Free Radicals

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.

Ahmed’s book,with its plodding style,falters in this particular section. After all,this was the time when the great modernist manifestos were being pounded out,and artists and writers were dizzy with visions of the future. The story of AIPWA’s origins fails to provide a real sense of that intellectual back-and-forth. (Compare this to a book with a similar aim,like Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture,also an interdisciplinary account of the creative cross-pollination of culture and politics in the 1930s.)

Premchand was the kindly light who led AIPWA’s founding conference in Lucknow,calling true literature “criticism of life” and “that which creates in us the power to act”. Jawaharlal Nehru spoke at the second Urdu PWA conference. Faiz,in a meeting organised at Jallianwala Bagh,discussed the possibility of middle-class artists expressing working-class concerns,and whether an authentic solidarity was possible. Through the years,it galvanised writers across the country.

Of course,AIPWA itself was a temperamentally and politically divided thing. It was split between the doctrinaire,Soviet-loving writerly faction,ardent nationalists and those who espoused a warm,fuzzy social liberalism. At the founding conference,Ahmed Ali trashed Tagore’s work as “morbidly escapist”,causing great consternation among other writers. But the book is a straight telling; it doesn’t explore the ironies of the AIPWA writer’s affiliations,or the way they were caught up in the very categories they sought to abolish.

One of the highlights in the book is the debate over Hindustani,and the PWA’s ultimate failure to construct a literary tradition in this demotic language even though the film industry carried on with it. After Partition,the PWA soldiered on — the Pakistan PWA remained an eclectic and committed presence for a few years but,increasingly alienated even from the wider (non-Left) community of writers and citizens,it could not survive the hostility of an insecure state. Meanwhile,in India,progressive writers chafed at Nehru’s unwillingness to institute full-blown industrial and land reforms.

Despite being patchily organised and sloppily produced (“lauding over the servants”,etc),it is a useful read for anyone interested in India’s cultural politics. The AIPWA and its theatrical sibling IPTA are just a jumble of alphabets with no name recall today,but their sentimental residue is still with us,in our ideas of “good”,elevating cinema — what is Swades if not an updated tractor musical? Reading about the AIPWA years is to be deeply moved for a time when art and ideas were unquestionably big,vital and convinced of their own purpose.