Subverting the British Raj: Delhi as a Metaphor of Resistance in Ahmad Ali’s Twilight in Delhi (1940)*

Abstract

Written in the wake of the eventful years of the All India Progressive
Writers’ Movement and Association during the late 1930s, Ahmad Ali’s
Twilight in Delhi has generally been regarded as a Delhi Saga. Despite
being labeled by the English publisher as a ‘subversive’ work of an
Indian writer, the novel has hardly been explored from the
aforementioned pigeonholing. Scholars have mainly examined the novel
by exploring the recurring themes of nostalgia and loss looking from
purely Eastern romantic perspectives influenced by Persian and Urdu
literary traditions. This paper attempts to fill a major lacuna in the
studies so far undertaken on this novel. Twilight is marked as a debut
which spawned the progressive and subversive literature in South Asia.
Taking the city of Delhi as a metaphor of socio-cultural resistance
against the Farangis and their Raj, the paper will explore that the
overwhelming nostalgia and the great sense of loss are subversive in their
nature. Also the novel’s emphasis on the past glories of the Indo-Muslim
civilization bears in itself a deeper meaning of resistance against the
British occupation.