Historical Notes: A one-man party in Parliament

WHEN AN Indian Communist was elected to Parliament from a south London seat in 1922 his working-class supporters said they thought they would storm heaven next. The surprise new MP for North Battersea was Shapurji Dorabji Saklatvala, a charismatic politician closely related to the Tatas, a wealthy family credited with the building of modern industry in India.

Saklatvala, the third Indian and joint first Communist to be elected to the House of Commons, turned his back on great riches to fight for Indian independence and the world's poor at the heart of the British Empire. He married a working-class Englishwoman, Sally Marsh, the daughter of a Derbyshire quarryman. She was a waitress at Smedley's Hydro health spa at Matlock when she met Saklatvala, who had been sent there by his employers the Tatas, to convalesce after a bout of malaria.

A big business client of the British Raj, the Tata company was embarrassed by Saklatvala's vocal stance on Indian independence. So he was sent to England, out of the way. At first he dabbled in Liberal politics. However, it was not long before he rejected the idea that liberalism could deliver freedom for the oppressed people of India or Britain and he joined the left-wing Independent Labour Party (ILP). But even the ILP was not radical enough for him and in 1921 he joined the newly formed Communist Party of Great Britain.

A year earlier, during a time of chronic shortage of jobs and economic recession, Saklatvala had become active in "Red" Battersea campaigning for the unemployed. It was here he met an important ally, the Pan-Africanist John Archer, who, in 1913, became Britain's first black mayor. Saklatvala was an early proponent of African and Asian unity; indeed he clashed with M.K. Gandhi on this issue as well as over the gradualist rather than revolutionary tactics the Mahatma employed in his mass movement for Indian independence.

Saklatvala was the first person to be imprisoned during the 1926 General Strike after being prosecuted for a "seditious" speech imploring the Army not to shoot strikers. He suffered police Special Branch raids on his home and, most painfully for him, was banned by the Conservative government from visiting India following a successful speaking tour of the country in 1927. After the General Election, two years later, Labour continued the ban. The United States also barred Saklatvala's entry for fear that he might "stir up unrest". Though, when first elected, he was endorsed as a parliamentary candidate by Labour despite being an open member of the Communist Party (the only time this was allowed to happen, such was "Comrade Sak's" popularity), he eventually fell out with the party he denounced as the "Labourals".

In 1929, when he stood solely as a Communist he was trounced by an "official" Labour candidate and was never again returned to Parliament. It took a bitter struggle by the "Black Section" campaign before any more black MPs - three African-Caribbean and one Asian - were elected in 1987. (After the 1997 general election there were nine black MPs - all of them Labour.) Saklatvala, a member of the tiny Persian-descended Parsee community of Bombay, clashed with his comrades in the Communist Party when he put all five of his children through the Zoroastrian novjote initiation ceremony. Their criticism of his "backward" religious observance exposed a Eurocentrism which finds an echo today in the Islamaphobic attitude of some liberals after the Rushdie affair. During most of his two terms in Parliament, Saklatvala had to operate as a "one man party". He did not live to see Indian independence, his most enduring legacy.

Marc Wadsworth is the author of `Comrade Sak, Shapurji Saklatvala MP: a political biography' (Peepal Tree Press, pounds 9.99)