22nd November 1992
Let me begin talking about my own growth as a progressive writer. My earlier writings were naive, impetuous and sporadic utterances coming from intense feelings. I found myself embroiled in sad moods, despairs and agonies. My teachers thought that confusions were the natural expression of adolescence. They did not know that, behind the broken lines, there were my feelings about my good mother turning cruel mother-in-law, my father a servant of the Sahibs even as a pseudo Arya Samajist, my Professors mostly pompous and senior students admirable because they were thinking brave thoughts.
Then I had the privilege of going home to the poet Iqbal, who conceded to naive poetry and their authors a good uncle's affection. His own poem of that kind, “Secrets of the Self,” carried on the flyleaf a quotation from the Upanishads: “A devotee asked the sage: What may I do with my life? And the sage answers: Ask yourself everyday: Who am I? Where have I come from? And where am I going?”
The fable became an obsession with me, a kind of motto and later I began to ask myself these questions and put down my loose thoughts in a private diary. In these notes the mood is one of sadness that came from the miseries around me, the bad habits of my own family and caste-brotherhood, the brutality of the older boys to the younger boys, in imitation of the patriarchs, contempt for the young, women weeping because husband went astray and the entire country in stresses from the inequity of foreign rule.
As I was a student of Philosophy, I dubbed my dominant mood existentialist and this mood seemed to reappear both in my life and in my writings. I suppose Urdu and Persian poetry is essentially dominated by despair. However, the small pleasures of life did give hope. I loved kite flying, walking in gardens, poaching fruit, hearing music and going to poetic recitals as consolations. And a mystic uncle introduced me to the teachings of Guru Nanak. This saint talked of 'being split', left home as a young man and wandered to far places: Mecca, Mansarovar, Assam and Lanka. Nanak's life became to me an antidote to the Advaita perennial philosophy. I preferred the human sympathies of Guru Nanak and Kabir.
Apart from this, I found myself falling in love with a young Muslim Girl. Her parents married her off to a Railway Guard as his third wife, and this man murdered her because he found my love letters in her bag. You can imagine how much more existentialist I would feel.
Later I was moved by Mrs. Besant's talk of freedom struggle when she came to lecture in our college. The legends of Tilak, Aurobindo and Gandhi seemed inspiring. At the end of her lecture, she sang the Hymn of Creation in English and Sanskrit from the Rigveda. This moved me more deeply. When she went away, the principal, who had called her was transferred back to the Imperial service. We students went on strike. The strike became violent. I went to jail for a month with others. When I came out my father raised his hand on my mother for being indulgent towards me. I left home and went to Dr. Iqbal for advice. The poet asked me what I wanted to do. I said “I want to follow your footsteps.” He said, “My footsteps will take you to Germany! You have no money and do not know the German language. I will give you some letters to friends in London.”
Along with the introductions Dr. Iqbal gave me also a donation of Rs. 101. My mother gave me some money stolen from the house-keeping. My new principal gifted me Rs. 101 for doing well in my Honours examinations. I went to Bombay and met B.G. Horniman and booked a ticket to London. I went away without informing my father of the trip.
As an exile in the cold and the wet and the fog of London I felt miserable. However, I secured admission for research in Philosophy. And the earlier habit of writing a diary became regular.
I also wrote letters to a college friend about the hopeless life in the West. All these writings-letters, diaries and other narratives-became a kind of confessional. They spoke about my wretchedness and the hostile atmosphere of rejection that Indians had to meet from landlords and Brown Saheb—fellow students, the lack of warmth of the British and the crisis of 1926 when Churchill put down the Coalminers strike with bloody violence. It reminded me of the Seven Stripes I had got in the Martial Law days in Amritsar. All these writings were dominated by moods of depression. My discovery of Buddha's teachings, ‘Dukha, Dukha, Dukha’ was to make the mood permanent. I found relief only in writing the confessional. Besides Philosophers, I also read Goethe's Faust, the novels of Balzac, Victor Hugo, Tolstoy, Gorky, Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Tagore and others. One reads two books a week in London.
When I was working in Hogarth Press as a proof-reader to earn my living, I had entry to Virginia Woolf's Drawing-room during her ambles on Wednesday evenings, when she read her novels in preparation. One day a young critic Edward Sackville West, asked me, “What are you writing?” I said, ‘I am writing about an outcaste.’ He said superciliously, ‘Oh! There can be no novel about the poor! One can only laugh at the Cockneys like Dickens.’ This unnerved me and made me feel hopeless about my confessional.
I happened to go to Ireland a little later and met the poet A.E. (George Russell) and W.B. Yeats. I told A.E. of what had happened in Mrs. Woolf's room. He said, ‘Son go back to Gandhi for a year. He is struggling against the rejection of outcastes; at the same time he is fighting against imperialism.’ And he wrote to Gandhi on my behalf. I also wrote asking Gandhi if I could come. There came a post-card saying, ‘Come end of March, 1927.’
I borrowed money for my fair and reached Ahmedabad at the appointed time.
Gandhi looked at my thick corduroy suit and said: “Why do you want to look like a monkey?” I answered, “You looked like a monkey at one time with your frock coat and top-hat!” He smiled at my brazen answer and asked his Secretary, Mahadev Desai, to lend me kurta pyjama. Later he asked me, “What do you do you want from me?” I said, “I want to show you my novel.”
“What is it about—some boy and girl affair?” he asked. I said, “No, it is about an untouchable.” “You mean Harijan? We do not use the word, ‘Untouchable’ ... All right, you leave your book.” Then he asked Mahadev Desai to give me a small room in the Ashram.
The next day he told me, “I have looked at your novel. You seem to use big words. Harijans sigh, moan, groan! They do not use such heavy words. Write in a simpler language and transliterate what they say.” And he gave me a paper on which was printed the title: Talisman. This magic formula read: “If you are in despair, think of the poorest man you can help and go to him and your despair will vanish.”
I rewrote the novel, Untouchable, in Gandhi’s Ashram. He approved the draft.
Then by sheer coincidence of Oxford—Sajjad Zaheer, Dr. Ghosh who taught Bengali, Cedric Dover, an anglo-Indian from Calcutta Dr. M.D. Taseer, Urdu poet, got together and framed a manifesto. It was drafted by Dr. Ghosh and myself. We criticised the decay of our culture, partly brought about by the continuance of the old Puranic myths of Manusmriti and the misinterpretation of Islam and partly by the inaccessibility of the important books in the West, which were banned by the British. They did not allow even European books. I had brought Balzac with me, but they took it away because they thought Balzac was a communist. Deprivation of culture in all parts of India was caused by Imperialist suppression of information and useful discussion. People like Sarat Chandra Chatterjee were writing in Bengali because Bengal was defiant. He was being read as also Tagore. Tagore was writing about the middle-class characters as in Gora, and Home and the World. Sarat Chandra Chatterjee was writing about the lower middle-class—the widows and the Babus; Premchand was writing about the peasantry and I was writing about untouchables. Thus the novel underwent a radical departure from the past.
The manifesto asked the writers to confront the realities of Indian life—the imperial shadow on the one hand and our own decadence on the other. There was also confusion among the intelligentsia caused by the absence of freedom. It was a time when a tremendous amount of consternation was generated by the emergence of fascism in Europe. Almost all of us were caught up in the anti-fascist movement, as we considered fascism to be pseudo imperialist movement. So this platform was accepted even by the European intelligentsia. Andre Gide in France, the Quakers, Laurence Housman and others in England…. Ernest Toller, Thomas Mann in Germany, Ilya Ehrenbourg and others in Russia, Pablo Neruda and others in Latin America were aware of the suppression of liberty in India and were with us. In the anti-fascist movement Indians were accepted as equals for the first time in England. At one time Indians were not allowed to be members of the Cambridge Union. But in the wake of the anti-fascist struggles Kumāramangalam became the President of the Union. Sajjad Zaheer and myself attended the World Conference of Intellectuals in 1935, presided over by Gorky. It had been organised by André Gide and André Malraux. We came back very enthused. Sajjad came to India and organised the first Progressive Writers Conference in Lucknow chaired by Premchand. Premchand’s address clearly showed how much he was alive to social and human issue. He had read Tolstoy, Gorky and Gogol and was unconsciously saying and doing what we had only begun to think about.
Later I went to Spain to fight against fascism and took part in the World Conference of Writers in Madrid in 1937. I returned to India in ’38. In the same year we organised the All India Progressive Writers Conference in Calcutta. Tagore presided. We already had the sympathy of Jawaharlal Nehru, Iqbal and Vallathol. Of course, there was a reaction against the movement from those writers in Hindi, who felt that we were depriving our culture of its links with the Vedanta. In one of Sajjad’s books (Angare) there was an attack on the Mullahs, the people who were misleading men of religion into the kind of fundamentalism that was being inspired by the Muslim League at that time. On the other side of the coin, there was the Hindu Mahāsabhā. In between the two stood Nehru, with his ideas of Socialism and Equality and Gandhiji with his struggle against Untouchability.
The relevance of the progressive movement is not to be found in its Manifesto but from the flowering of the sensibility of various writers in the country at a time when British Imperialism was still incharge.
All the reactionaries meanwhile gathered at Gorakhpur. The Muslim League passed its resolution on Pakistan. Jinaah spear-headed the action, even though he was not actively associated with his followers. In this context all the secular-minded liberals, socialists and radicals were drawn into the progressive movement. The creativity of this movement is proved by the finest writing that it inspired in every language. Gandhi and Nehru had created conditions suitable to its growth. As a literary movement it was a confrontation with the human condition itself in all its misery and wretchedness.
During my stay in London throughout the war I went through the hell of seven years bloodbath. However I refused to join broadcasting till 1942. Then I joined the India Section of the B.B.C. along with George Orwell. In India Jawaharlal Nehru had already warned the people that Fascism could easily advance to the East and engulf the whole world. The Quit India Movement had started leading to the imprisonment of all the important national leaders. My broadcasts were also censored, but Churchill himself intervened saying that so long as I was anti-fascist, they should not be censored. When I came back to India the Progressive Writers Movement had gathered force and already it was a movement of the people.
At the Non-Aligned Movement Conference in Bandung, Jawaharlal Nehru moved a resolution that spoke of cultural exchange between Asians. When he returned I suggested to him that the intellectuals of Asia had not met for more than a thousand years, after the last Buddhist Conference in the 6th Century A.D. under Harsha. I persuaded him to let us organise the first Asian Writers Conference. With his help and financial support we were able to mobilize writers from Ceylon, Burma, Egypt, Lebanon, Iran, Japan, China, Soviet Union, Cambodia and Indonesia. About 120 writers took part in the conference but our critics told the Home Ministry that it was a Communist—inspired conference, and that I was a Communist stooge. I had to send a telegram to Nehru in America to come and save the conference. Nehru came and spoke. Dr. Rādhākrishnan and Shri Rajgopalachari also took part. Rajendra Prasad invited the participants to tea in the Rāshtrapati Bhawan. Remember that the same President had earlier given a statement to Hindustan Times that the conference was a Communist show. Anyhow the conference was a success. The participants were so impressed that they organised a conference of Afro-Asian writers in Tashkent the next year. It was supported by several Asian and African countries. That conference was a movement in the direction of radicalism.
Significant writers like Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka were in a sense products of the movement. If our writings are similar to theirs, it only means that the human condition in all the countries of Asia and Africa are similar. Most of them had just thrown away the Yoke of imperialism and millions of people were living in poverty and wretchedness. This is the tragic heritage from the period of Imperial exploitation, and can be ended only by a world wide redistribution of resources by the codiscovery of our suppressed cultures and renascent thinking and writing.
The main point I want to make is that the Progressive Movement was an important departure in both fiction and poetry from the feudal heritage and modernity. The writers who criticise the progressives don’t understand that there is a search for the other in all writing. The young man seeks the beloved and writes about her when he cannot find her. The same is the longing of the writers who speak about the need for solidarity with other human beings from empathy. The departure brought about in poetry by Faiz is relevant. He addresses his beloved and tells her not to ask him for the old love. The personal love of the old ghazal writers has given way to love of the people.
Don’t ask me now beloved
Don’t ask me now, Beloved, to love you as I did
when I believed life owed its luster to your existence.
The torments of the world meant nothing;
you alone could make me suffer.
Your beauty guaranteed the spring,
ordained its enduring green.
Your eyes were all there was of value anywhere.
If I could have you, fate would bow before me.
None of this was real; it was all invented by desire.
The world knows how to deal out pain, apart from passion,
and manna for the heart, beyond the realm of love.
Warp and woof, the trappings of the rich are woven
by the brutish spell cast over all the ages.
(Page 39: The True Subject: Selected poems of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, tr. by Naomi Lazard)