Tariq Rahman

Ahmed Ali is known as the pioneer of English fiction and poetry among the Muslims of India. His literary career began during British rule over India and his significance as a writer is both historical and social. He moved from Urdu, his mother tongue and the literary language of Indian Muslims, to English. He was also the first to accept modernity, social-realism and then symbolism from Western sources among Indian Muslims writers. He is now remembered mostly for his historical significance.

He was born in Delhi in a family of theologians but his father, Syed Shujauddin, was a civil servant in British India. After attending elementary school at Gurgaon he went to a missionary school in Azamgarh. As his father had died in 1919 he lived with his uncle (father’s brother) as a student. He first attended Muslim University Aligarh where he studied science. Later, he joined Lucknow University where he studied English.

In 1931 he became a lecturer in English at Lucknow University and started producing literary work in both Urdu and English. He then moved to Agra, Allahabad and Calcutta in pursuance of his academic career. He also served in the British Broadcasting Corporation’s New Delhi office during the Second World War. In 1947 he went to China as a British Council Visiting Professor. This experience enabled him to facilitate the Foreign office of Pakistan to establish diplomatic relations with China in 1951. He served in the diplomatic service till 1960 when he retired and settled down in Karachi. He then visited the University of Karachi for occasional lectured, wrote, translated and contributed to the family’s business activities. He died on 14 January 1994 and is survived by his wife and four children.

It was in Lucknow that, in 1929, he published his first short story in English in the Lucknow University Journal. He also published plays in English such as ‘Land of Twilight’ and ‘Break the Chains’ (Premiered in 1932). He also wrote an Urdu short story ‘Mahavaton ki Ek Raat’ (A Night of Winter Rains) published by the literary journal Humayun. After this he wrote many short stories in Urdu collected in Sholay (Flames) (1934), Hamari Gali (Our Lane) (1944), Qaid Khana (Prison House) (1944) and Maut Se Pahlay (Before Death) (1945). Selected stories out of these were translated into English and published as The Prison House (1985). His most famous novel is Twilight in Delhi (1940). The second one Ocean of the Night was written after it but published in 1964. The last novel, Rats and Diplomats was published in 1985.

Ali also wrote poems in English. In 1960 he published eight poems under the title Purple Gold Mountain: Poems From China. Later he brought the number up to sixty. He was also anthologized, as in Shahid Hosain’s edited anthology entitled First Voices: Six Poets from Pakistan (1965). His interest in Urdu poetry resulted in several translations: The Falcon and the Hunted Bird: An Anthology of Urdu Poetry (1950); The Bulbul and the Rose: An Anthology of Urdu Poetry (1962); Ghalib: Selected Poems (1969) and The Golden Tradition (1973).

As a translator, besides Urdu poetry, his major work is the translation of the Qur’an from Arabic to English. He calls it All-Qur’an: A Contemporary Translation (1984). References to poems from China or Indonesia, as in The Flaming Earth: Poems from Indonesia (1949) do not make it clear whether he actually translated from Chinese or Bhasa Indonesian originals or used intermediaries.

Ali has written critical essays such as Mr Eliot’s Penny World of Dreams (1941), The Problem of Style and Technique in Ghalib (1969); The Shadow and the Substance: The Principles of Reality, Art and Literature (1977) and Muslim China (1949). The last is of sociological interest.

Ali’s family was among the first which had started making the transition from tradition to modernity. However, his uncle was puritanical and discouraged Ali from writing the Urdu ghazal poetry which was conventionally amorous. This made Ali turn to English but his interest in Urdu remained till the end. At Aligarh he met Raja Rao (1908-), who became famous as a novelist later. In Lucknow he met Sajjad Zaheer (1905-1973) and Mahmud uz Zafar (1908-1954), both socialist intellectuals, and minor Urdu literary figures.

This friendship with radical intellectuals brought Ali in touch with socialist and liberal ideas. He also contributed a story to the collection of short stories called Angare (Burning Coals) to which the other contributors were Rashid Jahan, Sajjad Zaheer and Mahmud uz Zafar. Zaheer’s short story---of a Muslim cleric who falls asleep on the prayer mat and dreaming of a houri has an ejaculation---shocked the Muslim clergy and the middle class so much that the authors were threatened with death. The British banned the book and the authors responded by creating a literary organ known as the All India Progressive Writers Association in 1936. This organization was dominated by the Communists and Ali soon disassociated himself from it though he kept espousing some progressive ideas.

Ali achieved fame with his novel Twilight in Delhi which is based upon the city of Delhi, once the capital of the Mughal emperors, and even in those days (the nineteen forties) one of the great centres of Muslim high culture. The protagonist, Mir Nihal, is a successful Muslim gentleman past fifty but still vigorous and healthy. He has control over his extended family and loves flying pigeons and making love to his mistress, a beautiful courtesan. The rest of the novel records gradual loss of power on the part of Mir Nihal. His son, Asghar, marries without his approval. His pigeons are killed by a cat and the mistress falls ill and dies. In the end Mir Nihal, unable to bear the trauma of a sons’ death, becomes paralyzed. At the symbolic level, Mir Nihal’s world---the world of the Muslim feudal gentry of north India---is coming to an end. It lies defeated at the hands of triumphant modernity.

The narrative technique is realistic but the symbolic aspect is very significant. Because of the former there are pictures of the visit of George V in 1911; the great influenza epidemic; the life of Muslim aristocratic families in the traditional mohallas (living areas) of Delhi and so on. This makes the novel a work of historical realism. Ali also uses the linguistic idiom of the Muslim gentry of Delhi so authentically that when the novel was later translated into Urdu by his wife Bilquis Jahan (Dilli ki Sham, 1963), it read as an Urdu novel. Indeed, the critics said that the novel should have been written initially in Urdu rather than in English. However, Ali’s use of English is very skilful. He translates many idioms and phrases from Urdu in such a way as to create the feeling that one has entered the realm of a different culture). This authenticity of diction and the detailed description of daily life, makes the book a valuable sociological description of a dying culture.

On the symbolic level, however, the novel is less successful. Ali’s theme is the passing away of the traditional culture of his ancestors. Although he had the reputation of an iconoclast and a modernist, Ali fails to transcend the emotional attitudes of his class. His attitude to Muslim feudal power is, in the last analysis, sentimental and nostalgic. In some of his works he does show the cruelty of people like Mir Nihal. However, in the novel he does not. Another novel, about the same kind of feudal family, is Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961). In this the author reveals the domination and exploitation of women and working class people by the dominant males. Ali, however, ignores these harsh realities.

Despite these shortcomings the novel was very well received by contemporary reviewers. Indeed, the novel made him famous and it was because of this fame that later works, which did not have the charm of Twilight, were not completely ignored. However, later critics did show awareness of Ahmed Ali’s weaknesses. Anniah Gowda, in a comparative study of Twilight and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart praises the latter while blaming Ali for being ‘fatalistic’. Alistair Niven, another perceptive critic, charges Ali’s work with two weaknesses: a ‘tired vocabulary’ and ‘ineffective nostalgia’.

Ali’s second novel, Ocean of the Night, is on the theme of the ruin of aristocratic feudal families through prostitution. The most notable works in this genre already existed in Urdu fiction when Ali chose to write about it. Among the best were Mirza Hadi Ruswa’s (1856-1931) Umrao jan Ada (1899) and Munshi Premchand’s (1880-1936) Bazar-e-Husn (1918). While the first deals with the life of a prostitute the second deals with the way women are degraded by patriarchy.

Ali’s novel is about a Nawab (a feudal lord) who transfers his property to Huma, his favourite courtesan. However, he goes on to get involved with yet another courtesan, Kesari Bai. Eventually the Nawab is ruined and, in a moment of insanity, murders Kesari Bai and commits suicide. Huma meanwhile returns the papers of his property to him but he never receives them. Huma finds peace through her selfless deeds.

The novel is on a hackneyed theme, there being many stories about prostitutes and nawabs when Ali was writing it, and Ali uses melodramatic techniques which make it very uninteresting and unoriginal. There is a mystical theme---that of a mysterious, nameless youth’s idolization of Huma---but it has not been exploited in a convincing manner. On the whole the work does not attain the artistic level of Twilight nor of other contemporary works on similar themes.

This novel was mostly ignored by reviewers but those who did comment upon it did not approve of it. Alistair Niven, for instance, calls it a melodrama in the tradition of Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones. In some ways it is like Urdu and Hindi films which feature a decadent aristocrat, a decent courtesan and a villain who may be male or female.

Ahmed Ali’s last attempt at fiction, Rats and Diplomats is a departure from his realistic mode of narration. It is an attempt at using modernist styles combining irony, symbolism and absurdism. The story is about a general being posted as the ambassador of Bachusan to Ratisan. Here he is caught early in morning in the garden of another ambassador being mistaken for a thief and is recalled. However, he grows a tail being transformed into a rat in the end. This absurdist tale about diplomacy as observed by a cynic purports to be an allegorical tale about modern perceptions of the world like Ionesco’s famous short story ‘The Rhinoceros’ or Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’. The point is that like General Sourirada Soutanna, the protagonist, everyone in high diplomatic circles is really a rat. Unfortunately, the novel fails to be interesting either from the narrative point of view or on the symbolic plane. As the book was published when Ali was the Grand Old Man Pakistani English fiction, it was not criticized severely but only a few reviews of it appeared in the press.

Ali’s short stores belong for the most part to the progressive, realist tradition of writing of which Premchand was the pioneer in Urdu and Hindi fiction. Some stories are, however, influenced by modern styles of narrative technique and Ali uses symbols and events rather than sequential narrative to convey meaning. Among the stories published in English in The Prison House, ‘Our Lane’, ‘Shammu Khan’, ‘Two Sides of the Picture’ and ‘The Man Accused’ are in the realistic style. ‘Our Lane’ presents a slice of the daily life of pre-Partition Delhi. In ‘Two Sides’, as in the novel Twilight, the conflict between tradition and modernity is the focus. But here the aristocratic characters support British rule and cannot be viewed sentimentally. The symbolic stories are surrealistic being influenced by the experimental techniques of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and J S. Eliot. These stories require too much ingenuity to unravel their meaning and yield too little pleasure. On the whole Ali’s experimental fiction is mainly of historical interest.

Ali’s poetry is influenced by the tradition of the Urdu ghazal as well as the English Romantic tradition. He is also influenced by the Chinese lyrics which give the poems an exotic style. His major themes, in common with those of the ghazal, are nostalgia, a sense of loss and the consciousness of loneliness. He is also influenced by T.S. Eliot’s theory of the impersonality of art which makes him employ imagery rather than narration to convey meaning. On the whole Ali has not written enough poetry to merit him a high place among South Asian poets who write in English.

Ali’s translations from Urdu try to be faithful to the original at the cost of being less poetic than they could have been. However, Urdu poetry is so deeply embedded in its historical and socio-cultural roots that it is not possible to give literal translations which are also poetic. Under the circumstances Ali has done a commendable job though his translations are less well known than those of other people. In The Golden Tradition Ali has not only given translations from the classical poets of Urdu but has also written what amounts to a competent history of Urdu poetry. His critical pieces on the masters of the ghazal, including the poets Meer Taqi Meer (1723-1810) and Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797-1869) are perhaps the best pieces of literary criticism he ever wrote.

Ali’s most surprising tour de force is the translation of the Qur’an---surprising because of Ali’s reputation as a Westernized, liberal intellectual with no known grounding in Arabic and Islamic scholarship. It is entitled Al-Qur’an: A Contemporary Translation (1984). Ahmed Ali uses metrical lines to convey what he calls ‘the sonority and rhythmic patterns of the Qur’anic language’ (Preface). Among the South Asian Muslims who had attained fame for translating the Qur’an into English was Abdullah Yusuf Ali (1872-1953) whose biography Searching for Solace (1994) by M. A. Sherif is available. What is surprising is that Abdullah Yusuf Ali and Ahmed Ali, both brought up in the colonial state’s secular educational institutions, should have mastered the Arabic language so well as to translate the Qur’an. However, since the present author is himself ignorant of Arabic, no comment as to the validity of the translation can be ventured. It may be mentioned, however, that no prominent scholar of Arabic or Islamic scholarship has commented on Ali’s translation.

On the whole Ahmed Ali is a minor literary figure as far as world literature is concerned. His creative output is limited but more than that he cannot escape the dichotomy between the traditional and the modern which leads to a sentimental treatment of tradition along with an intellectual admiration of some aspects of the modern. As a translator his work remains to be evaluated by critics competent in the original languages from which the work has been translated. Despite these limitations Ali remains one of the pioneers of South Asian writing in English.

References

Section 1: Major works by the author in English.

Twilight in Delhi [novel] 1940. Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1966.

Ocean of the Night [novel] London: Peter Owen Ltd, 1964.

Purple Gold Mountain London: Keepsake Press, 1960.

The Prison House: Short Stories Karachi: Akrash Publishing, 1985.

Rats and Diplomats [novel] Karachi: Akrash Publishing.

The Golden Tradition: An Anthology of Urdu Poetry New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1973.

Al-Qur’an: A Contemporary Translation Karachi: Akrash Publishing, 1984. Revised ed. 1986.

Selected Poems: Ahmed Ali (ed) Klaus Stuckert. Gulbarga, India: Journal of India Writing in English, 1988.

Selected Short Stories From Pakistani: Urdu Introduced and edited by Ahmed Ali, Islamabad: Pakistan Academy of Letters, 1983.

Section 2: Works on the author.

Alamgir Hashmi, ‘Ahmed Ali: the Transition to A post-Colonial Mode’, World Literature Written in English 2 (1989).

Alistair, Niven, ‘Historical Imagination in the Novels of Ahmed Ali’, Journal of Indian Writing in English Vol. III: Nos 1-2 (January-July 1980), 5-11.

Anita S. Kumar, ‘Twilight in Delhi: a study in lyricism,’ Indian Literature (March-April 1976).

Anniah Gowda, ‘Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart’, in A.K. Srivastava (ed), Alien Voices: Perspectives on Commonwealth Literature (Lucknow: Atlantic Highlands, 1981), 53-60. Also in The Literary Half-Yearly XXI: 1 (1981), 11-18.

Carlo Coppola, ‘The Short Stories of Ahmed Ali’, in Muhammad Umar Memon (ed), Studies in the Urdu Ghazal and Prose Fiction (1979). Also in Journal of South Asian Studies Vol. XIII: Nos. 1, 2, 3 and 4 (Fall-winter-Summer-Spring, 1977-78), 211-241.

_______ ‘The Writers Commitment, The Writer’s Art: A Study of Ahmed Ali’, Unpublished Typescript (Present author’s personal collection).

David D. Anderson, ‘Ahmed Ali and Twilight in Delhi’, Journal of South Asian Literature (Spring-Summer 1971), 81-86.

Lawrence Brander, ‘Two Novels by Ahmed Ali’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature (July 1967), 1-8.

Tariq Rahman, ‘ Ahmed Ali’, Chapter 3 of A History of Pakistani Literature in English (Lahore: Vanguard, 1991), 29-55.

_______ Linguistic Deviation as a Stylistic Device in Pakistani English Fiction; Journal of Commonwealth Literature Vol. XXV: No. (1990), 1-11.