When the Pen Was a Sword: The Radical Career of the Progressive Novel in India

Abstract

Is the Anglophone Indian Novel also a Progressive Novel? In April of 1936, while India was still under British rule, the All-India Progressive Writers' Association (AIPWA) held its inaugural conference in Lucknow (P. Gopal, Literary 17). The goal of the meeting, in part, was to bring together writers on a common platform to defend artistic freedoms against the twin challenges of colonial censorship and religious orthodoxy. But the goals of the AIPWA (also called the “Akhil Bharatiya Pragativadi Lekhak Sangh” in Hindi and the “Taraqqi Pasandi Masneef Tehreek” in Urdu) went beyond free speech issues to embrace a wide range of social and political concerns (Coppola, “Premchand's” 21). The Manifesto of the Progressive Writers' Association read, in part: 1) It is the duty of Indian writers to give expression to the changes in Indian life and to assist the spirit of progress in the country by introducing scientific rationalism in literature. They should undertake to develop an attitude of literary criticism which will discourage the general reactionary and revivalist tendencies on questions like family, religion, sex, war and society, and to combat literary trends reflecting communalism, racial antagonism, sexual libertinism, and exploitation of man by man. 2) It is the object of our association to rescue literature from the conservative classes – to bring the arts into the closest touch with the people… 3) 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 subjection. 4) All that arouses in us the critical spirit, which examines customs and institutions in the light of reason, which helps us to act, to organize ourselves, to transform, we accept as progressive. (Malik 651) In so doing, Indian writers were not only responding to the heady spirit of the agitations for India's independence, but they were also charting a course for the direction of India's future, embracing a wide range of concerns: social redistribution, gender equality, scientific rationality, and political reform (T. Ahmed 11–37). The organization, while initially dominated by Urdu writers, was vast: “almost no contemporaneous Indian writer in any language, including English, would remain unaffected by its reach” (P. Gopal, Literary 2). The Progressive Writers' Movement grew over the next decades to become the most important and largest literary movement in South Asia's history.