English Heart, Hindi Heartland. Rashmi Sadana
Urdu-speaking world. The lament begins in 1857 and is literally cemented when the British create a new colonial capital that will be New Delhi. Old Delhi, meanwhile, is home to the historic Muslim quarters of the city, especially in the adjoining by-lanes of the Jama Masjid. This religious containment is mirrored in the Urdu language. Urdu represents a lifestyle through which a cultivated Muslim sensibility is lived. The loss of language as lived in the city is the loss of an entire world.
Ali contrasts the public events and changes to the city with the private world of his protagonist, Mir Nihal, an aging, pigeon-flying, china-collecting Muslim patriarch, “an aristocrat in his habits.”12 As the colonial power intrudes in the city's alleyways and by-lanes, Mir Nihal's life and spirit are in a state of decline and degeneration. In one passage the narrator describes the alleyways of the old city as “tortuous and winding, growing narrower like the road of life” and terminating “at the house of Mir Nihal.”13 Mir Nihal's beloved city is literally closing in on him. He must accept that it is not only a new world that he is no longer part of, but as the narrator describes it, it is a “unity of experience and form” that no longer exists for him.14 This breakage in the unity of experience and form is paralleled in the form of the novel itself, as Ali renders an Urdu idiom of life in English. While others around him—even members of his own family—adapt and even embrace these changes, Mir Nihal suffers a cultural paralysis that is mirrored by a real paralytic stroke by the novel's end.
Priya Joshi has argued that what prompted Ahmed Ali to write Twilight in Delhi was that he had become (and his protagonist Mir Nihal by proxy) an “exile at home,” a foreigner in his own land.15 But it might be more accurate to characterize Mir Nihal as dislocated since his tragedy is precisely that there is no possibility of return and no new place to go to. His dislocation goes beyond the colonizing presence of the British; it is indicative of a sea of cultural changes that are occurring within his own family and in his own neighborhood. Further, this dislocation is a mirroring of the linguistic dislocation in the city itself. It comes at a time when the political distinctions and agendas of Hindus and Muslims under colonial rule have grown, and the shared north Indian language of Hindustani has split into a Sanskritized Hindi and Persianized Urdu.16 Even if Urdu becomes the language of Pakistan (as it does), the strongest Urdu-language communities in Delhi, Lucknow, and Hyderabad, will unravel but not be able to be reconstituted else-where.17 It is both the city and its language that make the cultural distinctiveness of Urdu life.
In narrative terms, the loss of Urdu culture and its replacement by a crass modernity introduced by the English and their language is most powerfully relayed as a classic generational struggle between father and son. Mir Nihal is increasingly alienated from his son, Asghar, and is resentful of his habits and ways, everything from the English boots his son wears—”You are again wearing those dirty English boots! I don't like them. I will have no aping of the Farangis in my house. Throw them away!”18—to his son's fervent desire for a love marriage. When, three quarters of the way into the novel, Asghar finally succeeds in marrying Bilqeece, with whom he has been obsessed from the start, the sad disconnect between the newly wed couple epitomizes the kind of emotional disjuncture with which Ali is preoccupied. The narrator explains:
Sometimes when they were alone, Ashgar would put his hand round her waist, but this annoyed Bilqeece. She did not say anything to Asghar, but she felt constrained, and would become silent.
‘Why are you so quiet?’ Asghar would ask her.
She would sit gazing in front of her and say:
‘I do not know what to say.’
He would have liked to hear her talk of love and happiness, her voice flowing like a sweet murmuring stream, talking of sad and beautiful things. He wanted her to kiss him and caress him, put her arms around his neck and whisper: ‘I love you, I love you…’
…
Now and then Bilqeece looked at him with beautiful, furtive eyes. At such moments Asghar loved her more than anything in the world, and smothered her with kisses. But she was not romantic at all. This damped Asghar's feelings. He thought of his Mushtari Bai and other sweethearts. He remembered the warmth of their passion and their loving ways. By contrast Bilqeece looked so dull and insipid. But she was young and beautiful; and Asghar had built most beautiful castles around her lovely frame.19
As English sensibilities trump Urdu ones, and in the novel's triumph over poetry, Ali seems to be saying, love will be domesticated. It is not a simple question of love becoming an exclusive part of so-called private space but rather that the male gaze turns inward to a love unconnected to the city itself. The imposition of new ways of thinking and being (or, importantly, in the case of Asghar, the yearning for and grasping of those new ways) begins a process of shifting social norms. Ashgar puts his modern desires and expectations onto his new, unsuspecting bride. For Ali, English is the language of his text, but it is also a sign of the intrusions of a Westernized, English sensibility. The mounting tragedy of the novel is that Mir Nihal continually refuses the possibility that he can find a place in this changed world. For him, there is no possibility of a dual cultural consciousness, a world of Urdu and English. But even the younger Asghar, in his grasping of English ways, is stymied in his modernistic impulses. He does not become at home in a new world but instead is completely lost (though not destroyed, like his father) by the end of the novel.
IN CUSTODY
At least three historical developments separate the writing of Twilight in Delhi and In Custody. After the partition of India and Pakistan, Urdu became the national language of Pakistan and hence acquired a nationalistic association for the first time in its own history. This association not only symbolically “consolidated” the newly formed Pakistani nation, with its own host of competing regional languages (Bengali, Punjabi, Sindhi, Balochi, Pashto), but also made official the perception of Urdu as being the language of Muslims. Meanwhile Indian cities like Delhi, Lucknow, and Hyderabad, once centers of Muslim culture and Urdu poetry, lost large sections of their Muslim populations who migrated to Pakistan or were killed in the violence of the partition itself. At the same time, Hindi, though the most widely spoken Indian language, was rejected as the Indian national language (mostly by southern India) despite its majority status. In what could be seen as a sad linguistic farce, Hindi and Urdu, once spoken as a lingua franca of north India in the form of Hindustani, were delinked to represent two nations with two national languages (Hindi and Urdu) that did not adequately represent the people in whose name they were created.20
By this time, English had become a sign of bourgeois India and middle-class aspiration, symbolized not only by the urban conglomerate of government, higher education, and commerce but also by such popular publications as the Illustrated Weekly of India, scholarly publications by Indian intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s, and the burgeoning canon of Indian English literary texts themselves. That there is and will be cultural production in English became a given, and its contestation became part and parcel of local and regional struggles, with little or no reference to empire. These major sociological shifts created a new linguistic and political culture in the city of Delhi, and In Custody reflects some of those changes.
In Desai's novel, and as distinct from Ali's, English is no longer a sign of Westernization but instead mediates an internal Indian discourse. If Ali's lament of Urdu is focused on the imposition of English modernity, in Desai's satirical portrait, Urdu culture has already become a relic. We may detect farce even in the setup of Desai's novel, which tells the story of Deven, a glum, small-town Hindi lecturer whose real and perhaps sole passion is Urdu poetry. Part of the satiric power of In Custody is that it is a hapless Hindi lecturer who goes to interview and record the poetic utterances of one of the last great living Urdu poets, called Nur. Deven is slight and unsure of himself; the narrator tells us that Deven's early life experience had taught him how to get by: “to lie low and remain invisible.”21 The title of the novel refers to Deven's quest to have Nur's poems in his custody, for safekeeping and for the possible revival of the Urdu poetic tradition. As in Twilight in Delhi, the demise of one literary form (poetry) is being told through another (the novel). However, Desai's novel relies on a different spatial order to do so. Where Ali brings to life the