subcontinent. As a result, In Custody may be read as a satirical coda to Twilight in Delhi and an index of how English has gone from dominator to the mediator of other Indian languages in the postcolonial era.
TWILIGHT IN DELHI
Twilight in Delhi was originally written in English by a writer who usually wrote in Urdu, and critics have rightly pointed to the Urdu rhythm of Ali's English.8 Ali made an explicit decision to write the novel in English in order to reach a wider audience outside of India. He writes that he saw the broadcasting of the loss of Urdu culture as a “cause” that “deserved a world-wide audience” and feared that “if presented in Urdu, it would die down within a narrow belt rimmed by Northwest India.”9 In the historical frame of 1930s India, writing in English is quite literally strategic. Ali admits that he must disavow Urdu in order to highlight Urdu, a move that may appear to us today as a classic postcolonial maneuver. His novel writing begins with self-consciousness about the very language in which he chooses to write. And yet, while there is a certain utility in his decision to write in English, his use of the language also leaves a deep literary impression: it marks the very death of Urdu in Delhi that it laments. Ali writes in English in order to “write back to Empire,” but it is a lonely, isolated voice, far from Rushdie's triumphant literary arrival in 1980s Britain.
Twilight in Delhi chronicles the decline of Urdu culture in the face of colonial infringements on city space and lifestyles. The novel is an elegy to a Muslim cultural sensibility that by the early twentieth century is inextricably linked to the Urdu language but must now adapt to the new spaces of British-inspired rationality. In this adaptation, as Ali poignantly renders it, Dilliwallahs become subject to the built environment of colonial India.10
The novel is set in 1911, two years after the British shifted the colonial capital from Calcutta to Delhi. It should be emphasized that until the early twentieth century the core and political heart of Delhi had always been Old Delhi, the Old City, or Shahjahanabad, as it is still sometimes called. The British reorganization of Delhi, then, is seen as both an assault and containment of this core of the city and the culture within it, both of which over time will become increasingly peripheral.
At the start of the novel British authorities are implementing a number of changes to the urban landscape and infrastructure: the removal of native trees, the widening of streets into boulevards, new sewage systems. Changes in urban form are accompanied by the pomp and circumstance of the public coronation of George V and the grand architectural constructions of what will come to be called New Delhi. In the opening paragraphs of the novel, the narrator chronicles the broad sweeps of history that have come to roost in the city, in grandiose phrases such as, “It was the city of kings and monarchs, of poets and story tellers, courtiers and nobles. But no king lives there today, and the poets are feeling the lack of patronage; and the old inhabitants, though still alive, have lost their pride and grandeur under a foreign yoke.”11The narrator emphasizes that these alterations to the city's landscape have changed not only the way people live but also the way they feel. The narrator dwells on what was, but even more powerfully, the tone of the novel is such that the reader continually feels as if something is still being taken away. Lament is not a leftover sentiment but something that seeps from the cracks in the soon to be demolished city walls.
These descriptions of early-twentieth-century Delhi are paralleled with flashbacks to the humiliations that Muslims experienced at the hands of the British in the 1857 Mutiny and the First War of Indian Independence. The narrator creates a continuum between these two historical moments to fashion his contemporary despair. But most significantly, Ali creates a narrative of Indian history in English to be “broadcast” beyond the borders of his Urdu-speaking world. The lament begins in 1857 and is literally cemented when the British create a new colonial capital that will be New Delhi. Old Delhi, meanwhile, is home to the historic Muslim quarters of the city, especially in the adjoining by-lanes of the Jama Masjid. This religious containment is mirrored in the Urdu language. Urdu represents a lifestyle through which a cultivated Muslim sensibility is lived. The loss of language as lived in the city is the loss of an entire world.
Ali contrasts the public events and changes to the city with the private world of his protagonist, Mir Nihal, an aging, pigeon-flying, china-collecting Muslim patriarch, “an aristocrat in his habits.”12 As the colonial power intrudes in the city's alleyways and by-lanes, Mir Nihal's life and spirit are in a state of decline and degeneration. In one passage the narrator describes the alleyways of the old city as “tortuous and winding, growing narrower like the road of life” and terminating “at the house of Mir Nihal.”13 Mir Nihal's beloved city is literally closing in on him. He must accept that it is not only a new world that he is no longer part of, but as the narrator describes it, it is a “unity of experience and form” that no longer exists for him.14 This breakage in the unity of experience and form is paralleled in the form of the novel itself, as Ali renders an Urdu idiom of life in English. While others around him—even members of his own family—adapt and even embrace these changes, Mir Nihal suffers a cultural paralysis that is mirrored by a real paralytic stroke by the novel's end.
Priya Joshi has argued that what prompted Ahmed Ali to write Twilight in Delhi was that he had become (and his protagonist Mir Nihal by proxy) an “exile at home,” a foreigner in his own land.15 But it might be more accurate to characterize Mir Nihal as dislocated since his tragedy is precisely that there is no possibility of return and no new place to go to. His dislocation goes beyond the colonizing presence of the British; it is indicative of a sea of cultural changes that are occurring within his own family and in his own neighborhood. Further, this dislocation is a mirroring of the linguistic dislocation in the city itself. It comes at a time when the political distinctions and agendas of Hindus and Muslims under colonial rule have grown, and the shared north Indian language of Hindustani has split into a Sanskritized Hindi and Persianized Urdu.16 Even if Urdu becomes the language of Pakistan (as it does), the strongest Urdu-language communities in Delhi, Lucknow, and Hyderabad, will unravel but not be able to be reconstituted else-where.17 It is both the city and its language that make the cultural distinctiveness of Urdu life.
In narrative terms, the loss of Urdu culture and its replacement by a crass modernity introduced by the English and their language is most powerfully relayed as a classic generational struggle between father and son. Mir Nihal is increasingly alienated from his son, Asghar, and is resentful of his habits and ways, everything from the English boots his son wears—”You are again wearing those dirty English boots! I don't like them. I will have no aping of the Farangis in my house. Throw them away!”18—to his son's fervent desire for a love marriage. When, three quarters of the way into the novel, Asghar finally succeeds in marrying Bilqeece, with whom he has been obsessed from the start, the sad disconnect between the newly wed couple epitomizes the kind of emotional disjuncture with which Ali is preoccupied. The narrator explains:
Sometimes when they were alone, Ashgar would put his hand round her waist, but this annoyed Bilqeece. She did not say anything to Asghar, but she felt constrained, and would become silent.
‘Why are you so quiet?’ Asghar would ask her.
She would sit gazing in front of her and say:
‘I do not know what to say.’
He would have liked to hear her talk of love and happiness, her voice flowing like a sweet murmuring stream, talking of sad and beautiful things. He wanted her to kiss him and caress him, put her arms around his neck and whisper: ‘I love you, I love you…’
…
Now and then Bilqeece looked at him with beautiful, furtive eyes. At such moments Asghar loved her more than anything in the world, and smothered her with kisses. But she was not romantic at all. This damped Asghar's feelings. He thought of his Mushtari Bai and other sweethearts. He remembered the warmth
