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Ahmed Ali in Conversation: an Excerpt from an Interview

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Ahmed Ali in Conversation: an Excerpt from an Interview Ahmed Ali in Conversation: An Excerpt from an Interview [The following excerpt is from an extensive interview with the late Ahmed Ali conducted by Carlo Coppola on August , in Rochester, Michigan, during Professor Ali’s initial visit to the United States. The entire interview, over sixty pages in length, will be published in a special Ahmed Ali issue of the Journal of South Asian Literature, Vol. XXVIII, No. (Summer–Fall ), which will appear in . The interview roughly follows the chronology of Ahmed Ali’s life. This excerpt deals with the publication of his Twilight in Delhi. All footnotes have been provided by the Interviewer. —Eds.] : When did you start work on Twilight in Delhi? : In the summer of , during the summer vacation in Delhi.1 I spent the whole summer vacation in Delhi. I did not go to Aligarh to visit Mohsin Abdullah’s family2 that year. It was my habit to 1Ali was employed as a lecturer in English at Lucknow University at the time. 2Mohsin Abdullah was a high-school friend of Ali’s in Aligarh, the son of Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah (–), renowned Muslim educator and libertarian who championed the cause of Muslim women’s education, and younger brother of Dr. Rashid Jahan (–), who later became a friend of Ahmed Ali and a fellow member of the so-called “Ag≥r® Group.” This group of friends published the highly controversial anthology Ag≥r® (Burning Coals), which ushered in the radical leftist “progressive movement” first in Urdu, and later, under various names, into most of the major literatures of India. • T A U S spend a month in Aligarh before I came on to Delhi to my mother’s house.3 Mohsin’s home was another home to me, and I could not just go there to visit for a short time, but was expected to stay there for long periods. But that year I went immediately to Delhi because I had the idea in the back of my mind that I wanted to write this novel. I went and met as many old people as I could and I watched everyone’s actions as I walked down the street. I watched everything. I watched people as I went to the Edward Memorial Park and when I went to the Jama Masjid. I watched everyone—the pigeon sellers, the pigeon buyers, the pigeon flyers—all those wonderful kaleidoscopic scenes and crowds. I also looked from the steps and platform of the Jama Masjid to the Red Fort in the distance. I was trying to picture in my mind where the fights in took place between the Muslims and Dr. Rashid Jahan, a gynecologist by profession, was also a communist political organizer and writer. Her works include two volumes of short stories: ‘Aurat aur Dµgar Afs≥n® (“Woman” and Other Stories; ; rpt. ; “Woman” is, in fact, a play) and Sho‘la-e Javv≥la (Raging Flames; ); she also wrote a number of radio plays, including a dramatization of Premchand’s famous short story “Kafan” (The Shroud). In Rashid Jahan married another member of the Ag≥r® Group, Mahmuduzzafar (–), a member of the royal family of Rampur, who was educated at Sherborune School, Dorset, and Oxford. He taught history and English as Vice-Principal of the Mohammaden Anglo-Oriental (MAO) College, Amritsar, between and , then became a full-time worker for the Communist Party of India (CPI), editing the Urdu political journal ≤ing≥rµ (Sparks) from late . In he was General Secretary of the CPI in Uttar Pradesh and was thereafter forced to go underground during the early regime of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru (prime-ministership: –). His major work is the travelogue Quest for Life (), in which he describes the trip he made to Russia with Rashid Jahan, who was at the time terminally ill with cancer, and his travels throughout the Soviet Union after her death in . The fourth member of the Ag≥r® group was Sajjad Zaheer (–), son of a prominent Shia family of Allahabad, where his father was a judge of the High Court of Judicature. Educated at both Lucknow and Oxford universities, he helped establish the All-India Progressive Writers Association as one of the organizers of its first meeting in Lucknow in . He also helped establish the Communist Party of Pakistan in the early s. 3Ali’s mother was Ahmad Kaniz Asghar Begum, whose distinguished lineage is traced back to a family of Hadramaut Syeds who had been brought to Delhi by the second Moghul emperor Humayun (–). C C • Indians on one side, and the British on the other, and where the cannons were fired from, and where the people, the spectators, watched the “fun,” as they considered it. I kept on watching, observing, and imagining. I would try to see as many people in the mu√alla [district, neighborhood] as possible, as many members of my family as I could. I never used to go see my relatives. My mother would always ask me to, but I never bothered. But this year I went out to see everyone. I was glad that it pleased my mother, but she didn’t know that I was doing it with something in the back of my mind. But in any case, I was glad to establish, or reestablish, contact with them. And all those old people were very glad that I came, especially all those wonderful old ladies of that time. I was simply preparing the background, the notes, for this novel. Perhaps it was then that the end of the story had come to me; I didn’t have a beginning yet. The beginning came when I returned to Lucknow, and it was then that I started writing out plots, thinking them out, preparing family trees for the whole book, rethinking events, evolving characters, giving them names, and so on. After that, I started writing and completed it in February or March . Then that summer vacation I spent typing it out in Simla, as I remember. I had to buy a typewriter for that purpose. Soon after that I went to London for study leave and left India near the end of July. : Did you have real individuals in mind when you wrote the novel? : People grew out of my notes, out of my observations. Not one of them is fiction because no novelist can evolve fictitious human beings, unless they are the computerized automatons of today’s fiction. What I had in mind when I wrote the novel was the awareness or the consciousness of the past, the sadness and the agony of suffering and of sacrifice. Also, a certain feeling for the glory that was gone, the failure of the people of India, and of the Muslims especially, to have held on to life, to have been able to look at things in terms of cause and effect. And behind this sadness and sorrow was the reason for the disappearance of this glory: the bêtes noires, British imperialism and the British people themselves. : The novel does not seem to be anti-British. : I never wanted to write against the British. I wanted to write about • T A U S what happened to society itself. If I had written an anti-British novel, it would only have been a political sort of thing. But I was depicting a phase of the life of India that had passed, and the reasons why it had passed do come in in the middle of the book, going back to and then to the Durbar of George V, who was crowned Emperor of India. One has to connect him with his grandmother, Queen Victoria, who was the first empress of the dominions and of the Empire of India. : The parade scene at the durbar is an extraordinary piece of description, perhaps one of the high points of the book. One gets the impression, though, that at the end of the novel none of the people, especially the hero, realizes fully the reasons for the situation being what it is. There seems to be no self-awareness on their parts at the end of the novel. : You’re quite right. If I had given the reasons why there is no self- realization or why the situation at the end of the novel was the way it was, the novel would not have come off. It would have been I who gave these reasons, I as the author, not the characters themselves. You see, in all the months and months of my study of the people in Delhi, no one, not one single person, was conscious of or had any awareness of why things were the way they were—why the Muslims lost their power over India, why the British were there, etc. No one knew why, so how could I go beyond my characters? How could I go beyond the consciousness of my characters without spoiling what I had built up in the novel, the unity of my characters and the story? I would have impinged on their consciousness, on their awareness, if I had done so. Since they did not have this awareness, I could not mention it. If this awareness had come through me, it would have been extraneous. But I did show it through my symbols. What happened, after all? A society was dying. I did not show that a society was coming to life. I showed that it was moving towards death, yet living, marching on, for it did continue to live right down until –. It was the war and then partition that made many changes, that altered the very basis of our thoughts and our attitudes.
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