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In March 1929, communist organisers and trade unionists were arrested across India and charged in what became the Meerut Conspiracy Case. The colonial government was not simply prosecuting individuals. It was attempting to break the networks through which communists had begun organising workers across factories, cities and trade unions.

Nearly a century later, the state continues to use laws such as the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act to prosecute political activity as a threat to national security. The legal framework is different, but the underlying question remains familiar: what happens when the state begins to treat political organisation itself as a form of threat?

The answer can be found in the archives.

Inside the Ajoy Bhawan Archives in New Delhi and the P.C. Joshi Archives at Jawaharlal Nehru University are hundreds of photographs, conference resolutions, party journals, courtroom records and sketches documenting the history of the communist movement in colonial India. Read individually, they appear to record familiar moments: a conspiracy trial, a strike, a peasant meeting, a cultural performance.

Read together, they tell a different story. Rather than recounting the rise of the Communist Party of India through its leaders or ideological debates, they reveal how a small revolutionary current built the organisations that transformed it into a mass movement of workers and peasants. Between the first communist groups formed in 1920 and the peasant uprisings of the late 1940s, Indian communists confronted a recurring challenge: how could a movement survive repression while continuing to expand? Colonial prosecutions, party bans and censorship repeatedly disrupted the organisation, but they also forced it to develop new forms of political work.

Trade unions, peasant associations, cultural organisations and underground networks were not separate chapters in this history. They were successive responses to the practical problems of organising under colonial rule. The photographs and documents that follow trace that process: how a revolutionary organisation was built, how workers and peasants were organised, how the movement survived illegality, and how it reproduced itself across workplaces, villages and cultural institutions.

Making a revolutionary organisation

The Communist Party of India did not emerge through a single founding moment but through a gradual process shaped by international revolutionary networks, colonial repression, and the slow work of institutional consolidation.

1920: N. Roy (centre, black tie and jacket) with Vladimir Lenin (tenth from the left), Maxim Gorky (behind Lenin), and delegates at the Second Congress of the Communist International, Petrograd, 1920. Credit: Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI), via Wikimedia Commons.

The photograph captures the scale of the Second Congress of the Communist International in Petrograd in 1920, where delegates from across the world gathered to debate the future of revolutionary politics. Before a communist party existed inside India, its earliest organisers had already entered a transnational political network linking anti-colonial struggles to an international socialist movement. It was here that M.N. Roy argued that colonial revolutions could not simply follow the trajectory of European socialism but had to develop through their own historical conditions.

For Indian communists, the significance of the Comintern extended beyond ideological debate. It provided organisational connections, strategic coordination and an international framework through which a revolutionary movement could begin to take shape before it possessed a formal organisational structure within India.

Nalini Gupta, Shaukat Usmani, S.A. Dange and Muzaffar Ahmed, among the accused in the Kanpur Conspiracy Case. Credit: Ajoy Bhawan Archives, Communist Party of India, New Delhi.

Colonial repression unexpectedly accelerated the public visibility of the communist movement. The Kanpur Conspiracy Case of 1924 brought four leading organisers to trial on charges of conspiring to deprive the King Emperor of sovereignty over British India. In the photograph, they stand formally dressed, looking directly into the camera.

The proceedings that followed received extensive press coverage, and the accused used the courtroom to explain socialist politics, anti-imperialism and the conditions of Indian workers before a national audience. A trial intended to suppress communist activity instead helped transform scattered groups of revolutionaries into a movement with a recognisable public identity.

Presidential address delivered at the First Indian Communist Conference, Kanpur, 1925. Credit: Ajoy Bhawan Archives, Communist Party of India, New Delhi.

The First Indian Communist Conference, held in Kanpur in December 1925, marked an important step in transforming dispersed revolutionary networks into a political organisation with a public programme. The presidential address reproduced here situated the communist movement within the struggles of industrial workers and agricultural labourers, arguing that national liberation and class struggle could not be separated.

Rather than responding only to immediate political circumstances, the conference sought to establish an organisational framework capable of uniting workers and peasants across........

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