For decades, they have been a familiar sight in the sun-kissed Indian state of Kerala or the country’s crumbling eastern metropolis of Kolkata. The somber portraits of dead white men — a bearded Marx, a bespectacled Lenin, and Stalin, his moustache bristling — peer down at passers-by from banners strung up over palm trees or street-corner billboards, accompanied by the less-hallowed visages of local comrades. India’s Communists have been key players in the hurly burly of the world’s largest democracy, dominating the ballot box in states like West Bengal, where Kolkata is the capital, and where a Communist government has ruled for over thirty years.
