Terry Eagleton, one of the leading cultural critics and literary scholars of our times, comments on Irish society in one of his works, saying that literary realism never took root there and the frontier between art and politics was never exact. At times, I find an uncanny resemblance between how Ireland and India were conceptualised, understood, portrayed and treated by the British who had colonised them both. The descriptions of the native Irish and the native Indians, their tribes and customs, work ethic and moral behaviour have palpable similarities. Of course, Eagleton is not included among them because of both the period in which he lives and the ideology he subscribes to. He is British, but a valiant critic of any absolutist views of the world, about ‘us’ and ‘them’.

In contemporary political terms, the Indian subcontinent is now referred to as the South Asian subcontinent to include all the three successor states of British India. Ireland also stands divided between Northern Ireland (part of the United Kingdom) and the independent Republic of Ireland. Not undermining complex historic factors, the division mainly draws its justification from religion — as is the case in our subcontinent. Therefore, just as the frontier between art and politics was never exact in the case of the Irish as Eagleton observes, it was never exact in our case as well.

Living under foreign rule, or oppressive rule of any kind, for long will blur the boundaries between aesthetics and politics. Even before the British, we lived under monarchies where the sovereign’s whims defined the subject’s existence. Or the sheer inequality perpetuated on the basis of caste and class cultivated a deep sense of revulsion and rebellion among a conscious section of our artists and writers. From the Kashmiri disenchantment with Emperor Akbar, to Guru Gobind Singh’s outstanding Persian verses in the Zafarnama challenging and ridiculing Emperor Aurangzeb, to Khushal Khan Khattak who dangled between the pen and the sword, to Jafar Zatalli whose satire brought him to the gallows during King Farrukhsiyar’s era, to Ram Prasad Bismil (hanged) and Maulana Hasrat Mohani (imprisoned) among others during the British Raj, we have continuously blurred the lines between art and politics.

The other part of Eagleton’s observation about Irish society, where he says that literary realism never took root there, may be accepted or contested — other scholars and writers knowing Irish literature would know better. However, it is certainly not true in our case. If I may call it a derivative of literary realism, ie social realism, it took root in our literary ethos and flourished in the middle and later half of the 20th century in the aftermath of the Russian revolution — although a hundred years before that we did produce an avant-garde poet such as Nazeer Akbarabadi who wrote about the tangible, real, familiar and mundane with such outstanding poise and finesse that even today he is celebrated as a major literary realist who makes no compromise on aesthetic appeal. To a large extent, Saadat Hasan Manto, who wrote about the tragedies of Partition with directness but without conceding any artistic merit, is Akbarabadi’s successor in prose.

The 1917 Russian revolution inspired the Progressive Writers’ Movement in the subcontinent which produced social realist works in literature. Undoubtedly, some of the writers were successful in going beyond that ideology. These people also converged the interests of the labour movement with the anti-colonial liberation movement. There is a worthwhile body of literary criticism that keenly identifies the weaknesses and limitations of the works produced by the Progressive writers. But how can we ever forget that, from Faiz Ahmed Faiz to Ali Sardar Jafri in poetry, and from Krishan Chander to Ismat Chughtai in fiction, all were a product of the Progressive Writers’ Movement? Besides, they influenced the themes and concerns of so many others who were not apparently associated with them. Literary realism in its various forms has enriched our writing and consciousness since long.

The writer is a poet and essayist based in Islamabad

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, November 5th, 2017