, he reached Bombay on 17 December, nearly 15 years after he left the country as a young revolutionary in search of arms. As ‘Dr. Mahmood,’ he was temporarily taken to the Theosophical Society in Juhu. Thereafter, he shifted lodgings frequently and often attended meetings with a small group at V.B. Karnik’s flat. ^[23] On occasion, he went to public gatherings in disguise.

The prominent filmmaker J.B.H. Wadia, who went to a mass gathering at Bombay Gymkhana Maidan (now Azad Maidan), recollected seeing “a tall Arab called Dr. Mahmud in the crowd.” Wadia learnt that Roy was attending clandestine meetings in disguise with a “few ultra leftists in an old dingy building.” In fact, the ten-member group known as the Royists had no idea of Roy’s real identity when they first met him.

At first, Roy moved about relatively freely. The police had also noted the presence of a ‘Dr. Mahmood’ but had no inkling of who he really was: they did not have a recent photograph. During this period, Roy met prominent Congressmen, including Sardar Patel, Bhulabhai Desai, B.R. Ambedkar and N.M. Joshi.

February 1931. Hanuman Terrace, Lamington Road, Bombay. Roy’s identity was betrayed at a meeting of the Royists. Harindranath Chattopadhyaya, or ‘Harin,’ was by then making a mark as a poet and playwright. He had travelled across Europe in the autumn of 1927 studying “Modern European Theatres and Play Production” and upon his return lectured frequently on communism. He had met Roy on his travels. Harin was a younger sibling to Sarojini Naidu and Chatto, and older brother to Suhasini Nambiar. British intelligence regarded Harin a “good for nothing sort of man” and “a poor sort of creature altogether.”

That particular evening at Karnik’s flat, Harin greeted Roy like “a long-lost brother.” Roy, as Karnik says, “dropped a hint that the chance meeting might not end well.” Harin lost no time informing Suhasini of Roy’s presence. Days later, he advised Karnik not to “associate with a dangerous person of that type.”

Given the surveillance on the Chattopadhyaya siblings, the police got wind of their target. But Roy was already on the move. He soon left for the United Provinces staying with his associate Brajesh Singh of the Kalakankar royal family, who would later marry the daughter of Josef Stalin. ^[24]

Politically, the Royists were now making good progress. In collaboration with the nationalists, they had gained control of India’s largest trade union group, the AITUC, edging out the CPI. Roy even travelled to Karachi undetected to attend the annual session of the Indian National Congress at the invitation of Jawaharlal Nehru. ^[25]

Roy, who attended the meetings in disguise, was said to have “had the ear of Nehru at this time.” British intelligence amplified his influence, and Nehru was forced to deny press reports that “a certain mysterious individual with communist affiliations” had penned a resolution pertaining to fundamental rights and a national economic programme. Roy dismissed the resolution as an “instrument of deception.”

Roy’s return to Bombay was much anticipated​​ by th​​e Royists, who had been receiving regular instructions from him regarding a strike at Khatau textile mill. But they were not th​e only ones waiting. ^[26]

20 July 1931. A rainy night in Byculla, Bombay. The Royists met at 8pm at the house of Dr. M.R. Shetty on Adam Wyllie Road. Their deliberations lasted till midnight. Roy went to a nearby building, where arrangements for him to sleep had been made. The group took no notice of three ‘mawalis’ sleeping on the road. They were undercover CID officers.

An urgent telephone call was made to DCP Khan Bahadur Kavasji Petigara. Policemen surrounded the vicinity. At around 5am the next morning, Petigara knocked on the door and was reluctantly let in by a domestic helper. Roy was found asleep in his pajamas.

The Commissioner of Police G.S. Wilson arrived shortly after. “Good morning, Mr. Roy,” he said, before placing him under arrest.

Gautam Pemmaraju is a Bombay-based writer and filmmaker with a special interest in Indian anti-colonial activists of the early 20th century.