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M. P. Tirumalacharya

(1887 – 1954) – (Tamilnadu)

Mandayam Parthasarathi Tirumal Acharya (Aged 67) was born on April 15, 1887, in Madras, to a family of Aiyangar Brahmins who were involved in the rise of Indian nationalism in South India. Acharya was exposed to nationalism from childhood and had close relatives including M.C. Alasinga Perumal and Prof. Rangachari. In his childhood, Acharya was an admirer of Swami Vivekananda.

Acharya was an Indian nationalist, communist, and anarchist. He was among the founding members of the Communist Party of India (Tashkent group) and associated with India House in London and the Hindu-German Conspiracy during World War I. As a key functionary of the Berlin Committee, he, along with Har Dayal, sought to establish the Indian Volunteer Corps with Indian prisoners of war from the battlefields of Mesopotamia and Europe.

In 1900, Acharya and Subramanya Bharathi launched the weekly journal India, which gained quick popularity. However, the British Raj noticed the publication’s nationalist editorials and satirical cartoons, leading the editors to flee to Pondicherry, a French enclave, where they continued their work. The press expanded to include revolutionary literature, leading to the British seeking French assistance to ban the “seditious literature.” Acharya found help from sympathetic French lawyers to fight against his expulsion from Pondicherry.

In 1919, after the end of the war, Acharya moved to the Soviet Union, where he was one of the founding members of the Communist Party of India at Tashkent. However, he was disappointed with the Communist International, and in the 1920s, he returned to Europe where he was involved with the League against Imperialism and subsequently with the international anarchist movement. In 1921, a split in the CPI emerged between factions siding with M.N. Roy and those who favored the approaches of Chatto, with Acharya in the latter group. This was the beginning of the end of Acharya’s associations with the international Communist movement.

By the early 1920s, Acharya had begun exploring Anarchism. He took an active role in promoting Anarchist works and contributed to the Russian Anarchist publication Rabotchi Put at that time. In 1931, he lived in Amsterdam working with the school of Anarcho-syndicalism. Acharya came to be acquainted in the early 1930s with Ranchoddas Bhavan Lotvala, a Marxist-leaning Indian industrialist from Bombay who had financed The Socialist, one of the first Marxist periodicals in India. Lotvala also financed the translation and publication of many leftist literature, including the Communist manifesto.

In 1935, the British-Indian ban on Acharya was lifted, and he returned to Bombay, where he worked as a journalist. During this time, Acharya wrote eight articles which were later collated and published as a book called Reminiscences of an Indian revolutionary. From Bombay, Acharya established correspondence with Japanese anarchist Taiji Yamaga and Chinese anarchist Lu Jinbao. The result of the correspondences led to the three establishing contacts with the Commission de Relations de l’Internationale Anarchiste (Liaison Commission of the Anarchist International). In the following years, Acharya contributed to anarchist publications such as Freedom in London, Tierra y Libertad in Mexico, and an anarchist publication called Contre Courant in Paris. He also remained in correspondence with Albert Meltzer for more than fifteen years.

After being appointed secretary of the Indian Institute of Sociology, which was established under Lotvala’s patronage in the 1930s, Acharya exerted his influence on the institute and led it to adopt a number of statutes in 1947. Eventually, the institute was renamed as the Libertarian Socialist Institute. Acharya’s profound views on economic matters were published in his work “How Long Can Capitalism Survive?” in 1951 by the Free Society Group of Chicago. He also wrote essays and critiques on capitalism, colonialism, communism, and nationalism, which were published in the journal Harijan. These contributions, which totaled almost thirty essays, became his primary source of income before he passed away in March 1954.