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I wish to begin with two truisms: one, from the 1930s right up till the mid1950s the Progressives were a force to reckon with; and two, while a 'progressive' in every sense of the word for various literary as well as personal reasons, Manto could not ever fully belong to this powerful literary grouping.
The significance of the Progressive Writers' Movement (PWM) is uncontested for most commentators on the literary history of India. Its importance lies not merely in the intrinsic merits of the writers associated with it or their individual works; it lies instead in the role played by the Progressive Writers' Association (PWA) - and, from 1943 onwards, its partner organisation, the Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA) - in shaping the political consciousness of large numbers of people, in its unequivocal emphasis on the need for social change, and in the relentless portrayal of these twin forces in their literature and, by extension, in all forms of art and popular culture, radio and films. The PWM and its proponents were a powerful and inescapable force commandeering a space for themselves on the political, social and literary canvas of India for nearly three decades. With time, certain other preoccupations began to come to the forefront: inequality among the sexes, social injustices, oppression by the powerful, and the latent capacity of the ordinary people to be agents of change and renewal. The Progressives' strength, and real contribution, lay in their ability to find common cause with a host of related issues, such as feminism, secularism, anti-imperialism, anti-fascism and, most importantly, nationalism.1 In the years before independence, they influenced the debates on imperialism and decolonisation, and in the years after, they were at the centre of the discourses on the nature of the newly independent, post-colonial State and society.
Equally, the presence of 'progressivism' in the works of Saadat Hasan Manto cannot be contested. The bulk of his oeuvre - comprising twenty-two collections of short stories, one novel, five (seven, according to some) collections of radio plays, three collections of essays and two collections of sketches of famous personalities - bears ample testimony to his belief in socially engaged literature. What has been contested - both by the Progressives and Manto himself - was whether...