A Prologue

 The Progressive Writers Movement has emerged as a constant refrain in almost all the studies of modernist Urdu literature ever since the 1930s. The entire corpus of literature produced under the influence of this movement has been broadly labelled as “progressive” on the one hand and “propagandist” on the other. While some literary writers and readers believe that all writings have to be necessarily “progressive”, others subscribe to the idea that no genuine literature can ever be written with a definite purpose in mind. Irrespective of these arguments and counter arguments, it would be important to note (a) how a group of writers, who came to be labelled as progressives during the 1930s, formed a strong and cohesive group of their own kind, (b) how they made a historic mark in responding to the call of their time, and (c) how they evolved an appropriate poetics for the kind of literature they created.

The Beginnings

The story of the Progressive Writers Movement begins with the meeting of four friends--Sajjad Zaheer, Mohammad Deen Taseer, Mulk Raj Anand and Ahmed Ali. They lived in London then and were deeply concerned with the conditions back home. In appreciating the need for a new socio-political order, they surmised that literature could well be a vehicle to create a socio-literary movement and give birth to a new literary culture. Several other persons, apart from the four mentioned above, also came to be associated with this movement simultaneously, or soon after. They included Kunwar Mohammad Ashraf, Abdul Aleem, Akhtar Husain Raipuri, Rasheed Jahan, and Mahmud-uz-zafar, apart from Pramod Singh Gupta and Jyoti Ghosh, who contributed towards preparing a manifesto for the Progressive Writers Association. Developed in 1935, this manifesto clearly laid out a policy that the writers were required to follow in order to bring about a change in the socio-political life of India through literature.

It would be interesting to note that only two years after the emergence of the Union of Soviet Writers, Sajjad Zaheer, the influential revolutionary, brought together some of the Marxist intellectuals and held the first All India Progressive Writers Conference in Lucknow on April 09-10, 1936. It was at this conference that Premchand delivered his famous presidential address which gave a precise call to relate literature to social reality. He believed that literature had a civilizing role to play and called for “revising the standards of beauty”. He also laid emphasis upon the value of truth, freedom, and moral courage in individual and collective lives. Positing that human society was a court of justice, he emphasized that there had to be a balance between nature and society. He underlined the significance of a sound economic and political order, based on the principles of justice and egalitarianism, and argued emphatically against capitalism, elitism, and militancy. Premchand ended his address by emphasizing that literature of acute social realism was required to be written while carrying the quest for freedom, beauty, and realism. It may be clearly noticed that the intellectuals who came together under the banner of Progressive Writers Association sought their inspiration from the Soviet writers and their ways of negotiating with the contemporary crisis. As such, the manifesto of the Association clearly laid out the historical necessity of producing the literature of social realism and political justice in quite clear terms.

Manifesto

“Radical changes are taking place in Indian society. Fixed ideas and old beliefs, social and political institutions are being challenged. Out of the present turmoil and conflict a new society is emerging. The spirit of reaction however, though moribund and doomed to ultimate decay, is still operative and is making desperate efforts to prolong itself.

It is the duty of Indian writers to give expression to the changes taking place in Indian life and to assist in the spirit of progress in the country. Indian literature, since the breakdown of classical literature, has had the fatal tendency to escape from the actualities of life. It has tried to find a refuge from reality in spiritualism and idealism. The result has been that it has produced a rigid formalism and a banal and perverse ideology.

Witness the mystical devotional obsession of our literature, its furtive and sentimental attitude towards sex, its emotional exhibitionism and its almost total lack of rationality. Such literature was produced particularly during the past two centuries, one of the most unfortunate periods of our history, a period of disintegrating feudalism and of acute misery and degradation for the Indian people as a whole.

It is the object of our association to rescue literature and other arts from the priestly, academic and decadent classes in whose hands they have degenerated so long; to bring the arts into the closest touch with the people; and to make them the vital organs which will register the actualities of life, as well as lead us to the future.

While claiming to be the inheritors of the best traditions of Indian civilisation, we shall criticise ruthlessly, in its political, economic and cultural aspects, the spirit of reaction in our country and we shall foster through interpretive and creative work (with both native and foreign resources) everything that will lead our country to the new life for which it is striving. We believe that the new literature of India must deal with the basic problems of our existence today — the problems of hunger and poverty, social backwardness and political subjugation, so that it may help us to understand these problems and through such understanding help us to act.

With the above aims in view. the following resolutions have been adopted:

• The establishment of organisations of writers to correspond to the various linguistic zones of India; the coordinations of these organisations by holding conferences, publishing of magazines, pamphlets, etc.

• To cooperate with those literary organisations whose aims do not conflict with the basic aims of the association.

• To produce and translate literature of a progressive nature and of a high technical standard; to fight cultural reaction; and in this way, to further the cause of Indian freedom and social regeneration.

• To strive for the acceptance of a common language (Hindustani) and a common script (Indo-Roman) for India. [This demand was later dropped in appreciation of the India's multilingual structure--ed.]

• To protect the interests of authors; to help authors who require and deserve assistance for the publication of their works.

• To fight for the right of free expression of thought and opinion”.

(Quoted in Mir, Ali Husain and Mir, Raza. 2006. Anthems of Resistance: A Celebration of Urdu Poetry. New Delhi: Roli Books)

Impact

It should be interesting to note that Hans (Allahabad) and Left Review (London) chose to publish this manifesto in their issues of October 1935 and February 1936 respectively. Since this was a major event in literary history and was going to impact literature immensely, it was taken with complete seriousness by authors and their readers. Essentially political in nature, and declamatory in tone and tenor, this manifesto made way for the emergence of a literary movement that shaped up in 1936 with a group of poets and fiction writers who strongly subscribed to a given socio-political ideology. The manifesto, that was no less than a radical statement against a decadent sensibility concerning life and literature, gave a clarion call for reason against sentimentality, realism against romance, and freedom against subjugation. At the social level, it rejected feudal order and decadent morality; at political level, it sought recourse to leftist ideology; and in the domain of literature, it made an organized effort to refute and resist the centuries-old romanticist-spiritualist tradition. Aiming at socio-political rejuvenation, it called for dismantling all retrograde institutions that believed in coercive power. Being anti-imperialist in nature, it fostered the spirit of decolonization and stressed upon the general human condition characterized by poverty, backwardness, and oppression. It aimed at social empowerment by making way for a new mode of apprehension, a new idiom of assertion, and a new will to resist the historical legacies of subjugation. The literary writing of the new age had, thus, to disengage from clichés of all sorts and romantic exuberance of all kinds.

Important writers associated with the movement included Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmad Ali, Rasheed Jahan, Sadat Hasan Manto, Mohammad Deen Taseer, Makhdoom Mohiuddin,  Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Vijaydan Detha, Khagendra Thakur, Bhisham Sahni, Krishna Chander, Ismat Chughtai, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Premchand, Amrita Pritam, Sahir Ludhianavi, Majrooh Sultanpuri, Ghulam Rabbani Taban, Kaifi Azmi, Ali Sardar Jafri, Jan Nisar Akhter, Sahir Ludhianvi, apart from many others. These writers sought and found their acute appeal in the larger public domain.

Some Consequential Publications

Even before the Progressive Writers Movement became a reality, some consequential publications had already made way for its emergence. One of them was the publication of Angare (Burning Coals) in 1932 which made a clear difference. This was a collection of ten short stories by some of the bold realists like Sajjad Zaheer, Rasheed Jahan, Ahmed Ali, and Mahmud-uz-zafar. Together, they spelt out the possibility of writing on issues considered to be taboos so far. This collection with explicit sexual references and attack on decadent moral order represented by social, political, and religious institutions, had a liberating influence on moral politics. Considered too radical in its makeup, the book was banned but the stories made their impact as they were thematically interesting and technically innovative. The reader had suddenly become exposed to the worlds of Freud, Lawrence, Joyce and Woolf. This kind of writing made way for shedding the age-old traditions, taking leave from stereotypes, and exploring a new world order.

Following this collection of stories, Akhtar Hussain Raipuri published his critical work of a radical nature called Adab aur Inquilab (Literature and Revolution) in 1934. Even before this, Raipuri had presented a literary manifesto at the Nagpur session of the Bharatiya Sahitya Parishad which was signed by Jawaharlal Nehru, Acharya Narendra Dev, Premchand and Maulvi Abdul Haq. He had discarded the canonical poets like Meer Taqi Meer and Mirza Ghalib as degenerate representatives of a feudal culture and had pronounced the need for a new poetics empowered by Marxist ideology. This rejection was, however, based on extra-critical considerations as he was more concerned with popularizing Marxist thought in literature than appreciating the literary worth of writers and their texts. However, Raipuri succeeded in setting forth the aims and objectives for the writers to create a new kind of literature in India. Earlier than this, he had also published an essay titled “Adab aur Zindagi” (“Literature and Life”) to illustrate at length what  Sajjad Zaheer laid out later as the aim of the Progressive Writers Association. In order to propagate his ideas, Raipuri published this essay both in Urdu and Hindi. All these path-breaking publications created a climate of opinion for the emergence of a new literary period in Urdu which found its ultimate expression in the Lucknow conference of progressive writers held on April 9-10, 1936.

Major Progressive Poets

The contours of new writing, thus, emerged with great clarity following these developments. Every progressive writer was a literary rebel, and every rebellion promoted a new poetics of resistance. Basically wedded to the idea of political and social revolution, these writers sought their inspiration in Marx. Although the major progressive poets like Makhdoom Mohiuddin, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Ali Sardar Jafri, Jan Nisar Akhter, Kaifi Azmi, and Sahir Ludhianavi were sharply unequal in their literary merit but all of them were equally committed to Marxist ideology. They heralded a tradition of modernism which resisted age-old social, political, cultural, and literary establishments. Generally clubbed together as poets who subscribed to the ideology of the Progressive Writers Association, they combined poetry with social activism and considered one as a supplement to the other. All these poets were passionate advocates of their ideas in poetry. Their poetry sometimes attained the status of impassioned speech, as many of their compositions on the stock themes concerning freedom, hunger, home and hearth, found a ready space in popular imagination. With a clear socio-political commitment, they developed their individual instances while seeking their inspiration from various quarters—indigenous and foreign, as well as literary and extra-literary. They were prompted by their vision for a just socio-political order as they aspired to construct the nation for its people. They reflected the hankerings of a whole generation of people at a particular point in the history of the subcontinent.

A Progressive Exemplar: Faiz Ahmad Faiz

Among all the progressive poets mentioned above, one poet who has been most widely read, discussed and idealized is Faiz Ahmad Faiz. This is precisely because he was singularly successful in striking a balance between arts and ideas. Even though Faiz aligned with the group of poets who raised slogans rather than raise poetry to a level of artistic excellence, he did not indulge into creating sentimental slogans in his poetry. Critically aware of the literary traditions in Persian, Urdu, and English languages, he devised a technique and evolved a tone that sounded like soft notes of expostulation. He was inspired more by the spirit of liberation than by slogans. Even while strongly subscribing to an ideology, he could artfully transcend it to write poetry of contemporary appeal and relevance. 

Faiz had a variegated career as an editor of Lotus, an international leftist magazine for many years, a teacher of English, a Lieutenant Colonel of the British Indian Army during World War II, a recipient of MBE for his wartime services, a broadcaster, and a political activist. His exiles in Paris, London, Moscow, and Beirut, and his readings in western literature helped him review his individual and social predicament with great confidence and clarity. With this extraordinary career, and with the kind of poetry he wrote to resist the structures of power, Faiz attracted the attention of a larger section of the general and informed readers, and also of those who were socially and politically concerned. He closely watched the vicissitudes of contemporary history, especially the capitalist oppression in many parts of the world, particularly the Indian subcontinent. These impacted his sensibility and he turned into a dissenter. He was a dissenter but of the most sophisticated sort; he exuded anger but with control and culture; he opposed tyrannies of all kinds but in a manner that made one and all hear him patiently. He, thus, composed his unique poetic oeuvre with great finesse where he explored his central metaphors of freedom against slavery, justice against oppression, gloom against light, hope against despair, friend against foe, and union against separation.

In explaining his poetic credo, Faiz has very appropriately remarked: “To me the old and the new, the traditional and the contemporary fall in their proper places in the larger composite tradition of literature. The great advantage—or miracle—of the ghazal form, for example, is that you can use it to render themes in traditional diction and still be in tune with contemporary reality”. Appropriately enough, in drawing upon the ghazal tradition, Faiz found space for the more pathetic moments of life, which he represented with greater empathy than other progressive poets. This also leads one to say that he was the last romantic who appropriated the best elements of the romantic tradition in Urdu poetry to represent the movement of history, politics, and personal dilemmas. His poems like  ‘Bol’ (‘Speak’) ‘Subh-e Azadi’ (Freedom’s Dawn’), ‘Tarana’ (‘Anthem’), ‘Irani Talaba Ke Naam’ (In the Name of Iranian Students’), ‘Aa Jao Africa’ (‘Come Back Africa’), ‘Intisaab’ (‘Dedication’), ‘Sipahi ka Marsiya’ (‘Elegy for a Soldier’), ‘Dua’ (‘Prayer’), ‘Falasteen ke Liye’ (‘For Palestine’) bear ample testimony to his commitment and vision. These poems make sense at various levels as appeals, entreaties, complaints, and as songs of resistance and testimonies of faith.

Reading Faiz is experiencing the human predicament at large and appreciating the true meaning of suffering and glory. Faiz was an artist of ideas and most popular of the poets in both the literary and extra-literary circles. Ten collections of his poetry, published from 1941 to 1984, represent issues that are private, public, contemporary, and historical and all of them may be appreciated in terms of his basic association with the Progressive Writers Movement.