As Tsundoku's answer to an earlier question says, Spender's visit to Gemini Studios is connected to his disavowal of communism. In the 1930s, Spender and the poets closely associated with him (chiefly W. H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Louis MacNeice) supported the Communist Party. Spender was briefly a member thereof in 1936–1937. But as he notes in a contribution to the collection of anti-communist essays The God That Failed (1949), he soon grew disillusioned. He saw that to the Communists, values such as freedom of expression, freedom of religion, or even the right to live were expendable, being collateral damage in the war against capitalism. He says that during the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939, he noticed this tendency to extremism even in himself. He would be dismissive of any evil perpetrated by the Communists:
When I saw photographs of children murdered by the Fascists, I felt furious pity. When the supporters of Franco talked of Red atrocities, I merely felt indignant that people should tell such lies. In the first case I saw corpses, in the second only words.
Crossman, Richard, ed. The God That Failed. 1949. New York: Harper, 1965. p. 231. Accessed at archive.org 3 December 2024.
Spender became a staunch anti-communist around the time of the Second World War. This is what brought him to Gemini. Ashokamitran tells us that the prevailing culture at Gemini Studios was also anti-Communist, albeit in an unthinking way:
Barring the office boys and a couple of clerks, everybody else at the Studios radiated leisure, a pre-requisite for poetry. Most of them wore khadi and worshipped Gandhiji but beyond that they had not the faintest appreciation of political thought of any kind. Naturally, they were all averse to the term "Communism". A Communist was a godless man — he had no filial or conjugal love; he had no compunction about killing his own parents or his children; he was always out to cause and spread unrest and violence among innocent and ignorant people. Such notions which prevailed everywhere else in South India at that time also, naturally, floated about vaguely among the khadi-clad poets of Gemini Studios. Evidence of it was soon forthcoming.
From the PDF of the essay provided in the question, p. 62.
This evidence of uncritical acceptance of anti-communism is two-fold. The first was the warm welcome given to the Moral Re-Armament visitors, and the second was Spender's talk. The former at least had their production of two plays to make their visit explicable and interesting, but the latter remained a mystery. Why would an English poet whose name and work was unknown to most of the staff seek and receive an invitation to speak at Gemini? Ashokamitran remains baffled by this until years later, when he comes across copies of The God That Failed and the penny drops. S. S. Vasan would not have known or cared about Spender's poetry, but he did share Spender's anti-communist views. On seeing the book, Ashokamitran realizes at last that those shared views were the reason that Vasan agreed to invite Spender to Gemini:
In a moment I felt a dark chamber of my mind lit up by a hazy illumination. The reaction to Stephen Spender at Gemini Studios was no longer a mystery. The Boss of the Gemini Studios may not have much to do with Spender’s poetry. But not with his god that failed.
p. 66
The double negative is a bit perplexing: Vasan "may not have much to do with Spender's poetry. But not with his god that failed." The meaning is that Vasan did not not have much to do with Spender's anti-Communist beliefs. That is, those anti-Communist beliefs did have everything to do with the talk. Like Vasan's hosting the Moral Re-Armament troupe, his agreeing to host Spender is part of his perhaps unwitting entanglement with the "counter-movement to international Communism" (p. 63).
