Professor Ahmed Ali

Noviiisr, riaxsiaroi, ioir axo ciiric, Ahmed Ali died on :

January :,,, thus concluding a most important and eventful chapter of
our cultural and literary history. Ahmed Ali, popularly known as
Professor Ahmed Ali, was an epoch-making personality. He was the father
of modern Pakistani literature; in fact, his work helped shape twentieth-
century South Asian literature in both English and Urdu.
He was born in Delhi in :,:c and educated at Aligarh Muslim
University and Lucknow University. At Aligarh, he was a student of Eric
Dickinsons; for a time Ahmed Ali and Raja Rao were classmates there.
Ahmed Ali began a career in teaching in :,,:, as a lecturer in English at
Lucknow, and apart from an appointment as Director of Listener
Research for BBCs New Delhi office during World War II, served as
professor at Agra, Allahabad, and Calcutta, before leaving for China in
:,; as a British Council visiting professor. Following Partition, he
moved to Karachi and joined the Pakistan Foreign Service, established
Pakistans embassies in China and Morocco, and retired in :,oc. For two
decades afterward, he worked as a businessman and as a visiting professor
with various Pakistani and US universities.
Ahmed Ali started his writing career as a poet and playwright and
soon found his forte in the short story and novel, developing fast as a
bilingual (English and Urdu) writer who wrote most of his short stories in
Urdu, but his plays, poems and novels in English. In fact, it can be
argued that some of the characterization and symbolism in his novels
Twilight in Delhi (:,c) and Ocean of Night (:,o) were drawn from the
sociological and structural kernel of his plays and short stories of the :,,cs


From The Nation, : April :,,, p. :o; originally appeared as Ahmed
AliFather of Modern Pakistani Literature.
Aiaxcii Hasuxi ,
which ranged stylistically from the realistic and the allegorical to the
autobiographical/psychological and the surrealistic.
In the :,,cs, Ahmed Ali was the main founder and the most creative
component of the Progressive Writers Movement, which later became the
League of Progressive Authors, and still later the Progressive Writers
Association. If it had not been for the publication of Agr (Burning
Coals) in :,,:and its aftermath and offshoots in several South Asian
languagesit is hard to imagine what future Pakistani literature would
have been like. One imagines that, despite an Iqbal or a Premchand, the
nineteenth century would have continued unabated. Holding up a
mirror to society required new perceptions, new attitudes, and new
techniques besides courage and familiarity with the Western literary
tradition.
Ahmed Ali had the right equipment. Twilight in Delhi and Ocean of
Night, as well as much of his fiction in Urdu, focus on the culture of
colonial India. As in Iqbal, broad humanistic concerns are studied
through the prism of the Muslim community and its destiny; his first-
hand knowledge of this community qualified it for artistic availability,
and his literatures immediate feel gave it a special significance.
Accordingly, Twilight in Delhi is set in the great Indian center of
Muslim civilization, Delhi, and the plot revolves round a simple love
story of a boy and a girl, of Mughal and noble Arabic extractions
respectively, who go through the cyclical joys and difficulties of having
their love accepted, formalized, and renewed despite social barriers or
death. Around this story is built a whole way of lifecustoms and
ceremonies that sustain a colorful though declining feudal culture,
including the fathers (Mir Nihal) pigeon-flying pastime, the zanna, and
wedding rituals. In the outer circle, round the old house in a bylane of old
Delhi, history is seen at work in the Great Durbar held by the King-
Emperor in :,::, the public reactions to the First World War, the
influenza epidemic of :,:,, the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre of :,:, in
Amritsar, and the political turmoil of :,:c in Northern India. The
excellent subject matter and innovative style here were enough to interest
Bonamy Dobree, Edwin Muir and E.M. Forster, who commended the
novelas well as those elements which could barely pass the British
censors examination of the manuscript during the Second World War. In
the process, Ali was able to enlist active interest and support of such
distinguished figures as Virginia Woolf, Desmond MacCarthy, John
Lehmann, and Harold Nicolson. The book was rated a classic in Asia; its
author was recognized as the first Muslim novelist of any consequence.
o Tui Axxuai oi Uiou Sruoiis
Ocean of Night, dealing with life between the two World Wars, was
published in :,o. It explores the possibility of the modern spirit within a
feudal structure, and whereas E.M. Forster finds the heart [sic Eds.]
to be undeveloped in A Passage to India (:,:), Ahmed Ali finds it here
half atrophied, half searching in confusion. The novel is set in the other
great Muslim center, Lucknow. The mood is somewhat subdued, the
atmosphere one of repose and contemplation amidst a celebration dance
and Muslim ideas of love, peace and friendship. The Nawabs mistress is a
fine courtesan, and the young lawyer in love with her cannot overcome
the class barrier to find fulfillment. The intellectual and mystical elements
in the Muslim tradition are related to the political degeneration of the
Muslim civilization and both ordinary feelings and the more delicate
emotions are seen as atrophied or sacrificed to the remaining oligarchys
reckless lifestyle and idle, indiscriminate social pursuits.
These early novels are concerned with the last of Muslim civilization
in British India and are written in the realistic-poetic tradition. Ahmed
Alis third, post-colonial novel, Rats and Diplomats (:,o), deals with
general decay in the world, in which representatives of the newly-freed
fourth world find analogs of their own decay and depravity prevalent on
a universal scale.
Consequently, the poetry disappears completely. And so does realism.
Before the very end, the protagonist wakes up one morning transformed
into a rat, with a tail grown at his back. The ratty business has taken its
moral toll, whose evidence is biological and (un)aesthetic. The narrative
aspires to the moral status of a fable. The historical imagination in the
earlier works did not offer to subvert history so as to reorder the moral
universe; and such verve and humor had never been at the forefront, as
they are in Rats and Diplomats.
Ahmed Alis example in this respect is most instructive. Leaving
introspective historical fictionsat a time when reconstructive urges were
paramount in the writing in major Indian languages including English, as
in the writings by Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan, Raja Rao and K.A.
Abbashis long fictional silence and preparation only led him to wield
what he called the scalpel. Evidently an ironic instrument of discourse,
the scalpel had to replace the realistic and reconstructive fictions of the
colonial period which insufficiently grasped either the historical forces at
work or the tremendous flux that they had caused in the fundamental
structure of colonial societies. Yet Ahmed Alis penetrating mind would
not rest easy for answers on triumphs of style. He had experienced the
twentieth century too fully to settle for simplistic solutions and continued
Aiaxcii Hasuxi ;
to see a precise definition of modernity. It is in regard to this resoiling of
culture that the search for harmony, love, and renewal is found to be at
the heart of Ahmed Alis fiction, as much as in his poetry.
His poems reflect the influences imbibed from Chinese lyric, English
Romantic, Urdu, and Persian traditions. Often written in a deliberately
antiquated styleas if an English translation of old Chinesethese
poems achieve a certain distance and impersonality while dealing with
personal details or human, moral and metaphysical themes; they also lend
themselves both to personal and political allegories, to which most of
Ahmed Alis work since the :,,cs responds rather readily.
Translation to him was an important medium of reading cultures and
he remained engaged in this vast enterprise throughout his life. Besides a
fine contemporary translation of Al-Qurn (:,) and a critical anthology
of Urdu poetry in The Golden Tradition (:,;,), he brought out the first
volume in English drawn from Indonesian work, The Flaming Earth:
Poems from Indonesia (:,,). His translations of poetry from pre-
revolutionary China still await publication. In the :,;cs, I used his
translations as texts in teaching courses in Comparative Literature, and
also testedpositivelythe popularity of his fiction among ever-growing
numbers of students in Western universities. His erudition and insight
into culture and literature set a standard in their own time, whether the
subject was Mr. Eliots Penny-World of Dreams (:,:), Muslim China
(:,,), or The Problem of Style and Technique in Ghalib (:,o,). He was
the happiest of authors in that he was still at work in the middle of his
eighty-fourth year, leaving behind a shelf full of unpublished manuscripts:
he revised his novel Ocean of Night to Where Love is Dead; he prepared
new versions of his translation of Mir and Ghalib; he completed his
Chinese poetry anthology, The Call of the Trumpet; he compiled a large
anthology of his own English poetry, still called Purple Gold Mountain
(after the title of his first poetry collection). He was still writing a history
of the region comprising Pakistan, and called it The Indus Flows On.
Ahmed Alis career spanned the better part of the century and his
work put us in touch with both our past and our present. His renderings
of the literatures of South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Far East
established links which were not yet known, and are remembered
respectfully. His creative writings still draw wide interest and are an
enduring contribution to international letters.
As he wrote in :,, (Afterword, The Prison-House):
[] I am still a progressive, and try to face the actualities of life,
Tui Axxuai oi Uiou Sruoiis
and look at it with unclouded eyes, untrammelled with baseless
conservatism or ideality, or the shibboleths of our own making, the
tin gods who sit in judgment over our freedom of thought and
expression, and restrain us from growth and progress and
emancipation from the shackles of blind orthodoxy that hold us
back from marching towards the goal of higher perception and
purpose of life, the intenser realisation of mans destiny for which
he was ordained from the beginning of creation. (pp. :oo,)
Ahmed Ali truly lived up to his credo till the very last moments of his
life.
Just months before his final departure, the University of Karachi
honored itself by making him a Doctor of Literature. A few years ago
when the Government of Pakistan conferred on him the Sitra-e Imtiyz
(The Star of Distinction), it only saw what had long been obvious. He
was one of the brightest stars in the firmament. His star came down to be
with us for a bit, and is back there again, shining away.