The aesthetics of the fragment: Progressivism and literary modernism in the work of the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association

ABSTRACT

Modernism has been retheorized as a global phenomenon, through phrases such as “geomodernism” or “planetary modernism”. This article considers Urdu literary modernism, as it developed in South Asia in the 1930s and 1940s. It offers new readings of canonical texts by writers connected to the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association: “Khol Do” by Saadat Hasan Manto, “Subah-e Azadi” by Faiz Ahmad Faiz and “Lajwanti” by Rajinder Singh Bedi. Against Urdu scholarship which views modernism (jadidiyat) as a postcolonial phenomenon, the article argues that in their critique of modernity, reinvention of tradition, approach to myth and interest in visuality these texts demonstrate that progressivism should be understood as part of the history of Urdu literary modernism in South Asia. Manto, Faiz and Bedi deployed an aesthetics of the fragment not only to critique Partition and its protocols, but also to investigate Partition as a crisis of nation, modernity and humanity.

KEYWORDS:

• Urdu literary modernism
• All-India Progressive Writers’ Association
• Indian partition
• Saadat Hasan Manto
• Rajinder Singh Bedi
• Faiz Ahmad Faiz

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Manto wrote “Khol Do” in a matter of hours, and reportedly was finishing the story when Qasmi arrived at his house. According to Qasmi, Manto took extra care in composing the last lines of the story, and Qasmi trembled as he read them. The story led Nuqush to be banned by the Pakistani government for six months (Jalal 2013, 153).

2. The first sentence is taken from the Muhammad Umar Memon translation (Manto 2015); the second and third sentences are my own translation, with significant words from the original Urdu given in brackets.

3. As indicated, the translation cited here is by Memon (Manto 2015), to which I have added in brackets significant words from the Urdu original, since they are discussed in what follows.

4. As in Manto ([1948] 2017); the English translation (Manto 2015) contains more than 17 paragraphs.

5. The volume was produced to show the unity of Indian literature in the subcontinent’s many vernaculars. Many of the stories were translated by the authors themselves.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Dubrow

Jennifer Dubrow is associate professor of Urdu at the University of Washington. She is the author of Cosmopolitan Dreams: The Making of Modern Urdu Literary Culture in Colonial South Asia (2018/19). Her current research focuses on Hindi and Urdu literary modernisms in post-independence India and Pakistan.