To turn 85 is a privilege. It means you have lived a decade beyond your golden anniversary. This year, two Delhi institutions are reaching this milestone. One is a novel. The other is a… we’ll celebrate the other one later in the week!
Published in the autumn of 1940, Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi recreates a world of poets and lovers, begums and havelis, dargahs and tombs—and all of this is arranged around Jama Masjid (see photo). The sandstone mosque is mentioned many times over across the pages. Indeed, every Twilight devotee has her own beloved scene in the novel. A few of us for instance might fondly recall “Chaori Bazar” courtesan Mushtari Bai singing “with great feeling” a poem that the last Mughal emperor wrote in “banishment.”
Although set in 19th century Purani Dilli, and despite being fiction, Twilight is like a timeless guidebook to Old Delhi. Step into whichever place in the historic quarter with a copy of the novel, and it has a passage describing the place’s exact ambiance. Like, on reaching Chitli Qabar’s Gosht Wali Pahari, flip to page 14 (of the 1991 OUP edition): “The air was filled with the shouts of the pigeon-fliers who were rending the atmosphere with their cries of ‘Aao, Koo, Haa!’” Now look up. There are men on rooftops, flying their pigeons, crying out similarly.
Or, on reaching Urdu Bazar, turn to page 77. “Vendors were selling small round kebabs… Many sold sherbet…” Look up. Street vendors are selling kebabs and sherbets.
Since Twilight is pointedly mournful in chronicling Purani Dilli’s transformation following the failed uprising against the British, it is ironical that it was written in the language of our colonisers, and published in their homeland (by Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press in London!). That said, the book’s earliest flag-bearer happened to be a British writer—the great EM Forster. He famously said: “I appreciated it not so much as a novel as for its poetry and for the picture it gave of a vanishing civilisation… one has a poignant feeling that poetry and daily life have got parted, and will never come again together however often Delhi re-arises.”
Actually, our Purani Dilli continues to be a blend of poetry and daily life. The scattered souvenirs of its earlier era continue to survive in less frequented galiyan and kuche. Over the years, these remnants have grown only more poetic, suffused with the unmistakable feel of saudade, the Portuguese word evoking a nostalgia for something that no longer exists. In fact, this something that no longer exists has endured for 85 long years in Twilight in Delhi. And being a part of true literature, it might endure forever.
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