TRACING EPISTEMIC DISOBEDIENCE IN AHMAD ALI’S TWILIGHT IN DELHI: A DECOLONIAL PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

This study investigates colonial universal truth and its proliferation in the context of colonial India through Ahmad Ali’s (1940) Twilight in Delhi. The study scrutinizes how Ali’s (1940) novel dismantles the Colonial Matrix of Power (CMP), the Western colonization model by installing epistemic disobedience to the received epistemes. The study aims to explore how CMP is operated, functioned, and established by the systematic control of sex/racism, subjectivity, economy, and authority in the indigenous society. Walter Mignolo’s (2018) theory of Decoloniality will be applied as a theoretical framework to analyze the novel as an illustration of Epistemic Disobedience: a process of delinking, disobeying and dislocating from the Western model of modernity/coloniality that questions colonial universal truths to establish connections and associations between local histories and individual perspectives. Hence, this rereading of the novel would be instrumental in establishing the bodies of knowledge and indigenous narratives against the backdrop of colonial India.