Negotiating Colonial Modernity: Material Culture, Cultural Memory, and Everyday Identity Formation in Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi

Abstract

Colonialism in South Asia operated not only through political domination and economic exploitation but also through cultural transformations that reshaped identities, social relations, and everyday practices. This article examines Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi (1940) as a cultural text that captures the complex negotiations between colonial power, indigenous traditions, and emerging forms of modernity in late-colonial India. Drawing on New Historicism and postcolonial cultural theory, the article argues that Ali's novel represents colonialism as a process that penetrated ordinary cultural practices, material objects, linguistic hierarchies, and domestic spaces. Rather than presenting colonial rule merely as an external political force, the novel reveals how colonial modernity reshaped everyday cultural practices, producing new negotiations of identity, memory, and belonging. Through close textual analysis, the study explores how British colonial authority transformed Delhi's social imagination, disrupted Mughal cultural memory, and generated tensions between inherited traditions and colonial modernity. By bringing New Historicist analysis into dialogue with postcolonial perspectives on power, representation, and cultural identity, this study extends existing scholarship on Twilight in Delhi beyond narratives of decline and nostalgia, focusing instead on everyday cultural practices and material objects. It demonstrates how colonial modernity produced simultaneous processes of displacement, adaptation, and cultural negotiation. It argues that Twilight in Delhi should be read as a cultural archive of colonial modernity in Asia, where everyday practices, material objects, and urban spaces reveal the uneven negotiations between imperial power and indigenous forms of knowledge. By examining these everyday negotiations, the article contributes to broader debates in Asian cultural studies on colonial afterlives, cultural memory, and the production of modern identities.