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영어

Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi, published in 1940 as arguably the first Indian Muslim English novel, shows the destructive effects of British imperialism on Old Delhi, the ancient capital of India since the 13th century. This paper examines how British colonial rule, which was firmly established after quelling the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, led to destroying the culture and language of Old Delhi and, ultimately, the construction of New Delhi. This paper also pays keen attention to how the novel uses Urdu and Persian poems to appropriate the dominant English language and revitalize the memory of the past. The novel, published in London with the help of E. M. Forster and Virginia Wolf and once banned in Pakistan, illustrates how the agency of memory can work to counter and even subvert the aftereffects of the forgetting and loss of language and lifestyle in Old Delhi because of British colonialism.