Zeno (Safdar Meer explains the undercurrents of Ahmad Ali-one of the pioneers of Progressive Writers Movement ) There are two basic characteristics in his writing that establish his identity as a progressive writer. Firstly, in the formal aspect of his fiction, he appears to be a strict realist who is concerned above all with the social reality of his group [ sic —Eds .] Secondly, in terms of content, he comes off as an astute and unremitting satirical critic of the life of his society who passionately upholds the cause of social change. Both these charac- teristics endure throughout in his writing, indeed till the very end. These twin characteristics of realism and social criticism defined the nature of Urdu progressive writing in its heyday. In western countries, where realism originated in the nineteenth century, it stood for a kind of literary activity aiming at the faithful depiction of the life of the individual in society as it actually was, not as it ought to be, or as it was imagined to be in romances and allegories. The emphasis on the role of literature as a mirror of society next led the nineteenth-century European writers to turn it into an instrument of social criticism. Dickens and Thackeray in England; Balzac, Stendhal and Flaubert in France; and Gogol, Pushkin, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky in Russia depicted the reality of their changing societies with all the ugly features of economic, social and political degradation which characterized them.
Posted on: Mon, 24 Jun 2013 05:27:08 +0000