Anti-Colonial Feminism

At every stage, Trent creatively combined her Bolshevik feminism with anti-colonialism. The Soviet Union of the 1920s had decriminalized abortion and homosexuality, liberalized marriage laws, and given women the vote, not to mention lifting millions of peasant women out of illiteracy. Trent witnessed these feminist transformations firsthand, highlighting them in her groundbreaking reporting on the Bukhara Revolution.

As a teacher at the Tashkent military school, she taught feminist ideas to receptive Pan-Islamists who had dreams of a liberation war against the British. At KUTV, feminism was not initially a part of the curriculum. Trent was the first to put it there. She held discussions in her classroom on “free love,” and brought visiting left-wing British and American suffragettes to lecture in her classes.

In 1920, Trent attended the First International Conference of Communist Women. She intervened to criticize a resolution drafted by European communists on “women of the East.” The resolution, she said, “mainly dwells on their backwardness, a topic that is constantly brought up to attack these women.” Liberal Europeans, she reminded them, “are in fact responsible for the backwardness of the people of the East.”

Aware of problems of representation, Trent tried to convince the revered veteran freedom fighter Bhikaji Rustom Cama (“Madam Cama”) to represent Indian women at communist women’s conferences, but she declined due to old age and health. Such actions reveal Trent’s commitment to Bolshevik feminism as well as her resolute resistance to the kind of white feminism that seeks to dictate to others what feminism ought to be.

In 1925, Trent participated in an anti-imperialist conference in Amsterdam, where she recommended the formation of a “committee of Indians, Egyptians, and Irish for concerted action against British imperialism.” The conference would be Trent’s final piece of anti-colonial work. For nearly a decade she had been constantly on the run, watched by British intelligence.

Even one of the Muhajirs, Abdul Qadr Khan, who followed Trent from Tashkent to KUTV, fed information to British intelligence. She faced deportation and detention multiple times. Her relationship with Roy became strained, likely due to Roy’s affairs. Moreover, Roy’s rivals in the Indian communist movement began circulating a rumor that she was a British spy.

The rumor quickly spread from Europe to Russia and India. All this was compounded by the fact that she was working full-time as a writer, printer, and organizer, and as Roy’s homemaker and secretary. The psychological stress became too much, and Trent left the movement in 1925.