‘Critical Realisms’ in Savera: Mapping an Evolution of Urdu Literary Writing in Post-Partition India
‘Critical Realisms’ in Savera: Mapping an Evolution of Urdu Literary Writing in Post-Partition India
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8 May 2023
“Radical changes are taking place in Indian society…We believe that the new literature of India must deal with the basic problems of our existence to-day– the problems of hunger and poverty, social backwardness, and political subjection. All that drags us down to passivity, inaction and un-reason we reject as reactionary. All that arouses in us the critical spirit, which examines institutions and customs in the light of reason, which helps us to act, to organize ourselves, to transform, we accept as progressive.”
Mulk Raj Anand, On The Progressive Writers Movement
The 1947 Partition catapulted the Indian subcontinent into a bloody epoch of religious, ethnic, gender, and political violence that has been adequately chronicled in fiction and non-fiction by the likes of Salman Rushdie, Urvashi Butalia, Amrita Pritam, and Yasmin Saikia, among others. There is, however, a dearth of scholarship on the tumultuous period of cultural transformation, particularly in literary production, that followed the former colonies into their newfound independence. The aforementioned excerpt is from the 1936 manifesto of the Progressive Writers Movement, an anti-imperialist and left-wing literary movement in the Indian subcontinent that traces its origins to the publication of a notoriously scandalous anthology, Angarey (Live Coals). Angarey heralded a radical shift in North Indian literary production towards what Ahmed Ali, one of the founding members of the Progressive Writers’ Movement, called ‘critical realism.’
Ahmed Ali’s conception of ‘critical realism’ can be understood as a form of narrative writing that ventures beyond the accurate representation of mundane realities of everyday life that ‘literary realism’ identifies itself with to also integrate a scathing critique of said realities, thus offering the possibility of transformation at the individual and communal level. This incipient literary practice, borne out of Angarey, occupied itself with the project of self-criticism or self-reflection that propelled Indian writers to rethink the dyadic conventional model of imperial conflict; a homogenous native Indian ‘self,’ the colonized, pitched against a homogenous foreign ‘Other,’ the colonizer. Since such a model obscures the possibility of interrogating the ‘self,’ and situating it as a target of criticism along with the ‘Other,’ the ‘critical realism’ propounded by Angarey, and the Progressive Writers’ Movement subsequently, sought to introduce a literary proclivity of looking within and locating the ‘self’ as both a subject of criticism and reformation. As Priyamvada Gopal states; “If the Angarey writers had chosen their natal religious community and class as the target of critique, in the radical literature that was to follow, such acts of identification and self-criticism would take place along other axes, including gender and caste.” The writer, therefore, is compelled to take on an activist role and locate his/her literary sensibilities in service of the social transformation of a vulnerable colony traversing through a political transition, by identifying, critiquing, and potentially reforming the native subject ‘self.’ 1For more on Angarey see Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London, Verso 1992.
The evolution of radical literary writing in Urdu from a critique of the colonial ‘Other’ to a “more comprehensive, multifaceted critique of ourselves: our class structures, our familial ideologies, our management of our bodies and sexualities, our idealisms, our silences” therefore originated from the Progressive Writers’ Movement project of bringing about social reformation through literature. This teaching tool seeks to explore the evolving trajectory of Urdu literary writing following the 1947 Partition by analyzing selected articles and poems from the third issue from the year 1948 of a left-wing, revolutionary Urdu literary magazine, Savera, (Morning). The tool will illustrate how by dissecting and critiquing native perceptions of nationalist and linguistic idealisms, national culture, and literary reimagination in the immediate aftermath of the Partition, Savera partakes in the self-reflective literary production, or ‘critical realism’ popularized by Angarey and the Progressive Writers’ Movement 2For more on ‘critical realism’ and literary traditions of Progressive Writers Movement see Gopal, Priyamvada. Literary Radicalism In India: Gender, Nation, And The Transition To Independence. Routledge, 2005.
A left-wing literary magazine, Savera started in 1946 and was published quarterly in Lahore, the epicenter of anticolonial organizing. Savera was published by Naya Idara Publications under the editorship of Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi, Zaheer Kashmiri, and Arif Abdul Mateen, all of whom had spearheaded the Progressive Writers Movement 3For more on the background of Savera see Usmani, Irfan, Waheed. Print Culture and Literary Radicalism in Lahore. University of Singapore, 2016. They, along with writers of similar radical and anticolonial commitments such as Syed Sibt-e-Hasan, Hajra Masroor, Khadija Mastoor, Abdullah Malik, A.A Mateen, Zaheer Kashmiri, Mumtaz Hussain were known as the ‘Savera Group,’ and through their contributions to the magazine, produced ‘critical realist’ literature that sought to reform the nascent colony-turned-states of India and Pakistan following the Partition 4For more on the literary traditions of Progressive Writers see Nazir, Sadia, Hayat, Mazhar. “Politics of Resistance in Pakistan through Progressive Poetry: A Neo-Gramscian Study”, Sir Syed Journal of Education & Social Research, 2020.
While the pre-Partition issues of Savera sustained a liberal editorial policy, the post-Partition issues saw a pronounced shift with respect to the radical, anti-imperialist Left. Issues 3 to 11, which appeared between August 1947 and 1952, represent the most radical phase of this magazine’s editorial policy after which it mitigated its radical convictions, but nevertheless retained its identity as a liberal magazine, committed to a progressive literary and social cause. As pressures from the establishment mounted, it was forced to adopt a moderate editorial policy. In 1948, it was among the progressive magazines banned under the Public Safety Act for six months. Upon resuming publication, it continued to be regulated by Pakistan’s stringent censorship laws 3For more on the background of Savera see Usmani, Irfan, Waheed. Print Culture and Literary Radicalism in Lahore. University of Singapore, 2016.
The main editors of Issue 3 of 1948, being analyzed in this tool, were Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi, Nazir Chaudhry, and Sahir Ludhianwi. Radical Urdu writers like Saadat Hassan Manto, Ismat Chugtai, and Faiz Ahmed Faiz were some of the most notable contributors of this issue who sought to consolidate the emergent literary tradition of reformative ‘self-criticism.’ In doing so, they catapulted to the forefront the ‘revolutionary’ or ‘activist’ role of the literary writer who was no more supposed to produce literature merely for art’s sake. Rather, according to the Progressive Writers’ Movement, the writer was to assume the moral responsibility of creating literature that had the potential to transform a colony across the axes of caste, gender, class, race, ethnicity, and language.
Note: All translations from Urdu to English in this tool are done by the authors unless otherwise stated.
All scans of the Savera magazine used in the creation and compilation of this tool have been obtained from the online Urdu archives of ‘Rekhta.’
Naya Sooraj (New Sun): Re-imagining National Idealisms in Urdu Poetry
Below are selected stanzas from the poem translated in English:
Today, the sun has risen with great pride
The high peaks of Himalaya are glistening
It has turned the lakes of the mountains into gold
It has taught them new ways, new tactics
The waterfalls have been adorned in precious garments
The marshy lands have been sprayed with water droplets
This is the view of dense, tall trees
They have all been showered in gold water
But in the shade of these trees, o heart
These trembling plants since thousands of years
These quavering plants since thousands of years
Even today, they are cold, miserable and frail
Even today, they have their heads bowed down
O My Sun of Newly Acclaimed Glory/Respect
May your warmth becomes even warmer
Do you have any such ray
Which can shine upon those trees
Which are trembling, which are quavering
Provide them warmth as well, embrace them as well
Manto’s Kasoti (Criterion): ‘Critical Realism’ in Urdu Literary Writing
Below are selected excerpts from the essay translated in English:
It’s a time of new things. New shoes, new stumbles, new laws, new crimes, new watches, new delays, new masters, new slaves, who, amusingly, have new skins also, which have worn off so many times that they too, now demand innovation. Now new lashes and whips are being designed for them.
Literature is also new, with numerous names. Someone calls it progressive, or degenerate, or obscene, or pro-worker. To test this new literature, there are also new criteria—these criteria are papers. Yearly, monthly, weekly and daily —The owners and editors of these papers are also new۔ They are Pakistani, or United Indian. They are Congressman, or communists—They all keep measuring this new literature on their own criteria and inform us of its inadequacies. But literature is not gold, the increasing or decreasing worth of which one can chart. Literature is like an ornament, and just like beautiful ornaments are not pure gold, so good literary writings are not pure reality. To test them like one would test gold by fixing it into stones is an egregious idiocy.
Literature is either literature or an outrageous insult, an ornament is either an ornament or an extremely ugly object. In literature or non-literature, in ornaments or non-ornaments, there is no in-between. Literature is not a picture of an individual’s own life۔ When a writer picks up a pen, he does not write the daily account of his domestic affairs. Does not mention his personal joys, resentments, sickness or health. In the images crafted by his pen, it is likely that the tears of his grieving sister, the smiles are yours, and the laughter is of a weary laborer. To measure these images on the scale of your own tears, your own smiles, your own laughter is a huge mistake. Every literature is created for a specific environment, a specific effect, a specific purpose; if that special atmosphere, that specific effect, that specific purpose is not felt in it, then it becomes a lifeless corpse
But literature is not a corpse that a doctor and his few students can lie down on a stone table and perform an autopsy on. Literature is not sick; it is a reaction to sickness. It is not even medicine for which a time and quantity can be fixed. Literature is the temperature of its country, of its nation—it keeps reporting on their health and illness.
Adab-o-Tehzeeb ka Mustaqbil (The Future of Literature and Culture): Creating New Linguistic Idealisms to Build Literary Cultures
Below are selected excerpts from the text translated in English:
At a time when internal political tensions with each other have shattered the country into pieces besides giving birth to Hindu Muslim conflicts that have brought the issue of Urdu versus Hindi into the political arena, we can take pride in that our Progressive Writers Association is the only organization that has no such conflict or fight and in which literati, writers and poets of different languages are working together to create literature for common people.
Now, first of all we should like to dispel the misunderstanding that is being deliberately created that Urdu is exclusively the language of Muslims and Hindi exclusively that of Hindus; and that now that the Pakistan of Muslims has been created, Urdu has no space in the national or other official languages of the Indian Union; and is now the language of a sect.
Urdu is a common language of Hindus and Muslims the birth of which has contributions from both. In Urdu, Pandit Ratan Nath Sharsar, Pandit Brij Narayan Chakbast, Munshi Premchand are placed at a level no less than that of Mir, Ghalib, Hali, or Iqbal. And today the number of Hindu writers and poets in Urdu is much higher than before. In fact, many Sikh poets and writers are also expressing themselves in Urdu. Krishna Chandra, Raghupati Sahay Firaq, Awpindranath Ashk, Mahindranath, Rajindra Singh Bedi, Balwant Singh, Fikr Taunsvi, Vishvamitra ‘Adil, Madhusodan, Devanand Satyarthi, Kannahiyya Lal Kapur are counted amongst the top-notch poets in Urdu and, without them, progressive literature in Urdu is regarded as incomplete. In this regard, the name of the greatest publisher of Urdu, Munshi Nawal Kishor, is particularly significant as it is he who had the whole classical literature in Urdu published.
While admitting that Urdu and Hindi are two separate languages, one cannot deny that the two languages have many common features and aspects. They both pervade India and are understood in most of its parts. They are both daughters of kharhi boli and, in the growing up of these languages together, Hindu and Muslim speakers of both live in the same areas; their idioms and colloquial registers are not much different. Above all, the grammatical structure of both languages is the same.
1947: ‘Self-Reflection’ in Emergent Partition Literature
Below are selected stanzas from the poem translated in English:
This moment awaits a new moment
This night awaits a new night
And the new dawn, racing time
Awaits its arrival
The poor man welcomes
The sudden deaths of 1946
Like he has a thousand other, in his short life
Rejoice! For we have seen the ugly face of death
Rejoice! For we are still alive
Rejoice! For each death gives us a new life
Morning arrives, the sleeping ones awaken
And begin to salve
The farmer keeps working his piece of land
The poor laborer keeps grinding stones
The sounds of their toiling echo in houses
Eik Tawaif ka Khat (A Letter from a Prostitute): Reconstituting the Politics of Gender and Nationalism
This sentence serves as a disclaimer for the triggering content of the story ahead.
Below are selected excerpts from the story translated in English:
To Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah,
I am sure you haven’t received a letter from a prostitute before. I am sure you haven’t even seen the faces of women like me before either. I also know how reprehensible you will find my writing a letter to you. And that too such an open letter. But what can I do? The circumstances are such. And the demand of these two girls is so crucial that I cannot live without writing this letter. I am not writing this letter. Bella and Batool are making me write this letter. So excuse a fallen woman for having the audacity to write a letter to you…
You might be thinking that Bela and Batool are my daughters. That is not true. I don’t have a daughter. I have bought these two girls from the market in the days when the Hindu-Muslim rioting was in full swing, and human blood was flowing like water on Grant Road and Faris Road and Madanpura. In those days, I had bought Bela from a Muslim pimp for three hundred rupees. The Muslim pimp had brought the girl from Delhi, where another Muslim pimp had brought her from Rawalpindi, where Bela’s parents lived. It was a middle class family; nobility and simplicity were their hallmarks. Bela was the only daughter of her father. And when the Muslims in Rawalpindi started slaughtering the Hindus, Bela was studying in the fourth grade. This is the story of 12 July. Bela was returning home after studying in her school. She saw a mob in front of her house and the houses of other Hindus. These people were armed and were lighting houses on fire. They were driving children and women out of homes and murdering them, while chanting the slogan ‘Allah is Great.’
Bela saw her father being killed before her own eyes. Then she saw her mother dying before her own eyes. The barbaric Muslims had cut off her breasts and thrown them away. The breasts from which a mother, any mother, a Hindu or Muslim mother, a Christian mother, or a Jewish mother, breastfeeds her child. And it opens a new door in the creation of the vastness of the universe. Those milky breasts were cut off with chants of ‘Allah is Great.’ Bela is with me now…She is not more than twelve years old, but she seems very old…The bitterness of humanity that is in her eyes, the thirst for death in them; Mr. Quaid-e-Azam, maybe if you could see it you would know of its intensity…
Bela and Batool are not sisters; Batool is a Muslim girl, whereas Bela is from a Hindu family. Today, both are rotting in a whorehouse at Faris Road. While Bela came from Rawalpindi, Batool is the daughter of a Pathan from Jalandhar. Batool’s father had seven daughters; five married and two maidens…Batool is only eleven years old. A Hindu pimp brought her to me. I bought her for five hundred rupees. This Hindu pimp had bought her from a Jat pimp in Ludhiana. Where was she before that? I do not know. But the Lady Doctor told me enough to drive you mad if you listen to it. Batool herself is also semi-mad now. Her father was killed by the Jats with such brutality that the skins of the last six thousand years of Hindu culture have come off. First, they gouged his eyes out. Then they urinated in his mouth. Then they ripped his throat and took out his intestines. And then they raped his married daughters. In front of their father’s dismembered body, Rehana, Gul, Derakhshan, Marjana, Susan Begum one by one, the savage men desecrated their bodies…
Pandit Nehru, I want you to make Batool your daughter. Mr. Jinnah, I want you to adopt Bela as your daughter. Just once free them from the clutches of Faris Road and keep them in your house. And listen to the lamentation of these millions of souls. This lamentation which is echoing from Akhali to Rawalpindi and from Bharatpur to Bombay. Is this voice not heard only in the Government House? You will hear this voice!
Yours faithfully,
A prostitute from Faris Road
- For more on Angarey see Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. London, Verso 1992.→
- For more on ‘critical realism’ and literary traditions of Progressive Writers Movement see Gopal, Priyamvada. Literary Radicalism In India: Gender, Nation, And The Transition To Independence. Routledge, 2005→
- For more on the background of Savera see Usmani, Irfan, Waheed. Print Culture and Literary Radicalism in Lahore. University of Singapore, 2016→
- For more on the literary traditions of Progressive Writers see Nazir, Sadia, Hayat, Mazhar. “Politics of Resistance in Pakistan through Progressive Poetry: A Neo-Gramscian Study”, Sir Syed Journal of Education & Social Research, 2020→
- For more on the background of Savera see Usmani, Irfan, Waheed. Print Culture and Literary Radicalism in Lahore. University of Singapore, 2016→
Mulk Raj Anand
Born in 1905, Mulk Raj Anand was one of the pioneers of Anglo-Indian writing and was particularly recognized for his realistic portrayal of the plight of the lower castes in the traditional, caste-segregated Indian society. He was born in a Hindu Khatri family in Peshawar, and studied at Khalsa College, Amritsar, graduating in 1924 before moving to England, where he attended the University College London as an undergraduate. Anand’s magnum opus, Untouchable, published in 1935, is a popular literary production renowned for its scandalizing expose of the miserable lives of India’s untouchable caste and its scathing critique of the society’s orthodox caste-based system. Perhaps it would not be incorrect to say that Anand’s novel was an early harbinger of the ‘critical realism’ tradition that the Progressive Writers’ Movement would eventually come to emulate in the wake of the Partition. In chronicling the daily struggles of his protagonist Bakha, a lowly sweeper hailing from the ‘untouchable’ Dalit community of India, Anand foregrounded a literary discourse that were to be a form of social protest as well as an agent of social transformation targeting India’s antiquated and ruthless caste hierarchies. As the founding member and president of the Progressive Writers’ Association, he drafted its manifesto in 1935 along with Zaheer Kashmiri, Muhammad Din Taseer, Pramod Ranjan Sengupta, and Jyoti Ghosh, calling Urdu literary writers to partake in a subversive literary tradition that was not just anti-colonial, but also self-reflexive and self-reformative. Apart from Untouchable, these themes recur in his other works such as Coolie (1938), which targets class inequities in colonial India and Two Leaves and a Bud (1937), a novel that revolves around the plight of Assam’s exploited tea plantation workers.
▴ Title cover of Anand's 'Untouchable' published by Penguin Classics, 2014
▴ Title cover of Anand's 'Coolie,' 1949 edition
▴ Title cover of Anand's 'Two Leaves and a Bud'
Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi
Born in 1916 in Sargodha, Qasmi was a prominent poet, journalist, and writer who actively contributed to progressive literary journals like Nuqoosh and the revolutionary journal Funoon, which he launched with the help of writers and poets like Hajra Masroor and Amjad Islam Amjad. He worked as a scriptwriter for Radio Pakistan and in 1947, joined the editorial board of Savera and became the first Secretary Journal of the Progressive Writers Association. For a long time—from 1974 to 2006, he served as the director of Majlis-e-Taraqi Adab (Board for Advancement of Literature). Qasmi was arrested several times during his lifetime for his radical political and literary activities. Under his editorship, Savera began to dabble rigorously in ‘critical realism’ in poetry as well as prose. Qasmi himself integrated self-critical and self-reformative themes in his writing. For example, his poems Tuluh (Sunrise) and Azadi key Baad (After Independence), published in the third and fourth issues of Savera in 1948, caution against the illusory nature of post-Partition festivities by decrying the rampant bloodshed, communal rioting, mass displacement, and migrant crises that he anticipated would continue to plague the newly formed stated into their nascent years. On the eve of the Partition, writers and politicians alike were occupied with mythologizing the subcontinent’s grueling odyssey towards independence. In his historic address to the constituent assembly of India on August 14 1947, Jawahar Lal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, said; “At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.” Others also relied heavily on metaphors such as the ‘rebirth of a nation, ‘onset of a new dawn,’ or ‘awakening from slumber,’ to communicate the celebratory spirit with which the Partition was welcomed. What was obscured in these celebratory vocabularies is the wanton loss of life, property, and loved ones produced in the wake of the Partition. Qasmi’s poems like Tuluh (Sunrise) and Azadi key Baad (After Inependence) therefore adopt a critical lens necessary for highlighting and potentially transforming the gruesome realities of Partition at a time when many in India and Pakistan had fallen into an ignorant stupor of celebration.
▴ Covers of Qasmi's literary magazine 'Funoon'
▴ Qasmi's poem 'Tuluh' (Sunrise) published in the third issue of Savera, 1948
▴ Qasmi's poem 'Azadi key Baad' (After Independance) published in the fourth issue of Savera, 1948
Progressive Writers Movement
The Progressive Writers Association was formally inaugurated in April 1936 at a conference in Lucknow. Its primary goal was to promote social realism in literature and thus explore the possibility of bringing about social reconstruction through literary production. The movement had its roots in the All India Progressive Writers Movement (AIPWA). It played a major role in the Indian anti-colonial struggle through literary resistance and labour mobilization as well as by seeking to create political and social awareness.
The Progressive Writers Movement in Pakistan published literary compositions that sought to create awareness about the conditions of the working class. The difficult lives of the rural poor were one of the major themes of progressive literature. Through these writings, the progressive writers tried to convey the dignity of the rural poor despite the harsh conditions they lived in. They realized that literature could be used as a tool of resistance and social transformation. The movement consisted of communists, as the Movement had connections to the Communist Party of India, as well as motley groups of young intellectuals. The content and style of their work varied “from incisive realism to affected sentimentality.” They galvanized an alternative vision and tried to promote a radical agenda geared at rehabilitating a decaying society plagued by colonial violence as well as its own norms and traditions.
Sajjad Zaheer, one of its founding members, stated, “We, the progressive literati, do not just consider literature as a mirror that reflects the realities of life. Rather, we take it as a medium and agency through which one can transform and enrich the lives of the people. We consider literature for life, literature for struggle and literature for revolution as the bedrock principles of our movement. Realism gives us an intellectual and conceptual framework and we want to resolve the contradiction that exists between our social system and fundamental human needs.”
The movement was mostly criminalized by the state in Pakistan. Writers such as Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi, Zaheer Kashmiri and Hameed Akhtar were imprisoned for six to ten months and all literary activity was closely monitored.
▴ Sajjad Zaheer at a Progressive Writers' conference Source: University of Texas, Sajjad Zaheer Archives
▴ Progressive Writers: Sibte Hasan, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Hameed Akhtar, Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi Source: Herald Dawn
▴ Top picture: Sibte Hassan, Malvi Abdul Haq, Mazhar Ali Khan, and Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi at a literary gathering in the 1950s. Bottom picture: Sajjad Zaheer and Faiz Ahmad Faiz Source: DAWN
▴ Beginning of an undated Progressive Writers' Association Manifesto Source: University of Texas, Sajjad Zaheer Archives
▴ An announcement of the arrest of a Progressive Writers' Movement member published in an issue of Savera in 1951 that demonstrates how the Movement's radical politics was met with stringent action by the state. The opening lines read: "Two years ago, the state leaders forcefully imprisoned the audacious translator of Savera and member of the Progressive Writers Movement. Now, the government of Punjab, under the Emergency Power Act, is demanding three, three thousand rupees from his publisher and the press for his bail."
For more information on the Progressive Writers Movement see:
Ahmad, Aziz. “Cultural and Intellectual Trends in Pakistan.”Middle East Journal, 1965.
Malik, Hafeez. “The Marxist Literary Movement in India and Pakistan.”Journal of Asian Studies, 1967.
Usmani, Irfan Waheed. Print Culture and Left Wing Radicalism in Lahore. University of Singapore, 2016.
Ismat Chughtai
Born in 1915 in Uttar Pardesh, Ismat Chughtai’s rise to literary fame (or notoriety) was catapulted by the publication of her short story Lihaf (The Quilt), in 1942. Chughtai’s story was lambasted by popular and literary audiences alike for its explicit reference to a lesbian relationship between the protagonist, Begum Jan, an aristocratic woman trapped in a sexless marriage, and Rabbu, her hired masseuse and the object of her desire. While Lihaf is now hailed as a proto-feminist literary production, Chughtai herself was not motivated by any particular ideological moorings. Rather, she was interested in exploring the sexual and emotional politics that unraveled in the everyday female domestic sphere. She situated herself and her writing in the emergent tradition of ‘critical realism’ by depicting the various emulations of sexuality and intimacy that the Indian woman partook in her daily life, and the bearing of these emulations on gender relations in the society. Her ‘critical realist’ writing therefore documented the banal realities of the Indian woman’s life and sought to transform the Indian female body from an inert, passive landscape upon which historical and social structures were thrusted upon to a living site that reciprocally acted upon these structures as the subcontinent transitioned into an age of national modernity. While her preoccupation with modernity and womanhood has been the source of her literary recognition, Chughtai also made Hindu-Muslim relations, particularly the disruptive communal rioting of 1947, an important subject of her writing. Two of her plays, Fasadi (The Rioters) and Dhaani Bankein (Green Bangles) critically investigate the social and political ramifications of the senseless rioting that gripped the subcontinent towards the end of the colonial Raj.
▴ Chughtai's play titled 'Green Bangles' that depicts the communal rioting of 1947 published in the third issue of Savera, 1948
▴ The subject of gender, particularly the discourse on the female body, was a recurring theme in the Progressive Writers' foray into 'critical realism' as they sought to explore how gender, as a social category, evolved at the nexus of modernity and nationhood. This short story by the Progressive Writer Krishn Chandar was published in an issue of Savera in 1946. Written in the epistolary form and titled 'A Prostitute's Letter to Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru and Quaid-e-Azam,' it explores how the welfare of working-class women such as prostitutes was of no significance in the struggle for Independence. An excerpt from the story reads: "Bela and Batool are two girls, two nations, two civilizations, two temples and mosques. Nowadays they live at a prostitute’s in Faris Road. She conducts her business in a corner off the Chinese barber. Bela and Batool dislike this business. I have bought them... Pandit Ji I want that you adopt Batool as your daughter. Jinnah sahib I want that you think of Bela as your daughter. Just for once keep them in your home away from the grasp of Faris Road and listen to the dirges of thousands of those souls which are booming from Noakhali to Rawalpindi and from Bharatpur to Bombay. Can’t it be heard in Government House alone, will you listen to this voice?”
Angarey (Live Coals)
Angarey (translated alternatively as “Embers” or “Burning Coals”) is an anthology of nine short stories and a one-act play in Urdu by Sajjad Zaheer, Rashid Jahan, Mahmud-uz-Zafar and Ahmed Ali, first published in 1932 by Nizami Press, Lucknow. The anthology is notorious for its inflammatory content that scandalized the delicate sensibilities of British India’s Muslim community by tackling taboo subjects such as repression of female sexual desire, the ideological enslavement perpetuated by religion (since the writers were rooted in a Muslim community, their target of critique was Islam and the cultural practices it endorsed), domestic abuse, and the violent social constructions of ‘masculinity.’ The anthology was actively denounced in print and in public, therefore, on 15 March 1933, four months after its publication, it was banned by the government of the United Provinces under Section 295A of the Indian Penal Code, all but five copies destroyed by the police. Angarey, in many ways, became the stepping stone for the inception of the Progressive Writers’ Association, since despite the ban, the four writers refused to apologize for their content. In 1933, Mahmud-uz-Zafar wrote an article, ‘In Defense of Angarey’ for The Leader, a newspaper published from Allahabad, that outlined a rudimentary version of the project of social transformation through the production of ‘self-critical’ and ‘self-reflective’ literature that the Association would take up in the years leading up to the Partition. An excerpt from the article reads:
“The authors of this book do not wish to make any apology for it. They leave it to float or sink of itself. They are not afraid of the consequences of having launched it. They only wish to defend ‘the right of launching it and all other vessels like it’ … they stand for the right of free criticism and free expression in all matters of the highest importance to the human race in general and the Indian people in particular…Our practical proposal is the formation immediately of a League of Progressive Authors, which should bring forth similar collections from time to time both in English and the various vernaculars of our country…”
For more information on Angarey, see:
Gopal, Priyamvada. Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence. Routledge, 2013.
Saadat Hassan Manto
Born in 1912 in Ludhiana, Manto was a Pakistani writer, playwright and author particularly notorious for his unabashed portrayal of sexual encounters and scathing critique of the male psyche. Such was the furore generated over his literary productions in less progressive circles that he was charged with obscenity three times in British India for his stories Dhuan (Smoke), Boo (Odour), and Kali Shalwar (Black Trouser) and three times in Pakistan after 1947 for Khol Do (Open It), Thanda Gosht (Cold Meat) and Upar Neeche Darmiyaan (Top, Below, Center) under section 292 of the Indian Penal Code (by the British Government) and the Pakistan Penal Code in Pakistan’s early years. While the themes of poverty, prostitution, and sexual violence were central to his large corpus of works, what rendered Manto’s writings a true harbinger of ‘critical realism’ was his daring foray into the otherwise uncharted terrain of masculinity, both as a psychological and social category. For him, the violence of constituting masculinity was metonymic of the violence of nation-constitution in the years leading up to 1947. His male protagonists such as Ishwar Singh from Thanda Gosht (Cold Meat), who rapes a dead Muslim woman, or Khushiya from the eponymously titled short story Khushiya, a pimp who abducts and allegedly rapes one of his prostitutes when he feels sexually inadequate, emulate violent masculinities that are in dire need of radical re-imagination. Therefore, Manto’s ‘critical realist’ project entails the reformation of the male psyche and male social experience in hopes of forging a less violent community. However, this vision of his was bitterly disparaged and dismissed as ‘obscene,’ ‘shameless,’ even ‘pornographic.’ Regardless, he was undeterred, and in many of his critical essays published in Savera, he vociferously argued that to apologize for his writing was to apologize for the ills of the society because his writing was merely portraying the ‘obscenities’ already rampant in society, which, according to him, could only be alleviated by critiquing and reforming the social conduct of the Indian man and his conceptualization of ‘masculinity.’
▴ An essay by Manto titled 'Story-Writing and the Problem of Gender' published in an issue of Savera in 1946. The essay is indicative of the growing proclivity in progressive writing to dissect and transform the social experiences of gender. An excerpt from the essay reads: "The attempt to overcome the gap between man and woman will continue in every era and in every century...Those who think that new literature has created crude problems are mistaken because the fact is that these crude problems have created literature. This new literature in which you sometimes see your own reflection and get confused... My job is to show you the mirror, if your face is polluted and ugly, then that is how it will appear."
▴ An essay by Manto titled 'Stony Pleasure' published in the fourth issue of Savera, 1948. The essay was written in response to charges of obscenity levied against one of Manto's short stories 'Boo' (Odour), in which a young man hailing from a privileged background becomes smitten with the odour of a low-class prostitute's armpits and achieves a sexual union with her that he believes he can never replicate with his wife. In this essay, Manto elaborates the aim of the Progressive Writers' 'critical realist' project of depicting and dissecting the ailments of the Indian society, and the necessity of including the topics of gender and sexuality in this discourse, despite their scandalizing potential. An excerpt from the essay reads: "It is objected that the new writers have made the relations between men and women their subject. I will not speak for everyone but I will say this for myself that I like this subject? Why? I just do. Perhaps you can say I am PERVERTED...If you cannot tolerate my stories, then it is the society that is intolerable. The evils in me are the vice of this era. The defect which is attributed to my name is actually the defect of the present system."
▴ A short story by Manto titled 'Five Days' published in the second issue of Savera, 1947. Set against the backdrop of the Bengal famine of 1943, the story is representative of Manto's focus on depicting and potentially reconstituting masculinity in his writing within the genre of 'critical realism.' The plot centers around an old professor at a girls' school who creates around himself a facade of purity and celibacy but on his deathbed confesses to entertaining erotic fantasies about young girls and women.
Faiz Ahmad Faiz
Faiz Ahmed Faiz, one of the most renowned poets and writers of Urdu and Punjabi Literature, was born in the year 1911 in Sialkot, Punjab. As one of the key protagonists of the Progressive Writers Movement, Faiz was convinced of the necessity of exercising a cautious optimism towards the Independence of the subcontinent since he did not believe that the mere expulsion of the British and the formation of new states in 1947 was a guarantee of communal prosperity. Like other members of the Progressive Writers Movement, he too focused on exploring and potentially transforming the social realities and lived experiences of the former colonies as they plunged into a vortex of national sovereignty and postcolonial modernity. For this reason, his poem, Sehar (Dawn), can be considered a hallmark in the ‘critical realist’ genealogy of Urdu literature. Far from mythologizing the ‘dawn’ of August 14 1947 as the harbinger of monumental prosperity for Pakistan, Faiz shed light on the bloody implications of the Partition in his poem and insisted that “This is not the dawn in whose longing, We set out believing…” While the poem received flak for its lack of enthusiasm for the independence of Pakistan and many were quick to accuse Faiz of being unfaithful to the national cause, it served as reminder of the gruesome realities of Partition at a time when the majority of Muslims and Hindus on both sides of the border were too intoxicated on their newfound freedom to reflect on their own individual and communal failings that had rendered the Partition such a deadly affair.
▴ Faiz's poem 'Sehar' (Dawn) published in the third issue of Savera, 1948. The opening stanza of the poem reads: "This stained light, this mottled dawn/ This is not that long-awaited day break/ This is not the dawn in whose longing/ We set out believing we would find, somewhere/ In heaven’s wide void/ The stars’ final resting place/ Somewhere the shore of night’s slow-washing tide/ Somewhere, an anchor for the ship of heartache."
▴ An essay by Faiz titled "The Value System of a Poet" published in the twelfth issue of Savera, 1952. In the essay, Faiz makes a case for reimagining the genre of poetry as a vessel for social activism instead of seeing it as merely an aesthetic literary category. In doing so, he also argues that the modern age requires the conventional poet to adopt a new 'value system' and take on the role of an 'activist' by bringing about social transformation through his poetry. An excerpt from the essay reads: "Many are of the opinion that art's absolute and singular value is aesthetic. Whoever a poet is, and whatever his values are, if his poetry is successful in its aesthetic purposes, then we have no right to criticize him. Let us suppose for a moment that the value of poetry is merely 'aesthetic,' and the singular purpose of a verse of poetry is to provide aesthetic satisfaction. But the question is whether other values of a poet interfere in the birth of this aesthetic value or not? And if the aesthetic pleasure that we derive from verses is influenced by other values of poetry or not?"
The Future of Literature and Culture: Creating New Linguistic Identities to Build Literary Cultures
This article highlights two things. One, the post-1947 vision of Progressive Writers for literary production in Urdu and Hindi, and two, the impulse to compile a ‘national history’ as well as consolidate a ‘national culture’ without falling prey to linguistic conflicts created in the wake of the Partition. Magazines like Savera thus became a site for reflecting on and critiquing internal linguistic divides as Hindi became communalized for Hindus and Urdu for Muslims, threatening to overhaul a centuries-old shared and linguistically diverse literary tradition.
Manto’s Kasoti (Criterion): ‘Critical Realism’ in Urdu Literary Writing
Titled Kasoti (Criterion), this essay by Saadat Hassan Manto tackles the overarching theme of this issue of Savera; to develop, curate, and popularize an emergent literary tradition of ‘self-criticism’ that therefore transforms the individual and the society. Manto’s choice of the term ‘criterion’ for the title of this essay is therefore pertinent as his primary argument bemoans how fixed literary ‘criteria’ are imposed on emerging literatures, thus both limiting their transformative potential and reducing them to genre categories like ‘progressive,’ or ‘obscene.’
Naya Sooraj (New Sun): Reimagining National Idealisms in Urdu Poetry
The poem Naya Sooraj (New Sun), penned by one of the prominent writers of Urdu literature, Moeen Ahsan Jazbi, participates in the nascent literary tradition of ‘critical realism’ through its implicit critique of the national idealisms crafted by the new states of India and Pakistan in the wake of the 1947 Partition. The poem relies heavily on natural imagery, hence the title of the poem, which uses the rising of a ‘New Sun’ as a metaphor for the rebirth of a region following a drawn-out anti-colonial struggle. However, Jazbi also highlights the misfortunes of Partition, the rampant communal violence, the tediously long and often unfinished migrations, and the statelessness of refugees produced by the demarcation of borders. In doing so, he offers a subtle critique of the national idealisms curated by the new state regimes, which created a narrative of mythical glory, valour, and prosperity around the Partition that obfuscated its bloody legacies.
1947: ‘Self-Reflection’ in Emergent Partition Literature
Muneebur Rehman’s poem, titled 1947, can be positioned within the large corpus of Partition literature in Urdu and Hindi writing that seeks to document and depict the pervasive violence of the event, and its ramifications for the people of the subcontinent. As such, Rehman’s poem is particularly pertinent to the emergent literary tradition of ‘critical realism’ that this issue of Savera endorses. He seeks to shatter the myth of the ‘glory’ and ‘triumph’ of nationalism by catapulting to the forefront the violence that accompanied the creation of the new states, particularly the violence enacted on marginalized communities. In doing so, he thus compels his readers to question and reform the emergent nationalist idealisms of both states, which sought to excise from memory the suffering of the working-class communities by peddling forth a narrative of ‘necessary sacrifice.’
The Crisis of Migration
The creation and consolidation of a cogent national idealism was necessary for fostering communal unity in the diverse populations of both states, and these idealisms were premised on catapulting to the forefront the heroism and nationalist fervor of years leading up to the Partition, and excising from memory the atrocities that accompanied them. The most glaring of these atrocities was the lack of citizenship and belonging that millions of refugees were subjected to. Yasmin Khan notes; “In Bengal, in contrast to the north-west, the physical reality of the refugee crisis was only just beginning to take shape in the 1950s. By 1951, there were at least three million refugees squeezed into every nook and cranny of Calcutta. They slept on pavements and in Nissen huts, made their homes on railway platforms and along riverbanks.”
While Jazbi optimistically welcomes the long-desired independence from colonial shackles, expressed through images of abundance and prosperity such as the ‘rising sun,’ the ‘high peaks of Himalaya’ or the ‘lofty, dense trees,’ he also sheds light on the human cost of this independence in the second stanza of the poem.
▴ In the years following the Partition, the death, disease, and loneliness that plagued the migrants and refugees on both sides of the border, became a central theme in the works of Progressive Writers who sought to alleviate this crisis through their writing. This poem, titled 'A Trail of Blood,' was published in the fourth issue of Savera, 1948, and, like Jazbi's poem, sheds light on the plight of migrants. Subtitled 'An Ode to the Migrants of Hindustan and Pakistan,' the opening verses of the poem read: "I am listening/ The sobs that have dozed off into the bosom of the earth like an imprint of grief/ The sighs that, from the fear of tyrants/ Are imprisoned in the hearts/ Screams that have been lost to the injuries of the motherland..."
Naya Sooraj (New Sun)
The poem Naya Sooraj (New Sun), penned by one of the prominent writers of Urdu literature, Moeen Ahsan Jazbi, participates in the nascent literary tradition of ‘critical realism’ through its implicit critique of the national idealisms crafted by the new states of India and Pakistan in the wake of the 1947 Partition. The poem relies heavily on natural imagery, hence the title of the poem, which uses the rising of a ‘New Sun’ as a metaphor for the rebirth of a region following a drawn-out anti-colonial struggle. However, Jazbi also highlights the misfortunes of Partition, the rampant communal violence, the tediously long and often unfinished migrations, and the statelessness of refugees produced by the demarcation of borders. In doing so, he offers a subtle critique of the national idealisms curated by the new state regimes, which created a narrative of mythical glory, valour, and prosperity around the Partition that obfuscated its bloody legacies.
‘Quavering Plants:’ Sacrificed on the Altar of Nationalism
Jazbi uses the imagery of ‘quavering plants,’ rendered ‘cold, miserable, and frail,’ to signify the plight of migrants and refugees in the aftermath of Partition, and compels the readers to reflect and question the credibility of emergent national idealisms. He implies that these nationalisms are premised on the systematic exclusion of certain people and groups such as women, migrants, and minorities from state-sanctioned narratives. In wishing for the ‘New Sun’ to bestow its warmth on these ‘trembling, quavering trees,’ Jazbi wishes for the re-imagination of these national idealisms that glorify Partition as part of a nationalist project of state-building at the expense of relegating to the periphery those who have been left physically and emotionally displaced by the event.
▴ One of the major aims of progressive and 'critical realist' poetry was to ensure that the mythical celebration and glorification of Partition did not occlude its cataclysmic social and political consequences. Many poems were published in Savera in the years following Partition that exhibited pointed skepticism towards the coveted idealism of Independence. This poem, titled 'Celebration of Independence,' was published in the fourth issue of Savera in 1948 and serves as an illustrative example of the progressive poetry being produced at the time. It cautions readers against considering Independence the ultimate culmination of their struggles and directs them to continue to reflect and reform their selves and community in the pursuit of true 'change.' A translated verse from the poem reads: "This is the harbinger of change, not change itself/ This is the wing of the Sun, not the Sun itself..."
▴ This poem titled 'Is this that Homeland?' was published in an issue of Savera in 1951 and is another example of progressive poetry being produced by the Progressive Writers' Movement at that time which examined Partition from a 'critical realist' lens. A translated excerpt from the poem reads: "For the longing of which the caravan left/ Is this that homeland? Ask the leader of the caravan/ Is this the path and way of leadership?"
Towards a ‘Critical Realist’ Understanding of Partition
In the poem, Jazbi compels readers to look inwards and critique their own exclusionary conceptions of national idealisms, formed in the wake of the Partition, and thus reform them to create nationalist narratives that account for and seek to rectify the plight of the millions of victims produced by the Partition, whether raped and abducted woman or Bengali refugees. In doing so, he seeks to inculcate in the new citizens of India and Pakistan a critical outlook for their national idealisms and ideological maneuvers of state-building that erase the voices and struggles of specific communities, and thus serves the Progressive Writers’ project of developing ‘self-critical’ literature.
▴ In the aftermath of Partition, the genre of poetry evolved drastically from an instrument of entertainment to an organ of social transformation under the awning of the Progressive Writers' Movement, and Jazbi's poem is part of a newly emergent genealogy of progressive poetry. This essay, titled 'Poetry of Thought,' was published in the first issue of Savera, 1946, and demonstrates a changing perception towards poetry as a literary category. An excerpt from the essay reads: "I think 'thought' is the kind of poet who wants to say a new and subversive thing, which is why it adopts a style that is also new and subversive. And this is a testimony to its artistic honesty which creates a new magic, a new music, a new melody and a new passion which enriches the world of poetry."
For more information on post-partition national idealisms and the 1947 refugee crisis, see:
Khan, Yasmin. The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan. Yale University Press, 2017.
Kasoti (Criterion)
Titled Kasoti (Criterion), this essay by Saadat Hassan Manto tackles the overarching theme of this issue of Savera; to develop, curate, and popularize an emergent literary tradition of ‘self-criticism’ that therefore transforms the individual and the society. Manto’s choice of the term ‘criterion,’ for the title of this essay is therefore pertinent as his primary argument bemoans how fixed literary ‘criteria’ are imposed on emerging literatures, thus both limiting their transformative potential and reducing them to genre categories like ‘progressive,’ or ‘obscene.’
‘A Time of New Things, New Literature’
The essay opens with ample references to the onset of a ‘new’ order, communicating the epochal quality of the transition that the states of India and Pakistan were going through, and simultaneously signifying what this transition spells for the literary conventions of the region. As such, the explicit aversion to a proliferation of print culture that seeks to design and impose a multitude of ‘criterion’ on an emerging literary practice of ‘critical realism’ seems to stem from Manto’s own involvement with the Progressive Writers’ Movement, which, along with its literary productions like Angarey, was accused of being ‘progressive,’ ‘degenerate,’ and ‘obscene,’ and subsequently censored. In cautioning against mechanically ‘testing’ literature against pre-fixed metrics, Manto therefore warns his readers of losing or dismissing ‘good’ literature (which we can understand to be literature that has the potential to transform) by reducing it to categories such as ‘progressive,’ ‘obscene,’ or ‘degenerate.’
▴ The essay titled 'Modern Urdu Criticism' was published in the fourth issue of Savera, 1948, and reinforces Manto's argument that with the onset of a new socio-political epoch in the subcontinent, a new tradition of realism in Urdu literature was coming into being that demanded reciprocal changes in existing practices of literary criticism. An excerpt from the essay reads: "The pioneers of new criticism have reversed the relationship between literature and life. The quality of literature, the duty of the writer, and the value of his writings have declared the fact that literature is nothing but a review of life. Aristotle said almost the same thing thousands of years ago. 'Literature for literature' and 'Literature for life' is the battle between Aristotle and Oscar Wilde; whether life imitates literature or literature imitates life. Not only imitation but the criticism of it when times tend towards excitement and movement such that the criticism of human values and life automatically emerges."
▴ This essay, titled 'The Proclivities of Urdu Literature,' was published in the twelfth issue of Savera, 1952, and also indicates towards a new preoccupation with social reality and its reformation within Urdu literature. An excerpt from the essay reads: "For the first time, an official movement has been created in Urdu literature. There were literary movements before too, but none as prominent as the Progressive Writers' Movement, and none with the purpose of publishing a specific literary perspective and supporting a specific ideological proclivity. The creation of this new movement has induced a mayhem in the literary world as heated debates between opponents and supporters of the movement are taking place. However, literature that makes us lazy and complacent is regressive literature, whereas literature that creates in us the capability to criticize and scrutinize our traditions in the light of intellect and helps us in social praxis and organization, is progressive literature."
‘Progressive’ or ‘Obscene?’ Beyond Literary Labels
In ruthlessly insisting that literature is either literature or ‘non-literature,’ Manto seeks to destabilize conventional ‘criteria’ of determining what is ‘literature’ and what is not, and convinces his readers to welcome the emergence of a ‘new’ self-reflective literature which has only amended its ‘tone’ to suit the socio-political needs of the time. In doing so, he also argues that ‘progressive,’ ‘obscene,’ or ‘pro-worker’ are arbitrary literary categories that should not be used to ‘test’ the merits of a literary production. The rationale behind this argument can be traced to the fact that the very term ‘progressive’ did not enjoy a fixed, comprehensive definition even amongst the members of the Progressive Writers’ Movement. While Zaheer Kashmiri believed the term to connote “consciousness, in many cases vague and undefined,” Ahmed Ali understood the term to mean “consciousness of what we are, what we were, what we should or can be. It is dynamic in essence.” For Manto to therefore be skeptical of these terms and their implications for emergent literary writings becomes a matter of how these genre categories were being invented and reinvented within a fragile political climate. The imagery of a violent birth or rebirth (‘A new era is being birthed by tearing open the womb of the old era’) is particularly interesting as it symbolizes the necessity of tearing down the ‘old’ order in order to reconstruct the ‘new.’ In other words, as the ‘critical realist’ literary endeavor envisioned, the project of social regeneration following the Partition was not merely a question of eradicating external colonial structures, but also of questioning, criticizing, and reforming the traditional practices and norms of the communities they themselves were implicated in.
▴ This essay, titled 'Reality and the Short Story,' was published in the ninth issue of Savera, 1951, and documents the emergent literary trend within the Progressive Writers' Movement that sought to integrate a new kind of 'realism' in short story writing which was not just supposed to 'present' but also critique and potentially transform reality. An excerpt from the essay reads: "What are the values of us Progressive writers? They are not any new values. Our literary values are the culture of the world and man's centuries old struggles, and the most significant of these values is realism...Not the realism of today's bourgeoise but the realism that allows literature to sustain human life, to be conducive to the organization and refinement of human life. The great indicator of great literature is that it helps human beings recognize their characteristics."
▴ This essay, titled, 'The Social Perspective of Progressive Literature,' published in an issue of Savera in 1953, continues in the vein of 'critical realism' by exploring how literature and reality are essentially inseparable, and literary change is concomitant with social change. An excerpt from the essay reads: "New social experiments are being carried out. And the writers' way of thinking is changing drastically. If there are revolutionary changes in the literature of a country, then the reader should understand that the respective country has gone through a phase of social change...Literature has not adopted any one nature forever. Every fundamental change in society has changed and will continue to change literature along with it."
From ‘Realism’ to Literary ‘Activism’
This excerpt particularly highlights the emergent impulse of Progressive Writers to partake in social activism by producing literature that was transformative at the communal level. Manto redefines literature by moving away from the notion that it is ‘a picture of an individual’s life,’ and insisting that the realities portrayed in literary writings are always borrowed from the community at large, whether it is a grieving woman or a frail working-class man. In other words, he compels his readers to think of literature in terms of not just the ‘personal,’ but the socially conditioned ‘political.’ In doing so, he also insists that literature is not created in a vacuum, rather it must be informed by a ‘specific effect’ and ‘specific purpose’ which, for publications like Savera, was to create an environment of self-reflection and criticism of communal structures and practices to reconstruct society in the aftermath of colonial and Partition violence. The imagery of health and disease is thus crucial to understanding the new role of literature following 1947 as it becomes a way to ‘report,’ ‘measure,’ and possibly cure the ills of an ailing society.
▴ This essay, titled 'The Responsibility of a Writer,' was published in the twelfth issue of Savera, 1952, and mirrors the overarching theme of 'critical realism' being endorsed by the Progressive Writers' Movement by exploring the evolving role and responsibilities of a writer at a time when literature and society itself was going through an evolution. A translated excerpt from the essay reads: "When a writers presents his social milieu and tries to improve it, he does not do so as a politician. When he mentions sincerity, ignorance, or social ills, he is not preparing to contest some elections. Instead, through literature, he tries to strengthen the relationship that exists between literature and life."
▴ This essay, titled 'Historical Literary Traditions,' was published in an issue of Savera in 1947, and explores how the politics of literature has evolved globally across generations, and how these changes have filtered into the subcontinent's literary milieu to cultivate the trend of 'critical realism' in contemporary progressive writing. An excerpt from the essay reads: "Because the writers of today are primarily humanist, there thought is not just optical but also practical. They claim to improve the future of man. They nurse in their hearts the grievances of the entire mankind. This is why such writers have always had a close relationship with revolutionary movements."
Redefining Literary Criticism
For Manto, the very practice of orthodox literary ‘criticism’ therefore becomes antithetical to the ‘critical realist’ project, a colossal ‘tragedy’ since these ‘criteria’ define what is ‘progressive,’ or ‘obscene,’ or ‘degenerate,’ and in doing so, inhibit literature’s potential for evolving, and in turn transforming society. The essay is therefore crucial to understanding how the project of developing ‘self-critical’ literature was being envisioned by the Progressive Writers, and the obstacles they encountered, particularly from literary audiences, in their attempts to do so.
▴ This essay, titled 'The Materialistic Theory of Literature,' was published in an issue of Savera in 1946, and continues in the same vein as Manto's perspective on formulating new literary criticism at a time when literature itself was moving away from the abstract to incorporate and dissect the 'material' realities of social life. A translated excerpt from the essay reads: "At the beginning of civilization, the son of Adam considered the universe to be static and began to search for harmony in everything. Heraclitus (Greek philosopher) was the first to shed light on the theory of change against this static fault of the universe. He said that everything in existence is changing moment by moment...This is the reason why the literary history of the world has been changing new guises in every age. The literature that was yesterday is not today. What is today will not be tomorrow. Therefore, it is wrong to judge contemporary literature with the yardsticks of old criticism or to judge old literature with the contemporary standard of criticism."
For more on emergent literary traditions in Urdu in the aftermath of Partition, see:
Gopal, Priyamvada. Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence. Routledge, 2013.
Adab aur Tehzeeb ka Mustakbil (The Future of Literature and Culture)
This article highlights two things: the post-1947 vision of Progressive Writers for literary production in Urdu and Hindi, and the impulse to compile a ‘national history’ as well as consolidate a ‘national culture’ without falling prey to linguistic conflicts created in the wake of the Partition. Magazines like Savera thus became a site for reflecting on and critiquing internal linguistic divides as Hindi became communalized for Hindus and Urdu for Muslims, threatening to overhaul a centuries-old shared and linguistically diverse literary tradition.
Divided Languages, Undivided Literature
Savera set a precedent for acknowledging and celebrating independence without severing cross-border literary or cultural contact. This is evident from the magazine’s inclusion of works from figures like Ismat Chughtai and Krishn Chandar, who were located across the new border. As such, it sought to create transnational literary solidarities that transcended geographical and linguistic boundaries between the newly-formed states of India and Pakistan, to create reciprocal progressive affiliations.
Members of the Progressive Writers Movement saw the distillation of Hindi from Urdu literature, or vice versa, as a mutual loss of common traditions, cultural practices, and histories. In doing so, they resisted the mainstream impulse to associate Urdu exclusively with Muslim nationalism or Hindi with Hindu tradition. They did not see the cultural and literary maturation of one language as antithetical to the development of the other, rather they sought to undertake a collective project for the mutual cultivation of both languages, particularly through literary production, under the pretext that both languages had similar features and were native to large parts of the Indian population, Hindu and Muslim alike. To separate Hindi writing from Urdu, or vice versa, was therefore akin to excising from an embryonic ‘national culture’ significant portions of literary writing and genres.
Prolific writers like Munshi Premchand had extensively written in both languages, whereas many productions in Urdu literature drew inspiration from the Vedas, a large corpus of ancient Hindu sacred texts, and Islamic sources alike.The formation of a national and literary culture that excluded either language was therefore incomplete and a disservice unto itself according to these writers.
▴ Excerpt from an issue of Savera, 1951, which illustrates the Progressive Writers' readiness to cultivate a post-partition literary heritage that was not contingent upon the excision of either Hindi or Urdu. The excerpt pays homage to Krishn Chandar, a prolific Indian writer and a member of the Progressive Writers' Movement, and is a testimony to the cross-border literary contact that was forged between progressive writers of India and Pakistan after 1947. A line from the excerpt reads: "Krishn Chandar is not the writer of any one nation, any one sect, or any one generation but rather the writer of all of humanity."
The Question of Language and ‘Critical Realism’
Through articles like this, the Progressive Writers defied the narrative that postcolonial identity-formation necessarily had to be homogeneous and that the consolidation of one language for official use was crucial to fostering national and communal unity. The writers illustrated the importance of cultivating literature and corresponding with writers in both languages in order to preserve indigenous literary traditions and practices that were native to, and shared by both the Hindu and Muslim community. In doing so, they also paved the way for critically reflecting on the concept of ‘national culture,’ and whether it had to be premised on a homogeneous literary and linguistic identity when Hindi and Urdu had co-existed for centuries in the subcontinent during and before the British Raj.
For the Progressive Writers, the task of reconstructing a ‘national culture’ through literary production was premised upon the mutual cultivation of Urdu and Hindi, and they compelled readers to reflect on and critique the misleading myth of ‘separate languages, separate cultures,’ that obscures centuries of a shared past, identity, and literatures. This article therefore is symptomatic of the Progressive Writers’ impulse to complement their critique of colonial injustices, with an inward reflection and critique of the community they inhabited, particularly by interrogating how the question of language was to be tackled and reimagined within literary production in the aftermath of the Partition.
▴ This essay, titled 'Public Literature,' was published in an issue of Savera in 1953, and illustrates how publications like Savera were central to the Progressive Writers project of demonstrating to the people of India and Pakistan that Hindi and Urdu were indeed separate, but similar languages that borrowed freely from each other. An excerpt from the essay reads: "The greatest quality of our language is that multiple synonyms exist to convey the same vision such as fire, agni, aatish, naar (Hindi synonyms of 'fire') and all of four of these are considered words from the Urdu language because in our poetry, all these four words that belong to a different language, have always been used equally... The past traditions of Urdu language cannot be divided like land, radio antennas, and military power. The language which was built by all sects, groups, religions, and parties of Hindustan with the constant hard work of hundreds of years, we are destroying it ourselves."
For more on post-Partition literary production and national imagination:
Ali, Kamran Asdar. “Communists in a Muslim Land: Cultural Debates in Pakistan’s Early Years.” Modern Asian Studies, vol. 45, no. 3, 2011, pp. 501–534.
Yamini. “Progressive Writers’ Movement in Hindi (1930s-40s): Conflicts and Debates.” Lapis Lazuli: An International Literary Journal, Vol. 11.
Savera (Dawn)
A compilation of Savera’s covers.
▴ Savera cover, 1977
▴ Savera cover, 1976
▴ Savera cover, 1975
▴ Savera cover, 1971
▴ Savera cover, 1968
▴ Savera cover, 1967
▴ Savera cover, 1966
▴ Savera cover, 1965
▴ Savera cover, 1964
▴ Savera cover, 1953
▴ Savera cover, 1951
▴ Savera cover, 1948
▴ Savera cover, 1946
▴ Savera cover, undated
▴ Savera cover, undated
▴ Savera cover, undated
▴ Savera cover, undated
Moin Ahsan Jazbi
Born in 1912 at Mubarakpur in Azamgarh district, Moin Ahsan Jazbi’s affiliation with the Progressive Writers’ Movement produced a unique literary style that blended classical literary tradition with contempo
rary poetics.He used this style to create poetry that depicted realities the common man was embroiled in. His most famous poem, “Fitrat ek muflis ki naẓar men̲” (Nature as Viewed by a Poor Man), which he penned at age seventeen, is a noteworthy indicator of his nascent ‘critical realist’ perspective, as the poem points out how our perspective of the world and our environment is contingent upon the social class we hail from. He contributed frequently to progressive journals like Savera and Hindustan, edited by Hayatullah Ansari. He wrote three major collections of poems: Firozān̲ (Resplendent Things; 1951), Sukhun-i muḵẖtaṣar (Words, Briefly; 1960), and Gudāz-i shab (Evening Melting; 1985).
▴ Cover of a complete collection of Jazbi's writing in book-form
▴ An excerpt from the Foreword of Jazbi's book 'Firozan' (Resplendent Things) that illustrates his perspective on literary writing and 'critical realism.' The translation reads: "Expediency has a lot to do with politics. But poetry cannot be based on expediency. Expediency wants partial truth whereas poetry wants complete truth and from this complete truth is born the passion which is the soul of poetry. Whenever anything has been said on the basis of expediency, it has been given a place in the domain of journalism rather than literature. What is most important for us is life and its experiences. But an experience cannot become a topic of discourse unless it is accompanied by the intensity of a poet's ambition and a sense of freshness/newness."
▴ An old cover of Jazbi's book 'Firozan' (Resplendent Things)
The Refugee Crisis
A central theme in his poem is the refugee crisis that accompanied the Partition, which produced one of the largest mass migrations in history as people sought to resettle themselves across the new border. The plight of refugees has been systemically erased in nationalist historiography and dominant narratives. The poem crucially inserts the question of displacement and dispossession into the transition towards Independence. Approximately 15 million people were displaced and banished to dilapidated refugee camps. On March 1, 1951, Muslim refugees in Pakistan totaled 7,150,000, and non-Muslim evacuees in India on the same date amounted to 7,471,000. In the opening lines of the poem, Rehman offers a potent critique of the psychological and physical violence that these refugees were subjected to, stuck at the threshold between a promised nationality and statelessness as their aspirations of Independence dwindled away in refugee camps.
The verses indicate a state of liminality between a present moment, signifying the transition of the Indian subcontinent from colonial enslavement to national sovereignty. However, the transition was obstructed and left unfulfilled for most; the refugees stuck in perpetual anticipation of the promised ‘upcoming dawn’ of freedom. Rehman, therefore, hints at the plight of the refugees produced by the Partition and criticizes the callous indifference of the nascent states of India and Pakistan that banished people into camps riddled with disease, hunger, and death.
The fledgling nationalisms that emerged in Pakistan and India following the Partition peddled a narrative of communal unity which, ironically, excluded the thousands of refugees wearing their days away in the camps, waiting to be bestowed a ‘Pakistani’ or ‘Indian’ citizenship. Rehman’s poem, therefore, becomes part of an emergent corpus of Partition literature that practices the ‘critical realist’ act of looking inwards to identify, investigate, and potentially reform the political and social choices made by the states of India and Pakistan that magnified the impact of colonial decisions.
▴ This short story, titled 'Toba Tek Singh,' was written by Manto for an issue of Savera published in 1951. He poignantly depicts the cruel state of liminality that migrants and refugees of Partition were often stuck in through his protagonist Bishan Singh, a lunatic who ironically dies on the no-man's land between India and Pakistan. The ending of the story reads: "There, behind barbed wire, on one side, lay India and behind more barbed wire, on the other side, lay Pakistan. There, in between, on a bit of earth that was no-man's land, lay Bishan Singh."
▴ Tents at the Kingsway Refugee Camp in Delhi (Courtesy Partition Museum Project) Source: The Hindustan Times
▴ Refugees migrating following the demarcation of the Radcliffe Line (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons) Source: Herald Dawn
Communal Massacres
These verses of the poem shed light on the communal rioting that accompanied the 1947 Partition in the form of murders, looting, abductions, and rapes. Rehman highlights one of the many injustices of Partition; critiquing mainstream politicians who remained mostly shielded from the violence borne out of these decisions, laying their brunt at the doorstep of the common man.
Many people were, in fact, unfamiliar with the prospects of Partition until they were forced to pay the price for it. Yasmin Khan says; “Among a population of almost four hundred million, where the vast majority lived in the countryside, plowing the land as landless peasants or sharecroppers, it is hardly surprising that many thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, did not hear the news for many weeks afterward. For some, the butchery and forced relocation of the summer months of 1947 may have been the first that they knew about the creation of the two new states rising from the fragmentary and terminally weakened British empire in India.”
In ironically enjoining the readers to ‘Rejoice! For we have seen the ugly face of death,’ Rehman compels them to reflect upon and question the sectarian slaughter produced by the Partition on both sides of the border.
▴ This essay, titled 'Literature and Rioting,' was published in the fourth issue of Savera, 1948, and explores how the debilitating impact of communal rioting and massacres required writers to adopt an activist role as part of the Progressive Writers' 'critical realist' movement. An excerpt from the essay reads: "Communal riots have paralyzed educational institutions along with literature...Due to the riots, the duties of the writers, poets, and journalists of the Indian Union and Pakistan have increased greatly. Today, they must face the growing magnitude of darkness, violence, and reactionary forces, with all their might. Through books, periodicals, and magazines, they must promote democratic trends within their own nations. In their own states, they must protect the oppressed by gathering the full forces of pen and language to decisively defeat the enemies of the people."
▴ Riots in Calcutta, 1946 Source: BBC
Nation and Class in Progressive Writing
In these verses, Rehman seeks to reconstruct the emergent nationalist narratives in India and Pakistan by highlighting the significance of the working class to the projects of nation-building undertaken by both states. Their physical toil and suffering, often obscured from hegemonic nationalist narratives, are deemed crucial to the process of constructing a new state, the political, economic, and social structures of which have been devastated by centuries of colonial rule and a bloody Partition.
Rehman, therefore, deploys a mode of subalternist historiography and social analysis by directing our attention towards the marginalized and invisibilized plight of the working classes in the march towards formal decolonization. His critical view of nationalism presages later attempts to write nationalist histories from the perspective of Subaltern Studies, thus indicating that the ‘critical realist’ literary movement was ahead of its time in terms anticolonial praxis.
This also depicts the leftist, pro-working class leanings of Savera and the Progressive Writers Movement. The poem compels readers to critically probe and question hegemonic nationalist narratives created in the aftermath of the Partition by both states to foster a sense of communal unity and national integrity. It calls them to excavate the buried suffering of disenfranchised communities and rectify the lacunae in these nationalist narratives by foregrounding the misfortunes of these communities.
▴ This essay, titled 'Class Consciousness and Literature,' was published in the ninth issue of Savera, 1951, and is indicative of a growing trend in 'critical realist' writing that sought to shed light on the plight of working classes in order to reform the inequitable class system of the subcontinent. An excerpt from the essay reads: "With the literary productions of Munshi Premchand, a new era began in Urdu literature. Munshi Premchand was influenced by specific class proclivities, thus he introduced new characters to Urdu literature, for example, familiarizing it with the lower class of the rural farmer...Through his novels and short stories, Premchand highlighted the lower and oppressed classes of Hindus in the subcontinent."
▴ Farmers working in India, 1947 Source: Stacker
▴ Sikhs migrating to Hindu section of Punjab after partitioning of India. (Photo by Margaret Bourke-White//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)
For more on the refugee crisis, communal rioting and ‘subaltern nationalism’ during the Partition, see:
Banerjee, Sumanta. ‘Indo–Bangladesh Border: Radcliffe’s Ghost,’ Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 36, no. 18, 2001. Pp: 505–506.
Chattha, Ilyas. “After the Massacres: Nursing Survivors of Partition Violence in Pakistan Punjab Camps.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 28, no. 2, 2018, pp. 273–293.
Dube, Ishita Banerjee. History of Modern India. Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Khan, Yasmin. The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan. Yale University Press, 2017.
Usmani, Irfan Waheed. Print Culture and Left Wing Radicalism in Lahore. University of Singapore, 2016.
1947: The Year of Partition
Muneebur Rehman’s poem, titled 1947, can be positioned within the large corpus of Partition literature in Urdu and Hindi writing that seeks to document and depict the pervasive violence of the event, and its ramifications for the people of the subcontinent. As such, Rehman’s poem is particularly pertinent to the emergent literary tradition of ‘critical realism’ that this issue of Savera endorses, since he seems to shatter the myth of the ‘glory’ and ‘triumph’ of nationalism by catapulting to the forefront the violence that accompanied the creation of the new states, particularly the violence enacted on marginalized communities. In doing so, he thus compels his readers to question and reform the emergent nationalist idealisms of both states, which sought to excise from memory the suffering of these communities by peddling forth a narrative of ‘necessary sacrifice.’
Muneebur Rehman
Muneebur Rehman was a prominent scholar, poet, and writer. He was born in Agra, India on July 18, 1924. He was particularly interested in classical Persian literature and the modernist voices in Persian poetry which he experimented with rigorously as a member of the Progressive Writers Movement. While in Iran, he studied modern Persian literature in greater depth and eventually published books on the subject, in both English and Urdu. Some of them include the Post-Revolution Persian Verse, Jadid Farsi Sha’iri, and an anthology of modern Persian poetry in two volumes. In the years leading up to and following the partition, his poems became increasingly focused on the necessity for individual and communal reformation as he became familiar with the emerging ‘critical realism’ tradition in progressive Urdu literature.
▴ This poem by Rehman, titled 'Self-forgetfulness,' was published in the second issue of Savera, 1947, and cautions readers against willfully inducing an individual or communal amnesia to start anew because he believes that the past is an integral part of future reformation and transformation. A translated excerpt from the poem reads: "If I forget myself/ And dust off from my hem the residue of the past thinking that this is the end of the story/ From here a new story will begin/ That my past and present are inclined to this moment/ If I forget even myself, then who will believe me..."
▴ Rehman's poem, titled 'The Sea,' was published in the second issue of Savera, 1947, and also thematically centers 'critical realism' by voicing his distress at the emergent political and religious divisiveness of the subcontinent. A translated excerpt from the poem reads: "This time is slowly shrinking into nothingness/ Slowly, I am going away from the world of my desires/ God, someone tell me what is this destination of imprisonment/ Till when will I remain enmeshed in the tangles of East and West/ Till when will this veil of national, racial, and religious prejudice remain before me eyes?"
▴ Titled 'Mahtama Gandhi,' this poem is a dirge written by Muneebur Rehman after the assassination of the Indian Independence Movement leader, Mahtama Gandhi, a Hindu lawyer who was famous for his 'non-violent' resistance to the British and for popularizing the idea of 'swaraj' (self-rule) in India. The poem was published in an issue of Savera in 1948 and is representative of Rehman's progressive commitments as it beckons readers to remember and emulate Gandhi's non-violent politics at a time when savage communal rioting between Hindus and Muslims was claiming countless lives. A translated excerpt from the poem reads: "At every moment a message of love his lips were voicing/ A love which was all-comprising/ Which cannot be besieged within limits of sect, religion and nation/ Which is present in the elements’ beautiful formation/ Whose power is not needy of a spear or sword..."
Eik Tawaif ka Khat (A Letter from a Prostitute)
Written in epistolary form as a letter to Quaid-e-Azam and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru from the perspective of a prostitute, this short story by the Progressive Writer Krishan Chandar interrogates how female bodies were represented and deployed in articulations of nationalism during and after the 1947 Partition. Chandar narrates the life stories of Bela and Batool, two young girls, Hindu and Muslim respectively, who end up in a dilapidated brothel of Bombay through a series of abductions and trafficking cycles in the wake of the sectarian violence of 1947. Chandar’s vivid focus on the physical and psychological dismemberment of women on the altar of nationalism illustrates how gendered bodies became sites of ethnic and sectarian violence while offering the possibility of self-realization and transformation within the vexed relationship between gender and nationalism. By having a nameless prostitute address two of the most respectable men in India and Pakistan in an open letter, Chandar inverts the hierarchy of gendered class distinctions, thus investing the realism of his story with a critical and reformist impulse aimed at the project of postcolonial transformation.
Gender as a Subject of ‘Critical Realism’
Chandar’s story signifies an emergent sensibility in the corpus of post-Partition progressive literature. The story attempted to investigate the changing social experiences of gender with the onset of national modernity.
Gender as a subject of critique and reformation also emerged in the oeuvres of Chandar’s Progressive contemporaries, from Ismat Chughtai to Saadat Hassan Manto, who articulated the shifting habitations of masculinity and femininity as they evolved at the nexus of colonial subjugation and sovereign statehood. Chandar’s primary character, the nameless prostitute of Faris Road who dares to address the prestigious leaders of the nationalist movements of India and Pakistan, seems to be positioned at this intersection. While prostitution was not a distinctly colonial phenomenon in India, the British colonial governance redefined sex workers as legally and pathologically abhorrent women. The Cantonment Act of 1862 followed by the Indian Contagious Diseases Acts of 1868 regulated commercial sex work in British military bases as well as the Presidencies and Provinces of British India, forming a colonial apparatus of disciplining and surveilling subversive female bodies.
Chandar’s story poignantly illustrates the socio-economic confinement that these prostitutes were subjected to as the nameless prostitute of Faris Road bemoans in her letter; “since the last ten years, I have been rotting in the same shop on the same Faris Road in Bombay.” However, in articulating a critique of colonial practices, Chandar does not concede exoneration to nationalist patriarchies within his own community since his story also decries the deployment of female bodies as sites of national (dis)honor violated during sectarian conflict. The plight of Bela and Batool, two young girls who barely escape the sexual violence meted out to their families only to be sold into prostitution, is orchestrated not only by colonial laws but also by indigenous social conceptions of gender that render the female body a malleable repository of nationalism.
Nonetheless, Chandar also offers the possibility of transforming these sensibilities through his main character who, despite being entitled to exhorting sexual services from Bela and Batool for her brothel or selling them to another pimp for a higher price, strives for their emancipation in the new states. Her insistence on writing a letter to the leaders of India and Pakistan signifies an urge to rethink the violent nationalist project and reform social experiences along the axis of gender, making Chandar’s narrative an important contribution to the ‘critical realist’ genre.
▴ An essay by Manto titled 'Story-Writing and the Problem of Gender' published in an issue of Savera in 1946. The essay is indicative of the growing proclivity in progressive writing to dissect and transform the social experiences of gender. An excerpt from the essay reads: "The attempt to overcome the gap between man and woman will continue in every era and in every century...Those who think that new literature has created crude problems are mistaken because the fact is that these crude problems have created literature. This new literature in which you sometimes see your own reflection and get confused... My job is to show you the mirror, if your face is polluted and ugly, then that is how it will appear."
▴ An essay titled ‘The Gendered Perspective of Love’ published in the 1953 issue of Savera
Rethinking the Gendered Body in Nationalist Violence
The inherently gendered and sexualized nature of the violence visited upon the population of South Asia in the wake of the Partition is a crucial theme in Chandar’s story. His vivid accounts of how the breasts of Bela’s Hindu mother were cut off by Muslim marauders or how Batool’s married Muslim sisters were sadistically raped by Jats in front of the disfigured corpse of their father are not merely fiction. The violation and subsequent mutilation of female bodies became a common mechanism of humiliating and overpowering the ‘Other’ male, and by extension, the ‘Other’ nation during the chaos of Partition.
As Menon and Bhasin have pointed out, a ‘preoccupation with women’s sexuality formed part of the contract of war between the three communities (Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs)’ with genital mutilation and branding, public sexual humiliation, and abductions becoming ritual practices. Chandar’s recurrent focus on this violence in his story indicates the urgency of radically reimagining self-conceptions of masculinity and femininity in the nascent postcolonial states to ensure that the bloodbath of 1947 is not repeated in the name of nationalism. He offers the space for such a transformation through the seemingly bizarre demand of the nameless prostitute of Faris Road who pleads Quaid-e-Azama and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, the two most respectable men in Pakistan and India respectively in 1948, to adopt two ‘fallen women’ from the bowels of Faris Road as their daughters.
Chandar’s message, delivered ironically, is clear: the gory violence enacted on female bodies in 1947 should be as unimaginable and unacceptable as the adoption of two disgraced prostitutes at the hands of two respectable men. Chandar therefore compels readers to reflect on and reconstitute their own perceptions of nationalism and gender that produce such violent outcomes as archived on the bodies of a plethora of Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh women.
Gender and the Politics of Space
The contestation of marginal gendered positions is intricately linked to the politics of space in Chandar’s story. The space that the prostitute inhabits, Faris Road, figures predominantly in the narrative. The letter is signed not by a name but by ‘A prostitute from Faris Road,’ the women’s subjective identity subsumed under the physical space.
The spatial segregation of sex workers was proposed first under the Cantonment Act of 1864, which regulated prostitution in British military bases. This was followed by the Contagious Diseases Act (1868), which deemed the segregation of prostitutes into separate quarters and areas a mechanism of locating and placing under surveillance dissident bodies and sexualities. While the Acts were subsequently repealed, socio-economic inequalities often prevented these prostitutes from leaving the decrepit spaces they had been confined to.
Consequently, they were forced to make a home there, like Chandar’s prostitute who wears out ten years of her life at Faris Road because of her poverty, despite dreaming of moving to well-maintained regions like Poon Bridge or Worli Seaside. This spatial segregation also consolidated hierarchies of class; Faris Road, “the neighborhood of whores and stray dogs and cocaine-addicts and criminals and pimps” becomes a regulatory grid of gender and class. The nameless prostitute affirms this when she writes in the letter; “Mr. Jinnah has seen Bombay a lot, but he certainly has not seen the market where I live, Faris Road…All the garbage of our community’s social life is dumped on the streets of Faris Road. Obviously he will not come here. No respectable man even looks in the direction of Faris Road.”
Chandar questions how the spatial segregation of prostitutes, sanctioned by colonial laws, restricts their mobility and access to civic institutional spaces under the guise of ‘respectability.’ Their sequestration and absence from the public spaces of society renders them invisible residents of the state whose struggles and voices cannot be seen and heard. This is evident from the nameless prostitute’s apprehension; “I know it’s likely that this letter of mine may not even reach you…Is this voice not heard in Government House?”
In keeping with the revolutionary proclivity of ‘critical realism,’ the epistolary form of Chandar’s story shatters all spatial and social barriers erected between the working classes (the fallen woman) and the highest echelon of society (the state leaders of India and Pakistan). It jolts the community into critiquing and reforming practices of spatial segregation that participate in the marginalization of the gendered, impoverished subaltern.
▴ The intersection of the politics of space and class in producing marginalized subjects remained a recurrent topic of investigation in Chandar’s oeuvre, as demonstrated by the story, 'Kaalu the Addict,' published in the 1951 issue of Savera. The story documents the struggles of an addict in a downtrodden neighborhood of India.
For more on gender and the politics of nationalism in colonial India, see:
Levine, Philippa. “Venereal Disease, Prostitution, and the Politics of Empire: The Case of British India.” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 4, no. 4, 1994, pp. 579–602. JSTOR.
Menon, Ritu, and Kamla Bhasin. Borders & Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition. Rutgers University Press, 2018.
Mitra, Durba. Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought. Princeton University Press, 2020.