'Life is feelings, life is love, life is pain too': A Progressive Reimagination of Lyrical Modernity in the Select Non-Film Works of Sahir Ludhianvi

Starting in the mid-1930s in India and essentially marked by its propensity to rebel against different agents of oppression, the Progressive Writers’ Movement produced writings that were simultaneously humane and disdainful depending on the context. Influenced by Marxism, the literature offered by the movement was, thus, an interweaving of the despair of the oppressed and a critique of the oppressor(s). The movement found its strongest literary manifestation in poetry, and hence, Sahir Ludhianvi, an eminent practitioner of Progressive verses, appears as a voice that intensely presents the void of freedom and the vainness of partition in India. Besides expressing the art of protest, Sahir’s lyrics are also an ardent romantic expression of anguish, resignation, and contempt. Sahir’s poems are, therefore, a direct commentary on the bitterness of human relationships and an emptiness that pervades the relationships. Sahir presents the disturbed narration of modernity with a voice that is concurrently passionate and penetrative. Hence, the present paper is an attempt to explore the intrinsic ideals of Sahir’s poems that remain a proclamation of the Progressive ideology and lyrical modernity.