LEFT CULTURAL MOVEMENT 115
Historical Background
In the 1930's the people of the world were faced with a common enemy—Fascism. Socialists and bourgeois humanists alike joined hands to fight this menace, under the call for a United Front given in 1935 by Dimitrov. India was no exception and intellectuals were seen to organise themselves to form anti-fascist fronts. In 1938 the Students Federation started a movement in Bengal which led to the formation of the Youth Cultural Institution in 1940. This organisation started staging progressive, anti-fascist plays with considerable success. In the meantime, Germany attacked Soviet Union and India had to face a Japanese attack on its eastern frontier. Fascists began attacking intellectuals within the country through the fifth estate — Somen Chanda, a promising young writer, was brutally murdered at Dacca. The need for broad-based unity was seen and the intellectuals organised themselves to form the Anti-Fascist Writers' Association in 1941. The Communist Party of India was always active in these organisations but the need to reach a wider section of the people necessitated the formation of the IPTA.
The early 1940's was an important period in the Indian subcontinent. On the one hand the period ^ittstt^i the teerei^ttg struggles against Imperialism and Fascism and, on the other, it saw the Bengal Famine of 1943. The force of such circumstances, led to a period of fertile cultural activity, rich in progressive content and earmarked by a distinct break from the traditional pattern, both in form and content. The stress on naturalism was by-passed and realistic works made their impact on the cultural scene. This was the first time that the workers' and peasants' conditions were portrayed in literature, plays, paihtings and films. This periad saw the emergence of such writers as Sukanta, Manik Bandopadhyay, Subhas Mukhopadhyay, Samaresh B^su, Narayan Ganguly, and so on. In the realm of music, compositions with a difference were produced by Salil Chaudhuri, Benoy Roy, Hemanga Biswas and others. The famous Calcutta Painters' Association was depicting the stark reality of the times. But the greatest impact was on the peoples' theatre movement with the rearing of such talents as Bijon Bhattacharya, Sambhu Mitra and the like. IPTA's ^Nabanna" ushered in a new era and spearheaded the new direction in which the entire peoples' theatre movement was to move in the forthcoming years. This impact was so tremendous that even films were affected to the extent that film-makers of different parts of the country began to project the conditions of the people in realistic terms. Bimal Rey^s ^Udayer Pathe" (Bengali) and "Do Bigha Zamin" (Hindi), Chetan Anand's "Neecha Mahal" ^nd several films of V Shantaram are notable examples of tins twid. Both Ritwik Ghatak and Mrinal Sen, who later established themselves as socially conscious film-makers, were direct product^ of this movement. The strength of the IPTA lay in the unity of the CPI, as leader, an4 che