Art for Life: Conversations with the Progressive Writers Movement: On Pens, Swords and Internationalism from Antifascism to Afro-Asian Solidarity

When South Asian leftist intellectuals launched the manifesto of the Progressive Writers Association in London in the mid 1930s, their goal was to harness literature as a tool of social change.

They were fighting not only British colonial rule but internal modes of exploitation and oppression. Their field of vision was global, with a multidimensional analysis of empire, capitalism and race. In the 1930s-40s they linked their liberation struggle to the cultural front against world fascism, a...