 In the 1930s, he was active in selling "khadi" in the East Bengal districts of Dhaka, Comilla and Chittagong, with the centre being Malekandra, the village home of Dr. Prafulla Chandra Ghosh, a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi.He was a member first of the Calcutta and then Hooghly district Congress committees.During this period he also came in contact with Bhupendranath Dutta (brother of Narendranath Dutta, better known as Swami Vivekananda), one of the known early communists in India, who introduced him to works by Lenin (autobiography - Kashtokalpito).