Why we named the company 1936

People ask about the name all the time. Is 1936 a founding year? A street number? A lucky number? It's none of those. Why 1936 is a short story about a room in Lucknow, a group of writers, and an idea we keep coming back to when we build software.

April 1936, Lucknow

On 9 and 10 April 1936, a group of writers met in Lucknow for the first conference of the All-India Progressive Writers' Association. Munshi Premchand, by then one of the most loved writers in Hindi and Urdu, presided.

The group had first come together a year earlier in London. Indian students and writers there, including Mulk Raj Anand and Sajjad Zaheer, wrote a manifesto. It said, in short, that Indian writing should face real life: hunger, poverty, backwardness, the lack of freedom. It should help people think, not lull them.

By the time they met in Lucknow, that idea had a home in India.

What Premchand said

Premchand's address that April is still read today. One line has stayed with me: "language is a means, not an end."

He was talking to writers. He meant that beautiful words aren't the point. The point is what the words do for the person reading them. Writing should help people see their own lives more clearly, and push towards something better.

It's an old idea, said plainly, in a city I know well. And it turns out to be a very good test for software.

Why a writers' conference names a software company

We build tools for the work nobody starts a company to do. Data rooms for a fundraise. Hiring, leave and attendance. Books, GST, TDS and payroll.

This is unglamorous work. It is also where founders lose their evenings. A data room that investors can't make sense of. A hundred CVs nobody has read. A month-end that drags to the 25th. A GST notice because one return slipped.

A lot of business software treats this work as something to decorate. More dashboards. More features. More words on the screen.

We'd rather follow Premchand. The software is a means, not an end. It's there so that a founder closes the laptop at seven, so an HR lead doesn't spend Monday chasing leave requests on WhatsApp, so a finance lead closes the books by the 5th.

Three things we take from 1936

Plain. The writers of 1936 wanted to be understood by ordinary readers. We want our products understood by a founder who has never taken an accounting course. That means short words, clear screens and no jargon. If our help pages need a glossary, we've failed.

Useful. The manifesto asked writers to deal with real problems. Every feature we build has to take a real job off someone's plate. Not a demo. A job. If it doesn't, it doesn't ship. You can read more about how we test that in what broke when we ran our own company on these tools.

For everyone. Progressive writing was meant for the many, not a small circle. Good back-office software has mostly been built for big companies with big finance teams. We want a ten-person startup in Indore to have tools as good as a thousand-person company in Bengaluru, at a price that makes sense for ten people.

What the name is not

It isn't a claim that we're writers, or that software is literature. It isn't a political statement. The movement had its own arguments and its own history, and we don't pretend to carry any of that.

It's simpler than that. 1936 is a reminder, pinned to the top of every page we make, of what good work looks like: plain, useful and for everyone.

Why it matters to us

I grew up in Lucknow. The city has a long memory for words, and the story of that April conference is part of it. When we needed a name for a company that builds quiet tools for hard-working people, a year when writers in Lucknow decided their work should serve ordinary lives felt right.

Every time we argue about a screen, a feature or a sentence on the website, someone eventually asks the 1936 question: does this help the person using it, or does it just look good? It settles more arguments than you'd think.

The name also keeps us honest about tone. Our website, our product screens and even our error messages are written to be read by a busy person on a phone, not by a committee. When a sentence starts to sound important rather than helpful, we rewrite it. Premchand wanted writing that ordinary readers could use. We want software that ordinary teams can use on a Tuesday afternoon without a manual.

That's why we're called 1936. And that's why the "AI" part comes second. The AI is there to do the slow work, so people can do theirs. If you want to see how we draw that line, read how we use AI, and where a person always decides.

Questions people ask

Why is the company called 1936 AI?

The name comes from April 1936, when the first All-India Progressive Writers' conference met in Lucknow with Premchand presiding. The writers wanted work that was plain, useful and for ordinary people. We try to build software the same way, for the people who actually do a company's paperwork.

What was the Progressive Writers' Movement?

A group of Indian writers who first organised in London in 1935 and held their first all-India conference in Lucknow on 9 and 10 April 1936. They believed literature should deal with real life, including hunger, poverty and injustice, rather than only beauty or escape.

Who presided over the 1936 Lucknow conference?

Munshi Premchand, one of the best-loved writers in Hindi and Urdu, presided over the first conference in Lucknow in April 1936 and gave the presidential address. He died later that year, in October 1936.

Sources

• Progressive Writers' Association, Making Britain, The Open University (opens in a new tab)
• Premchand, The Nature and Purpose of Literature, presidential address at the first All India Progressive Writers' Conference, Lucknow, 10 April 1936, Social Scientist (opens in a new tab)
• Premchand, Encyclopaedia Britannica (opens in a new tab)