Socialism, Anti-Communism, and the Cold War: Vijay Dev Narayan Sahi and the Politics of Postcolonial Hindi Literature

Abstract

The role of the communist movement in bringing about a vibrant force of literary and aesthetic radicalism at the cusp of India’s decolonization has been widely explored by historians and literary scholars. What has received less attention is the place of the non-communist left—the socialists, more precisely—in the literary milieu of late colonial and early postcolonial India, partly due to the limited influence of the socialists in the literary-cultural field as compared to the widespread “Marxist cultural movement” led by the CPI. Yet, the intellectual history of post-independence India—and of the postcolonial Hindi literary world, in particular—remains incomplete without taking into account the inter-animation of political and cultural discourse in which the socialists had a considerable part to play, especially in the heyday of the global “cultural Cold War.” With this in view, this paper will examine the works of the socialist intellectual and Hindi poet Vijay Dev Narayan Sahi (1924–1982) against the backdrop of the ideological fault lines that ran through the Hindi literary field in the 1950s and 60s and shaped the discourse of the various “new poetry” and “new story” movements that emerged and crystalized during this time. A strong advocate of democratic socialism, Sahi was also a vocal critic of communist politics, especially in its post-war, “left-sectarian” Stalinist avatar, and used this vantage point to polemicize against the doctrine of “partisan aesthetics” as championed by the Marxist progressives and to expound alternative modes of literary discourse and practice ostensibly grounded on democratic ideals and principles. This paper will look at Sahi’s polemical writings and intellectual legacy in the light of his socialist politics and in the larger context of the trajectory of socialism in Nehruvian India.