Progressive Politics and Poetry from 1931-47
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The Art of Opposition: Progressive Politics and Poetry from 1931-47 Mirza Jaffer Abid Committee Chair: Carollee Bengelsdorf Member: Uditi Sen 1 For Nana, who survived not one but two partitions. And Anas, whose daily life was partitioned. Speak, for truth is living yet. Speak, whatever must be said. − - Faiz Ahmed Faiz 2 Table of Contents 1. Introduction 4 2. Chapter 1: A Pleasant Conversation 14 3. Chapter 2: Returning 36 4. Chapter 3: Translating the Nation 67 5. Chapter 4: When Lines are Drawn 85 6. Chapter 5: Lal Singh's Encounter with Modernity 107 7. Conclusion 129 8. Bibliography 136 3 Introduction It is a spirit in opposition, rather than in accommodation, that grips me because the romance, the interest, the challenge of intellectual life is to be founding dissent against the status quo at a time when the struggle on behalf of underrepresented and disadvantaged groups seems so unfairly weighted against them. - Edward Said Representation of the Intellectual In The Progressive Writers Association, therefore, we have the broadest organization of the Intellectuals of India, the largest bloc of writers who, what ever the difference in their standpoints, whatever their contradiction of philosophical, religious and cultural belief, join for common actions, in the defence of our old culture and the development, through a proper criticism of the past, of a new culture. In this Association, scholars, poets, novelists, essayists and lay readers, all stand united for the winning of our right to the democratic ideal, and to the economic, political and cultural freedom of India. - Mulk Raj Anand On the Progressive Writers Movement In 1991, the eminent scholar, critic and Palestinian intellectual Edward Said gave a series of lectures for the B.B.C. entitled Representations of the Intellectual. In these talks, later published as a collection of essays, Said laid out the many interpretations and roles of intellectuals. He cites first the Italian Marxist philosopher and working-class organizer Anotonio Gramsci, from whom he borrows the concepts of the “traditional” and “organic” intellectual. The 'traditional' intellectual is someone who fulfills the same function from generation to generations; teachers, priests and academics. “Organic” intellectuals, on the other hand, are those directly connected with a class. This brand of intellectuals require the labor of fellow organic intellectuals for their work, the way “the capitalist entrepreneur creates alongside himself the industrial technician, the specialist in political economy, the organizers of a new culture, of a new legal system, etc.” Said then shifts his attention to the French novelist and philosopher Julien Benda, from whose work he adopts his second formulation of the intellectual. For Benda, intellectuals are a small band of elite philosopher kings who “constitute the conscience of mankind.” (Said, 1991, 5) Unlike Gramsci, Benda believed that only a select few, highly skilled individuals, were fit for 4 performing intellectual activity. Said's own perspective on the intellectual moves beyond these two descriptions of the intellectual. For him, the importance of the intellectual is not his/her role in society as it is for Gramsci and Benda, but the position they occupy in respect to the functioning norms of their society. Intellectuals are those people who, when motivated by justice, will rise in defence of the weak and defy the structures of authority. It is not so much the duty of the intellectual, but their moral obligation, to champion the cause of the exploited and oppressed. About sixty years before Said wrote this, a group of young Indian students convened at the back room of a Chinese restaurant on London's Denmark Street. Inspired by European intellectual activity in the thirties against fascism, these students decided to form their own group of writers, for the purpose of “... liberate[ing] literature and the other fine arts from the fatal grasp of the conservatives and, making them the interpreter of the suffering and happiness and the struggle of the people, to show the path of the bright future towards which mankind is striving.” [AIPWA Manifesto] (Pradhan, 1979; 21-22) Like Said, these students believed that the function of intellectuals, (which they saw themselves as) was to struggle for and with those people who faced problems of 'hunger, poverty, social backwardness and slavery.' This study traces the history of the All India Progressive Writers Association [henceforth AIPWA], from the publication of Angare, the controversial collection of short stories that initially inspired the formation of AIPWA in 1931, to the partition of the sub-continent and the group's split in 1947. Born during one of the most turbulent, but also potentially rich, periods of South Asian history, AIPWA set themselves the goal of mobilizing writers from all around India . Their idea was to advance the nationalist movement through literature by infusing it with primarily social critique and content. Consisting of over three thousand writers at its peak, AIPWA grew to 5 become one of the 20th century's most influential and interesting literary political movements. Between its first meeting in London and it's collapse, the group released amended versions of their initial manifesto multiple times and published versions of it in different languages. What this project attempts to do is examine the notion of 'progress' formulated in each of these manifestos through an examination of the sources from which AIPWA drew its inspiration. By placing their definition of “progress” against the historical backdrop of the ongoing anti-colonial struggles in India, it seeks to analyze what AIPWA had to offer in defining the deeply contested space of the “nation.” The argument it makes is that AIPWA purposely started off with a vague definition of “progress” that included many ideologies, of which only national independence was a must. As time progressed, a divide started to grow between the “political” and “literary” factions of the group. The former were more inclined towards politics, while the latter placed precedence on literature. While the changes made to the definition of progress by the group did reflect a stronger relationship of AIPWA with socialism and later the Communist Party of India (CPI), this piece suggests that this did not detract from the literary merit of the group. Although the primary components of 'progress' were no longer social, but political factors, the progressives remained a group of highly committed individuals struggling “on behalf of [the] underrepresented and disadvantaged.” (Said, 1991; 17) This project utilizes Partha Chaterjee's framework of the “public” and “private” sphere to examine the location in which AIPWA, as a group, fleshed out it's definition of “progress.” According to Chaterjee, before it engages in warfare against the colonial power, anti-colonial nationalism starts imagining itself as sovereign within the colonial society “by dividing the world into two domains – the material and the spiritual.” The material, or outside realm, is of “the economy and statecraft, science and technology.” The spiritual, “inner” domain consists of the 6 '“essential” marks of cultural identity,' the concealed, Indian layer that was not penetrable to the colonizer. In recent studies of nationalism, the work of Bennedict Anderson has been the most significant. His book, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism is considered the most important text on the subject in the last thirty years. Anderson maps out the emergence and intersection of script languages through mass vernacular literacy and print-capitalism, the two categories that for him constitute the formation of all modern nation- states. His argument is that a nation is an “imagined political community that is imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign" (Anderson, 1983; 7) Imagined because "members . will never know most of their fellow members . yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion,” limited as "even the largest of them . has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations" and sovereign as "the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm” (Anderson, 1983; 6-7) Chaterjee's reply to Anderson's argument is that the third world does not possess the ability and freedom to imagine their own nations, If nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain “modular” forms already made available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine? History, it would seem, has decreed that we in the postcolonial world shall only be perpetual consumers of modernity...Even our imaginations must forever remain colonized. (Chaterjee, 1993; 5) In his interpretation of Anderson's theory of imagined communities, the colonized never possessed the intellectual freedom to even imagine and create independent nations. “But it is not as though the so called spiritual domain is left unchanged. In fact, here nationalism launches its most powerful, creative and historically significant project: to fashion a “modern” national culture that 7 is never the less not western.” (Chaterjee, 1993; 6) In light of this Chaterjee critique of Anderson, this project examines whether AIPWA was imagining a “modular” form of nationalism exported by Europe or was it successful in imagining its own, original nationalist project? Was it that they too were, in Chaterjee's words, a “consumer of modernity”' or did they succeed in creating their own version of the “modern.” Through looking at what AIPWA adopted from what is the 'inner' and 'outer' domain , we can gauge the type of nationalism they were arguing for and how they did so. By creating a clear cut boundary between what is public and private, material and spiritual, outside and essential, Chaterjee makes his own analytical framework modular. However, his work is a useful tool for understanding what ideas constituted AIPWA's definition of “progress" and the sources of these ideas.