November 2,1998
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BOOKS Britain's Original Red Indian How an aristocratic Parsi from Bombay became a communist MP in London. By Amit Roy COMRADE SAK: S. SAKLATVALA, A
POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY
It says a lot for the working class voters of Battersea that they could trust a "coloured foreigner" to represent them. He was born in Bombay in 1874 and sent to Britain in 1905. In the Commons Saklatvala proved an awkward man, forever behaving according to his conscience and speaking his mind. He caused a stir by addressing the Speaker as "Comrade". One of the more moving passages is the account of Saklatvala's funeral in 1936. The procession was over a mile long and several hundred people waited at Golders Green crematorium in the rain. The service was conducted by three Zoroastrian priests, for Saklatvala, who was related to the Tata family, remained true to his Parsi traditions. Even among his erstwhile political critics there was a feeling that a light had been extinguished. Though Marc Wadsworth is a signed up member of the Saklatvala fan club, this is no hagiography. Saklatvala clashed with Mahatma Gandhi over the question of Indian independence. Though they were agreed on the objective, the member for Battersea was plainly contemptuous of what he saw as Gandhi's excessively conciliatory approach to the British masters. In this, Wadsworth acknowledges Saklatvala was wrong. Nevertheless, such was the consternation caused in Whitehall by the support he drummed up during a visit to India that he was prevented from visiting the country ever again. What also comes across is the essential fairness of the man. He thought it was wrong for Indian nationalists to impose a boycott on British goods because this would hurt the poor mill workers and miners back in the UK. But this was coupled with the belief that it was equally wrong of Britain to flood India with "munitions and weapons". The personal revelations are, if anything, even more engaging. Saklatvala fell in love with and married Sally Marsh, a working class Englishwoman 14 years his junior. She gave him children and stability and appears to have been a woman of considerable character. At a time when this must have been seen as provocative, she often wore a sari in public and gave total support to her husband even when his politics caused financial difficulties. It was clearly a marriage which worked. Wadsworth tackles the larger question of why Saklatvala was allowed to sit in Parliament at all when he was so obviously opposed to everything the British establishment represented. The answer was that it was felt he would be less dangerous if the authorities could keep an eye on him. But Saklatvala was a lot cleverer. He realised to be effective he had to be in the mainstream of British politics. Just before his election to the Commons, he told a gathering of Indians in London: "In this country, no political progress can be made except through the channels of one of the existing parties." If there is one lesson that diaspora Indians should learn from Comrade Sak, it must be this.
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The reaction of
most Indians chancing upon this biography of Shapurji Dorabji Saklatvala is likely to be:
"I didn't even know this man existed." Dipping in and out of its pages is a
humbling experience. Here was this giant of a man who achieved something truly astonishing
in 1922: a Parsi of the patrician tendency, he was elected to the House of Commons as MP
for Battersea. He held the seat until 1929, sitting until 1923 as a Labour Party member
and then, of all things, as a communist. 
