Socialism and Literature
As mentioned earlier, inter-empire connections conditioned international political movements in the 1920s and 1930s; this included communism. Communist- inspired literature played an important role in anti-imperial literature in the twentieth century, and by its very nature it was transregional and international.
Marx's own writings were peppered with citations and allusions to a range of literary texts in European languages, including Greek and Latin, and he used these to powerful rhetorical and critical effect. He also addressed the issue of the socioeconomic contextualization of literature and the techniques of literary writing.[896] The career of the Indian Marxist M. N. Roy (1887-1954) as an “interstitital thinker” spanning Europe, Latin America, and India, is indicative of the internationalist trajectory of a number of Marxist writers and authors in this period.[897] The Marxist- inspired All India Progressive Writers Association (AIPWA) first met in embryonic form in London in late 1934, electing the novelist Mulk Raj Anand (1905-2004) as its president. The group's manifesto was discussed at this meeting, and subsequent versions appeared in the Hindi literary journal Hans in October 1935 and the Left Review in London in February 1936. A third version was discussed at the first meeting of AIPWA in India in April 1936. A major figure in the development of AIPWA was Syed Sajjad Zaheer (1905-1973) who liaised between the organization and the Communist Party of India. The Left Review version of the manifesto referred to the importance of using “both native and foreign resources” in creating a politically committed Indian literature, and Zaheer described the London phase of the association as valuable because of the connections that were made with progressive literary movements outside India. This internationalist outlook was reflected in the early careers of Zaheer and Anand; the latter had close contacts in the Bloomsbury group and both attended the Paris International Congress for the Defence of Culture, convened in June 1935 against the rise of fascism in Europe. Some of the French members of the organizing committee had strong connections with India or Indians. Anand presented an address at the Second Conference of the International Association of Writers for the Defence of Culture in London in June 1936.[898] Referring to this period of his life, Anand described how[y]oung writers like Aragon, Malraux, Auden, Spender, Lewis and others... were asking themselves [questions] more or less similar to ours in India, and irrespective of race and colour, we shared similar concepts and aspired toward kindred objectives All of us were united... in the faith that we could defend world
heritage from the attacks of the Fascists of Germany, Italy, and Japan, as well as the reactionaries of our own country, and help to build a new healthy civilization on the reserves of enormous potential power for good of human beings.[899]
It was in conversation with Louis Aragon in Paris after this conference that the idea of AIPWA further crystallized in Sajjad Zaheer's mind prior to his departure for India in late 1935.[900]
In Orphan of Asia, Taiming vacillates between identifying with Chinese classical literature and its literati and the rural peasantry. He sees his dilemma as “the common tragedy of all intellectuals” in relation to “the people” of emerging nations.[901] His predicament exemplifies Szemans characterization of the nation as a fluid conceptual and rhetorical space for the articulation of the political dilemmas faced by writers in relation to the production of culture vis a vis “the people.”[902] This predicament was intensified in the case of the AIPWA writers because of their socialist politics. The Conferences in Paris and London foregrounded the question of culture and art in relation to political commitment and opposition to fascism, highlighting the cultural dimensions of imperialism alongside its political and economic aspects, and stressing the need to bring literature close to the “masses.” This was echoed by the AIPWA manifestos, especially in the Left Review version, and writers in the movement reflected on how they might overcome their class origins in creating socialist literature.
This included practical proposals for living and working with peasants and laborers.[903] Similar questions were addressed by Mao Zedong's “Talks at the Yan‘an Forum on Literature and Art” in the 1940s, where the immediate context was resistance to Japanese imperialism and the establishment of a soviet in the Yan‘an countryside controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. In defining a revolutionary art and literature, Mao made practical suggestions regarding how writers were to connect to peasants, workers, and soldiers and how they were to represent them. Like the key figures in AIPWA and in its manifestos, he stressed the need to draw upon the art and literature of other countries, alongside incorporating popular and folk traditions of Chinese art and appropriating the “literary and artistic forms of the past,” infusing them with “new content.”[904] In both India and China, politically committed writers reflected upon, modified, and practiced different forms of socialist realism as propounded by the Union of Soviet Writers and the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party in 1934. The literature of these movements covered a variety of genres and forms, and was an important part of the anti-imperial literature of the twentieth century.
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