official organ of the Progressive Writers' Movement, Hans was nonetheless the leading literary journal around which "progressive" Hindi writers congregated, and in the pages of which these writers and their ideological concerns and controversies found expression. It is perhaps too early for the consensus of posterity to have emerged regarding what is most durable and significant in the literature of this period. Even so, I am conscious that I have not drawn upon what might be described as "high" literature in developing my account of the Hindi literature of this period. Indeed, I am not certain that the notion of "high" literature — an authoritative "canon", so to speak — is not itself too problematic to be used quite innocently. The processes whereby certain writers and works acquire a canonical status themselves need to be regarded with a degree of scepticism. However, my justification for examining in some detail the mixed, uneven contents of a monthly journal is simply that through doing so it might be better possible to approximate to the contours of one area of contemporary consciousness, observe the mental landscape of the period before it has been "landscaped" by its inheritors, savour the texture of the past before it has been altered to suit our-present preferences. There is, however, a paradox in using as one's sample for such an exercise the work of the most avowedly socially conscious group of writers. On the one hand, it was the chosen business of these writers to be aware of the changes that were happening in the history of their time, and so it is here that one may expect to find reflections of what was immediately topical, to find imaginative distillations of the specificity of these years. On the other hand, such a self-conscious social sensitivity went hand in hand with particular, ordered interpretations of the changing reality. As such, someone who wishes to get to the undifferentiated texture of contemporary consciousness might well be tempted to look at less "ideological" sources, such as popular and even "sub-literary" genres. Finally, in addition to the prose — mainly fictional — writings in Hans, I have also drawn upon a rather random sample of writing on the Partition, produced around the time of the traumatic event itself. The "objective" conditions which determined the literary consciousness of these years may be described as consisting of several counterpointing double movements. There is, for one, the exhilaration at the end of the war for freedom and democracy with its counterpoint in the Indian despair at the return of the status quo ante, a condition of colonial subjugation. Underlying this, and gradually becoming stronger as the weeks and months unfold, there is, internationally, the deepening Cold War with its corresponding gloomy hysteria, and, within India, the gathering slow wave of an increasingly imminent Independence. Finally, and perhaps most crucially, there is the paradoxical and ironical and ultimately tragic process whereby, in the words of one historian, 'a "peaceful" transfer ofpowerwas purchased at the cost of Partition and a communal holocaust.91 Not surprisingly, therefore, in early 1945, as the war draws to a close the mood seems to be somewhat of a lull, a muddle, a pause before new theoretical orientations, new responses can be worked out. Elements of this mood persist throughout the period under review — not remembered, or perceived at the time, 20 January-March 1984