ways. By contrast Bilqeece looked so dull and insipid. But she was young and beautiful; and Asghar had built most beautiful castles around her lovely frame.19
As English sensibilities trump Urdu ones, and in the novel's triumph over poetry, Ali seems to be saying, love will be domesticated. It is not a simple question of love becoming an exclusive part of so-called private space but rather that the male gaze turns inward to a love unconnected to the city itself. The imposition of new ways of thinking and being (or, importantly, in the case of Asghar, the yearning for and grasping of those new ways) begins a process of shifting social norms. Ashgar puts his modern desires and expectations onto his new, unsuspecting bride. For Ali, English is the language of his text, but it is also a sign of the intrusions of a Westernized, English sensibility. The mounting tragedy of the novel is that Mir Nihal continually refuses the possibility that he can find a place in this changed world. For him, there is no possibility of a dual cultural consciousness, a world of Urdu and English. But even the younger Asghar, in his grasping of English ways, is stymied in his modernistic impulses. He does not become at home in a new world but instead is completely lost (though not destroyed, like his father) by the end of the novel.
IN CUSTODY
At least three historical developments separate the writing of Twilight in Delhi and In Custody. After the partition of India and Pakistan, Urdu became the national language of Pakistan and hence acquired a nationalistic association for the first time in its own history. This association not only symbolically “consolidated” the newly formed Pakistani nation, with its own host of competing regional languages (Bengali, Punjabi, Sindhi, Balochi, Pashto), but also made official the perception of Urdu as being the language of Muslims. Meanwhile Indian cities like Delhi, Lucknow, and Hyderabad, once centers of Muslim culture and Urdu poetry, lost large sections of their Muslim populations who migrated to Pakistan or were killed in the violence of the partition itself. At the same time, Hindi, though the most widely spoken Indian language, was rejected as the Indian national language (mostly by southern India) despite its majority status. In what could be seen as a sad linguistic farce, Hindi and Urdu, once spoken as a lingua franca of north India in the form of Hindustani, were delinked to represent two nations with two national languages (Hindi and Urdu) that did not adequately represent the people in whose name they were created.20
By this time, English had become a sign of bourgeois India and middle-class aspiration, symbolized not only by the urban conglomerate of government, higher education, and commerce but also by such popular publications as the Illustrated Weekly of India, scholarly publications by Indian intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s, and the burgeoning canon of Indian English literary texts themselves. That there is and will be cultural production in English became a given, and its contestation became part and parcel of local and regional struggles, with little or no reference to empire. These major sociological shifts created a new linguistic and political culture in the city of Delhi, and In Custody reflects some of those changes.
In Desai's novel, and as distinct from Ali's, English is no longer a sign of Westernization but instead mediates an internal Indian discourse. If Ali's lament of Urdu is focused on the imposition of English modernity, in Desai's satirical portrait, Urdu culture has already become a relic. We may detect farce even in the setup of Desai's novel, which tells the story of Deven, a glum, small-town Hindi lecturer whose real and perhaps sole passion is Urdu poetry. Part of the satiric power of In Custody is that it is a hapless Hindi lecturer who goes to interview and record the poetic utterances of one of the last great living Urdu poets, called Nur. Deven is slight and unsure of himself; the narrator tells us that Deven's early life experience had taught him how to get by: “to lie low and remain invisible.”21 The title of the novel refers to Deven's quest to have Nur's poems in his custody, for safekeeping and for the possible revival of the Urdu poetic tradition. As in Twilight in Delhi, the demise of one literary form (poetry) is being told through another (the novel). However, Desai's novel relies on a different spatial order to do so. Where Ali brings to life the public and private spaces of Old Delhi, Desai highlights the space between Old Delhi (seeped in culture) and the new hinterlands of Delhi (devoid of culture). Where Urdu culture was symbolized as being on the decline in Ali's Delhi, in Desai's Delhi it is a nearly dead literary presence. In this regard, her novel is also a post-partition view of the state of literary language in Old Delhi; but, unlike Ali's novel, it illuminates the space of Hindi as much as Urdu. So for instance, Murad, a buffoon-like character in the novel who has started up an Urdu literary journal says, “Someone has to keep alive the glorious tradition of Urdu literature. If we do not do it, at whatever cost, how will it survive in this era of—that vegetarian monster, Hindi?…That language of peasants…raised on radishes and potatoes.”22
The notion of cultural refinement is central to both novels, but Desai's novel views Delhi from the provinces and structures the relationship between Hindi and Urdu accordingly. The spatial ordering of Hindi, Urdu, and English is not dependent on a distinction between public and private space, as it is in Twilight in Delhi. Instead, it is reflective of an urban-provincial divide. It is a moment in which English takes the place of Urdu as the language of urban sophistication. Mir Nihal views Delhi as the center of his world, and as the city changes, he becomes emotionally dislocated. For Deven, Delhi is the locus of his desires, which from beginning to end is always just beyond his reach. The space of the “countryside” is never the site of action but a space that Deven must traverse in order to travel to and from Delhi, as the narrator describes:
Of course the stretch of land between Mirpore and the capital was so short that there was no really rural scenery—most of the fields looked withered and desolate, and tin smokestacks exhaling enormous quantities of very black and foul-smelling smoke, sugar-cane crushing works, cement factories, brick kilns, motor repair workshops and the attendant teashops and bus-stops were strung along the highway on both sides, overtaking what might once have been a pleasant agricultural aspect and obliterating it with all the litter and paraphernalia and effluent of industry: concrete, zinc, smoke, pollutants, decay and destruction from which emerged, reportedly, progress and prosperity.23
In this passage, the bucolic ideal is unmasked for the industrial wasteland it has become. And yet country and city are tied by this space, or perhaps tied up by it.
What is the “really rural scenery” that Deven expects and hopes for? Would that landscape redeem his position as a small-town Hindi lecturer? Would it perhaps make his spatial positioning more palatable if he were surrounded by something “really rural”? The narrator continues to probe Deven's spatial past:
As a student he had known the countryside only as a background for an occasional picnic with his friends: they had gone out into it on their bicycles, bought sugar cane from some surly farmer and sat in the shade of a ruined monument to chew it and sing songs from the latest cinema show and talk lewdly of cinema actresses. That countryside had had no more connection with the landscape celebrated in the poetry he read than the present one. Then, after he graduated and married and came to Mirpore to teach, it became for him the impassable desert that lay between him and the capital with its lost treasures of friendship, entertainment, attractions and opportunities. It turned into that strip of no-man's land that lies around a prison, threatening in its desolation.24
In this passage, Deven has discovered the despoilment of the space that Hindi was meant to occupy in his ordering of the landscape. But this spatial setup is further betrayed, since Delhi itself only disappoints. It continually offers Deven the possibilities of poetic exaltation, of cultural renewal amid decay, but takes them away before he can grasp them. Do they exist at all, he wonders?
Where Ali's Mir Nihal was a cultured and romantic gentlemen quoting Urdu verse as part of his daily life, Desai's Nur has let his love for food and drink, the sycophantic antics of his admirers, and the bitter rivalries between his two wives overtake his poetic life. The satiric setup is played out as Deven, longing for Delhi, for its urbanity, and for an Urdu way of life, enters the world of Nur. Deven is longing for a different life,
