Cold War geopolitics directly shaped Pakistan’s literary and political landscape

Evidence

Toor’s book The State of Islam is particularly useful in revealing the dialectic of culture and politics that was present even before 1947. She describes how in the 1930s a left-leaning radicalism emerged among intellectuals on the Subcontinent, influenced by both the anticolonial struggle and revolutionary socialism in Russia. This radicalism resulted in the establishment of the All India Progressive Writers Association, a literary organization with links to communism, whose members included Sajjad Zaheer, Mulk Raj Anand, Muhammad Din Taseer, and the unofficial poet laureate of Pakistan, Faiz Ahmed Faiz. After Partition, some members of this group reconstituted as the All Pakistan Progressive Writers Association, with the aim of using their writing to shape the new nation. However, factionalism and the prevailing anti-Communist atmosphere meant that the group was soon subject to persecution. Toor describes how in a bid to curry favor with the Americans Pakistan banned the Communist Party in 1954 and signed the Mutual Defense and Assistance Pact with the United States. To combat left-leaning intellectuals, a Pakistani branch of the Congress for Cultural Freedom was set up with the backing of the CIA as part of that attempted cultural rollback of the Cold War years that resulted elsewhere in the establishment of CIA-funded magazines such as Encounter and the Partisan Review. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 391

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the CIA-funded Encounter and Partisan Review, which ties to broader Cold War cultural-front history and to Naqvi’s diasporic context where geopolitics presses on fiction.