In March 1929, communist organisers and trade unionists were arrested across India and charged in what became the Meerut Conspiracy Case. The colonial government was not simply prosecuting individuals. It was attempting to break the networks through which communists had begun organising workers across factories, cities and trade unions. Nearly a century later, the state continues to use laws such as the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act to prosecute political activity as a threat to national security. The legal framework is different, but the underlying question remains familiar: what happens when the state begins to treat political organisation itself as a form of threat?The answer can be found in the archives.Inside the Ajoy Bhawan Archives in New Delhi and the P.C. Joshi Archives at Jawaharlal Nehru University are hundreds of photographs, conference resolutions, party journals, courtroom records and sketches documenting the history of the communist movement in colonial India. Read individually, they appear to record familiar moments: a conspiracy trial, a strike, a peasant meeting, a cultural performance. Read together, they tell a different story. Rather than recounting the rise of the Communist Party of India through its leaders or ideological debates, they reveal how a small revolutionary current built the organisations that transformed it into a mass movement of workers and peasants. Between the first communist groups formed in 1920 and the peasant uprisings of the late 1940s, Indian communists confronted a recurring challenge: how could a movement survive repression while continuing to expand? Colonial prosecutions, party bans and censorship repeatedly disrupted the organisation, but they also forced it to develop new forms of political work. Trade unions, peasant associations, cultural organisations and underground networks were not separate chapters in this history. They were successive responses to the practical problems of organising under colonial rule. The photographs and documents that follow trace that process: how a revolutionary organisation was built, how workers and peasants were organised, how the movement survived illegality, and how it reproduced itself across workplaces, villages and cultural institutions.Making a revolutionary organisationThe Communist Party of India did not emerge through a single founding moment but through a gradual process shaped by international revolutionary networks, colonial repression, and the slow work of institutional consolidation.1920: N. Roy (centre, black tie and jacket) with Vladimir Lenin (tenth from the left), Maxim Gorky (behind Lenin), and delegates at the Second Congress of the Communist International, Petrograd, 1920. Credit: Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (RGASPI), via Wikimedia Commons.The photograph captures the scale of the Second Congress of the Communist International in Petrograd in 1920, where delegates from across the world gathered to debate the future of revolutionary politics. Before a communist party existed inside India, its earliest organisers had already entered a transnational political network linking anti-colonial struggles to an international socialist movement. It was here that M.N. Roy argued that colonial revolutions could not simply follow the trajectory of European socialism but had to develop through their own historical conditions.For Indian communists, the significance of the Comintern extended beyond ideological debate. It provided organisational connections, strategic coordination and an international framework through which a revolutionary movement could begin to take shape before it possessed a formal organisational structure within India.Nalini Gupta, Shaukat Usmani, S.A. Dange and Muzaffar Ahmed, among the accused in the Kanpur Conspiracy Case. Credit: Ajoy Bhawan Archives, Communist Party of India, New Delhi.Colonial repression unexpectedly accelerated the public visibility of the communist movement. The Kanpur Conspiracy Case of 1924 brought four leading organisers to trial on charges of conspiring to deprive the King Emperor of sovereignty over British India. In the photograph, they stand formally dressed, looking directly into the camera.The proceedings that followed received extensive press coverage, and the accused used the courtroom to explain socialist politics, anti-imperialism and the conditions of Indian workers before a national audience. A trial intended to suppress communist activity instead helped transform scattered groups of revolutionaries into a movement with a recognisable public identity.Presidential address delivered at the First Indian Communist Conference, Kanpur, 1925. Credit: Ajoy Bhawan Archives, Communist Party of India, New Delhi.The First Indian Communist Conference, held in Kanpur in December 1925, marked an important step in transforming dispersed revolutionary networks into a political organisation with a public programme. The presidential address reproduced here situated the communist movement within the struggles of industrial workers and agricultural labourers, arguing that national liberation and class struggle could not be separated.Rather than responding only to immediate political circumstances, the conference sought to establish an organisational framework capable of uniting workers and peasants across colonial India. The conference also adopted a resolution barring members of communal organisations from joining the party, a founding commitment that explicitly refused the religious divisions fracturing the broader nationalist movement.Organising the working classCreating a revolutionary party did not, by itself, create a mass movement. During the 1920s, communists moved beyond small circles of revolutionaries and entered the expanding industrial centres of colonial India: the textile mills of Bombay, the railway yards of Bengal, the docks and jute factories that sustained colonial commerce. The question was whether dispersed workers, divided across factories, occupations and regions could be organised into institutions capable of sustaining collective struggle.Singaravelu Chettiar (1860–1946), labour organiser and trade union pioneer who convened India’s first May Day rally in Madras on May 1, 1923. He later presided over the First Indian Communist Conference at Kanpur in December 1925. Credit: Wikimedia Commons (PD-India).On May 1, 1923, India’s first May Day celebrations were organised in Madras under the leadership of M. Singaravelu Chettiar, who raised the red flag before workers assembled under the banner of the Labour Kisan Party of Hindustan. The event marked the public emergence of working-class politics in colonial India.It connected local labour struggles to the international workers’ movement and affirmed workers as a collective political force rather than isolated groups of employees. From this point onwards, trade unions became not merely instruments for negotiating wages but institutions through which communists sought to organise the working class as an enduring political constituency.‘Forward to the Political General Strike’: Bombay textile workers during the six-month strike of 1928–29. Credit: Ajoy Bhawan Archives, Communist Party of India, New Delhi.The banner in the photograph, ‘Forward to the Political General Strike’, shifts the focus beyond the immediate demands of the strike itself. It reflects an effort to transform industrial action into a broader politics of working-class organisation.During the six-month Bombay textile strike of 1928, more than 1,50,000 workers participated under the leadership of the Girni Kamgar Union, sustaining collective action across one of colonial India’s largest industrial workforces. The strike linked workplace grievances over wages and conditions to a wider anti-imperialist politics, demonstrating that trade unions had become institutions capable of coordinating collective action on an unprecedented scale.Group photograph of the accused in the Meerut Conspiracy Case (1929–33), including leading communist organisers and trade unionists. Credit: Ajoy Bhawan Archives, Communist Party of India, New Delhi / P.C. Joshi Archives, Jawaharlal Nehru University.The Meerut Conspiracy Case of 1929 marked the colonial government’s most sustained attempt to dismantle the organisational links between communist leadership and the growing labour movement. Thirty-three trade unionists and communist organisers were arrested and charged with conspiracy, extending the strategy first employed at Kanpur to a much larger scale.Like the Kanpur trial before it, Meerut became more than a prosecution. The accused used the courtroom to defend Marxism, trade unionism and working-class organisation in statements that circulated widely in the Indian and international press. Rather than isolating the communist movement, the trial helped establish labour organisation as a central arena of anti-colonial politics.The spread of socialist politicsThe Communist Party was not the only organisation through which socialist ideas entered Indian political life. Revolutionary groups previously focused on armed resistance were simultaneously linking the struggle against colonial rule to a broader critique of class exploitation. When the CPI was banned in 1934, it did not vanish into a vacuum. It was banned into a political culture in which socialist ideas had already taken root beyond the party’s boundaries.Poster issued by the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA), signed by ‘Balraj’ (Chandrashekhar Azad’s revolutionary alias) as Commander-in-Chief, 18 December 1928, days after the killing of British police officer J. P. Saunders in Lahore. Credit: Wikimedia Commons (PD-India).The poster is signed not with a personal name but with the revolutionary alias “Balraj,” used by Chandrashekhar Azad. Its language situated the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association within a socialist rather than merely nationalist political tradition, declaring its objective to be the abolition of “the exploitation of man by man.”The Assembly bombing of April 1929 led to the Lahore Conspiracy Case, where Bhagat Singh, like the accused in the Meerut trial, transformed the courtroom into a political platform. His statements on imperialism, socialism and revolution circulated widely in the Indian press, extending the reach of socialist politics beyond the organisational boundaries of the Communist Party. Although the HSRA and the CPI followed different organisational paths, both recognised that colonial repression could be turned into an opportunity for political communication.Surviving illegalityBy 1934, the colonial state recognised that prosecuting individual communists was no longer sufficient. The Communist Party of India was banned in an effort to dismantle the organisational networks that had emerged through trade unions, workers’ organisations and peasant mobilisation.Yet illegality did not bring organisational collapse. It forced communists to confront a different problem: how could a movement continue to grow when the party itself could no longer function openly? The answer lay in expanding through institutions that remained legal. Trade unions, the All India Kisan Sabha, literary organisations, newspapers and cultural associations became the public infrastructure through which communist politics continued to circulate, recruit and organise. Rather than destroying the movement, the ban accelerated the development of a broader organisational ecosystem that extended well beyond the formal party.Cover of The New Age, Vol. XI, No. 11, April 1936, edited by H.D. Rajah. Published during the ban on the Communist Party of India. Credit: P.C. Joshi Archives, Jawaharlal Nehru University.The New Age, published in April 1936, two years after the Communist Party of India was banned, became part of the movement’s public life during a period when the party itself could not function openly. Journals such as this allowed communist ideas to circulate across trade unions, peasant organisations and literary circles, linking dispersed organisers through a shared political language.If illegality made public organisation more difficult, publications like The New Age ensured that communication, debate and political education continued.Delegates at the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association. Founded in Lucknow in April 1936, with Munshi Premchand delivering the inaugural presidential address. Credit: Ajoy Bhawan Archives, Communist Party of India, New Delhi.If journals sustained political communication, the Progressive Writers’ Association extended the movement into literary and cultural life. Founded in 1936, it brought together writers across languages around a shared commitment to confronting colonialism, inequality and social oppression. The photograph records one of those gatherings: writers assembled not simply to produce literature, but to build an institution through which progressive politics could circulate beyond the formal boundaries of the party.The Indian People’s Theatre Association, established in 1943, carried that work further, taking theatre, music and performance into factories, villages and public squares. During the years of illegality, culture became another means through which communist organisation could endure and expand.From organisation to mass struggleThe work of three decades did not simply accumulate. By the late 1930s and through the 1940s, it began to transform the scale of what was politically possible. The uprisings that followed were not spontaneous eruptions of rural discontent but the accumulated capacity of thousands of cadres, local leaders, and ordinary workers and peasants, finally brought to bear on conditions of exploitation that had become intolerable.Mass meeting of the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), established in 1936 as the principal organisation of the peasant movement. Credit: Ajoy Bhawan Archives, Communist Party of India, New Delhi.The photograph captures a gathering that extends well beyond the frame, suggesting the scale of peasant mobilisation by the late 1930s. Such assemblies did not emerge spontaneously. They were the outcome of years of organisation across regions marked by different agrarian conditions, forms of tenancy and local struggles.Founded in 1936, the All India Kisan Sabha provided a common organisational framework through which these diverse grievances could be brought together within a national political movement. Its programme linked demands for lower rents, the abolition of landlordism, an end to forced labour and relief from rural indebtedness to the broader struggle against colonial rule. Between 1938 and 1939 alone, its membership grew from around 6,00,000 to 8,00,000, making it one of the largest peasant organisations in colonial India.Chittaprosad Bhattacharya’s drawing of famine victims during the Bengal Famine, 1943. Credit: P.C. Joshi Archives, Jawaharlal Nehru University.Chittaprosad’s drawing strips the famine to its essentials: emaciated bodies, hollow faces and the physical devastation of starvation. Produced after the artist travelled through famine-stricken Bengal in 1943, it became part of a wider effort by communist organisers, artists and cultural workers to document a catastrophe that colonial authorities sought to minimise.The famine claimed an estimated three million lives, not because of crop failure, but because of wartime colonial policy. At a moment when official accounts obscured its scale, drawings such as these carried evidence of the famine into newspapers, pamphlets and political campaigns. Chittaprosad’s booklet Hungry Bengal was seized and destroyed by the colonial government, confirming the political force that visual testimony could acquire under colonial rule.A gathering during the Tebhaga movement, Bengal, 1946–47. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.The demand for Tebhaga was not simply a dispute over the division of the harvest. It challenged the agrarian relations that structured rural Bengal by asserting that those who cultivated the land should retain a greater share of its produce. Built through years of organising by the Kisan Sabha, the movement united sharecroppers across districts despite differences of religion and locality. The photograph captures that achievement: an organised peasantry assembled as a collective political force.At a moment when communal violence threatened to fragment rural society, Tebhaga demonstrated that class organisation could produce solidarities that cut across religious divisions. Although the movement was defeated by state repression, the political capacities it created survived long after the repression itself.Participants in the Punnapra–Vayalar uprising photographed after their release from prison, raising clenched fists in solidarity. Credit: Ajoy Bhawan Archives, Communist Party of India, New Delhi.The Punnapra–Vayalar uprising did not emerge spontaneously in October 1946. It rested on more than a decade of communist organising among coir workers, agricultural labourers and village committees across Travancore. When the Dewan sought to preserve princely rule outside a democratic Indian Union, these organisations became the infrastructure of resistance.The repression that followed left between 500 and 1,000 workers and peasants dead. The armed uprising had been suppressed, but the organisational capacities that made it possible endured within the communist movement that would soon reshape Kerala’s politics.Warli Adivasi peasants during the Warli revolt, Maharashtra, 1945–47. Credit: Ajoy Bhawan Archives, Communist Party of India, New Delhi.The Warli revolt was built through years of work among Adivasi cultivators who faced bonded labour, debt and landlord violence. Communist organisers, including Godavari Parulekar, began from these specific conditions rather than assuming that strategies developed in industrial centres could simply be transplanted into tribal regions. By rooting organisation in local social relations, the movement transformed dispersed acts of resistance into a sustained agrarian mobilisation.Members of an armed squad during the Telangana armed struggle, 1946–51. Credit: P.C. Joshi Archives, Jawaharlal Nehru University.The armed squad in this photograph represents only the most visible phase of the Telangana struggle. Long before rifles appeared, communist organisers working through the Andhra Mahasabha had built village organisations that united peasants against landlordism, bonded labour and the Nizam’s rule. When the armed struggle began in 1946, it rested on this existing organisational foundation.Across nearly 3,000 villages, local committees redistributed land, organised agricultural labour, settled disputes and exercised forms of popular authority. The struggle continued even after Hyderabad’s annexation by the Indian Union in 1948, ending only when the Communist Party withdrew it in 1951. The rifles mattered, but it was the organisation behind them that made the movement possible.What the archive tells usArchives rarely preserve political movements in their entirety. What survives at Ajoy Bhawan and the P.C. Joshi Archives is fragmentary, shaped as much by what was lost as by what was preserved. There are organisers whose names survive only in trial proceedings, struggles that left no photographs, and institutions that disappeared without leaving an archive behind.Yet, read together, these materials reveal a different history of Indian communism from the one usually remembered. They show that the movement became a mass political force not through a single insurrection, charismatic leader or decisive event, but through the slow and cumulative work of organisation. Trade unions, peasant associations, cultural organisations and underground networks were not separate chapters in this history. They were the institutions through which the movement survived repression, expanded its social base and carried political experience across generations.The history of repression has its own continuity. The colonial state used conspiracy prosecutions, bans and imprisonment to disrupt the organisational networks through which communists were building collective power. Independent India developed its own legal framework for dealing with organisations and political activity deemed threatening to the state, including the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act of 1967 and its subsequent amendments.The laws are not identical, and the political contexts are different. But the question that runs through both histories is harder to dismiss: when does organised political activity come to be treated not as dissent, but as a threat to be contained through criminal law?That is perhaps the archive’s most enduring lesson. Political movements are often remembered through spectacular moments: a trial, a strike, an uprising or a martyr. These photographs tell a quieter story. They recover the work that made those moments possible: building institutions, sustaining collective action and adapting to changing political conditions. The history of Indian communism is therefore not only a history of resistance. It is a history of organisation and of the state repeatedly confronting the political power that organisation can create.Rashi Agrawal is a PhD Research Scholar at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, working on labour movements and agrarian transformation in India.