Effective Antidote

Blowing Up India, by Philip Spratt. 117 pp. Calcutta: Prachi Prakashan. $0.50 Philip Spratt joined the British Com- munist Pru:ty after graduating from Cambridge in 1924. In 1926 he was sent as a Comintern emissary to India. His revolutionary activities led to several years in jail. The reading and reflection he there accomplished combined with the lesson of events to bring him much wisdom. He broke with communism, but remained in India, where he mar- ried a Hindu and became an Indian citizen.

This small and admirable book is a political autobiography, but at the same time it is a calm, just commentary on the course of Indian, to some degree of Asian, politics dw-ing the past gen- eration. It is remarkable how much Mr. Spratt is able to say, in so little, about even the individual persons of the story-Mao, for example, Chiang, Gandhi, M. N. Roy, Krishna Menon, and of course Nehru (a man “deter- mined to be determined” in whom he finds a most suggestive analogy to Franklin Roosevelt).

JB

About the Author

J. B.

Blowing Up India, by Philip Spratt. 117 pp. Calcutta: Prachi Prakashan. $0.50 Philip Spratt joined the British Com- munist Pru:ty after graduating from Cambridge in 1924. In 1926 he was sent as a Comintern emissary to India. His revolutionary activities led to several years in jail. The reading and reflection he there accomplished combined with the lesson of events to bring him much wisdom. He broke with communism, but remained in India, where he mar- ried a Hindu and became an Indian citizen.

This small and admirable book is a political autobiography, but at the same time it is a calm, just commentary on the course of Indian, to some degree of Asian, politics dw-ing the past gen- eration. It is remarkable how much Mr. Spratt is able to say, in so little, about even the individual persons of the story-Mao, for example, Chiang, Gandhi, M. N. Roy, Krishna Menon, and of course Nehru (a man “deter- mined to be determined” in whom he finds a most suggestive analogy to Franklin Roosevelt).