Progressivism and Modernism in South Asian Fiction: 1930-1970

Abstract

This essay aims to periodize South Asian literary modernism in fiction, noting its several identifiable phases and arguing that its stylistic peak occurred after independence, in the era of the ‘New Story’ movement of the 1960s. Earlier phases in South Asian modernism included the Bengal Renaissance, as well as the Progressive Writers’ Movement, which began in the early 1930s. The strides made by the Progressive Writers clearly nourished the emergence of the New Story movement in the 1950s, and a number of authors might well be located in both or can be seen transitioning from the social realism of the Progressive Writers era to a more introspective and experimentalist mode beginning in the late 1950s. The goal here is to develop a non-exclusive analytic for studying the Progressive Writers’ and New Story movements as species of transnational modernism without foreclosing their links to other literary movements, both within India and abroad.