Ahmed Ali

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Date of birth: 
01 Jul 1910
City of birth: 
Delhi
Country of birth: 
India
Date of death: 
14 Jan 1994
Location of death: 
Karachi, Pakistan
Date of 1st arrival in Britain: 
04 Aug 1939
Dates of time spent in Britain: 

4 August 1939 - September 1949

1954 (travelled through)

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About: 

Ahmed Ali, best known for his acclaimed literary fiction, was born to Syed Shujauddin, a civil servant, and Ahmad Kaniz Asghar Begum in 1910. Ali attended Wesley Mission High School in Azamgarh and Government High School in Aligarh before beginning his studies in 1926 at Aligharh Muslim University where he met Raja Rao and their English poetry tutor Eric C. Dickinson (Ali’s first mentor), and published his first poem in Aligarh Magazine. Just a year later he transferred to Lucknow University, where he published his first short story and graduated, in 1930, with the highest marks in English in the history of the university.

In 1931, Ali gained his MA from the same institution and became a lecturer there. It was in this year that he also met Sajjad Zaheer and Mahmaduzaffar. With Rashid Jahan, the daughter of the well-known advocate of women's education in India, Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah, the three men produced an anthology of short stories titled Anghare ('Burning Coals') which, because of its political radicalism and also, according to some, obscenity, provoked considerable hostility and was eventually banned. In the wake of this controversy, the four writers became involved in the All-India Progressive Writers' Association which had its beginnings in London in 1934 but its first official meeting in Lucknow in 1936. Ali also published his own first collection of short stories, Sho’le (‘Flames’) in that year.

Soon after the inception of the AIPWA, a rift developed within it; Ali disagreed with Zaheer and others about the function of literature within society, arguing that it should not be reduced to political propaganda. He severed his connections with the association, departing for London in 1939 with the manuscript of his first novel Twilight in Delhi. He remained in Britain for just over a year. During this time, he mixed with writers, both Indian and English. Introduced to E. M. Forster by his distant relative Syed Ross Masood, Ali became good friends with him and was introduced by him into London’s literary circles and, in particular, the Bloomsbury Group. He was one of the editors of the magazine Indian Writing, had short fiction published in John Lehmann’s journal New Writing, and was successful in securing a publishing deal for his first novel, Twilight in Delhi, with Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press.

On his return to India, Ali was appointed Director of Listener Research for the BBC, Delhi. In 1944, he left this post and was appointed Professor of English at Presidency College, Calcutta. In the following year, he attended the first All-India PEN conference in Jaipur, with Forster as chief speaker. Later, he founded Pakistan PEN with Hasan Shahid Suhrawardy. In China during the partition of the Indian subcontinent, Ali moved to Karachi in the newly formed Pakistan on his return and began a career in the diplomatic service which took him back to China and to Morocco. He was eventually retired from government service by General Muhammad Ayub Khan’s military regime in 1960, and went on to start up his own business. He was married to Bilquis Jahan and had three sons and a daughter.

During his lifetime, Ali published several more volumes of short stories in Urdu, as well as anthologies of English translations of Urdu poetry, the first anthology of Pakistani writing in English translation, the first anthology of Indonesian poetry in English translation, a study of China’s Muslim population, and his second and third novels (1964, 1985), continuing to produce new works until his death.

Connections: 

J. R. Ackerley, Harold Acton, Mulk Raj Anand, E. M. Forster, Attia Hosain, Rashid Jahan, Beatrix Lehmann, John Lehmann, Rosamond Lehmann, Desmond MacCarthy, Harold Nicolson, George Orwell, Raja Rao, K. S. Shelvankar, Iqbal Singh, Sasadhar Sinha, Stephen Spender, Hasan Shahid Suhrawardy, M. J. Tambimuttu, Leonard Woolf, Virginia Woolf, Sajjad Zaheer.

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Published works: 

‘When the Funeral Was Crossing the Bridge’, Lucknow University Journal (1929) [short story]

‘Mahavaton ki ek Rat’, Humayun (1931) [short story]

(ed. with Zaheer, Jahan, Mahmuduzaffar) Angare (‘Burning Coals’) (1932) [short stories]

Shole (‘Flames’), 1932 [poems]

Twilight in Delhi (London: Hogarth Press, 1940) [novel]

Hamari Gali (‘Our Lane’) (1942) [short stories]

Qaid Khana (‘Prison House’) (1944) [short stories]

Maut se Pahle (‘Before Death’) (1945) [short stories]

(ed.) The Flaming Earth: Poems from Indonesia (1949) [poems]

Muslim China (1949) [non-fiction]

(ed. and trans.) The Falcon and the Hunted Bird (1950) [poems]

(ed.) Pakistan PEN Miscellany (1950) [short stories]

Purple Gold Mountain: Poems from China (1960) [poems]

(ed. and trans.) The Bulbul and the Rose (1960) [poems]

Ocean of Night (1964) [novel]

(ed. and trans.) Ghalib: Selected Poems (1969) [poems]

(ed. and trans.) The Golden Tradition (1973) [poems]

(trans.) Qur’an (Akrash Publishing, 1984; Princeton University Press, 1988)

Rats and Diplomats (1985) [novel]

Contributions to periodicals: 

New Writing (‘Our Lane’, 4, Autumn 1937)

Indian Writing (extract from Twilight in Delhi, 1, 1940)

Reviews: 

Bonamy Dobree, Spectator, 8 November 1940

Maurice Collis, Time and Tide, 30 November 1940

Desmond Hawkins, New Statesman 20, July – Dec 1940

Secondary works: 

Anderson, David, ‘Ahmed Ali and Twilight in Delhi’, Mahfil, A Quarterly of South Asian Literature (now Journal of South Asian Literature) 7.1-2 (1971), pp. 81-6

Askari, Muhammad Hasan, ‘Ahmad Ali ka ek Navil’ (‘A Novel by Ahmed Ali’), Makhzan, Lahore (1949)

Coppola, Carlo, ‘Ahmed Ali (1910–1994): Bridges and Links, East and West’, The Annual of Urdu Studies, pp. 49-53

Coppola, Carlo, ‘Ahmed Ali in Conversation: An Excerpt from an Interview’, The Annual of Urdu Studies, pp. 11-26

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Example: 

Coppola, Carlo, ‘Ahmed Ali in Conversation: An Excerpt from an Interview’, The Annual of Urdu Studies, pp. 19, 21-2

Content: 

In this interview, Ahmed Ali recalls his visit to England, focusing in particular on his friendship with E. M. Forster and other writers in the Bloomsbury Group, and describing the events surrounding the publication of his first novel Twilight in Delhi by Hogarth Press in 1940.

Extract: 

I built up quite a wide variety of friends from various groups: Lehmann’s group, Forster’s group, and there was another was another group of younger poets and writers – there were so many of them, and I was so happy in that world; it was a wonderful world, in spite of the blackout, in spite of its dreariness. It had its own richness, a richness which the bright-lit, neon-signed London of today will never know again.

Lehmann…asked me to come to lunch. I went to lunch and was disappointed that the printers would not print the book as it was. They felt that it was subversive to law and order and, until such-and-such a chapter and such-and-such portions of the novel were deleted, it would not be published.

I was very saddened, but what could I do? Lehmann said, 'Ahmed, I’m so sorry that this has happened. What a wonderful book it is! Why don’t you just delete these portions.' I answered, 'John, I cannot! Nothing can persuade me to cut those sections out of the book; they’re part of a whole. They are the quintessence of the book – the portions dealing with the durbar and comments about the 1857 Rebellion – I could not.'

And even towards the end of lunch Lehmann, who was anxious just to get the book out, kept on saying to cut out the problematic sections. Finally I agreed to one condition: if Morgan Forster says they should be deleted, I would do so. Lehmann agreed. Then we discussed who should send it to Morgan, he or I. I thought that he, as the publisher, should send it to Forster. So he wrote Forster, who responded, 'Unfortunately, you cannot cut out any portion without emasculating the whole.' That pleased me very much but John Lehmann was disappointed. But what could he do! He’d lost the bet, and I had won.

Relevance: 

This extract demonstrates the immersion of this South Asian Muslim writer in London’s literary circles of the 1930s and 1940s. The apparent ease with which he socializes with this renowned and elite set of writers is suggestive of Ali’s privileged social class and of the way in which class status could cut across barriers of race and religion. Also of interest here is the reluctance of the printers and also of Lehmann (a left-wing editor/publisher) to publish a book whose content could be perceived as anti-British – indicative of the processes of censorship that were at work in the final years of empire. Worthy of note is Ali’s implicit motivation for wanting to retain the problematic sections – his belief that they were integral to the coherence of the novel, rather than a political (anti-colonial) objective. This recalls Ali’s break with the IAPWA on the grounds that this organization was leaning towards a reduction of literature to political propaganda, and relates to questions of how far the work of Indian writers in this period of struggle for independence was shaped by political concerns.