Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Literary Pasts, Presents, and Futures
- 1 Beginnings: Rajmohan's Wife and the Novel in India
- 2 The Epistemic Work of Literary Realism: Two Novels from Colonial India
- 3 “Because Novels Are True, and Histories Are False”: Indian Women Writing Fiction in English, 1860–1918
- 4 When the Pen Was a Sword: The Radical Career of the Progressive Novel in India
- 5 The Road Less Traveled: Modernity and Gandhianism in the Indian English Novel
- 6 The Modernist Novel in India: Paradigms and Practices
- 7 “Handcuffed to History”: Partition and the Indian Novel in English
- 8 Women, Reform, and Nationalism in Three Novels of Muslim Life
- 9 Found in Translation: Self, Caste, and Other in Three Modern Texts
- 10 Emergency Fictions
- 11 Cosmopolitanism and the Sonic Imaginary in Salman Rushdie
- 12 Postcolonial Realism in the Novels of Rohinton Mistry
- 13 Far from the Nation, Closer to Home: Privacy, Domesticity, and Regionalism in Indian English Fiction
- 14 Ecologies of Intimacy: Gender, Sexuality, and Environment in Indian Fiction
- 15 Some Uses of History: Historiography, Politics, and the Indian Novel
- 16 Virtue, Virtuosity, and the Virtual: Experiments in the Contemporary Indian English Novel
- 17 Of Dystopias and Deliriums: The Millennial Novel in India
- 18 “Which Colony? Which Block?”: Violence, (Post-)Colonial Urban Planning, and the Indian Novel
- 19 Post-Humanitarianism and the Indian Novel in English
- 20 Chetan Bhagat: Remaking the Novel in India
- 21 “New India/n Woman”: Agency and Identity in Post-Millennial Chick Lit
- 22 The Politics and Art of Indian English Fantasy Fiction
- 23 The Indian Graphic Novel
- 24 “Coming to a Multiplex Near You”: Indian Fiction in English and New Bollywood Cinema
- 25 Caste, Complicity, and the Contemporary
- Works Cited
- Index
4 - When the Pen Was a Sword: The Radical Career of the Progressive Novel in India
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Literary Pasts, Presents, and Futures
- 1 Beginnings: Rajmohan's Wife and the Novel in India
- 2 The Epistemic Work of Literary Realism: Two Novels from Colonial India
- 3 “Because Novels Are True, and Histories Are False”: Indian Women Writing Fiction in English, 1860–1918
- 4 When the Pen Was a Sword: The Radical Career of the Progressive Novel in India
- 5 The Road Less Traveled: Modernity and Gandhianism in the Indian English Novel
- 6 The Modernist Novel in India: Paradigms and Practices
- 7 “Handcuffed to History”: Partition and the Indian Novel in English
- 8 Women, Reform, and Nationalism in Three Novels of Muslim Life
- 9 Found in Translation: Self, Caste, and Other in Three Modern Texts
- 10 Emergency Fictions
- 11 Cosmopolitanism and the Sonic Imaginary in Salman Rushdie
- 12 Postcolonial Realism in the Novels of Rohinton Mistry
- 13 Far from the Nation, Closer to Home: Privacy, Domesticity, and Regionalism in Indian English Fiction
- 14 Ecologies of Intimacy: Gender, Sexuality, and Environment in Indian Fiction
- 15 Some Uses of History: Historiography, Politics, and the Indian Novel
- 16 Virtue, Virtuosity, and the Virtual: Experiments in the Contemporary Indian English Novel
- 17 Of Dystopias and Deliriums: The Millennial Novel in India
- 18 “Which Colony? Which Block?”: Violence, (Post-)Colonial Urban Planning, and the Indian Novel
- 19 Post-Humanitarianism and the Indian Novel in English
- 20 Chetan Bhagat: Remaking the Novel in India
- 21 “New India/n Woman”: Agency and Identity in Post-Millennial Chick Lit
- 22 The Politics and Art of Indian English Fantasy Fiction
- 23 The Indian Graphic Novel
- 24 “Coming to a Multiplex Near You”: Indian Fiction in English and New Bollywood Cinema
- 25 Caste, Complicity, and the Contemporary
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
Is the Anglophone Indian Novel also a Progressive Novel?
In April of 1936, while India was still under British rule, the All-India Progressive Writers' Association (AIPWA) held its inaugural conference in Lucknow (P. Gopal, Literary 17). The goal of the meeting, in part, was to bring together writers on a common platform to defend artistic freedoms against the twin challenges of colonial censorship and religious orthodoxy. But the goals of the AIPWA (also called the “Akhil Bharatiya Pragativadi Lekhak Sangh” in Hindi and the “Taraqqi Pasandi Masneef Tehreek” in Urdu) went beyond free speech issues to embrace a wide range of social and political concerns (Coppola, “Premchand's” 21). The Manifesto of the Progressive Writers' Association read, in part:
1) It is the duty of Indian writers to give expression to the changes in Indian life and to assist the spirit of progress in the country by introducing scientific rationalism in literature. They should undertake to develop an attitude of literary criticism which will discourage the general reactionary and revivalist tendencies on questions like family, religion, sex, war and society, and to combat literary trends reflecting communalism, racial antagonism, sexual libertinism, and exploitation of man by man.
2) It is the object of our association to rescue literature from the conservative classes – to bring the arts into the closest touch with the people…
3) We believe 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.
4) All that arouses in us the critical spirit, which examines customs and institutions in the light of reason, which helps us to act, to organize ourselves, to transform, we accept as progressive. (Malik 651)
In so doing, Indian writers were not only responding to the heady spirit of the agitations for India's independence, but they were also charting a course for the direction of India's future, embracing a wide range of concerns: social redistribution, gender equality, scientific rationality, and political reform (T. Ahmed 11–37). The organization, while initially dominated by Urdu writers, was vast: “almost no contemporaneous Indian writer in any language, including English, would remain unaffected by its reach” (P. Gopal, Literary 2). The Progressive Writers' Movement grew over the next decades to become the most important and largest literary movement in South Asia's history.
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- A History of the Indian Novel in English , pp. 73 - 87Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015
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