india author m 1- a-nan - University of Wollongong

Corrects and contests the statements of N. M. Rashed about the origins and motives
of the Progressive Writers Movement. Exposes Rashed's lack of historical and literary validity
and questions his purpose in distorting facts about the progressives. Establishes the non-
Marxist practice and intention of the Angare writers group which preceded the PWA.
COPPOLA, CARLO. "The Poetry of Ahmed Ali" JIWE 8.1-2 (1980):63-76. Reprinted in
SINGH, KIRPAL ed. Through Different Eyes: Foreign Responses to Indian Writing in English
Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1984: 87-105.
Best known for his fiction, Ali “feels that he best expresses himself” though his poetry
in English. Biographical survey noting his Urdu short stories and 1938 disillusionment with the
prescriptive politicisation of the Progressive Writers Association and the impact on poetry of
his trips to China (Purple Gold Mountain, 1960). Early work of “naked emotion” drew on
Persian rubai but China and translation work gave the model for “impersonalising personal
experience”. Themes cover loss of friends, memories of love and youth, unfulfilled hopes, life’s
evanescence. Illustrative commentary focusing on imagery. Poems grouped as “Exile” divide
into early political didacticism and later working of political and historical critique into
allegorical reference and symbol. Takes “Having been attacked for speaking the truth...” as his
finest poem of this type. Generally, his work blends English Romantic, Chinese lyric and Urdu
traditions, the last most deeply influential and its derivative quality makes it less than his
fictional achievement, but there are individual poetic successes.
GOWDA, H.H. ANNIAH. “Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi and Chinua Achebe’s Things
Fall Apart” The Literary Half-Yearly 21.1 (1980): 11-18.
Comparison of two treatments of societies disappearing under colonial rule, both
grounded in historical detail and locality (Delhi of 1900-1910 and Iboland 1850-1900) and
embodying the respective cultures in a central hero (Mir Nihal and Okonkwo), following the
Victorian “linear bourgeois familial novel”. Ali alludes to “farangi” incursion but attributes
change to fate, while Achebe shows socio-historical forces at work. Notes the escalating
impact of missions probing the weak points of traditional African society. Both books show
civilisations that “collapse from within and are overwhelmed from without, and what replaces
them appears most opposite to themselves, being built on what they had overlooked”. Lyric
and humour apply to the “ceremonies of innocence” before the Yeatsian tragic collapse. The
authors both step in to explicate material but avoid anthropologising by being part of what they
observe and by concentrating on the human drama.
KING, BRUCE. “From Twilight to Midnight” in HASHMI, ALAMGIR ed. Worlds of the
Muslim Imagination details???
Reads Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Ali’s Twilight in Delhi and Ocean of Night,
Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column and Zulfikar Ghose’s The Murder of Aziz Khan
as a collective history of Muslim society from the Moguls to colonial decadence and Partition;
a story of loss, exile, displacement. Ali began with naturalistic Urdu stories moving to a
combination of poetic evocation and social realism carrying an early modernist view of
decadence awaiting cleansing but capitulating to Western ideas. Hosain focusses
impressionistically on the intersections of personal, political and religious independence within
a woman’s love story. Ghose depicts the deleterious effects on Punjab peasantry of
modernising muslim immigrants from Bombay after Partition. Ghose and Rushdie evince a
more complete modernism, separation of heart and mind reflected in expatriation and
Rushdie’s carnivalistic metafictional allegory substituting for loss of faith.