Literature and Politics in the Age of Nationalism

The Progressive Episode in South Asia, 1932-56

Talat Ahmed

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000083941
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia asiática

This book aims to provide a historical account of the All-India Progressive Writers' Association (AIPWA). In a structured narrative, it focuses on the political processes inside India, events and circumstances in South Asia and the debates and literary movements in Europe and the United States to demonstrate how the literary project was specifically informed by literary-political movements. It explores the theorisation of literature and politics that informed progressive writing and argues that the progressive conception of literature, art and politics was closer to the theorisation of two thinkers of whom the writers themselves knew very little – Leon Trotsky and Antonio Gramsci.

The book charts the progressive movement's extension into the cultural arena through the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA) and the deepening of its nation-wide character through a progressive nationalism instilled with left-wing ideology. One of the important aims of the AIPWA project was to advance the development of a popular vernacular based on the demotic language of north India – Hindustani. The book locates this issue within the broader nationalist discussion on the national language. Contrary to what is implied by much of the previous scholarship, the book argues that the progressive movement did survive the ravages of partition and that the progressives maintained organisations in both India and Pakistan. It looks at the short-lived but very colourful history of the PWA in Pakistan, using PWA documents, government records and personal testimonies.

Arguing that literary output and cultural production cannot be understood, let alone interpreted, outside the context of the nationalist movement, war, independence and partition, the book presents a narrative that necessarily transcends disciplinary boundaries between literature, politics and history. Supplemented with literary and archival sources and oral testimonies from the members of the movement, it pr

1
Literature and Politics

On April 10, 1936, a small, slender and very pale figure rose to the auditorium of the Rifah-e-Aam hall in Lucknow and declared, if literature ‘does not arouse in us a critical spirit...[and] does not make us face the grim realities of life in a spirit of determination, [it] has no use for us today. It cannot even be termed as literature.’¹ The author of these words was none other than Premchand, aka Dhanpat Rai, the doyen of Hindi and Urdu literature. The event was the inaugural conference of the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association (AIPWA), an association that would herald the beginning of the largest cultural movement that South Asia had ever seen. In deriding those writers who produced literature that was moribund and devoid of life and dynamism, Premchand defined literature as the ‘criticism of life’ and ‘progressive [literature]’ as

[T]hat which creates in us the power to act; which makes us examine those subjective and objective causes that have brought us to such a pass of sterility and degeneration; and finally which helps us to overcome and remove those causes, and become men once again.²

And he concluded by reaffirming his central belief that,

We shall consider only that literature as progressive which is thoughtful, which awakens in us the spirit of freedom and of beauty; which is creative, which is luminous with the realities of life, which moves us, which leads us to action and which does not act on us as a narcotic, which does not produce in us a state of intellectual somnolence — for if we continue to remain in that state, it can only mean that we are no longer alive.³

Premchand’s Address represented a call to arms to South Asian intellectuals. But if the proceedings of this conference were opened by a living legend, the organisation of it was anything but grand. The Rifah-e-Aam was a very plain hall, poorly decorated with a simple handmade banner and old rickety chairs. A mere thirty tickets had been sold before the conference began. Sajjad Zaheer, one of the founding members of the association, described in detail the very modest and rudimentary organisation of the conference some eighteen years later in Roshnai, which he wrote whilst in a Pakistan prison. One person did all the secretarial work in terms of ensuring that papers were typed and available. Students helped to sell the three-rupee tickets and distribute handwritten leaflets to fellow students, lecturers and even trade union members.⁴ The organisation did not have the resources to have material printed or to make arrangements for guests and speakers. Premchand himself walked to the venue as he did not expect to be met by anyone, knowing that it was a conference organised by a very young and inexperienced bunch of people.

Such was the inauspicious manner in which the AIPWA began. But its humble setting was in sharp contrast to the venue, the site of many anti-British protests in the past, dating back to the days of the Mutiny of 1857. The venture had the support of the outstanding litterateurs and artists of the age. In addition to Premchand, Kamala Devi Chattopadhyay, a leading woman writer spoke to welcome the movement; Sarojini Naidu, a close associate of Mahatma Gandhi and poet, sent a message in which she endorsed its aims and leading political figures, notably Nehru, gave their support. The hall was packed with 300 delegates from all over India — writers, students, teachers, peasants and workers sympathetic to the leftist progressive cause. Premchand’s speech has come to epitomise the Lucknow conference and with its manifesto has become the hallmark by which the progressive movement would be judged.

The second All-India conference, two and half years later, was held at the Ashutosh Memorial hall in Kolkata. Sadly, Premchand was no more, but the proceedings were set alight by a speech delivered by Mulk Raj Anand, the great novelist and essayist, who had just returned home after eighteen years spent living and studying in London. He was the co-author of the founding manifesto of the Association and the assembled writers were most keen to hear his address. Anand reiterated the case for the association and the need for intellectuals to organise in the light of war and Fascism. He had visited Spain with the International Brigades and had witnessed the carnage of Francoist advance in Catalonia. For Anand this represented the greatest threat to culture and civilisation. Anand’s speech was both his personal manifesto as well as the direction for the new organisation. Much of the speech covered his time in Europe and he spoke at length about how international writers’ congresses there had shown the direction of the movement.He quoted speeches made by André Gide and Julien Benda at those congresses on the need for universalism against nationalism.

In a speech strongly reminiscent of Premchand’s two years earlier, he called on Indian writers to ‘adopt the point of view of the man in the street in their writing’⁵ and to

fulfil their creative aspirations by a radical realisation of the causes that hamper our social life and by the portrayal, through a heightened sensibility, of all those tragedies in the obscure lanes and alleys of our towns and villages which have only just begun to find utterance in the literature of India.⁶

He concluded,

The task of building up a national culture out of the debris of the past, so that it takes root in the realities of the present, is the only way by which we will take our place among those writers of the world who are facing with us the bitterest struggle in history, the struggle of the peoples of the world against Imperialism, its twin brother Fascism, its old aunt Feudalism and all other aunts who refuse to let the new shoots of life burst into the future.⁷

Here, Anand was setting forth the manifesto for a new popular culture as part of a new type of politics emerging in India.

This gathering was inaugurated by Sudhindra Nath Datta, Buddhadeva Bose, Sailajanda Mukherjee and Pandit Sudarshan, demonstrating how the Association had broadedned out to incorporate linguistic areas beyond Urdu. Perhaps more fundamental than Anand’s presence and speech was the address sent by Rabindranath Tagore, who endorsed the movement in much the same way as Premchand had done two years ago. Even though he was unable to attend in person due to illness, his address argued,

To live in seclusion has become second nature to me, but it is a fact that the writer who holds himself aloof from society cannot get to know mankind. Remaining aloof, the writer deprives himself of the experience which comes from mingling with numbers of people. To know and understand society, and to show the path to progress, it is essential that we keep our finger on the pulse of society and listen to the beating of its heart. This is only possible when our sympathies are with humanity, and when we share its sorrows...New writers must mix with men, and recognise that if they live in seclusion as I do they will not achieve their aims. I understand now that in living apart from society for so long I have committed a grave mistake…This understanding burns in my heart like a lamp, and no argument can extinguish it.⁸

As the most famous Indian writer known to the West at that time, Tagore had expressed solidarity with his fellow country men earlier in 1920, protesting against the massacre at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, by returning the knighthood he had been awarded. So his support for this venture did not seem strange. What was significant was his seeing the purpose in writers actively engaging in society through an organisation uniting them around a new project and vision.

By then, the PWA was flourishing right across India, with branches in Bombay, Calcutta, Allahabad, Delhi, Cawnpore, Ahmedabad, Lucknow, Bophal, Agra, Hyderabad, Lahore, Amritsar and Patna. Anand commented that in two years the Association had achieved the feat of organising the most significant writers of the land with a membership so large that quantitatively it formed one of the ‘largest blocs for the defence of culture in the world’.⁹ By 1947, according to Zaheer, its membership was to grow to over 3900 in fifty branches.¹⁰

Antecedents of the Movement

The common strand in the words delivered by Premchand, Anand and Tagore was the supreme public role and responsibility of writers and the inevitable and inextricable interplay between literature and politics. There was an internal dynamic influencing the Indian intellectual throughout the 1930s. The freedom struggle was emerging as a mass movement at the forefront of Indian politics, with ideas of socialism and liberation from colonial rule gaining an increasing currency amongst activists. The nationalist movement had entered a new phase with Gandhi issuing the call for a mass campaign of civil disobedience. This resulted in mass agitation, protests and direct action not seen before under colonial rule. Strong nationalist feelings began to emerge in literature, particularly Urdu literature which, according to Ralph Russell, reflected empathy for the poor, a questioning of existing customs as well as desire for liberation from foreign rule and indigenous elites.¹¹ However, the PWA project would be more radical and more uncompromising in its ethos. Reflecting back on the founding conference, Zaheer stated that it had to be a project that broke from the language of Mir and Ghalib.¹² By the 1930s a very different kind of language was required for a very different kind of literature and therefore a new body that would act as the organiser of such a bold, new venture. Its revolutionary component and commitment to a root-and-branch transformation of society as well as the literary and cultural field marked this project off from previous efforts. In this respect the PWA project represented a sharp break with previous literary currents, although notions of the social responsibility of intellectuals were not anything new.

The roots of the movement lay in a small publication from 1932 that caused an enormous controversy. A small book entitled Angare (Burning Coals) was published in Urdu from Lucknow. It contained ten short stories: five by Sajjad Zaheer, two each by Ahmed Ali and Rashid Jahan and one by Mahmuduzzafar. These four young writers had met earlier that year in Lucknow and became great friends. Ahmed Ali recalls that what brought them together was a shared love of ‘art and literature and, inspired by the youthful discovery of the strange new world of European culture, [they]were filled with a zeal to change the social order and right the wrongs done to man by man’.¹³ Although external influences clearly played a major role in politicising these writers, they were also passionately anti-British, and it was the struggle for independence and what they perceived as oppressive practices at home that propelled them to write. Ahmed Ali contributed Mahavaton ki Ek Rat (A Night of Winter Rains) and Badal Nahin Ate (Clouds Do Not Come) to Angare. They are both critical of the treatment meted out to Indian women by men and society at large. Rashid Jahan, the only woman in the quartet, penned two stories concerning the plight of married women — Dilli ki Sair (Trip to Delhi) and Parde Ke Piche (Behind the Veil).

Mahmuduzzafar’s lone contribution to Angare was the short story Jawanmardi (Manhood) which parodies the supposed modernity and superiority of an English: educated Indian man who seeks to impregnate his wife in spite of her illness. Zaheer contributed the greater portion of stories to Angare and they were all deemed to be provocative. But particular condemnation was directed towards two of these — Nin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Glossary
• Introduction
• 1. Literature and Politics
• 2. PWA's Conception of Literature, Art and Society
• 3. The Politics of Independence
• 4. The PWA during the War
• 5. The Fate of Hindustani
• 6. Writers and Nationalism in the Age of Independence
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1: 'In Defence of Angare: Shall We Submit to Gagging?'
• Appendix 2: Manifesto of the Indian Progressive Writers' Association, London
• Appendix 3: Manifesto of AIPWA
• Appendix 4: Resolution of Indian People's Theatre Association
• Appendix 5: Some Key Writers
• Bibliography
• Index