Postnational Aesthetics and the Work of Mourning in Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi

Abstract

One of the first novels written in English by an Indian Muslim, Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi (1940) has in many ways suffered the fate of extinction it seems to describe. Critical interpretations have confined it to a purely nostalgic portrait of a moribund Indo-Muslim society, unproblematically situated within a European realist aesthetic. In contrast, I argue Ali’s original location as an Urdu writer and the narrative’s sustained engagement with Urdu poetry do not merely lend authenticity to the elegiac tone of his portrait, they constitute a complex challenge to the priority of realism and the ostensible trope of Muslim cultural extinction being narrated. Contextualizing the novel within an evolving Urdu literary modernity since the late nineteenth century, I suggest the relevance of a continually reinvented poetics of loss that, on the eve of Partition, opens up discreet canons and communities to the politics of mourning and the absent presence they seek to foreclose.