Nationalist Politics and Delhi

By 1940, when Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi was published, it would have been increasingly difficult, though not impossible, to be a Muslim and a nationalist in the united Provinces. a few important figures had managed to navigate the problem of communal loyalties: Shibli Numani, Abul Kalam Azad and the Ali brothers had all publicly defended and made alliances with the Indian national Congress (Lelyveld 2004). In 1941, Jamaat-e-Ulema-e-Hind (later Jamaat-e-Islami), a relatively powerful collective of Muslim ulama from North India, would also come out in defense of an undivided India in opposition to Jinnah and the Muslim League and their “two nation theory” (Sarkar 1989). Furthermore, the Congress paid lip service to the idea of speaking for all of India by raising the slogan that Muslims were welcome under its large tent Jalal 2001). Still, the contradiction between a Muslim identity and a nationalist one would have been palpable. Muslims appeared to give up longstanding internal debates and fall into rank behind the Muslim League by the 1942 elections, while the Muslims in the Congress were more and more seen as Muslims in name only, and were thoroughly critiqued for their heterodoxies. Leading Muslims in the Congress were devout, but the larger chunk of the Muslim membership would have been composed of secular, Western-educated, professional and left-leaning individuals. The Communist Party, when it entered into the Congress, brought with it thousands of young, secularized Muslims who were hostile to religiosity and saw only the trappings of orthodoxy in it.