Twilight in Delhi - Ahmed Ali

Notes During Reading:

01/28/22

The narrative (or the translator?) is eerily similar to One Hundred Years of Solitude, without the bizarre overt unending existential crisis.

01/27/22

I am fascinated by the communal fasting/prayer experience recounted in this novel (during Ramadan and Eid specifically). Having recently read Dalrymple's City of Djinns, in which a remarkably similar experience is related by the author, it was interesting to encounter a similar scene set in a novel written 70 years earlier.

An excerpt from Twilight in Delhi:

"At the Eed-gah there were thousands and thousands of people, all elated and happy with attar on their bodies and collyrium in their eyes. The noise of people talking, vendors shouting, children crying, filled the air. All along the roads and in the open ground near the Eed-gah toy-sellers had coloured the earth with bright earthen toys. Vendors went about selling delicacies, and many sold whistles and bugles and trumpets, and deafened the ears with their noises and cries.

Then the prayer began. They all stood in rows, one behind the other. There were so many people that they had to form rows outside the enclosure of the Eed-gah. As the shout of Allah-o-akbar went up a sudden quiet descended upon the earth. Everyone became silent as if there were no one there at all. Only now and then a child began to cry, frightened by the sudden silence, perhaps, or at being lonely in the midst of that huge crowd. One could hear a horse neighing or a kite shrilly crying as it flew in the sky.

When the prayer ended they all began to embrace, falling to the earth on each other;s necks, pressing the chests together warmly. All those who knew one another went through this show and expression of affection. And the lovers found the opportunity of their lives. A middle-aged man quoted these lines to a young man with arms open for an embrace, just where the whole family of Mir Nihal were embracing and waiting for the crowd to thin so that they could go out:

In is the day of Eed, my dear,

Ah come, let me embrace thee.

It is custom and besides

There's time and opportunity..."

And from City of Djinns:

"From all directions people were still pouring out of the maze of the Old City and heading towards one of the three gates of the Jama Masjid - three seething crocodiles of humanity heading towards the same walled courtyard. Within minutes the last remaining areas of the pink stone flooring were covered with bodies and had turned home-spun-white. The mosque was now packed full, but still crowds were pouring in. Finding the courtyard full, but still crowds were taking up their stations in perfectly straight ranks first on the steps, then on the roads leading up to the mosque, then out in the gardens and bazaars beyond. Five minutes before the prayers were due to start, the waves had nearly stilled. Twenty or thirty thousand people were kneeling down facing westwards, patiently waiting for the final prayers of Ramadan. Had I taken my station on the same day, two, three or even four hundred years earlier the same spectacle would have presented itself, completely unchanged."

One detail is conspicuously different in these two accounts, Ahmed Ali and the poet of his account observe the desegregated and even permissive nature of the Eid prayers. Fifty years later Dalrymple observes a strict separation of the sexes. It would be interesting to watch these prays performed today, and compare them to those of the 1910s and 1980s. My guess would be an even more discernible segregation that of the 80s and an irreconcilably different scene than that of the 10s. The divide and conquer method of empire continues rear it's ugly head.