the new age justifying a new language, of the individual's isolation and the writer's alienation, were debated like issues in an election. Things have settled down now, partly because the reader has gotten used to the new writer's idiom. The Progressives too have admitted into their realm of discourse questions about the value of metaphor, symbol, individual expression. Muhammad Hasan, a latter-day Progressive, hastened to write a paper entitled "Saccf JadTdiyat—NaT TaraqqT-pasandF [True Modernism, the New Progressivism] (1971). Wahid Akhtar, regarded by many as a Modernist and by many others as a Progressive, wrote that Modernism was really an extension of Progressivism
Ironically, while there has been some softening in the Modernists' attitude in recent years, the Progressives—whatever of them are left—have shown a touch of their old, hard stance. They have tried to woo the writers of the eighties—without conspicuous success, so far Fiction writers have engaged their benign interest more than poets. Perhaps because fiction unavoidably reveals overt social concerns—concerns which can, hopefully, by interpreted as Progressive In a democratic age, when everyone regards himself as superior to the rest, many new fiction writers do not seem to have resented or resisted the Progressives' blandishments. But then, Modernism never set itself up as the sole custodian of literary appraisal. In fact, it has always stood against the kind of hegemony which the Progressive movement had tried to establish in Urdu literature.
Writing in the last days of 1985, I am conscious that Modernism is now a quarter of a century old, more or less. Eliot once said that in literature there is a change of generation every twenty years or so. The Progressive movement didn't properly survive its twenty-fifth year, either Will a new Modernism now emerge7 I hope so In the last years of the nineteenth century we were shown our darkened and distorted image in a Western-style mirror Will the ghost in the mirror ever be fully exorcised9 I wonder
Annual Of Urdu Studies, #6 54