page_title: Puran Chand Joshi
section_title: Early years
hierarchical_section_title: Puran Chand Joshi / Early years
caption_attribution_description: English: Muzaffar Ahmed, Bankim Mukherjee, PC Joshi, Somnath Lahiri at Calcutta 1937
context_page_description: Puran Chand Joshi, one of the early leaders of the communist movement in India. He was the first general secretary of the Communist Party of India from 1935–47.
context_section_description: Joshi was born on 14 April 1907, in a Kumaoni Hindu family of Almora,in Uttarakhand. His father Harinandan Joshi was a teacher. In 1928, he passed his M.A. examination from the Allahabad University. Soon, he became the General secretary of the Workers and Peasants Party of Uttar Pradesh, formed at Meerut in October 1928. In 1929, at the age of 22, the British Government arrested him as one of the suspects of the Meerut Conspiracy Case. The other early communist leaders who were arrested along with him included Shaukat Usmani, Muzaffar Ahmed, S.A. Dange and G.V. Ghate.
  Joshi was given six years of transportation to the penal settlement of Andaman Islands. Considering his age, the punishment was later reduced to three. After his release in 1933, Joshi worked towards bringing a number of groups under the banner of the Communist Party of India (CPI). In 1934 the CPI was admitted to the Third International or Comintern.
caption: (From left to right) Muzaffar Ahmed, Bankim Mukherjee, PC Joshi, Somnath Lahiri at Calcutta 1937
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