ABSTRACT
The aim of the PWA, wrote Mulk Raj Anand in Left Review in 1936 was, ‘to rescue the arts from the decadent classes in whose hands they have degenerated, and to bring them into close touch with the peoples of India’. Russian writer Maxim Gorki’s address had a major impact since he was the most celebrated Russian writer. He said the purpose of the new Writers’ Union launched from the Congress was not solely to organise writers into one unified organisation but ‘to define with all possible clarity their varied tendencies, creative activity, guiding principles, and harmoniously to merge all aims in that unity which is guiding all the creative working energies of the country’. The fact that Premchand’s political development and his writings were informed by the trajectory of the nationalist struggle is not widely appreciated. Antonio Gramsci developed an approach similar to that of Trotsky, who had consulted him on the Italian futurists when writing Literature and Revolution.
