Novel
Twilight in Delhi
Ahmed Ali · 1940
Synopsis
Delhi, from 1911 to 1919, in the lanes near the Jama Masjid. Mir Nihal, patriarch of a Muslim merchant family, keeps pigeons and watches with bitterness as his family adopts Western ways. His son Asghar falls in love with Bilqeece, a girl the family disapproves of; around them pass his widowed sister Begum Waheed, family ceremonies and kite-flying contests, while the coronation Durbar of 1911 and the works at Chandni Chowk undo the old Mughal city.
Context
The book appeared in London in 1940, from the Hogarth Press, after the intervention of E. M. Forster. Its author, who also wrote in Urdu, had written it in English; his wife, Bilqees Jehan, produced an Urdu version in 1963, and Gallimard published the French translation in 1989. Publishers Weekly saw in it a sort of Buddenbrooks of Delhi, clumsy as a novel but precious as a document; Britannica describes it as the nostalgic chronicle of the end of the Muslim aristocracy.
Who it is for
In English, translated into French by Gallimard; a slow, lyrical prose, mixed with Urdu poetry, more attentive to rites than to plot.
Prizes and reception
The first novel in English by the man whom the critic Muneeza Shamsie calls the ancestor of all Pakistani fiction in English.
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