Kaifi earned Rs 40 as monthly salary from the party; from this he had to give Rs 30 towards his wife’s boarding expense. To earn some extra money, he wrote a column for the Urdu daily, Jamhuriat (Democracy).10 Partly to lighten the burden on Kaifi and partly in response to P.C. Joshi’s command that ‘the wife of a communist should never sit idle’, Shaukat got drawn into the IPTA.11 Her first role was in Ismat Chughtai’s Dhani Bankein (‘Green Bangles’), a play on the Hindu–Muslim riots that were tearing the fabric of a newly independent India. Here, Shaukat got involved in the country’s most vigorous cultural movement that had the likes of Zohra Segal, Uzra Butt, Bhisham Sahni, Prithviraj Kapoor among its stalwarts.

The IPTA, the PWA and the Bombay film industry were like three interlinked circles, with overlapping memberships and a host of common concerns. Foremost among these was a socially transformative agenda which would fulfil the needs of a fledgling nation. For this they sought inspiration not only from Marxist tomes and ideologues but also from Nehruvian socialism that hailed schools, colleges, dams and factories as the ‘temples of modern India’. Members of IPTA and PWA—some of whom worked in the film industry as actors, directors, scriptwriters, lyricists, technicians, etc.—worked in tandem to produce a radically new set of images, metaphors, vocabulary, even aesthetics that influenced several generations of filmgoers. Their most visible and immediate effect was the introduction of a non-sectarian ethos, one that rose above the narrow confines of caste, creed and religion and worked as balm on a national psyche that had been traumatized by the communal outrages before, after and during the partition.

The hegemonic ideological force of the PWA in Bombay did not dissipate overnight. The coming of Independence saw the departure of many writers to Pakistan, especially Zaheer who was sent by the Communist Party of India (CPI) to set up the communist party in Pakistan. The declaration of Independence as false freedom by the CPI and the increasing ideological commitment demanded by Jafri alienated many. The flock dwindled, many of the progressive journals closed down, Urdu itself shrunk in importance as a lingua franca. Those who remained within the progressives’ fold increasingly found no reason not to respond to Nehru’s call and join the nation-building project. Then, in purely literary terms, there was the rise of another literary movement—the modernist movement—that spoke of the inner life, the life of the mind. The PWA, as it had existed in all its glory and might all through the 1940s, became a shadow of its former self. Having said that, while the Bombay progressives may have weakened as a literary group, their influence continued to be felt for a very long time in the work of the film lyricists. For instance, Kaifi was speaking for an entire generation of progressives when he was writing for films such as Apna Haath Jagannath (1960):