The Meanings, Forms and Exercise of ‘Freedom’ : The Indian PEN and the Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom (1930s-1960s) Chapitre d’ouvrage - Février 2022

Abstract : This chapter excavates the history of the Indian PEN and the Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom in order to restore the political and cultural significance of these two relatively neglected organizations, and recover the lineage of liberalism both for anti-colonial and postcolonial struggles, and for an understanding of modernisms in India. Struggles over the implications, the ownership and the boundaries of ‘freedom’ from the Freedom struggle to the Cold War, were also waged over the meanings and forms of ‘modernism’. Drawing on figures difficult to pigeonhole in clear-cut ideological or cultural categories (Nissim Ezekiel, Sophia Wadia, Jayaprakash Narayan, or J S Saxena), and on the publications of the Indian PEN and the ICCF, I discuss the ways by which many writers teased out the varied meanings and forms of ‘freedom’. The ‘essay’, which Adorno has defined as the experimental and the critical form par excellence, was one of the privileged mediums through which they staged these struggles, but also championed ‘freedom’ against its many (local and international) opponents, exercised their independence, and cultivated their individuality. Struggles for creative and critical freedom and for political freedom were inseparable, and writers associated with the PEN and the ICCF were in different ways carving out spaces/voices of self-determination. In their struggles against forces of authoritarianism, and their conviction that ‘cultural regression links up to political reaction’ (Ezekiel), they also foreshadowed the struggles many writers face in India today.