The Flawless Commitment of a "Flawed Progressive:"Krishan Chandar and His Art of Storytelling

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.