Juned Shaikh | A Communist’s Library and the Question of Translation in Late-Colonial Bombay

The fourth and the last Eurasian Empires workshop of the winter quarter 2023 will feature Juned Shaikh from UC Santa Cruz, presenting his paper titled “A Communist’s Library and the Question of Translation in Late-Colonial Bombay.” 

In December 1928, Gangadhar Adhikari arrived in Bombay with a tranche of books, pamphlets, and letters. Adhikari had recently completed a PhD in Chemistry from Friedrich Wilhelms Universitat in Berlin and had joined the Communist Party of Germany in 1926 while he was a student there. He was arrested in Bombay in March 1929, and his books and pamphlets were confiscated by the police. After his release from jail in 1933—in what became famous as the Meerut Conspiracy Case—some of his books were returned, but he was not allowed back into Bombay. Instead, he was externed to the city of Bijapur, in south India. In 1935, Adhikari’s home in Bijapur, and his brother R.M. Adhikari’s home in Bombay was searched again, and some of the same material seized in 1929 was confiscated by the Bombay government. What was this material? Why would it pique the interest of the police at two different moments (1929 and 35) and why would they find it objectionable? The 62 books and pamphlets seized by the police included Friedrich Engels’ Origins of the Family, Sigmund Freud’s Introduction to Psychoanalysis, and books by German Indologists. These books were eventually returned to Adhikari. But the literature that was never returned included Marxist pamphlets and Marathi translations of these pamphlets. This paper does two things: through Adhikari’s library, it seeks to reconstruct the world of ideas that an important Indian Marxist participated in; and it highlights the politics of the translation of Marxism in this period.

About the Speaker

Juned Shaikh is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Outcaste Bombay: City Making and the Politics of the Poor. His current work is on the life and times of the Indian Marxist, Gangadhar Adhikari.