Liking Progress, Loving Change: A Literary History of the Progressive Writers’ Movement in Urdu

The Progressive Writers Movement in India shaped the political consciousness of a large number of people with its unequivocal emphasis on the need for nation-building and social transformation. The stalwarts of Urdu literature—Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Ismat Chughtai, Kaifi Azmi, Krishan Chandar, Saadat Hasan Manto, Rashid Jahan, Ali Sardar Jafri—contributed prominently. The movement and its objectives were endorsed by eminent writers across diverse literary traditions such as Rabindranath Tagore, Mohammad Iqbal, Maulvi Abdul Haq, Hasrat Mohani, Acharya Narendra Dev, Tara Chand, and Sarojini Naidu. With the coming together of mediums of popular culture such as cinema, theatre, and radio, the movement created a significant impact against then prevalent social ills.

Rakhshanda Jalil interweaves primary sources and personal collections of Urdu prose and poetry to trace the evolution of this movement from its heady days in the 1930s to its decline in the 1950s.