Research Journal of English Language and Literature (RJELAL) A Peer Reviewed (Refereed) International Journal http://www.rjelal.com Vol.3.Issue 4.2015 (Oct-Dec) 498 GHULAM MOHAMMAD KHAN EXPERIMENTS IN FORM AND CONTENT: APPROXIMATING INDIAN PROGRESSIVE WRITING IN CONTEMPORARY LITERARY DISCOURSE GHULAM MOHAMMAD KHAN Research Scholar Department of English and Foreign Languages Central University of Haryana ABSTRACT Given the unprecedented intellectual and critical activity in the field of literary and cultural studies, theorists, creative writers and public intellectuals have grown conscious of the arbitrariness and fluidity of the ideological and epistemological structures at work in the theory industry. The form as well content of modern literary texts come under the influence of these structures or thought processes in one way or the other. In these literary and theoretical complexities, there is a possibility of exploring and re-reading the great oeuvre of Progressive Writings. This paper will study, how certain literary and ideological experiments employed by various Progressive writers are still as relevant as they were in late 1930’s and early 1940’s, when the movement was at its peak. Progressive writers’ departure from the ponderous romantic and imaginative ebullience and formal and lexical intricacies of the nineteenth and early twentieth century poets and fiction writers and embracing a new pattern of both form and content are still very relevant and authentic issues in the field of literary studies. Though this writers’ association disintegrated and finally demised after the Independence, the writers of this association had already invested an unparallel effort to turn literature into a vehicle of social realism. Keywords: Progressive Writing, Literature, Movement, Ideology, Criticism, Condition, Form and Content. ©KY PUBLICATIONS INTRODUCTION In his presidential address to the Progressive Writers’ Movement’s (PWM) first congress held in 1936, Munshi Premchand defined the objectives and the whole enterprise of the Movement as an omnium gatherum of intellectual efforts set to produce an oeuvre of literature, the high point of which would be the common man, the suppressed, or those who have been rendered voiceless by the harsh disciplinary mechanism of the imperial regime. Premchand maintained that the literature will meet our demand which has thought, passion for freedom, beauty, a constructive spirit, the light of life’s realities; that moves, creates a turmoil and turbulence, makes us restless, does not put us to sleep since it would be akin to death if we sleep more (Anwar). The objectives of the Movement, though the political turbulence of the time and the gathering storm of public discontent against the imperial rule intermittently occluded the Movement’s march forward, were creatively devised to establish a powerful literary canon that RESEARCH ARTICLE