Future Interrupted: The Subjunctive Nationalism of M. N. Roy

Abstract

Despite today’s routine denunciations of Eurocentrism and the rise of critical schools that consider imperialism to be the exclusive outgrowth of “European epistemologies,” Europe has always been a much more internally mixed entity than is usually supposed as a result of foreign occupations, unassimilated indigenous peoples, contested borders, and a massive cultural and intellectual influx from its present and former colonies. Especially interwar Europe saw this unevenness come to the fore with the residency in Europe of intellectuals and activists from the global South who joined Europeans of like mind in the wake of the Russian Revolution to forge a new international order. The Bengali revolutionary M. N. Roy was one of the most exceptional figures of this type, a promoter equally of science and humanism who dedicated the latter part of his life, in fact, to promoting a “radical and integral humanism” fashioned in part on the work of European thinkers of earlier centuries. In doing so, he was establishing the unevenness of Europe, and making a case for Europe as a joint creation. He was pointing out that these ostensibly European ideas derived from an Enlightenment infused with the more worldly and cosmopolitan philosophies of medieval Arabic, Persian, and Jewish thought.