Comrade Abdul Majid: Fragments from a Revolutionary Life
Recovering the memory of a forgotten pioneer of the communist movement in undivided India
Illustration by Jamhoor
The end of World War I in Europe and subsequent dissolution of the Ottoman Empire sparked a wave of anti-imperialist mass upsurge in the Indian Subcontinent. The wartime prime minister of Great Britain, Lloyd George, had sought help for the war from Indian Muslims while promising that the Allies’ aim was not to deprive Turkey of its territories in Asia Minor and Thrace. Yet the Treaty of Sevres, which marked the end of the war, disposed of the Ottoman Caliph, igniting a feeling of betrayal among thousands of young Muslim men. These men joined the Hijrat Movement with the aim of “liberating India from [the] foreign yoke”. This movement became an umbrella for young revolutionaries for pan-Islamism and anti-imperialism. Among the thousands of men who undertook the perilous hijrat (migration), from parts of Indian subcontinent for Afghanistan and other Central Asian countries, was the revolutionary young Mir Abdul Majid who would go on to become one of the first leaders of the Communist Party of India.
Approximately 40,000 muslim men took the journey from British India to Afghanistan during the 1920 Hijrat movement. Image: Paperjewels.org
Comrade Abdul Majid or M.A. Majid alias Sahari, is remembered in the memoirs of communists and mentioned in the accounts of almost all historical moments connected to the Indian communist and revolutionary movements of the 1920s and ’30s. He is mentioned in documents confiscated by British colonial police and those held by the Comintern. Abdul Majid was also named in two of three major communist conspiracy cases (Peshawar and Meerut) in the 1920s. However, despite his central role in mobilizing and consolidating the early Left and communist movements of India, little is known about the person he was.
The memoir of Comrade Muzaffar Ahmed, one of the stalwarts of the communist movement in India, titled Myself and the Communist Party of India, was dedicated to Abdul Majid:
“Mir Abdul Majid and to the memory of Ferozuddin Mansur. They were among the first members of the Communist Party of India. They studied in the Communist University of the Toiling East in Moscow. To spread Communist ideas, they crossed the all but insurmountable Pamirs and returned to India…Abdul Majid was one of the founders of the well-known Naujawan Bharat Sabha…”
Other prominent communist leaders Sohan Singh Josh from Punjab and Shaukat Usmani (who also undertook hijrat) both mention Abdul Majid in their accounts of revolutionary movements. Sohan Singh Josh described the trials and tribulations he shared with Abdul Majid during the formative years of the Communist Party in Punjab. Similarly, Shaukat Usmani lauded Abdul Majid’s “fine management skills” which helped the young revolutionaries make their way through the perilous Hindukush range on their way to Afghanistan from Tashkent. Several recent academic works on the communist and revolutionary movements in colonial India also mention Abdul Majid.
This article pieces together scattered vignettes and fragments of information from a range of secondary sources to assemble a picture of Abdul Majid’s life and politics. These sources include the memoirs of his comrades, confiscated official documents, and recent research on the formative years of communist movements in India. They chart Abdul Majid’s journey from a young revolutionary participating in the universalist project of pan-Islamic anti-imperialism to another universalist struggle, that of socialism. As one of the first communist leaders of India, Abdul Majid’s role and commitment to scientific socialism and struggle for communism has been crucial for cementing the revolutionary base that would inspire and mobilize generations of communists to come.
The Formative Years — First Balkan War of 1912
Not much is known about Abdul Majid’s early years. We know he was born in 1902 to Faiz Baksh, a Kashmiri trader who had settled in Lahore near Mochi Gate. According to noted Soviet scholar M.A Persits, Majid never completed his higher education and instead became involved in revolutionary organizing in 1915. It isn’t till 1920 that we learn that Abdul Majid joined the hijrat.
The young men who joined the Hijrat Movement came to be known as the muhajireen. Almost 40,000 Muslim men took the journey to Afghanistan with the aim of fighting against British forces. A segment of the movement wanted to launch a struggle against the British from Afghanistan while others wanted to fight in Anatolia on the side of the Ottomans. But several factors impeded the success of both aims: the intricacies of geo-politics, nationalism, and ethnicity coupled with a civil war in Central Asia shaped the trajectories of these young men.
Routes followed by the the Indian Muhajireen during the Hijrat Movement, 1920. Image: History of Pashtuns.
As these realities caught up with the muhajireen, the movement split into several groups: some retuned to India, others stayed back in Afghanistan, a segment made their way to Anatolia, while others were left adrift in Central Asia. Those in Central Asia once again divided into two groups after arriving in the city of Termiz in present-day Uzbekistan. Here, the muhajireen found the city embroiled in civil war and under the control of the Red Army. Having travelled through perilous terrain, the muhajireen were exhausted and tired. The Red Army welcomed them and offered accommodation, food, and clothing.
Soviet authorities advised the muhajireen not to proceed further given the insurgency in the city. Yet a majority chose to continue their journey toward Anatolia and a minority decided to turn back. In Anatolia, the group was arrested by Turkmen in Bokhara province and thrown into prison without food or water. Many went missing or died in custody. Those remaining were rescued by the Red Army after Bukhara fell to the Soviets in September 1920. A few of these survivors then joined the International Red Brigade and fought for the Bolsheviks.
It was at this time that noted Indian Communist M.N Roy, on behalf of the Communist International, arrived in Bukhara and invited the muhajireen to Tashkent. The invitation led to yet another split between the group—nearly half decided to continue journeying to Anatolia while 35 members, including Abdul Majid, accepted Roy’s invitation. At Tashkent, they met with another muhajir-turned-communist, Maulana Abdul Rab Peshawari.
Suchetna Chattopadhyay in her article Towards Communism: 1917 and the Muhajirs from India Adrift in Central Asia, has described in detail the military and ideological training muhajireen received at the Indian Military School in Tashkent. Under the leadership of M.N Roy, Muhammad Shafiq, and Abani Mukherjee, the revolutionaries prepared the ground for the formation of an émigré Communist Party of India. After the Indian Military School closed in the spring of 1921 they moved to the newly established Communist University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow. Their training continued in economics, history, political science, philosophy, and arts of warfare. Describing the education they received at University of the Toiler for the East, Abdul Qadir, a British spy in the Tashkent group of the muhajireen wrote that, ‘In the courses on philosophy and history, historical materialism was emphasized and ‘the Marxian philosophy of class war was dominant’. They were also taught about French and American Revolution; history of capitalism; the works of Marx and Engels along with the works of J.S Mills, Adam Smith, Plato, and Aristotle. Along with military and political education the muhajireen also received a maintenance allowance to cover their everyday expenses. Though the course was initially meant to last two years, it was shortened abruptly to four months when heavy snowstorms ripped through Moscow in December 1921.
The newly trained former muhajireen thus began the next chapter of their revolutionary life. They took the journey home in groups—comrades Abdul Majid, Shaukat Usmani, Masood Ali Shah, Gawhar Rahman Khan, Firozuddin Mansoor, and Sultan Muhmud Khan were in the same group. They persevered through severe hardship in crossing the Hindukush mountains and upon arrival, they were arrested and tried under the Peshawar Conspiracy Case (1921). Abdul Majid and his comrades were tried under 121-A of the Indian Penal Code, and he was sentenced to three years’ rigorous imprisonment. This was the first communist conspiracy trial in India according to Muzaffar Ahmed’s memoir, but it would be followed by a string of others.
Thus began Abdul Majid’s lifelong struggle for a working-class revolution. Having started out from the hijrat movement struggling to restore the Ottoman Caliphate, he poured his energies into a new struggle – that of socialist revolution.
Consolidating the Communist Party of India
Abdul Majid was completing his prison sentence when the first Communist Conference in India was held on December 26, 1925. Such was his stature that he was nevertheless elected to the executive committee in absentia. Upon release, he arrived in Lahore and established links with the communists of the international Ghadar Party organization. With Sohan Singh Joshi, he founded the Kirti Kisan Party on 12th April 1928. Abdul Majid was the joint secretary and a part of the five-member committee to decide the rules, regulations, and programme of the party.
Muzaffar Ahmed’s memoir remembers Abdul Majid as: ‘a tireless trade-union leader, who along with some of his close associates, did some excellent organisational work among the Railwaymen and textile workers at Lahore’. Similarly, Philip Spratt’s memoir “Blowing Up India” published in 1955, mentions that Muhajir communists “were all very charming fellows but disinclined to do anything. Abdul Majid alone ever did any party work…”
These memoirs help place Abdul Majid as a central figure in the CPI’s formative years. Documents from the Meerut Conspiracy Case initiated by the British India Government against trade unionists and communists toward the end of 1920s, as well as correspondence between Majid and his comrades provide further evidence for this. Abdul Majid played a central role in establishing and consolidating the CPI from 1925 (when the first conference was held) to 1929, when the Meerut Conspiracy Case was initiated.
25 of the accused in the Meerut Conspiracy Case photographed outside Meerut jail. The Case began on March 15, 1929, and concluded in 1933 with the conviction of Mir Abdul Majid along with 30 others. Image: Peoples Democracy.
As one of the organizers of Kirti Kisan Party in Punjab, Abdul Majid was in touch with key leaders of communist groups in Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, and Kanpur. He travelled frequently between cities for the purposes of party building. He regularly communicated with prominent communist intellectuals like Sapurji Saktavala, Rajani Palme Dutt, and the British communists B.F Bradley and Philip Spratt who were deputed in India by the British branch of The Communist International to organize the CPI. He played a key role in the formation of the branches of Workers’ and Peasants’ Party in the United Provinces and Delhi. He was also central to establishing the Press Workers’ Union in Lahore and a member of the All India Trade Union Congress.
Comrades and Revolutionaries
While Abdul Majid was beginning his political journey in Lahore as a pan-Islamist in the late 1910s, another young Muslim man from the United Provinces had started on a similar course. His name was Ashfaqullah Khan.
Khan, as he wrote in his short autobiography, was initially a pan-Islamist who later moved towards nationalism and in his last days, veered towards socialism. Ashfaqullah was on the run after the infamous Kakori Train robbery in 1925, when he arrived in Ajmer and wrote a letter to Abdul Majid.
In his unpublished dissertation titled Revolutionary Networks in North Indian Politics (1974), Max Harcourt recounts that: “the letter to [Abdul Majid] suggested that he use his influence with the Amir [of Afghanistan] to get Ashfaqullah a passport to Kabul under an assumed name or to get him a job as a lascar or a ship’s clerk on a ship out of Bombay. In return he promised to work for the Comintern once he got to Europe”.
Muzaffar Ahmed and Comrade Ramachandra also mention Ashfaqullah Khan’s correspondence with Abdul Majid in their memoirs. According to Ramachandra, when Ashfaqullah reached Lahore, Abdul Majid arranged his stay and his onward travels to the Soviet Union via Afghanistan. But before Ashfaqullah could undertake the journey, he was arrested.
In popular memory, the Naujawan Bharat Sabha (NBS) (Youth Society of India) is usually associated with Bhagat Singh and his comrades. They had formed NBS in 1926 as an open mass front of the Hindustan Republican Association (HRA) (also known as Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, HSRA). But the HRA was largely limited to colleges of Lahore. In 1928, Bhagat Singh met Sohan Singh Josh (Founder-President of Kirti Kisan Party) and was attempting to build a mass organization for students and youth. Josh writes in his memoir My Tryst with Secularism (1991) that the name of the new youth organization was suggested by Bhagat Singh who also merged his group with Kirti. This gave rise to two tendencies: one represented by Bhagat Singh (anarchist) and the other represented by communists like Josh and Abdul Majid. Josh describes that even though the groups worked together, there were tensions between the two.
The newly reconstituted NBS was able to expand to other regions of Punjab and became a mass organization. Though largely associated with Bhagat Singh, both Abdul Majid and Josh played a crucial role (arguably larger than Singh as he and his comrades got more involved in reviving and revitalizing the near-defunct HRA following the Kakori Train conspiracy case) in expanding the organization as they toured villages and towns of Punjab. With a lot of communists in its ranks, NBS had a significant impact upon Bhagat Singh’s group and their ideology.
Bhagat Singh’s shift from anarchism to socialism took place during his involvement with NBS. I would argue that Abdul Majid played a very significant role in this development. Shalini Sharma’s article “Developing a Communist Identity: the case of Naujawan Bharat Sabha”, has discussed how post-October Revolution Russia became an important reference point of many communist activists in their attempts to mobilize the masses. Analysing the speeches of Sohan Singh Josh, Abdul Majid, and others at NBS meetings, Sharma emphasized that for the young Punjabi communist activists, Russia became the “metaphor for emancipation from illegitimate imperial rule… [Russia for them] was the art of the possible—it stood for what they were fighting for…”.
“Abdul Majid was an important link in the long chain of anti-imperialist/socialist groups operating in the Indian Subcontinent of the 1920s and 30s”
This representation of Russia, ‘as an ideal state of affairs where social relations had been re-ordered according to socially just principles’, expressed in and disseminated through the speeches of Josh, Abdul Majid and others, can also be found in several writings and essays of Bhagat Singh. We can be sure that between Abdul Majid, a communist trained in Soviet Russia with first-hand experiences of Soviet society and fascinating stories to tell, and an inquisitive Bhagat Singh, there would have been a lot of debate and discussion about theory, practice and tactics.
Thus, Abdul Majid was an important link in the long chain of anti-imperialist/socialist groups operating in the Indian Subcontinent of the 1920s and 30s whose members were crucial to the development of a communist movement. India’s early communist movement was a mix of communists of different stripes, including émigrés, Ghadarites, and those from revolutionary movements both at home and abroad. Abdul Majid was a member of the émigré Communist Party of India formed in Tashkent in 1920 but he was also working with the revolutionaries of the HRA (later HSRA), while being among the founders of the Central Committee of the CPI and in touch with the Ghadarite Communists.
1920: Lenin, Gorky and M.N. Roy among others pose for a photograph at the Second Conference of the Comintern at the Uritsky Palace in Petrograd. Later that year the Communist Party of India was announced in Tashkant. Image: The Hindu Archives.
Abdul Majid’s Ideological and Intellectual Life
After his release from prison in November 1933, Abdul Majid arrived in Lahore and launched an Urdu weekly titled Mehnatkash (which translates to toiler) along with Gauhar Rehman and Comrade Ramachandra. Marxist or communist literature was scarce and censored in Punjab. None of the essays written by Abdul Majid in Mehnatkash are available in the public domain today, but we have access to fragments of speeches by Abdul Majid during Naujawan Bharat Sabha and Kirti Kisan Party meetings. These speeches were recorded in shorthand by CID officers shadowing Abdul Majid and other Kirti or NBS leaders and were presented as ‘evidence’ in the Meerut Conspiracy case trial. Though these fragments are not enough in themselves to paint a comprehensive picture of Abdul Majid’s ideological development, they do shed some light.
At the founding conference of NBS in Jallianwala Bagh, Abdul Majid said: “…today Russia has set an example to the world and has shown how workers are governing and how they can take up the reins in their own hands after destroying big governments… At present Russia’s revolution is a lesson…”
At an NBS conference on 24th February, 1929 in Lahore, Abdul Majid implored the youth to take an anti-war position:
“…In the opinion of the conference all wars are waged and bloodsheds caused to promote the cause of capitalists and imperialists, it therefore strongly requests the young men not to take any part in the war which is to take place in the near future and to induce the masses to do the same...”
While addressing peasants, Abdul Majid described the Russian government as having a benevolent attitude towards peasants:
‘…because there it is their own government. They feel the trouble of their own brethren, in contrast to British India, where the English men don’t realise this. They say the “black” may suffer, but the English, white soldiers and judges should not suffer…”
Directly attacking the colonial state-capitalist propaganda against workers, Abdul Majid said at a conference of the Kirti Kisan Party:
“Does the labourer want to strike unreasonably? No. Never. The labourer does want to get work and pass his life but the capitalists... whose business is it to commit dacoities in the open daylight and not to do any work wish to employ the labourers and derive unlawful gain from their labour of wages. Unite together… and give such a blow on the face of the capitalist that his teeth may fall out. Take your bread from him…It is my belief that so long as this capitalistic system exists in the world, no evil can be obliterated from the world…If you want to reform the world change this system which in itself is the most impure thing of all impure things. This very capitalism is responsible for evil deeds …”
Questioning the legitimacy of Congress leaders in another address, he said…
“…Almost all the big leaders have proved traitors to the people. The people should now chalk out a line of action for themselves. Popular leaders should belong to the poor classes and should be free from selfishness…”
In his last statement before the conclusion of Meerut trials, Abdul Majid boldly declared:
“I wholeheartedly sympathise with the scientific programme of the Communist International which it has put before the world for a world revolution. We Communists in India are making efforts to bring about this revolution”.
These statements reveal Abdul Majid’s conviction on scientific socialism and his firm grasp of Marxist-Leninist principles which he was able to translate into local idioms. He was a trained propagandist from the University for the Toiler of the East. As a result, in the Meerut Conspiracy trial, he was sentenced to seven years in prison—not for criminal activity, but for being a communist.
Aftermath of the Meerut Conspiracy Case
Those convicted in the Meerut Conspiracy Case, including Abdul Majid, were released in November 1933. Along with Sohan Singh Josh, Abdul Majid went to Punjab and picked up from where they had left. But due to an ultra-sectarian line of the Communist International and a sharpening of communist identity in the wake of Meerut Conspiracy case, Abdul Majid and Josh soon found themselves in a difficult position. The sixth congress of the Communist International had passed a resolution on the question of National Liberation Struggle in colonies stating that the “formation of any kind of bloc between the communist party and the national revolutionary opposition must be rejected…”. This thesis had a decisive impact upon the nascent Indian communist movement divided among various regional branches of Workers and Peasants Party (WPP) and the embryonic Communist Party of India (CPI). Before the sixth Congress, the WPPs and CPI worked in synchrony with free exchange of cadres. The Sixth Congress came down heavily upon the WPPs asking the Indian communists scattered across different parties to come together and form a separate united Communist Party. Following this, two tendencies emerged in the Punjab Kirti Kisan Party, one seeking to work independently from the International but together with the broader anti-colonial struggle, and the other seeking to remain allied with the Comintern.
A fragment from The Weekly Mehnat Kash, documenting one of Abdul Majid’s letters.
In his autobiography, Josh describes in detail his and Abdul Majid’s struggle to bring the entire party in line with the Comintern thesis. A compromise was struck in favour of working together under the Anti-imperialist league, in which both Abdul Majid and Josh played a crucial role, but this did not last long.
In the recent book Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India (2020), Ali Raza has reproduced a report filed by an Indian activist to the Comintern regarding the status of communist activists who were implicated in the Meerut Conspiracy Case. Regarding Abdul Majid, the report says: “since release (Nov 1933) [Majid] has not been very active” adding that he was a “very reliable and sincere comrade”. We don’t know the criteria based on which the reporter judged Abdul Majid’s allegedly inactive status, but there is evidence that Abdul Majid was active in the Communist Party of India at least until 1937.
A Home Department report of the Colonial British Indian administration from June 1937 states that Abdul Majid was planning a trip to Australia. The file titled ‘Refusal of Passport to Mir Abdul Majid, a Communist, For Australia’, says that Mir Abdul Majid had applied for a passport to travel to Australia on the pretext of taking care of unfinished business left by his late uncle. British officials deliberating over the reason for travel came to the conclusion that Abdul Majid wanted to travel abroad “in order to collect funds for the spread of communism in India…to receive assistance in bringing about general revision of the policy of the Communist Party of India…to visit the principal centres of Communism overseas…to secure interviews with well-known communists B. F. Bradley and Rajani Palme Dutt”.
The assessment of British officials was somewhat correct—it was substantiated by Majid’s close associate Comrade Ramchandra. In his memoir Naujawan Bharat Sabha and Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (1986), he writes that in 1937, communist leaders from Punjab were “devising a scheme for the diversion of Ghadar funds received from abroad into Communist channels”. Abdul Majid, who was then tasked “with organizing study circle for Industrial Workers in Lahore…and reviving the journal Punjab Awaz”, was entrusted with this task for which he was to proceed to the USA and USSR from Australia.
A colonial document from 1937, showing the refusal of a passport to “Mir Abdul Majid, a communist”. Image: National Archives of India.
According to a British intelligence report as well as Ramchandra’s account, Abdul Majid went “inactive” for some time so he could get a passport. He even took the legal route to procure his passport, albeit through a “notorious Socialist agitator”, according to British intelligence. Despite all his efforts, Majid’s passport was denied.
This is the last episode where Abdul Majid’s name crops up, either in documents of the colonial government or in the memoirs of his comrades (at least those publicly available). After 1937, news of Abdul Majid dwindled as he drifted away from Communism and after Partition, established a printing press in Lahore. Abdul Majid died in 1980.
“Owing to the absence of any photographs and lack of written material, the memory of Abdul Majid has receded from the story of the Indian communist movement”
When Abdul Majid’s house was raided by the colonial police in during the Meerut conspiracy case the police recovered a group photograph showing Abdul Majid, Muzaffar Ahmad and Gauhar Rehman in a blackwood frame. This picture may have been destroyed during the Meerut Conspiracy trials. Photographs are powerful objects in that they not only capture the present, but also preserve it for the future. They are essential for the act of ‘remembering’. Owing to the absence of any photographs and lack of written material, the memory of Abdul Majid has receded from the story of the Indian communist movement. This article is an attempt to pay tribute and collect the life story of a comrade who is not remembered today, but who made an immense, invaluable, contribution to the fledgling cause of the communist movement in the Indian Subcontinent.
Harshvardhan is a PhD student in Sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU).