Ahmed Ali and the Art of Languishing

Ahmed Ali's 1940 novel, Twilight in Delhi, is strangely committed to passivity, given the writer's pioneering affiliation with the All-India Progressive Writers' Association (PWA). Instead of representing activist struggle, the novel depicts the death of a culture and its lingering afterlife, ironically via the English language and literary form. While there is no doubting the novel's opposition to empire, it embraces passivity as a formal challenge to the ideological demands of the PWA from which Ali broke in 1938. Indeed, Twilight in Delhi places itself in the tradition of the modernist novel by rethinking the role of character--the novel treats its characters with some indifference--and by suggesting alternate temporalities to those that govern historical time. I argue here that a flattened present tense competes with historical memory in order to emphasize the idea of afterlife, or what critics have called Nachleben, and consider two fragile cultural forms that linger even after their extinction: Urdu poetry, especially the ghazal form, and the ancient art of pigeon-keeping. In the end, the novel aligns itself with the vanquished and vulnerable and submits to an English form that will, paradoxically, ensure their survival.