Source: http://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl2826/stories/20111230282608900.htm
Writers For Change:
BY: Ajoy Ashirwad Mahaprashasta
in FRONTLINE
A symposium to mark the 75th
anniversary of the Progressive Writers' Association discusses purposeful
writing in India.
|
“IF you are not familiar with the age in which we
live, read my stories. If you cannot endure my stories, it means that this age
is unbearable.” The statement by the prolific writer Saadat Hasan Manto was not
just an expression of his individual feeling but a signifier of the mood of
most progressive writers of pre-Independence India. Prominent regional writers
such as Manto, Munshi Premchand, Kishan Chander, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Ismat
Chughtai, Bhisham Sahni and Firaq Gorakhpuri grappled with themes that were
never taken seriously in Indian literature until then. These themes were part
of human lives and what people from the colonial era related to. These themes
spoke of emotional realities and were not intended merely to entertain readers.
The writers created characters out of the
imperialist order of the day and people who engaged with the
colonial-capitalist set-up. They had to live a life that threw them into moral
dilemmas, sometimes leading to self-damage, sometimes to decadence and
depravity, and yet, they were the protagonists of these stories. They were
never the fairy-tale heroes, and yet the sympathies of the readers lay with
them. These writers became cults in Indian literature because they also put
considerable attention to their craft or form while telling these real stories.
This moved readers, unsettled them, and cultivated their thought processes. The
stories let them know that their problems were not just their own but the
results of structural issues. These novelists and poets wrote not just to make
personal gains but also to contribute to Indian intellectualism and political
activism. This was a significant departure from the Indian literary traditions
of the 1930s.
Indian literature was populated mostly by
travelogues of foreigners or stuff that received royal patronage. However, some
writers started the trend of independent writing and dealt with contemporary
themes, and gradually all of them associated themselves directly or indirectly
with the Progressive Writers' Association (PWA), which peaked from 1936 until
the late 1940s. Known for its revolutionary thoughts and belief in socialist
practices, the PWA got unflinching support from the then Communist Party of
India, especially from its first general secretary P.C. Joshi, who was also instrumental
in forming the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA) and was responsible
for finding many promising artists and writers from the grass roots.
The year 2011 marks the 75th anniversary of the
PWA, and writers, activists and academics have been celebrating the year to
push a progressive agenda in contemporary literature. While doing so, they also
offer a critique on what they call the “soulless” literature of the
post-globalisation era. According to many literary critics, the growth of the
publishing industry in India in recent times is coupled with a decline in
thoughtful literature where writers are happy to narrate their individual
experiences without caring to write about caste discrimination, exploitation of
the poor, superstitions, or callous administrations. The current trend, many
believe, is solely towards making stories marketable and the thrust is,
consequently, only to entertain. In this context, leading artists and academics
gathered for a symposium, organised by the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust
(SAHMAT), in New Delhi to discuss ways to push relevant topics in Indian
writing.
The symposium reminded its audience of the writers of the PWA and the artists of the IPTA and also the philosophy that guided them. It recalled how, with the patronage of the Communist Party of India, the PWA grew in strength and what was primarily a Hindustani cult spread to Malayalam, Assamese, Tamil, Telugu and other languages of India. The growth of progressive writing in the regional languages coincided with the growth of the united Communist Party, which believed that the cultural awakening of people towards communist practices should coincide and sometimes precede political action.
Origins
The PWA was formed in April 1936 in Lucknow under
the leadership of Munshi Premchand. But the seeds of it had been laid in
London. Mulk Raj Anand, in one of the first volumes of the PWA journal, writes
thus while recollecting the dark days of a depression-hit London in 1935:
“…[A]fter the disillusionment and disintegration of years of suffering in India
and conscious of the destruction of most of our values through the capitalist
crisis of 1931, a few of us emerged from the slough of despondency of the cafes
and garrets of Bloomsbury and formed the nucleus of the Progressive Writers'
Associations.
“For, since the historic meeting in the Nanking
restaurant in Denmark Street where the original manifesto was read, through the
eager, well-attended fortnightly meetings of the London branch where essays,
stories and poems were read and lectures delivered (and through less eager,
ill-attended meetings), through the first All-India Progressive Writers'
Conference held in Lucknow in April 1936, and the opening of branches or
committees in the various linguistic zones through the provincial conference
and the opening of more branches, our organisation has today gathered into it
or around it, the most significant writers in India and commands membership so
large that it forms, quantitatively, one of the largest blocs for the defence
of culture in the world.” ( Marxist Cultural Movement in India; edited by Sudhi
Pradhan.)
MULK RAJ ANAND. The first manifesto of the progressive writers' movement was
drafted in London by him and the Urdu litterateur Sajjad Zaheer. The movement
was formally launched in Lucknow in April 1936.
Another founding member of the PWA and its general secretary for long, Sajjad Zaheer, says in his reminiscences: “Just remember the two years preceding 1935. The political effect of the economic crisis that engulfed the world took in Germany the shape of the dictatorship of Hitler and his Nazi Party. In London and Paris, we daily came across the miserable refugees who had escaped or were exiled from Germany. Everywhere one could hear the painful stories of fascist repression….
“The painful darkness, which, spreading from the
bright world of arts and learning that was Germany, was throwing its fearful
shades on Europe – all these had shattered the inner tranquillity of our hearts
and minds. One power could stem the tide of this modern barbarism – the
organised power of the factory workers, the power that emerges from the working
together, through cooperation, through ceaseless struggle against repression
and exploitation of capitalist…. The experience of the continuous class
struggle creates on this class a revolutionary class consciousness enabling it
to frustrate the attempts of capitalism to put the clock back and to become the
creators of a new civilisation.” ( Marxist Cultural Movement in India; edited
by Sudhi Pradhan.)
Ideology of the PWA
The foundation conference of the PWA, or the
Anjuman Tarraqi Pasand Mussanafin-e-Hind as it was called in Urdu literary
circles, had the blessings of such giants of Indian literature as Rabindranath
Tagore, Sarojini Naidu and Munshi Premchand. Right from the start, the
inclination and ideology of the writers were clear as has been stated by
Premchand in his inaugural speech: “Hitherto we had been content to discuss
language and its problems; the existing critical literature of Urdu and Hindi
has dealt with the construction and the structure of the language alone. This
was doubtless an important and necessary work, and the pioneers of our
literature have supplied this preliminary need and performed their task
admirably. But language is a means, not an end; a stage, not the journey's end.
Its purpose is to mould our thoughts and emotions and to give them the right direction.
We have now to concern ourselves with the meaning of things and to find the
means of fulfilling the purpose for which the language is constructed. This is
the main purpose of this conference.”
“Our literary taste,” Premchand added, “is
undergoing a rapid transformation. It is coming more and to grips with the
realities of life; it interests itself with society or man as a social unit. It
is not satisfied now with the singing of frustrated love, or with writing to
satisfy only our sense of wonder; it concerns itself with the problems of our
life and such themes as have a social value. The literature which does not
arouse in us a critical spirit or satisfy our spiritual needs, which is not
‘force-giving' and dynamic, which does not awaken our sense of beauty, which
does not make us face the grim realities of life in a spirit of determination,
has no use for us today. It cannot even be termed as literature.”
AT THE ALL India IPTA conference, Ahmedabad, 1948, a group from West Bengal
performing on a truck.
Critiquing religion, which writers of yore had shown as the chief spiritual and moral guiding principle of man, Premchand said: “Today, however, literature has undertaken a new task, and its instrument is our inherent sense of beauty; it tried to achieve its aim by arousing this sense of beauty in us. The more a writer develops this sense through his observation of nature, the more effective will his writings become. All that is ugly or detestable, all that is inhuman, becomes intolerable to such a writer. He becomes the standard-bearer of humanity, of moral uprightness, of nobility.
Critiquing religion, which writers of yore had shown as the chief spiritual and moral guiding principle of man, Premchand said: “Today, however, literature has undertaken a new task, and its instrument is our inherent sense of beauty; it tried to achieve its aim by arousing this sense of beauty in us. The more a writer develops this sense through his observation of nature, the more effective will his writings become. All that is ugly or detestable, all that is inhuman, becomes intolerable to such a writer. He becomes the standard-bearer of humanity, of moral uprightness, of nobility.
“It becomes his duty to help all those who are
downtrodden, oppressed and exploited – individuals or groups – and to advocate
their cause. And his judge is itself – it is before society that he brings his
plant. He knows that the more realistic his story is, the more full of
expression and movement his picture, the more intimate his observation of human
nature, psychology, the greater the effect he will produce. It is not even
enough that from a psychological point of view his characters resembled human
beings; we must further be satisfied that they are real human beings of bone
and flesh. We do not believe in an imaginary man; his acts and his thoughts do
not impress us.”
Premchand's speech showed that talking and writing
about the different types of oppression prevalent in India and other
contemporary realities was not a Western construct but something that was
rooted in the Indian soil.
Revolutionary resolution
An association of writers was a novel idea in
India. And so was its revolutionary resolution adopted in the first conference
in Lucknow. In the political climate of the 1930s, this was considered a highly
political activity. The aims and objectives of the association were unanimously
passed as follows: “To establish organisation of writers to correspond to the
various linguistic zones of India; to coordinate these organisations by holding
conferences and by publishing literature; to establish a close connection
between the central organisations and to cooperate with those literary
organisations whose aims do not conflict with the basic aims of the
Association; to form branches of the Association in all the important towns of
India; to produce and to translate literatures of a progressive nature, to
fight cultural reaction, and in this way to further the cause of India's
freedom and social regeneration; to protect the interests of progressive
authors; to fight for the right of free expression of thought and opinion.”
The resolution was Left-liberal in its approach.
The cultural Left and the political Left operated with relative autonomy, each
complementing the other. Some of the papers presented at the SAHMAT symposium
pointed out that this autonomy was necessary for a progressive cultural agenda
and that to some extent the control of the Communist Party over the Left
cultural groups after Independence led to their downfall. This was a point that
the noted historian K.N. Panikkar and theatre personality Shamik Banerjee
elaborated in their papers. Neither the PWA nor the IPTA could function well
after 1955. Writers and artists from the Left broke away from the association
but kept writing within its ideology.
BALRAJ AND DAMAYANTI Sahni in the IPTA's only film,
`Dharti ke Lal'.
The traumas of Partition and the violence during
the late 1940s left the writers of the PWA bewildered: they have narrated these
in their stories. Heated debates within the Communist Party of India further
weakened the PWA. Writers who were no more a part of the PWA still carried its
legacy forward.
In his paper, the noted Bengali academic Mihir
Bhattacharya proposed that “a political movement of the people like the PWA
introduces a moment in culture which acts as something like a singularity,
altering the configuration of its dynamics, and though the movement dies out,
the moment stays and works often as a manifest power in the construction and
reconstruction of texts, and sometimes as an immanent force which enters into
relationship with other forces”. It is this heritage that many of the
contemporary progressive writers tend to follow even today.
Progressive experiments
Some papers at the symposium pointed out that when
progressive experiments got much attention and were subject to renewals in
States like Tamil Nadu and Kerala in recent years, cultural groups in other
States were lagging behind and had failed to reinvent themselves. In this
context, Jana Natya Manch, founded by Safdar Hashmi, was hailed for drawing
crowds and volunteers even today when most others failed to do so. Safdar
Hashmi's wife, Moloyshree Hashmi, recalled how they went about writing their
plays and mobilising people everywhere they went.
The function of cultural activity for a progressive
agenda is to evoke a sensibility that is pro-people. This can then lead to a
political awareness. Such cultural activity proved to be an instrumental tool
in pre-revolution Russia or in early 20th century Europe. In India, aggressive
cultural activity have made left-wing extremist political parties such as the
Communist Party of India (Maoist) stronger in tribal hinterlands and have made
Dalit identity politics a force to reckon with.
THE COMMUNIST PARTY of India's cultural workers Ali Sardar Jafri,
Chittaprosad and Kalpana Joshi. A photograph by Sunil Janah. The growth of
progressive cultural movements coincided with the growth of the Communist Party
of India, which believed that the cultural awakening of people towards
communist practices should coincide and sometimes precede political action.
In these times of globalisation, when inequalities between the rich and the poor are growing, what could the electoral Left parties do to reinvent their cultural wings so that their appeal increases among the people? Prabhat Patnaik's explanation in this context seems to throw some light on this. He says that the Marxist cultural movement should not just talk about class inequalities but also address permanent problems of Indian society, giving the communist movement a local flavour. Thus he departs from the universally accepted communist position of internationalism.
He writes in his paper: “The progressive cultural
movement... must therefore fight, in its own terrain, not only against the
exploitative order presided over by the bourgeoisie, allied with the rich
landed interests, but also against the ideological perceptions and cultural
practices of the old order, against caste, patriarchy, communalism and all
forms of suppression of the individual by the so-called ‘traditions' of the old
community. The latter struggle is a permanent struggle that stretches from the
present until the establishment of the new order.” This is exactly what the PWA
did in those times and this is what Left cultural groups could do in a
reinvented form and understanding of an ever-changing political climate.
Many scholars at the SAHMAT conference tried to
reinterpret the old subjects of cultural activism, and almost every
participant, through discussions, implicitly urged contemporary writers to
probe society further. As they say, to not probe is to surrender and if a
writer surrenders, she/he ceases to be a writer.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.