Private Space as a site for Anti-Colonial Imagination

Critical Study of Twilight in Delhi

Abstract

In my paper, I intend to conduct a discourse analysis of
Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi to demonstrate how living by narratives
has a therapeutic effect on our injured sense of national pride. In Ahmed
Ali, the protagonist, Mir Nihal feels frustrated at the political and
cultural disempowerment in the public sphere. But he is incapacitated to
put an active resistance to the colonizer. Thus he develops an aesthetic
or in Chatterji’s words spiritual mode of resistance in the private realm
of imagination. Whenever he feels insulted at the hands of the colonizer,
he takes refuge in an imagined past when the Muslim rulers enjoyed
absolute political power. He views the Muslim past in India as a linearly
constructed discourse in which the Muslims and Hindus enjoyed an
exemplary social and cultural harmony. My argument is that it is an
attempt to narrativize the past and to create a benign, monolithic Muslim
identity. Mir Nihal does not say a single word about the Muslim
colonization of India. In my view, it is related to the politics of building
historical narratives. Since Mir Nihal wants to regain lost power, his
narrative remains silent on the Hindu perspective as it may become fatal
for an imagined national unity needed to fight back the colonizer. His
idea of nationhood draws strength from the selective narration of the
past, the mythological past of India during the reign of Asoka and
Chundergupt a Maurya and the arrival of the Muslim.