The act of writing is fundamentally about the arrangement of words in a certain order to convey a meaning. Writing itself is a creative process but all writing is not considered creative by most. It has many forms.
Let us take the example of technical writing. Technical manuals are documents that explain how each and every machine works — from basic tools like the fulcrum and inclined plane to precision engineering objects such as microchips and rocket controls. A technical manual requires the highest ability of knowing the subject and then writing about it. But every instruction contained in a technical manual has one single meaning. It can never be imprecise.
There can be many other examples of the different forms of writing but let us look at journalism. In journalism, both its broad contours and basic standards have been pretty much defined over the last few centuries. Every serious reader, leave alone a competent editor or sub-editor, knows what a good news report or a decent commentary based on a news item should look like, and how it should be presented.
The news has to be comprehensive and correct and the commentary or feature is expected to take into account all major aspects of the issue being investigated and argued about. Columns or opinion pieces may be considered somewhat different than news or features, but they are also written within a certain framework.
When it comes to art’s relationship with power, history is replete with instances where artists have sucked up to power. However, there has always also been a resistance to power in various shapes and forms from the earliest of times. That resistance has not only created noteworthy pieces but some of the best pieces of art.
In literature, the questions of what we write, how we write and who we write for remain unresolved. There are scores of theories propounded and debated over millennia to understand what literature is about and what purpose it serves. Besides, the forms, standards, aesthetics and sensibilities change with age, social transformation, languages and cultures, and development in other disciplines — particularly philosophy and physics.
Coming closer to our age, from the 19th century to the present times, we have seen many literary movements and types of writing broadly categorised under romanticism, realism, modernism, symbolism, surrealism, existentialism, social realism, magical realism and postmodernism etc. Although most of the literary theory in the past few centuries has developed in the West, it is not just limited to Western critics and theorists. Critics and writers in other parts of the world also borrow these categories in order to appreciate their own bodies of literature.
The writings of post-colonial and anti-imperialist authors are also analysed within both broad and narrow classifications developed largely by the Western academia and literary theorists. This approach presents enormous challenges — ranging from a lop-sided sensibility and the divide between the Occident and the Orient to the difference between what is local and what is universal to a colonial and neo-colonial gaze. Nevertheless, it remains the dominant way of understanding literature.
Art, including literature, has a wide embrace. It includes all facets of human life and experience — from appreciating and understanding the beauties and bounties offered by Mother Nature to the calamities it brings upon human existence; from the love and romance felt by individuals
to chronicling the human and existential suffering experienced in society, economy, history and polity of a people or globally.
When it comes to art’s relationship with power, history is replete with instances where artists have sucked up to power. However, there has always also been a resistance to power in various shapes and forms from the earliest of times. That resistance has not only created noteworthy pieces but some of the best pieces of art. These forms of art and literary expression subvert power and authority in the political realm and conformity and homogeneity in the social realm.
With her clear statement on why and who one should write for, Sasha Javed Malik — a journalist and teacher of literature at a university in Lahore — has recently published an article critiquing the elite capture of literary spaces in Pakistan, from conferences and festivals to the literary analysis and the literary discourse generated by university departments. Malik has argued in favour of the same position that the Progressive Writers Movement in our Subcontinent held since 1936 and reiterated from time to time since, in both India and Pakistan.
While I understand where Malik is coming from and partly agree with the thrust of her desire to see literature serve the cause of the working class and downtrodden and pave the way for a progressive social change, I believe that it is not that simple. Politics and art are related but are not the same. Malik, perhaps, needs to revisit her understanding of the role literature has played and can play with more nuance.
Malik is absolutely right in saying that speaking truth to power for all writers is essential. But how it is manifested in literature is different from mere sloganeering. Literature opens up new vistas of emotions and imagination. It makes people think differently, feel differently. It changes their consciousness, but it does not bring about a change. A real, tangible change comes through a political process.
Sharing the same political ideals as Malik I still do not wish to see good literature being defined as a purposeful political manifesto. It isn’t. Writing goes beyond the desires of a political worker — even if the writer agrees with her/his politics.
