Contents · 6 sections · 4 min
Core Theses
Literature must reflect the real life of the people — their poverty, hunger, exploitation and struggle.
Writers should oppose imperialism, feudalism, communalism and the oppression of women.
Art for art’s sake and escapist mysticism are a betrayal of the writer’s duty.
Hindi and Urdu writers are one community, writing for a free and socialist India.
The Progressive Writers’ Movement — in Urdu Anjuman Taraqqī-pasand Muṣannifīn, the “Association of Progressive Writers” — was the most influential literary movement in twentieth-century South Asia. Founded in 1936, inspired by Marxism, the anti-colonial struggle and the international anti-fascist writers’ movement, it called on writers to abandon romantic escapism and religious revivalism and to write about the real lives of ordinary people — peasants, workers, women, the poor — and to make literature an instrument of social change. Its first conference, in Lucknow in April 1936, was presided over by Premchand, who declared that the standard of beauty must change. Its members included the greatest Urdu writers of the century — Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Saadat Hasan Manto, Ismat Chughtai, Krishan Chander, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Ali Sardar Jafri, Sahir Ludhianvi, Kaifi Azmi, Majrooh Sultanpuri — as well as Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi and other writers, and its influence reached deep into Indian cinema and song.
Origins
The movement had its roots in a scandal. In 1932 four young writers — Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmed Ali, Rashid Jahan and Mahmuduzzafar — published in Lucknow Angārē (“Burning Coals”), a collection of ten short stories in Urdu attacking the hypocrisy of the Muslim clergy, sexual repression and the oppression of women, in a frank, modernist style influenced by Joyce and D. H. Lawrence. It caused a furore; mullahs issued fatwas against the authors; the British government banned and burned the book in 1933. Rashid Jahan, a doctor and communist, became known as “Angāréwālī”.
In London, a group of Indian students around Sajjad Zaheer and Mulk Raj Anand, influenced by Marxism and by the anti-fascist Writers’ International, drew up a manifesto in 1935. It declared 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”, and denounced reactionary tendencies, mysticism and “the spirit of reaction which… seeks refuge in religion and in a past that is dead.”
The Lucknow conference
The All-India Progressive Writers’ Association held its first conference in Lucknow on 9–10 April 1936, with Premchand in the chair, two months before his death. His presidential address, “Sāhitya kā Uddeśya” (“The Aim of Literature”), became the movement’s charter:
We shall have to change our standard of beauty… Literature which does not arouse in us critical spirit, which does not satisfy our spiritual and intellectual needs, which is not energising and dynamic, which does not awaken our sense of beauty, which does not make us face the grim realities of life with determination, is useless today.
He insisted that the writer stand with the oppressed: “The literary man is not a mere entertainer… he is the torch-bearer that walks ahead of politics.”
Writers and works
The movement gave modern Urdu literature its golden age. In poetry, Faiz Ahmad Faiz transformed the classical ghazal so that the beloved could be the revolution and the lover a prisoner of conscience; Josh Malihabadi, “the poet of revolution”; Ali Sardar Jafri; Kaifi Azmi (“Aurat”, “Makān”); Sahir Ludhianvi, whose film lyrics carried progressive ideas to millions (“Ye mahlõ, ye takhtõ, ye tājõ kī duniyā… ye duniyā agar mil bhī jāe to kyā hai”); Majrooh Sultanpuri; Makhdoom Mohiuddin, poet of the Telangana peasant uprising. In fiction, Krishan Chander (Ann Dātā, about the Bengal Famine), Rajinder Singh Bedi (Ek Chādar Mailī Sī), Ismat Chughtai (Liḥāf, Ṭeṛhī Lakīr) and Saadat Hasan Manto, whose relationship with the movement was stormy — his stories were attacked as obscene by conservatives and as decadent by doctrinaire progressives.
In Hindi, the movement (Pragativād) included Yashpal (Jhūṭhā Sac, an epic of Partition), Nāgārjun, Kedārnāth Agarwāl, Rāngeya Rāghav, and drew Sumitranandan Pant and Nirala toward social themes; Premchand’s late work (Godān, the story “Kafan”) was its model. Mulk Raj Anand (Untouchable, Coolie) wrote in English.
The movement shaped the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA, 1943) and, through writers like Sahir, Kaifi, Majrooh, Shailendra and Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, the golden age of Hindi cinema — films like Pyaasa (1957) and Do Bigha Zamin (1953).
Partition and decline
Partition in 1947 split the movement. Sajjad Zaheer went to Pakistan to organise the Communist Party and was imprisoned after the Rawalpindi Conspiracy case (1951), along with Faiz. The Pakistani government banned the Progressive Writers’ Association in 1954. In India, the movement fractured over doctrinal disputes — the demand for strict socialist realism after 1949 alienated many writers — and by the mid-1950s it had lost its central role, giving way to modernist movements (the Nayī Kahānī, Nayī Kavitā, and in Urdu the Jadīdiyat modernism of the 1960s). Yet its values — commitment, social realism, secularism, the unity of Hindi and Urdu — remain central to South Asian literature.
Criticism
Critics have charged the movement with turning literature into propaganda, imposing ideological conformity, and dismissing writers who did not fit — Manto’s quarrels with the progressives are famous. Defenders reply that it gave voice to the voiceless, broke taboos about sex, religion and caste, and produced some of the finest writing in the languages of the subcontinent.
In conversation
- “The standard of beauty must change” — Premchand’s call for a literature of the real lives of the poor.
- Taraqqī-pasand — “progressive”; a writer committed to social change.
- Angārē — the “burning coals” that set off the movement; any book whose scandal changes a literature.
Members
6
Premchand
The greatest writer of modern Hindi and Urdu fiction — novelist of the Indian village, of peasants crushed by debt, caste and colonial rule — whose Godān and stories like “The Shroud” founded social realism in Indian literature.
Faiz Ahmad Faiz
The greatest Urdu poet of the twentieth century — a Marxist and lover whose ghazals and nazms fused the classical language of love with revolution, prison and protest; jailed in Pakistan, exiled in Beirut, sung across the subcontinent: >- “Mujh se pahlī sī mohabbat”, “Bol”, “Ham dekhẽge”.
Saadat Hasan Manto
The fearless master of the Urdu short story — chronicler of Partition’s madness in “Toba Tek Singh”, “Khol Do” and “Ṭhanḍā Gosht”, of prostitutes, pimps and the city’s outcasts in Bombay — tried six times for obscenity, dead of drink at forty-two, now hailed as the greatest story-writer of South Asia.
Bhisham Sahni
The Hindi writer of Partition and of the middle class — author of Tamas (“Darkness”, 1974), the great novel of the communal riots of 1947, and of the story “Chīf kī Dāvat”, the plays Kabirā Khaṛā Bāzār Mẽ and Hānūś, and the memoir of his brother, the actor Balraj Sahni.
Ismat Chughtai
The boldest woman of Urdu fiction — author of “Liḥāf” (The Quilt), tried for obscenity in 1944, of the novel Ṭeṛhī Lakīr and of stories of women’s desire, the zenana and middle-class Muslim households, told in a racy, colloquial voice that changed Urdu prose.
Sahir Ludhianvi
The Urdu poet of protest and heartbreak who became the greatest lyricist of Hindi cinema — author of Talkhiyā̃ (“Bitterness”) and of film songs like “Ye mahlõ ye takhtõ”, “Kabhī kabhī mere dil mẽ” and “Allah tero nām” — who brought progressive poetry to hundreds of millions.
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Godān
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