in Delhi, is of a younger generation and yearns for modernity, even if, unlike Ashgar, he is looking for it in an older, now-lost tradition of Urdu poetry. In Desai's tale, tradition itself is longed for and refabricated with tape-recorded recitations in order to make sense of modern selfhood. But the recording itself shows up the futility of the longing. In one scene, Nur vehemently resists the management of his art by Deven:
Frantic to make him resume his monologue now that the tape was expensively whirling, Deven once forgot himself so far as to lean forward and murmur with the earnestness of an interviewer, ‘And, sir, were you writing any poetry at the time? Do you have any verse belonging to that period?'
The effect was disastrous. Nur, in the act of reaching out for a drink, froze. ‘Poetry?’ he shot at Deven, harshly. ‘Poetry of the period? Do you think a poet can be ground between stones, and bled, in order to produce poetry—for you? You think you can switch on that mincing machine, and I will instantly produce for you a length of raw, red minced meat that you can carry off to your professors to eat?'25
In other scenes, Deven and Nur are able to strike up moments of understanding, but it is a story that will ultimately offer little redemption.
LAMENTING URDU IN ENGLISH
Reading Twilight in Delhi and In Custody in tandem, one is struck by their surface similarities: they are both set in Old Delhi and reflect the waning of Urdu literary culture within a male world of cultural pleasure. A sense of bleakness and loss pervades both narratives, as does a palpable forlornness in the principal characters. For both Ali and Desai, Old Delhi symbolizes the Urdu language as well as a declining Muslim sensibility and culture that came to life through Urdu. Urdu itself is a translated idea in Ali's text; we might sense the meaning of the language to his protagonists, but we never experience it for ourselves. Desai has explained that she wrote the verses that were to stand for Nur's Urdu poetry by “concocting poetry” that she then attributed to him. In the process, a new kind of literary question, and perhaps conundrum, arises: How does one write Urdu poetry in English? Desai's method was to “write verses in English that echoed their Persian origin,” verses that employed “traditional images and metaphors” and followed “Persian verse forms.” She goes on to say that despite their authentic ring to some ears, she saw them as “pastiche, not poetry.” And yet, when Nur's verses (her concoctions) had been translated into Urdu for the film In Custody, directed by Ismail Merchant, she writes: “Hearing the translated lines spoken, I felt myself translated into an Urdu poet—a surreal experience.”26 A concocted language is returned to Urdu to complete the fabrication begun by Desai. Yet her research and writing also come from her own experiences of speaking and living in Hindustani in 1950s Daryaganj, part of Old Delhi. There is both remembrance and resonance in her text, even if it is sociologically—happily so—unsound. It is in this way that Desai's text, and perhaps all literature, “refracts” rather than reflects.27 It is her imagination and vision that achieve “accuracy,” not merely the representation of a single social reality.
In other moments, Desai's narration is more removed from the language. For instance, she writes of “flowery Urdu,” “ornate Urdu,” and “chaste Urdu.” Here, Urdu is object and nothing more. But the meaning of Urdu in both texts—Desai's and Ali's—was perhaps never meant to be the language itself; how could it be in an English-language novel? Instead the idea of Urdu is the locus for drama, regret, discussion, and the delving into dense emotional webs of disappointment. In both novels, language and place are symmetrical, as both narratives continually inscribe the loss of language onto the physical structures and landscapes of the city and its environs. What is revealed is how the politics of language is an intimate affair in modern Indian life. So it is not surprising that the question of language—who speaks what, when, and where and how they feel about doing so—becomes the engine of both novels' narratives. For the principal characters of each tale, it is the very right to create and exist in different languages that is at stake.
In the temporal move from Ali's novel to Desai's, Urdu's decline is mirrored by the greater influence of a Sanskritized and so upper-caste Hindi, a Hindi that is slowly but surely purged of its Arabic and Persian vocabulary. And it is the shifting places of Hindi and Urdu that influence the changing place of English. These “political dismemberments of language”—to use Gayatri Spivak's phrase—have both social and literary consequences.28 The political dismemberment of Hindi and Urdu—whereby vocabulary changes and becomes less representative of average people's everyday speech while also becoming symbols of national and religious difference—allows for English to emerge as a more neutral and secular language. And it is the very process by which English becomes an “Indian” language. The “Indianness” of English, then, is not merely attributable to its being able to represent a national consciousness but instead to its ability to mediate the sensibilities of other Indian languages. It offers something new, yet it is as partial and compromised as they are.
In Ali's text, the demise of Muslim Delhi is a direct consequence of British colonial rule and the way his community reacts to that rule, whereas in Desai's post-partition tale, cultural ruptures have been made more strident by the realities of shifting borders and population exchanges. It is not the case that Indian modernity is captured solely or most ably in English but instead that English takes on a mediating role. It is this principle that may be abstracted from the novel. It is precisely the interlingual dialogue in each text that sheds light on the ways in which language politics has been central to the articulation of Indian modernity. In contrast to Hindi-Urdu's dismemberment, Desai's English prose becomes further solidified, as it offers a seemingly neutral and yet also authoritative rendering of the cultural aftermath of the split of Hindi and Urdu and the trauma of the politicization of religious identity inherent in that split.
A CINEMATIC INTERLUDE
The demise of Urdu as a story line arises not only in literature but also in popular Hindi film. In Manmohan Desai's classic film, Amar Akbar Anthony (1977), the audience witnesses how Urdu can also play a mediating role in the Indian landscape. And yet in this case the language is reduced to being the vehicle of expression for a single religious community. The film's conceit is that the three brothers named in the title are separated in their childhoods and go on to be raised in families of different religious backgrounds only to meet again as adults. Amar is Hindu, Akbar is Muslim, and Anthony is Christian; they are played by three titans of Hindi cinema: Vinod Khanna, Rishi Kapoor, and Amitabh Bachchan, respectively. A pivotal moment occurs near the film's climax when Akbar is being held hostage by the villainous Robert and tries to send out a call for help to his brothers, Amar and Anthony. Robert allows Akbar to send a note to his tailor shop for more materials, which are required to alter the wedding dress of one of the heroines (who is also being held hostage and is about to be forced to marry her former bodyguard turned thug). Instead of writing down a list of supplies, Akbar pens a plea for help to his brothers. In a voice-over, Akbar explains that he writes the note in Urdu so no one will be able to read it except for the Muslim tailor at his shop. A close-up of the note is then shown on camera as having been written in the Perso-Arabic script. In the next scene, the tailor reads the note and then verbally relays the message for help to Akbar's brothers; a rescue ensues, eventually leading to a happy ending uniting all the brothers of differing faiths with their common mother. The message: religious diversity may exist side by side in a single, unified mother India.
What is not reunited is the language of Hindi and Urdu, a matter that brings us to the question of script. Before Hindi and Urdu were distinct languages with Sanskritized and Persianized vocabularies, respectively, they were commonly written in the same script, the Perso-Arabic or Urdu script as it is called. Part of the “collapsing bridge” between Hindi and Urdu occurs when Hindi began to be written in the Devanagari script.29 Harish Trivedi has called this switch to the “Nagari” script a “triumph” that “gave a tremendous boost to the morale of the users of Nagari and Hindi” and thereby “led rapidly to a reversal in the balance of power between Urdu and Hindi, resulting in a virtual rout of Urdu in the public domain of authorship and publishing.”30
