The significance of the PWM and the Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA), known in Urdu as Anjuman-i Taraqqui Pasand Mussannifin, is uncontested for most commentators on the literary history of India. It succeeded in bringing into its fold established and emerging writers from almost all the important languages in the Indian subcontinent. Virtually from its inception, it succeeded in gaining the attention—and the blessings—of the literary stalwarts of the time. Rabindranath Tagore, Dr Muhammad Iqbal, Maulvi Abdul Haq, Hasrat Mohani, Acharya Narendra Dev, Tara Chand and Sarojini Naidu, while belonging to diverse literary traditions, endorsed the PWM and its objectives. The eminent Hindi writer Premchand addressed the inaugural session of the First All-India Progressive Writers’ Association in Lucknow on 9 April 1936, virtually spelling out its agenda in his presidential speech entitled ‘Sahitya ka Uddeshya’ (‘The Purpose of Literature’).

In the years ahead, some of the greatest Urdu writers came to be associated with it, namely Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Sajjad Zaheer, Ismat Chughtai, Krishan Chandar, Kaifi Azmi, Ali Sardar Jafri among others. The importance of this movement today 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 PWA—and its partner organization, the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA)—from the mid-1930s till the mid-1950s 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.

The movement and its proponents soon became a powerful and inescapable force commandeering a space for themselves on the political, social and literary canvas of India for nearly three decades. In the years before Independence, they influenced the debates on imperialism and decolonization and in the years after they were at the centre of the discourses on the nature of the newly independent, post-colonized state and society. While the PWA was a pan-Indian movement with flourishing branches in all the major Indian cities, Bombay was the beating heart of the PWM, and it was here that the movement flourished and reached its zenith. What the writers in the Bombay branch of the PWA thought or wrote or included in the journals they edited or the many anthologies they published impacted writers across the length and breadth of India. How did this come to be?