Draft:Comrade Kirillov

Comrade Kirillov

The slightly flighty manner of Raja Rao's Comrade Kirillov clearly captures Kirillov's confused personality, indecision, and the struggle between Communism and India.

Comrade Kirillov is the name given to a sketch of Padmanabha Iyer, a South Indian man, by the Rao-like storyteller. The novella opens, "I first met communism in Kirillov," and the book explores this embodiment in contemporary man. Indian-born Kirillov, who traveled overseas when he was a young man, settled in England in 1928. He is a seeker, and Marxism has captured him from the beginning by providing (in his opinion) a certainty that Indian tradition did not:

The predictability of events in the dialectical calendar far surpassed the accuracy of the Indian astrologer. The deft astrological hands could play humbug, but the figure of statistics never does.

Kirillov is forced to choose the only option he can think of due to Hitler's ascent, his house painter humbug, and the weakness he perceives in both India and even England:

There is Stalin. Father Stalin. He alone has the might and magic of the new world. The senility of the Labour Party is the bane of the British working classes. England is finished. Stalin is certain.

Kirillov can defend and excuse the mock trials while disparaging Mahatma Gandhi and his work in India.

       The novella spans the years 1930–1940, ending with Indian independence and going forward. Kirillov, as the narrator recognizes, is caught between the ideology he has accepted and the Indian culture that still holds a place in his heart. In fact, he sounds more like the ascetics of his native country even if he claims to be the embodiment of the Soviet ideal:

"Anonymous my name," Kirillov had once declared to me, "Logic my religion, Communism my motherland." How alike, I thought to myself, my Sannyasi of Benares, and this Sadhu of Communism.

In the end, Kirillov goes back to India. Although independence gives rise to some hope—the narrator is confident that "his Indianhood would break through every communist chain"—Kirillov finds it difficult to reconcile these two aspects of himself.

       The narrative of the novel shifts from second- to even third-hand, with the author included a passage from Kirillov's wife Irene's journal prior to the end. Towards the conclusion, the author gives up on Kirillov and focuses on his son Kamal, the next generation, dismissing him as "last reported to be at Peking". While Kirillov is lost on this path he cannot escape, obsessed like the religious fanatic, Kamal, quickly enmeshed in his history, gives hope for the future.

Rao is a skilled writer, but this is a sketchy book that offers a lot of life (and ideology) in brief, elegant strokes. Although the story should have been expanded upon and given in more detail, Kirillov's conflicted nature, uncertainty, and the struggle between Communism and India are all convincingly reflected in the somewhat flighty style. Although it is not the main subject of the book, it provides a decent overview of the Indian expatriate experience in the 1930s, and it is also a fascinating fiction about that experience.