ABSTRACT
This chapter is centrally concerned with understanding the ontological preeminence of the imaginal, imaginary, and narrative for mapping out the relegation of urban Muslims through the shifting and/evolving contours of Delhi, as the locus of historical memory, in Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi.1 Ahmed Ali, recipient of the Sitara-i-lmtiaz Award in 1980, is “a Muslim fourth to the Indian big three of the 1930s-Rao, Narayan and Anand” (King, “From Twilight to Midnight” 244). Ali was not only one of the most active participants of the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association in 1936, but also one of the signatories of its rst manifesto of April 5, 1933. However, he broke away from the paradigmatic Marxist stranglehold of the Progressive ideology and pursued the elusive world of individual consciousness in his creative works (Gopal 16-17). In the introduction to Twilight in Delhi, Ali says: “My purpose was to depict a phase of our national life and the decay of a whole culture, a particular mode of thought and living now dead and gone already right before our eyes. Seldom is one allowed to see a pageant of History whirl past and partake in it too” (xxi). Originally rejected by the printers who viewed Twilight in Delhi (henceforth Twilight) as a subversive text, it was eventually published by the Hogarth Press in 1940 after the “friendly” intervention of E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf (Coppola 21-2). The novel chronicles the life of the ashraf or the upper-class Muslim family living in Delhi (India) at the beginning of the twentieth century, who sees its fortunes fading as the British work to eradicate Islamic culture. Ali’s narrative delineates the “relationships between the memorialization of the past and the spatialization of public memory” (Johnson 63) in the postcolonial context of nation-building.
