Anti-imperialism, national inde-pendence, social revolution —these ideas possessed the consciousness of people everywhere & The Progressive Writers Movement. Urdu prose writers at the beginning of the twentieth century were, by and large, unaware of the changes in literary activity and purpose that were taking place among the European writers. But by the end of the First World War they could be said to have caught up with those changes. Along with the awareness of a new mode of writing—realism, especially connected with social criticism—the Urdu writer found himself in the midst of a political storm in his society, a storm whipped up by a set of freshly-introduced political ideas. Anti-imperialism, national inde- pendence, social revolution—these ideas possessed the consciousness of people everywhere. The end of the First World War found the Muslim people locked into a bitter confrontation with tyranny and imperialist exploitation everywhere. The Russian socialist revolution worked as an explosive ideological force among the younger generation. These criss-crossing patterns of political and social dynamism, and the national revolutionary struggle going on in India itself, awakened the Urdu writer,as they did the writers of other Indian languages, to the new realities of life that ran counter to the traditional views of their forefathers as much as to the preferences of their colonial masters and the latter’s follow
Posted on: Mon, 24 Jun 2013 05:42:54 +0000