COLUMN: Ra’epuri’s ‘Literature and Life’ and the progressives
Their mutual attraction blossomed in Aligarh, where Ra’epuri had come from Calcutta to study. Aligarh is also where I was born. An early chapter of her work revived my boyhood memories of a time now tucked away in a misty little cove of dense emotions. My father was a health addict and a stickler for fresh air. Well before dawn every morning he would drag a groggy-eyed little boy out for a five-mile stroll — hardly a stroll, really, for he walked as though he was going to miss the train and made me jog, perhaps to catch up with the engineer and ask him to hold his horses. We walked from Memon Manzil in Badar Bagh all the way to the dilapidated Qila (the Aligarh Fort) of the Second Anglo-Maratha War fame. A mile down our gravel-topped route, a little before the railroad crossing to the right, our path skirted by a kothi with “Neeli Chhatri” inscribed on a plaque embedded in the right column of its gate. This was the house built by Mrs Ra’epuri’s father Zafar Omar, the author of the two detective novels Neeli Chhatri and Behram ki Wapsi. In a cottage built on the land surrounding Neeli Chhatri, a little way to the left of it and closer to the railway crossing, lived Professor Bhattacharya, who taught mathematics at Aligarh University. On our way from Manto Circle, our school, we boys sometimes used to steal limes from this professor’s small front yard, as we did mangoes, star fruit, qait and kakrondas from the University’s Sahib Bagh.
But I’m digressing — ah, the inexorable lure of the enchanted days of childhood! Fast forward! Fifty-seven years later, in Madison, a University of Texas student by the name of Adeem Suhail submitted his translation of Ra’epuri’s ‘Adab aur Zindagi’ (Literature and Life) for the journal I edit. I accepted it, mostly for personal reasons. I had read and heard a great deal about this seminal document of the Progressive Writers’ Movement (PWM), but had not had the opportunity to read it myself. So here was that opportunity.
While there is no evidence in Gard-e-Raah that ‘Literature and Life’ — published in July 1935 by the Anjuman Taraqqi-e-Urdu in its quarterly journal Urdu, edited by Baba-e-Urdu Maulvi Abdul Haq — was written specifically to promote the agenda of the Progressive Movement (PM), this seminal article “took the Indian literary scene by storm,” writes Suhail in his Translator’s Note. It “announced the arrival of the progressive literary movement in India and was a pioneering effort of Marxist literary criticism. It represented the crest of a wave of revolutionary thought that culminated in the formation of the Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA) in 1936. The foundations of the nascent organisation’s manifesto can be clearly traced back to the principles and ideologies that are outlined in [Ra’epuri’s] essay.”
1 The article did not much impress me, although I could understand its arguable appeal to the Indian nationalist intellectuals — most from the urban upper-middle class and enviably well-educated — who later coalesced around it to form and, a year later, to launch the PM in literature. Its main thrust came from the highly idealistic humanitarian ideals of Maxim Gorky — “the prophet of modern literature,” as Ra’epuri calls him — and unquestionably provided the Movement with its ideological underpinnings and its broadly Marxist orientation. Because of his sensitive and compassionate treatment of the down-and-out of Russian society, Gorky was not just Ra’epuri’s favorite, he was also a favorite of Munshi Premchand and, indeed, of many Progressive writers.
Much of Ra’epuri’s argument, groundbreaking and nothing less than revolutionary to the Urdu literati in the infancy of their modern Urdu literature, may have felt like a breath of fresh air in a literary milieu redolent, for the most part, of cloying romantic twaddle, and averse to “objective” realism. At the very least, it placed the concrete world of life — die lebenswelt, to borrow Edmund Husserl’s phrase — more determinedly in the dead centre of literary engagement, pulling the floodgates wide open for the entry of the common man as a valid subject of literature, just as 14 years later Arthur Miller was to usher him in as the tragic hero of drama in his play Death of a Salesman — a role reserved, up until then, only for historical personages of colossal stature.
However, reading Ra’epuri’s argument today, after so much water has flowed down the Indus and the Ganges, one is struck by its overly simplistic approach to the complex nature of literature and its raison d’être. Rather short on depth and hard substance and long on gushing emotion, it tends to reduce literary aesthetic to economic and material determinants and the production of literature to a kind of social activity. Society being the aggregate of its individuals, and life a unity, literature, like any other enterprise, could have meaning only if it strove to attain the greater good for the greater number in society. The primacy is here accorded to society at the expense of the individual. Simply stated, “Literature is a branch of life and there is no reason why […] it should become something of a Holy Spirit speaking from on high.” Society can progress only when the bonds between its individual members are strengthened, and this can be ensured by making their basic needs more accessible, which depends on securing more “effective means of production.”
Ra’epuri endorses Russian thinker Prince Kropotkin’s statement that “You shall support the oppressed because it is the duty of every human being to defend reality and truth”; and concludes “The primary duty of literature is to initiate the erasure of discrimination based on nation, country, colour, ethnicity, class or religion and to represent the group that takes practical steps with this aim in mind” (ibid).
Evidently, Ra’epuri has saddled literature with an impossible task. He has made it into a veritable soup kitchen from which no citizen walks away hungry, the locomotive for socio-economic change. But the Progressives had finally found their prophet and their gospel and ran — amok — with it, imposing their precepts on the literary establishment with the unrelenting force of an autocrat. No writer, however independent-minded, could hope to survive outside the PW’s ever-tightening noose. The inherent weakness of Ra’epuri’s stance is immediately evident to anyone (and I strongly suspect that it had become evident to Ra’epuri himself later on; or maybe he was aware of it all along as one finds very contradictory statements about the nature of literature in his writings); however, its main outrage lay squarely in denying literature its autonomy and self-sufficiency. To him, it was an activity like all other activities and made sense only when its power was exploited to promote the interest of the masses, which lay in the distribution of wealth across the board, in social justice and equality, in the erasure of oppression and religious obscurantism, in universal suffrage, and, ultimately, in the creation of a classless society. Stated differently, unalloyed communism. The definition of fiction as a realm of infinite imaginative possibilities is here reduced to a single possibility, which, in the end, has to be only a practical one. And if, perchance, imaginative, it must be oriented toward serving the material needs of the populace.
Muhammad Hasan Askari’s ‘Marxism and Literary Planning’ and ‘Literature and Revolution’2 — written much later and certainly not as a critique of Ra’epuri — show with formidable logic the inherent fallacies and contradictions of the Marxist view of literature, pulling apart every last thread of Gorky’s theoretical fabric woven on the loom of a view of society every bit steeped in the confining worldview of Marxist struggle.
If literature was an activity like any other, Ra’epuri didn’t pause to question why it was indispensable in the first place. One cannot equate literature with roti (food), kapra (clothes), and makaan (shelter). What urge produced it and why was it inevitable? Suppose it ever fulfilled its dubious goal of establishing a just and equitable society, would it become redundant thereafter? Why were novels such as Crime and Punishment, War and Peace, and Ulysses necessary, and why would we be the poorer if they had never been written? But, most of all, what concrete societal function do these novels perform, other than enriching us with wisdom in the most unsuspecting of ways, and helping make sense of our world and ourselves. The nuances and wider implications of obvious facts often escape us, unless we see them filtered through the prism of their imaginative (fictional, poetic) reconstruction. It is not novels, not even paintings that change society. It is action. Ra’epuri seems to be repeating, with greater panache, what Hali had already said about literature’s purpose decades earlier in his Muqaddama. But literature is a poor agent to accomplish this task. Had Ra’epuri followed the assumption to its logical conclusion, he would have concluded that such literature could only produce shrill slogans, works such as Nikolai Ostrovsky’s How the Steel Was Tempered — which is pretty much the tenor of much of Soviet literature in its heyday when education, health, and satisfaction of material needs were universally available across the Soviet Union — indeed, of many Progressive writers also.
I’m not arguing against ‘objective’ realism and truth in literature, only that good literature cannot survive without ‘subjective’ elements in its creation, any more than it can do away with ‘reality’ and ‘truth’ altogether; they are its raw material, but they enter its realm on its terms. They make the objective reality less categorical, less harsh, somewhat more opaque, by creating doubt about commonly held certainties and see past them. It is this hazy twilight of ‘truth/reality’ that makes us sensitive to their wider possibilities of interpretation that transcends the limitations, the one-sided view of reality.
J.M.G. Le Clézio’s novel Desert may be cited as a powerful example of how objective reality and imagination interact to create superb fictional art. A lyrical and mystical tour de force, it nowhere lacks awareness of contemporary Western, particularly French, society. In other words, of the concrete world of reality. Timeless yet time bound, two narratives — one nearly mythical in its ambience, existing, as it were, in a timeless geography of North Africa, the other as tangible as the pier in Marseilles, or the studio of Lulla’s photographer and her portfolio for the fashion magazines — run parallel, creating the effect of what Mario Vargas Llosa has perspicaciously termed “communicating vessels.” By which he means, “Two or more episodes that occur at different times, in different places, or on different levels of reality but are linked by the narrator so that their proximity or meaning causes them to modify each other, lending each, among other qualities, a different meaning, tone, or symbolic value than they might have possessed if they were narrated separately.”3
It is the mutual communication of the two interacting narratives, so radically different in ambience and tone, that gives the novel its dense semantic texture, suggesting, but just, how the primeval tribal values, self-sustaining and self-sufficient for centuries, are now supplanted, in fact destroyed, by the mercantile values of Europe. Independently, neither narrative would affect us as much. It is their proximity, their alternating occurrence in the novelistic space that fills them with unsuspected meaning, beauty, and, ultimately, a tragic sense of loss, of slow but sure annihilation of a way of life. It is their mute communication through contiguity and silence that creates dimensions of reality that are rarely seen and appreciated. So there is plenty of ‘reality’ and ‘truth’ here, but it is tempered with literary decorum. What it does not have — and thankfully — is the endless harping on socio-economic problems and needs up front.
But the learned theoretician Ra’epuri, surprisingly, flouts every article of the Progressive template — which, apparently, he helped create — or, rather deftly incorporates its main assumptions without compromising art in his ‘Jism ki Pukaar’ (The Call of the Flesh),4 the best short story by far in his entire fictional corpus.
1.Akhtar Husain Ra’epuri, ‘Literature and Life,’ translated by Adeem Suhail, The Annual of Urdu Studies 25 (2010), 123–30.
2.Both translated by Muhammad Umar Memon, The Annual of Urdu Studies 25 (2010), 131—41, and 150—56).
3.Letters to a Young Novelist, translated by Natasha Wimmer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002).
4.Translated by Muhammad Umar Memon, The Annual of Urdu Studies 25 (2010), 187—93).