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

NIVEN, ALISTAIR. "Historical Imagination in the Novels of Ahmed Ali" JIWE 8.1-2
(January-July 1980):3-13. Reprinted in SINGH, KIRPAL ed. Through Different Eyes:
Foreign Responses to Indian Writing in English Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1984: 1-15.
Unlike much Third World fiction recording the disappearing past, Ali’s novels
Twilight in Delhi and Ocean of Night are not rural, but celebrate two centres of urban
civilisation: Delhi and Lucknow, fatalistically hymning the fading glories of indian islamic culture
and the plight of individuals cut off from tradition. The novels were both written in the late
thirties (though Ocean only appeared in 1964) still in an Indian context (notes metaphysical
simliarities between Rao and Ali in Ocean and engagé echoes of Anand) . Later poetry
conventionally reproduces a muslim theme of mortal transience and death. Images of darkness
envelop the novels but are related to linked private and public events and reistered in Asghar’s
swings between fantasy, self-pity and nostalgia, and Mir Nihal’s growing old. The mass of
humanity lives on in unaltered rhythm of rise and fall, reflecting LAi’s essentially classical
outlook. Notes a “kinship of mood” to Eliot, especially in Ocean with its images of time as
dance. Ali’s writing in English threatens to become part of the cultural decline from Urdu
classical culture into modernity, just as its prose can become slack and its elegiac tone
bathetic. Ocean moves to symbolism and dreams but is not altogether the lesser work; both
novels are saved by the affirmation of God’s constancy and human nobility in endurance and
the dignity of Biblical-Koranic cadence.
SHANKAR, D.A. "Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi" Literary Criterion 15.1 (1980):73-80.
Descriptive appreciation of Ali’s detailing of the texture of a lost way of life. A classic
relies on provincial rootedness, grounding ideas in individual sensibility as well as collective
social history. Details of pigeons show the personalities of people around them and the values
of a class and period now crumbling under foreign intrusion. The novel remains a minor classic
limited by its closeness to its central family: it needs irony, humour and “comprehensiveness of
understanding”.
STILZ, GERHARD. “‘Live in Fragments No Longer’: A Conciliatory Analysis of Ahmed
Ali’s Twilight in Delhi” in DAVIS, GEOFFREY & MAES-JELINEK, HENA eds. Crisis and
Creativity in the New Literatures in English Amsterdam’Atlanta: Rodopi, 1990: 369-387.
Bio-bibliographic survey of contradictions in Ali’s life (India/Pakistan, Urdu/English,
politics/Art) including his espousing both modern change and nostalgia for romantic beauty.
His twilight metaphor corresponds to an “existential ambivalence” that reconciles opposites
Narrative modes derive from the psychological novel offset by repetetive emphasis of a
message and swinging from realism to romantic pathos. Twilight shows “the decline of a world
that places art above reality”.
Alkazi, Roshen
DUBEY, SURESH CHANDRA. "Roshen Alkazi and Mamta Kalia" in DWIVEDI, A.N.
"Eves' Song: Contemporary English Verse by Indian Women" Studies in Contemporary Indo-
English Verse: A Collection of Critical Essays. Vol. I Female Poets Bareilly: Prakash Book
Depot, 1985: 201-16.
Amanuddin, [Syed? or Urdu? Pakistan?]
AMANUDDIN, SYED. "The Image of Woman in My Poetry" SARev (July 1979): 36-42.
DIESENDORF, MARGARET. "Early Love Poems of Amanuddin" Creative Moment 3.1
(1974):35-41.