SOUTH ASIA RESEARCH www.sagepublications.com DOI: 10.1177/026272801103100303 Vol. 31(3): 231–248 Copyright © 2011 SAGE Publications Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC MUSLIM MODERNISM AND TRANS-REGIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN BENGAL, 1911–1925: THE WIDE WORLD OF SAMYABADI Neilesh Bose Department of History, University of North Texas, Denton, USA abstract Histories of Marxism in South Asia often focus on the great men of colonial Indian politics, such as M. N. Roy, who imagined political futures away from nation or identity, or narrowly on activists like Muzaffar Ahmad, the founder of the Communist Party of India, without consideration of the regional-historical and intellectual contexts out of which such activism and imaginations sprang. Using the Bengali Muslim context of the early twentieth century, this article examines how Muslim activists imagined their identity outside of and beyond normative frameworks such as nation or religious community. This article specifically analyses Samyabadi, a left-oriented journal published in Calcutta from 1922 to 1925, in the larger context of communist developments in Bengal and throughout India. The findings offer exciting support for new research approaches to regional and religious identity in late colonial South Asia. keywords: Bengal, Communist Party of India, history, identity, India, Islam in South Asia, Marxism, Muslims, Muzaffar Ahmad, Nazrul Islam, Political Islam, press, Samyabadi Introduction The connection between Islam and communism, as ideologies and forms of belonging, as well as challenges to various modern world orders, has been studied primarily with a focus on Central and Western Asia, throwing light on institutions such as the Toilers of the East, a training school for Muslims as communists in the colonial world after World War I. 1 Though iconic South Asian Muslim intellectuals, such as Muhammed Iqbal and Abul Hashim, have written about ideological connections between the two systems of thought, 2 the intellectual history of the relationships between Islam and communism has yet to be systematically pursued. Within the South Asian context,