Knock knock.

Who’s there?

Subversion.

Subversion who?

Umm, just Subversion, isn’t that enough?

That’s precisely the problem with Talat Ahmed’s study of the heady years of the All India Progressive Writers Association (AIPWA). It is a perfectly adequate (and much-needed) chronicle of the events, organisation and leading figures of the movement, but it fails to interrogate its own “oppositional” categories enough.

The Progressive Writers Movement counted, at one point or the other, figures like Mulk Raj Anand, Saadat Hasan Manto, Ali Sardar Jafri, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Ismat Chughtai and Kaifi Azmi in its ranks. It was nationalist, it was internationalist, its loyalties were torn between the hardcore communists and the pinko Congress, it was a middle-class formation that addressed itself to working class consciousness-raising, and it was a profoundly formative force in the decades immediately preceding and following Independence.

In 1932, a little magazine called Angarey sparked a great conflagration: writers like Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmed Ali, Mahmuazzafar and Rashid Jahan wrote a set of provocative short stories that took on the British establishment and the Muslim clergy. Immediately, state and social hostility made it clear that the barricades were drawn. This was the bloody crossroads where literature and politics met.

Zaheer was the moving spirit behind the AIPWA, organising the first few meetings in London, and helping chalk out a rough statement of purpose, which was published in the old Left Review. In Europe, when Zaheer announced his intention of forging a writer’s movement, the French poet Louis Aragon laughingly warned, “no other group is more difficult to organise than writers. Every writer wants an exclusive path for himself”, even as he acknowledged that the conditions of the modern world force this solidarity.

... contd.