The work of Ahmed Ali offers a literary understanding of what it meant for English to “usurp” another place, language, and cultural sensibility. His 1940 novel, Twilight in Delhi, brought us Mir Nihal, a Muslim patriarch steeped in the traditions and language of Urdu, living in Old Delhi at the peak of Britain's colonial enterprise in India, from 1911 to 1919. Forty-four years later, Anita Desai wrote another novel about the demise of Urdu; In Custody recounts the tale of a Hindi (and Hindu) lecturer from the provinces who comes to Old Delhi to find and interview one of the last great Urdu poets.
By reading the texts as a pair, one may see how Delhi is transformed by its own linguistic history from the colonial period to a postcolonial one and how the English language becomes central in the reformulation of people's identities as Indians and as Dilliwallahs (residents of Delhi). Read one after the other, the two novels create a surprising narrative of their own. This narrative is not a straightforward sociology or history of the city of Delhi but instead has to do with the kinds of artifice being created by each author. It is also a narrative whose resonance is felt precisely because of the gap in time between the writing of the two texts. English, it turns out, was not about the relationship between Indians and Britons but more about Indians' relationships with one another. Where Ali directs his English prose to English speakers outside India, Desai is speaking to a homegrown audience of Indian English readers, people essentially like herself. Further, both novels recount prose stories about Urdu poetry; in Ali's tale it is the poetic imagining of Old Delhi; in Desai, the tale of a degenerating Urdu poet living in Old Delhi. Both tales highlight a disjuncture in terms of language and of genre, whereby the form of the novel is summoned to explain, as it were, the poetic.
Franco Moretti intriguingly writes of the relation between verse and prose to suggest why prose prevailed “so thoroughly” in the historical formation of the novel. He writes that “a line of verse can to a certain extent stand alone, and so it encourages independent clauses; prose is continuous, it's more of a construction. I don't think it's an accident that the myth of ‘inspiration' is so seldom evoked for prose: inspiration is too instantaneous to make sense there, too much like a gift; and prose is not a gift; it's work.”7 The distinction between “work” and “gift” plays out especially, and to great comic effect, in In Custody, where the poet Nur sees his poetic utterances as gifts that can never be returned from a prosaic, Hindi world. Both novels tell tales of how poetry is romanticized, comically and tragically, and how it is ultimately squashed by a less forgiving, prose-dominant world. The lament for language is also a lament for genre.
Ali (1910-94) was part of an earlier generation of Indian English writers, those whose literary consciousness was formed during the colonial period. By writing a history of Delhi in literary form, Ali assumed the role of historian in the colonizer's language, and he achieved this within the temporal space and climate of the British Raj. His novel employs the English language to tell Britons of the emotional toll on their colonial subjects in a language they will not only understand, but uncannily recognize, as it describes a foreign city they themselves have come to dominate. Desai (b. 1937) is closer to the Salman Rushdie (b. 1947) generation of Indian writers. She came of age just after Indian independence but is usually not included in the post-Rushdie Indian fiction boom. In many ways the style and themes of Desai's fiction form a bridge from one generation of Indian English writers to the next, whereas Rushdie's marks a more decisive break.
Desai's In Custody is especially interesting for the way it almost seems to take up temporally where Ali's left off. The protagonist changes from an Urduwallah to a Hindiwallah; Delhi is still the capital but is no longer ruled by the British; most important, the population and character of Delhi have changed considerably after the partition of 1947. Yet, reading Ali's novel and then Desai's, it is also as if the same tale is being passed down and retold. Both novels recount the demise of Urdu literary culture in the city of Delhi, even if the manner in which they do so points to two different moments in what could be called the “localization” of English in India. Ali's is a mournful tale, heavy with despair and dilapidation; Desai fills her pages with sly humor and linguistic caricatures, balancing the personal failures and unfulfilled longings of her characters. In an attempt to locate Ali and Desai on the same map but then chart the distance between them, I will illustrate the shift from one kind of English to another, a movement that illuminates both the fact of Indian independence from the British and the complicated legacy of the social and linguistic upheavals of the partition of the Indian 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