Progressive Writers' Movement

The Progressive Writers' Movement was a left-leaning literary movement in British India, active from the mid-1930s through the years after independence, that united writers across many of the subcontinent's languages, including Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi and English, around a shared commitment to using literature for social change, anti-imperialist critique and the exposure of poverty, caste oppression and social injustice. Sparked in part by the controversy over the 1932 story collection Angarey, the movement was formally founded at its first All-India conference in Lucknow in 1936 under the leadership of the Marxist critic Sajjad Zaheer, and its most celebrated figures included the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz, the short-story writers Saadat Hasan Manto and Ismat Chughtai, and the English-language novelist Mulk Raj Anand. Though the movement's formal organization declined after Indian independence in 1947 amid Cold War-era political pressures and internal splits, its influence on socially conscious South Asian literature, particularly in Urdu and Hindi fiction and poetry addressing labor, gender and communal politics, continued for decades afterward.