At least one commentator has seen a strike of Bombay textile workers in 1908 as deriving from the doctrines of Karl Marx, though it was not for another decade that the British could be absolutely certain that this pernicious new philosophy had spread to their Indian Empire. The Communist Party of India was founded in Tashkent in 1920 by expatriates who had usually struggled on foot across some of the bleakest country on earth to get away from the strictures of British rule. One of the early leaders, Muzzafar Ahmad – ancient, ailing, almost bedbound in Ballygunge, and clearly en route to his place in the great Bengali pantheon – remembers one such group slogging over the Hindu Kush mountains to Tirmiz in Soviet Tadzhikistan, where a military band of the Red Army played them aboard a train for Tashkent and its new Indian Military School, which specialized in teaching political philosophy and the mechanics of the machine gun. At home that year, the All India Trade Union Congress was founded with a strong and militant left wing, and from then on Communism became a very active ingredient in the turbulence of British India.
