In the Twilight of Nostalgia: Ambivalences of Leisure, Patriarchy and Genre in Two Classic Muslim Novels.

The article maps out the affinities between Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi (1940) and Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk (1956). It traces the central mood of nostalgia for a lost past in the two novels and demonstrates how this ambivalent mood plays out in three respects: in the characters’ leisure activities, marked by their indolence and retrospective yearning; in the exaggerated assertion of patriarchal self-importance, compensating for a loss of actual political significance; and in the fraught relationship with the British. These three issues coalesce in the male protagonists’ amorous exploits, which link with the production of traditional poetry and song, serial adultery and the cultural clash between British and vernacular culture. In the final section, I discuss the two novels from the perspective of literary history and propose that they may be typical of a genre of the Muslim novel on its emergence from colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]