Symmetry and universality in the plot

Twilight in Delhi provides a real and accurate portrait of the static and decaying
tradition of culture of Delhi while the British arranged the coronation Durbar of 1911
and draw up plans for new imperial city, new Delhi, the novel has planned at reveal
interconnecting levels and has been praised for its lucid style, its use of symbolism and
the manner in which it merges the life of its main protagonist, Mir Nihal with that of the
family. Much attention has also been parcel to this feeling that it had universal appeal
because it focuses on the rhythms life birth marriage deaths, which are intrinsic to every
culture.
Use of metaphor
Twilight in Delhi maces extensive use of metaphor, it begins with the description of the
city,
Night envelops the city, covering it like a blanket_ in the dim straight roofs and wrapped in a
rustle slumber breathing heavily as the heat become apprentice or shoots through the body like
pain. In the by came on the road men sleep on bare bed, half naked tired of for the sore days
capture A few still walk on the other wise deserted roads, hand in hand, talking and some have
jasmine garlands in their herds, the smell from the flower escapes scents a from yards of air around
by them and alias smothered by the heat dogs so about sniffing the gutter in search of offal.

The linguistic deviation does, it may be concluded, present the ethos of the culture the
novel purports to portray. If this is the idiom which African and Indian ( I mean sub_
continental here ) writers want to evolve something not as bizarre as the language of
Amos Tutola nor as British as the idiom of V.S. NaipaulAhmed Ali has given them a
model of what may be achieved.
Ethos of Indian Muslims
Another way in which the ethos of Indian Muslims has been conveyed is by making the
characters quote poetry. As Coppola points out:
It is a custom of long standing among Urdu _ speakers to quote lines of poetry copiously,
appropriately, and energetically in order to emphasize, to make a point in conversation, or to add
elegance to speech and writing.

Use of couplet
Thus it would be nave to look for existential despair in Asghers reply to his friend Baris
question as to where he has been. He replies by quoting someone elses couplet which
does not represent his real feelings but is merely an elegant way of replying to any
query:
Life has become a burden, the time is ripe for death.
The space of existence has shrunk into a narrow cell

The couplet is merely used for ornamentation and factitious dramatization of

commonplace disappointment in love. The function of poetry was mostly rhetorical in
Urdu speaking culture and that is how been used by the characters. The couplets are.
Therefore, clichs which substitute a hackneyed formula for an intellectual response to a
given experience. But of course, the couplets prefacing chapters are intellectually
relevant and emotionally evocative.

Most of the couplets used by narrator express the ethos of the Urdu-speaking middle
class. And this class had a distinct world view. A world view which was essentially
romantic in eighteen nineties . Three qualities can be discerned in this special world
view: nostalgia, sublimation of sexual feelings into vague aestheticism, and world
weariness. A pose of wistfulness, ennui and jadedness complement these three
dominant qualities. And all these are found in most of the verses quoted. For instance:
Im the light of no mans eye,
The rest of no ones heart am I.
That which can be of use to none
Just a handful of dust am I.

These kinds of couplets the theme of regret for a dying culture directly. The self pity in
the poetry is, of course, a reflection of the self pity which was a part of the Indian ethos
before the partition. Ahmed Alis novel has been able to catch this aspect of Indian
culture faithfully.
False sense of diffidence
One aspect of the male-dominated Urdu speaking culture which has not been revealed
out of a false sense of modesty by most other writers, but which has been revealed by
Ali, concerns the sexual emotion. As I have mentioned above, sex was suppressed or
sublimated. But, mainly because women were in purdah (behind the veil), it took
unusual forms. It took, for instance, the form of celebrating the beauty of boys rather
than that of women in poetry. Thus the sown on the face (khat) became a conventional
attribute of the beloved. One reason for doing this was that in Iran, where the ghazal had
its genesis; boys did actually become the beloveds of certain poet. The other reason was
that when Persian mystic poets started writing love poetry symbolizing the souls quest
for merging with the Soul of God, the symbol they chose for the beloved was that of a
beautiful youth rather than a woman. On the other hand the Indian mystics, Muslims
and Hindus, represented God as the lover and the soul as the woman who desires union.
As Urdu poetry followed Persian fashions the beloved was addressed by the male
pronoun and had some of the physical attributes of adolescent boys (such as khat)
though it was often clear otherwise that a woman was being referred to. This literary
fashion, and perhaps the absence of women, led to talk between men becoming full of
homosexual innuendoes. Ali, with relentless honesty, tells us about this aspect of
Muslim culture.
He tells us, for example, that when Asghar lives in Bhopal as an adolescent youth, he
was the beloved of men:
He had just to cast a glance and there were many who would have given their lives to do
his bidding. At the least sign from him they would have done anything. Then he was the
bestower of favours; there he was the loved one and not the lover. To be loved is sweet,
he thought, whereas to love is full of sorrow and grief and pain (TD, 23).
We are also told that a man called Huzoor Ali was devoted to him (p.23) and if Asghar
had happened to look at him kindly even one there had appeared such joy on his face

(p. 23). When Huzoor Ali invites Asghar or dinner and Asghar refused and refused until
the old man was brokenhearted (p.24) the lover recites these lines:
Would to God that You
Might also fall in love and suffer
As I am suffering now

This special kind of homosexuality in which the youth or boy is sought as a female
surrogate by the male is also a feature of Greek, Persian and some Arab literature. To
distinguish it from the adult peer-group homosexuality common in modern Western
literature I have suggested elsewhere that is should be called pedophilia. It is this which
was a part of Indian Muslim culture and is not hypocritically dissembled in Twilight.
At its noblest the love between man and youth is described as a mystic or sacred
emotion. Kambal Shah, the mystic, tells Mir Nihal and his friends that the real cause of
the downfall of the Mughal Empire was that they had separated lover and beloved from
each other by burying Mohammad Shah between the graves of Hazrat Mahboob Elahi
and Hazrat Amir Khusro (TD, 146). The audience listens to this with religious emotion
because the two saints mentioned are revered by all. At its most vulgar, of course, the
nature of the emotion is purely sensual. In Our Lane, for instance, Munno tells Aziz:
I had a cousin. The boy was rather handsome. It was about ten years ago. I sort of fell out with
him over a kiss.

This is said seriously but most allusions to sexual feelings of this kind are fictitious.
Sometimes there is open buffoonery:
As he [an old man] crossed Asghar, his stick unwittingly touched the old mans behind.

As once he turned round and remarked:

I say, moon-bridegroom, even with an old man? .

A eunuch who sat on the balcony just above in the hope of some stray customer, clapped
loudly in a vulgar way and gave a loud guffaw (p.79).
And sometimes the humour is more refined but, in fact behind the humour there is
sexual flirtation as in the following scene:
And the lovers found the opportunity of their lives. A middle aged man quoted these
lines of an young man with arms open for an embrace,
It is the day of Eid, my dear,
Ah come, let me embrace thee.
It is the custom and besides
Theres time and opportunity

What is even more remarkable is that the narrator offers no comment on these scenes.
That makes Ahmed Ali one of the few Indian writers who could reveal such tabooed
areas of Indian life without either falsifying reality or preaching as Muslim. However,
unfortunately, Ali does offer platitudinous comments of a moralistic kind at some places
and this flaw of his work must not go unnoticed.
Realism
To continue with the discussion of the quality of Alis realism in Twilight, it has been

noted that he present the corporate life through the minor characters who help to create
the illusion that one is in India, the land of the crowded houses in which something is
always going on. As Niven says, the novel is full of servants, beggars and craftsmen. In
fact no other novel catches the nuances of the Muslims culture in Delhi as convincingly
as twilight. One can find out all about the details which make a culture come alive in
Alis descriptions. And the descriptions are not as if they were a part of a documentary,
they from an organic whole and are, therefore, artistically successful whereas those of
Scented Dust were intrusions. In this respect Twilight represents an aspect of Indian
culture as successfully as Chinua Achebes Novel Things Fall Apart represents African
culture, a point made by Anniah Gowda in as article.
Realistic portrayal of culture and traditions
The novel evokes the culture of Delhi through describing customs and ceremonies
minutely and says Brander the fine wedding chapter reads like an epithalamium in
which verse and prose alternate in wonderfully refreshing bridal music. Even the
beggars are described and their songs and mannerisms make them concrete presences
and not allude to the superstitions of the time he does so in a manner which reveals his
own beliefs. For instance, Kambal Shah, a Faqir who visits Mir Nihal, is described as
follows:
He was said to be high up in the mystical order although no one knew his hidden spiritual powers, for such
faqirs never reveal themselves to human beings.

The italicized line seems to suggest that the narrator shares in the belief or Mir Nihal
and his friends. Since there is no indication that the author was deliberately
distinguishing himself from the narrator in this instance, one may assume that Ali to
believes in this. On the other hand Mir Nihal also believes that mercury can be
converted into silver but here he narrator shows his own skepticism by correcting Mir
Nihal credulity when he says: Yet no one really did it. Still Mir Nihal believed in its
truth and went on hoping against hope (p.128). this suggests that the narrator, and by
implication the author, had shed off some of the beliefs and ways of looking at life of the
Muslim gentlemen of U.P but not all: a conclusion which will help us to understands the
theme of the novel.
Theme and Structure
The theme, the philosophical import of the novel, is based in Alis subjective response to
his moribund culture and is, in the last analysis, sentimental and therefore,
unsatisfactory. For the theme is the passing away of Muslims civilization in India. The
narrators attitude towards this culture is romantic. Yet Niven calls it classical:
Despite the rhapsodic treatment of Asghers love for Bilqeece (Alis own wife is called
Bilqeece), the autumnal mood at the novels close, the grief-stricken regrets for the
Mughal past and the frequent opulence of his prose style, Ali writes less from a romantic
than a classical standpoint. He recognizes the immutability of the basic elements in
human life. Individual dramas come and go Yet the denominator remains the same in
every age.

Yet classicism in so far as it refers to a recognition of the permanence of he change

brought about by the passing of time is perhaps the intention of the novelist. My
contention is that this intention has not satisfactorily been transmuted into art. Other
critics have, of course, criticized the novel. Gowda thinks Achebes Things Fall Apart is
superior.
Ahmad Ali bengs his fatalistic drum and suggests that fate is to blame when things
wrong; Achebe relegates the supernatural to the background and shows tragedy to be
consequent on the interaction of social forces and human character.
And Niven comes more close to my own interpretation of the Novel when comments
that Alis writing can be charged, therefore, with two permeating weaknesses: its
tendency towards a tried vocabulary and its sorrow for the past which at time collapses
into ineffective nostalgia this is the point it does not only collapse into nostalgia but the
purpose of the whole novel is, therefore, sentimental and its sentimentality is traceable
to the romantic world view of the Urdu speaking middle class of which Ali is a member.
As I have already shown, Ali did share the emotional attitudes of this class. And a part of
this attitude was to regard the past as having been very grand merely because it was the
time of the domination of this class. This falsifies reality because this Muslim grandeur
was based on the exploited labour of Hindu peasants in the final analysis and, to go
further into the past, in conquest and colonialism by the Muslims, the very thing for
which the British are being blamed. There is no justification for such empty rhetoric as
one finds towards the end of many chapters of Twilight. And it is not, as Lawrence
Brander contends, the raised rhythms of biblical English every time (though Branders
own quotation from Ali is indeed an example of appropriately used raised rhythm) it is
used. Sometimes it is merely the Indian Muslims penchant for using high-sounding
words:
For if it not for hope men would commit suicide by the scores, and the world would
remain a barren desert in which no oasis exist. On this tortuous road of life man goes on
hoping that the next turn of road will bring him in sight of the goal (TD, 128).
Conclusion
Several such passages mar the book. Most of the ellipses too suggest much more than is
actually warranted by the situation. For this situation in itself does not evoke the
response of inexpressible emotion which the ellipses seem to suggest. The author hints
at a profundity through them, which is not really there. The purple passages the pseudo
philosophical dictums, and the incomplete sentence, point out that the writer is relying
on rhetorical devices in order to evoke pathos for a civilization to which he responds for
personal reasons but which does not really deserve this response from the reader.
It is indeed a fault of the writers understanding of India that it should be so. And this is
strange because Ali had the reputation of being an iconoclast and a progressive writer.
After all in his short story Two Sides of the Picture he dose show the cruelty and moral
turpitude of people like Mir Nihal. But in the novel not even Asghar challenges Mir
Nihals way of life except in trivial ways. He dose adopt British dress but exploits

women, indulges in self-pity and loves emotionality. Thus if the symbols of the cat and
Babban Jans death signify that a cherished way of life is passion away we are not told
why it was cherished at all. This way of looking at life is flawed and sentimental and
Twilight is a flawed novel. It is like the golden bowl of Henry James which has a crack.
And the pity is that most critics have not paid much attention to the crack.