Thursday, September 17, 2009
random thoughts
it's strange that you mentioned our supposed emotional alignment with Asghar over Mir Nihal in class, because from the very first pages i've sided in the complete opposite way. while my modern western sense of issues like marriage and women's rights at first led me to Asghar's side, shortly after you realize that he is just a spoiled kid. the interesting thing about his marriage to Belqueece is that though it goes wrong for him, it's not because it's an arranged marraige but because he fell in love with the girls face, strictly against islam's codes for bequethment. when you add to that the fact that father and son represent the old India and the new British India (NEW Delhi) your feelings fall further into place behind Mir Nihal. the pervasive images of culture that Ahmed Ali draws falling into dust create a very depressing mood over the novel. towards the end of the novel you can't help but despise Asghar as he embodies (by embracing) the very thing dragging india down, and susequently destroying the happiness of mother, father, and even his betrothed.
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It's true that Asghar's marriage goes wrong, but the opening scenes of Asghar's life are definitely of deprivation (he's denied a certain kind of education, he's denied his mother because of his father's infidelities, he's denied any control over his life) -- and if he is spoiled then this is largely because of the arrested development that he finds himself in. Besides, isn't the argument that Mir Nihal and Begum Nihal produce against the marriage with Bilqeece offensive? That she has a slave bloodline? Ali is clearly trying to make the case for a modern sensibility (remember the novel is written in English) tied to an aristocratic cultural past.
ReplyDeleteAt the same time, things do go very badly (and the question for us is why). Why does Ali need this marriage to end so badly (interestingly enough, Ali's wife's name is Bilqeece ...)? Why does Ali make the wedding fun, get Mir Nihal to come around, and make Bilqeece the martyr? It could just as easily have gone the other way, no? It seems to me that there is something dissatisfying to Ali about modern attitudes even though he is still tied up in them. It's a very contradictory, and as a result very interesting, set of aesthetic and political preoccupations to find yourself contending with.
I don't think it's as simple as modern=British=bad for Ali (and it's clearly not aristocratic=Muslim=good either). It's some interesting mixture of the terms that he's attempting to arrive at and I think that it takes a little bit of patience to tease out the exact relationship between the terms. Consider that Mir Nihal doesn't do anything about the British either. The only person in the novel that does do something about the British dies. Clearly, contending with the pervasive fatalist mood was also one of the ambitions of the novel.