Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
A fascinating story of what life was like in a prosperous, middle-class family in the crowded lanes of Old Delhi in the early 20th century. There’s a lot about standing on the roofs – everyone’s got their own flock of pigeons, and people are calling to them, and the idea is to try to capture some other person’s pigeons with your own.
Twilight in Delhi by Ahmed Ali.
This is a book about Delhi, which was a mainly Muslim city before partition and it’s about old life in Delhi. It’s a very interesting book and it has a very interesting publishing history actually. It was published by Hogarth Press at the beginning of the war, then the printers refused to print it because they thought it was subversive – it was quite critical of the British in India. E M Forster had initially found him a publisher and then Virginia Woolf got involved, and had a friend who was the chief censor and it was passed, and it came out to some acclaim, but then the warehouse was bombed in the Blitz and it was out of print for many years. But it is a fascinating story of what life was like in a kind of prosperous, middle-class family in the crowded lanes of Old Delhi in the early 20th century. There’s a lot about standing on the roofs – everyone’s got their own flock of pigeons, which you still see sometimes in Delhi – and people are calling to them and the whole idea is to try to capture some other person’s pigeons with your own.
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Roy Moxham is the author of Outlaw: India’s Bandit Queen and Me, A Brief History of Tea, an updated edition of Tea: Addiction, Exploitation and Empire, The Great Hedge of India, and The Freelander. A former tea planter in Nyasaland and later Malawi, he spent 13 years in Eastern Africa before becoming Senior Conservator of the Senate House Library, University of London.
