Though many writers placed themselves in relation to a collective endeavor, the corpus of work I study--from the early rationalist short fiction of Rashid Jahan and the "Angarey" group, to the experimental autobiographical style of Ismat Chughtai, the controversial psychosexual themes engaged by Saadat Hasan Manto and the complex moral visions explored by Bhabhani Bhattacharya--is a fascinatingly heterogeneous one. This heterogeneity reflects the fierce debates about social issues, especially gender and sexual politics, that took place on the emergent national stage. Through close textual analysis of short and long fiction, manifestoes and essays, I show how the varied aesthetic, ideological and ethical orientations among these writers, and the specific ways in which they engaged with realism, can be tracked through the differential gendering of their work. Feminism, I contend, often brought the progressive self-conceptions of such writing to crisis and served to mark the both the potential and the limits of the progressive. www.researchgate.net/publication/34033367_Midnight's_labors_gender_nation_and_narratives_of_social_transformation_in_transitional_India_1932-1954