End of an E-RA
From Premchand and Manto to Chitra Mudgal, Progressive Writing Comes Full Circle
In April 1936, a frail Munshi Premchand stood before the first All India Progressive Writers’ Conference in Lucknow and delivered what would become one of the defining speeches in modern Indian literary history. Six months later, he was dead. Yet the literary movement he helped inspire would shape generations of writers across India and Pakistan, influencing fiction, poetry, theatre, and criticism for decades. Its institutional form eventually faded, but its central question has endured: What responsibility does literature bear toward society?
Nearly a century later, that question remains as urgent as ever.
Premchand’s Call to Realism
As President of the inaugural Progressive Writers’ Conference, Premchand rejected the notion that literature should merely entertain or offer escape from reality. He argued that true literature must engage with the struggles of ordinary people, exposing poverty, caste oppression, inequality, exploitation, and injustice. Beauty, he suggested, could no longer be separated from truth.
This was not a sudden shift in his thinking. Through novels such as Godaan, Rangbhumi, Karmabhumi, and countless short stories, Premchand had already transformed Hindi and Urdu literature by placing peasants, labourers, women, and the socially marginalized at its centre. The Progressive Writers’ Movement gave intellectual and organizational expression to ideals he had long practiced.
Around him gathered an extraordinary generation of writers including Sajjad Zaheer, Ahmed Ali, Rashid Jahan, Ismat Chughtai, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Krishan Chander, Mulk Raj Anand, Rajinder Singh Bedi, and the young Saadat Hasan Manto. They differed widely in style and temperament, but they shared the conviction that literature should confront the realities of its time rather than retreat into romantic idealism.
Manto and the Limits of Ideology
No writer tested those convictions more relentlessly than Saadat Hasan Manto.
His stories about prostitution, Partition, communal violence, desire, and human brutality challenged readers with an honesty that few writers had attempted before. Stories such as Toba Tek Singh, Khol Do, Thanda Gosht, and Bu refused to simplify human suffering into political slogans or moral lessons. They exposed violence without offering consolation.
Manto was prosecuted repeatedly on charges of obscenity, facing six trials during his lifetime, yet he was never convicted. More painful than the courtroom battles, however, was his growing estrangement from the Progressive Writers’ Movement itself. As ideological divisions deepened after Independence and Partition, many within the movement became uncomfortable with Manto’s refusal to write fiction in service of any political doctrine. His work was too morally ambiguous, too psychologically unsettling, and too resistant to ideological certainty.
His eventual break with the movement revealed a tension that has accompanied socially committed literature ever since. Should literature serve an ideology, or should it remain accountable only to the complexity of human truth?
A Movement Beyond Its Institution
By the latter half of the twentieth century, the Progressive Writers’ Association had largely ceased to function as the influential literary force it once was. Internal political divisions, its close association with Communist Party politics, changing literary aesthetics, and the emergence of new movements gradually diminished its institutional influence.
Yet its deepest ideals survived.
The belief that literature should give voice to the marginalized, question injustice, and bear witness to history did not disappear with the organization. Instead, those principles were absorbed into the work of individual writers who no longer needed manifestos to guide them. Progressive literature ceased to be a movement and became an enduring moral tradition.
Chitra Mudgal and the Continuing Tradition
Among contemporary Hindi writers, Chitra Mudgal stands as one of the clearest heirs to that tradition.
Her landmark novel Āvān, inspired by the Bombay textile mill workers’ movement and written in the aftermath of the assassination of labour leader Shankar Guha Niyogi, explores the lives of workers caught within the forces of industrial change, political struggle, and economic exploitation. It continues Premchand’s belief that literature must remain rooted in the lived experiences of ordinary people.
Her Sahitya Akademi Award-winning novel Post Box No. 203, Naalasopara extends that commitment further by giving literary voice to a transgender child navigating exclusion, prejudice, and social violence. In doing so, Mudgal expanded the scope of progressive literature beyond class struggle to include identities and experiences that earlier generations had rarely addressed.
Her literary career has been accompanied by decades of direct engagement with labour movements and marginalized communities. Like Premchand before her, she writes not from distant observation but from sustained participation in the lives of those whose stories she tells.
The End of an Era, Not an Idea
Every literary movement eventually reaches the limits of its historical moment. The Progressive Writers’ Association belongs to another century, shaped by colonialism, anti-imperial struggle, socialism, and Partition. Its organizational life has effectively come to an end.
Yet the questions it first raised have not disappeared.
Who speaks for the forgotten? Can literature remain indifferent to injustice? Does art merely reflect society, or does it possess the power to challenge it?
Each generation has answered these questions differently. Premchand found the answer in economic and social justice. Manto found it in uncompromising honesty, even when that honesty offended both society and ideology. Chitra Mudgal found it in workers, women, and those living at the margins of modern India.
Today, new generations of writers confront different realities shaped by globalization, digital technology, artificial intelligence, environmental crisis, migration, and changing identities. The subjects have changed, but the responsibility of literature remains remarkably familiar.
Full Circle
The title of this article deliberately plays on the phrase “End of an Era.” Institutions may decline, literary movements may fragment, and manifestos may fade into history. Yet the ethical impulse that animated progressive writing has survived every transformation.
From Premchand’s vision of social realism, through Manto’s uncompromising humanism, to Chitra Mudgal’s contemporary engagement with labour, gender, and exclusion, progressive literature has not disappeared. It has evolved.
The movement may have ended, but its conscience has not.
The future of literature will almost certainly be shaped by new technologies, new readers, and new forms of storytelling. But as long as writers continue to ask whose voices remain unheard and whose suffering remains unseen, the spirit that first filled the hall in Lucknow in 1936 will continue to find new language, new forms, and new storytellers.