The Flawless Commitment of a “Flawed Progressive:”Krishan Chandar and His Art of Storytelling
Dhurjjati Sarma
DOI https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.13292344
Abstract
The article attempts to undertake a critical–textual study of select short stories and novels of Krishan Chandar (1914–1977), who, along with Sa’adat Hasan Manto, Ismat Chughtai, and Rajinder Singh Bedi, emerged as a major prose writer in Urdu literature during the early to middle decades of the twentieth century. All of them were collectively inspired by the Progressive Writers’ Movement taking place in the 1930s and sought to imbibe the principles of the movement in writing stories and novels that drew attention to the social–political predicaments of the times, and addressed them with a vision towards bringing about radical transformation within an Indian society besieged by the woes of communal violence and religious polarisation. The study will also deal with the major features of Chandar’s writings, particularly his dual engagement with romanticism and progressivism, and how these thought-processes were synthesised within/through his masterful art of storytelling, thereby enabling him to explore the varied dynamics of human character and action in the course of his long writing career spanning over four decades.
Keywords
Krishan Chandar, Urdu literature, Progressivism, short story, novel
Works Cited
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Dr. Dhurjjati Sarma is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Indian Languages and Literary Studies, Gauhati University, Assam. He was educated at the University of Delhi and the English and Foreign Languages University, Shillong Campus. He was a Production Editor at SAGE Publications, New Delhi, and, before that, a Research Fellow in North East India Studies at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), New Delhi. His articles and book reviews have appeared in journals like the GUINEIS Journal, Language and Language Teaching, Indian Literature, English Forum, Indica Today, Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, Dibrugarh University Journal of English Studies (DUJES), Space and Culture India, and Margins: A Journal of Literature and Culture. He has chapters in edited books published by Springer Nature, Sahitya Akademi, Routledge, and Palgrave Macmillan. He is the Assistant Editor of the Delhi Journal of Comparative Studies, published by the Delhi Comparatists, and presently also the Guest Editor of the transcript: An e-Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies, published by the Department of English, Bodoland University, India. He translates between Assamese, English, and Hindi, and his notable works include the Assamese translation of G.N. Devy’s Mahabharata: The Epic and the Nation and the forthcoming Hindi translation of the PLSI Assam Volume. He is presently working on a critical history of Assamese literature.
dhurjjati.sarma@gauhati.ac.in, dhurjjati.sarma@gmail.com
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3808-0152
The Flawless Commitment of a “Flawed Progressive:”Krishan Chandar and His Art of Storytelling by Dhurjjati Sarma is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0 
