Skip to main content

Should India's Radical Humanists feel proud? Mexico remembers MN Roy thru nightclub!

This was surprising: A nightclub in Mexico in the name of MN Roy, an early 20th century Indian revolutionary, whose thoughts are claimed to be have influenced Lenin, Einstein, Gramsci and Sun-Yat Sen! A Communist who turned a radical humanist, whatever that means, during the later period of his life, Roy founded the Mexican Communist Party and participated as one of the top representatives in the Communist International.
The “revelation” about the nightclub is made in an article by one Krish Raghav in a site declared “unsecure” by an anti-virus software, yet, it is interesting. The article is titled “The Radical Indian Activist Who Influenced Mexico City, Lenin and Einstein: A Mexican nightclub still pulses for Bengali thinker MN Roy”.
A search on the Google found that currently, on account of coronavirus, the nightclub is closed. Be that as it may, this is what the small writeup says:
***
The streets of Mexico City in the early 1900s were buzzing with bohemian visions of a new world. The famous Mexican critic Carlos Monsiváis once described the capital as “an apocalyptic city, populated with radical optimists”. He forgot that, for three years at least, there was one radical humanist among them.
MN Roy is one of India’s intellectual giants, an early 20th-century figure whose mind thought globally, and whose influence ran through some of the era’s biggest minds, from Einstein and Gramsci to Lenin and Sun-Yat Sen.
All of this I learnt only after encountering a bizarrely named nightclub on the streets of Mexico City. MN Roy (not his real name) is also sadly obscure, a largely forgotten fringe figure in the annals of modern Indian thought.
But he shouldn’t be. His writings hold up extraordinarily well, and his philosophical school of Radical Humanism has newfound relevance in our fractured, divisive time. 

Comments

TRENDING

The “Dr” debate masks a larger crisis in allied-health education

By Dr P K Gupta*  India’s allied-health professions have long operated in a fragmented landscape of universities, hospitals, State authorities and private institutions, each with its own nomenclature, curriculum and standards. The National Commission for Allied and Healthcare Professions Act, 2021 was meant to correct this by creating a unified national framework for education, professional regulation and institutional recognition. Few dispute the need for such oversight. The real question is whether standardisation is quietly becoming synonymous with longer courses, additional internships and new professional titles—changes that risk masking deeper gaps in clinical training, institutional capacity and affordability.

Pilgrimage or pollution? The waste crisis of Indian faith

By Raj Kumar Sinha*  In today's times, there are certain issues that are constantly talked about and discussed, yet no visible impact seems to be made. Beyond water, soil, and pollution, one crisis that continues to be overlooked is waste. Like other life-threatening problems, waste too is gradually moving toward burying and obliterating us. After the Kanwar Yatra in Haridwar, approximately 8,000 tonnes of waste were left behind on the riverbanks, including bottles filled with urine. 

Can cow dung become a source of income? Durga Maida shows the path to self‑reliance

By Vikas Meshram*  In the Sailana block of Ratlam district lies the small village of Govardhanpura. This is where Durga Maida lives with her husband and four daughters. Their livelihood depended on just one bigha of land—far too little to feed a family of six. Growing enough grain for the year was impossible, and even meeting daily expenses was a constant struggle. Alongside farming, Durga kept livestock and took up wage labour whenever she could. Hard work was never lacking, but income always was. Month after month, the accounts failed to balance, forcing her to borrow. Looking back, Durga says those days felt heavy and hopeless; farming offered no promise, and there was no sign of change. Her story mirrored the reality of almost every small farmer in the area.