July 1 marks the birth centenary of Professor Ahmed Ali (1910-1994), a towering figure in Pakistani literature. He was among the co-authors of the revolutionary Urdu short story collection Angaray (1932) which spawned the hugely influential Progressive Writers' Movement.

He wrote the first major South Asian Muslim novel in English, Twilight in Delhi (1940), as well as critical essays in English on Ghalib and several renowned English translations including The Golden Tradition (1973) an anthology of classical Urdu poetry and Al-Quran A contemporary translation (1984).

He also established the Pakistan Academy of Letters and pioneered Pakistan's diplomatic relations with China and Morocco.

For many years I perceived him as this rather intimidating, straight-backed figure who presided over literary gatherings. I finally met him in 1989 and discovered that he was a wonderfully lively conversationalist.

The following year, I interviewed him to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Twilight in Delhi, a novel that I greatly admire. Although he was bilingual, Prof Ali wrote the novel in English to challenge the imperial narratives and provide the Muslim view of the colonial encounter.

Set against the 1911 Coronation Durbar, with flashbacks to the events of 1857, the novel revolves around the timeless but decaying Old Delhi household of a Muslim gentleman.

The novel, which vividly recreated the colours and nuances of a world alien to native English speakers, was particularly courageous and innovative because Ali experimented with English to try and capture the essence of Indo-Muslim culture and its literary imagery into English prose, although this did lead to some rather ornate sentences.

Ali was born into a family which belonged to the shurafa of Old Delhi that he has described in his novel. His father and uncle were both civil servants in the British administration, but his father died when Ali was eight. He went to live with his puritanical uncle, a deputy collector in the United Provinces, who deplored his love for literature, called him 'a loafer' and pushed him toward a medical career.

At Aligarh University, however, his literary interests were encouraged by Eric C. Dickinson, the professor of English. Ali rebelled against his family, abandoned medicine and Aligarh, joined Lucknow University and graduated in English Literature.

He published his early Urdu stories, wrote and produced two English plays and became a communist. Ali and the Marxists Rasheed Jahan, Sajjad Zahir and Sahibzada Mahmuduzzafar Khan decided to co-author Angaray to hold a 'mirror to society' and attack mullahs and social hypocrisy.

The book caused an uproar. The Government of India banned it 'for hurting the religious susceptibilities of a section of the community.' In his 1990 interview Ali chortled and his face positively lit up when he recalled those days 'We were lampooned. We were abused. There were editorials on the front page and pamphlets written against us.

Speeches were delivered in pulpits and mosques and some of the qasais ran after us with daggers.'

The literary community rose to the defence of Angarey and formed The Progressive Writers' Association. However, Ali broke away from the group, amid much acrimony, because he wanted to explore literary dimensions beyond Marxist proletariat literature. In 1990 he said 'I wanted to depict the conditions of Delhi and the anti-British feeling I had always had. Besides, as a writer, I felt my job was to present reality as I saw it.'

Twilight in Delhi was published in London to critical acclaim although its publication was delayed because its British printers considered it to be 'seditious' — until literary luminaries such as Virginia Woolf, John Lehmann and E.M. Forster interceded. In India, the Progressives scorned the novel as a nostalgic portrait of a decadent bourgeois society.

A multifaceted man, Ali worked for the BBC during World War II, taught at Lucknow and Calcutta Universities, published three Urdu short story collections during 1942-45 and put together his English translations of his Urdu fiction in The Prison House (1985). In 1947 he was in Nanking, China as a British Council visiting professor when Partition was announced.

He joined the Pakistan Foreign Service and was Pakistan's first charge d'affaires in China and later Morocco, but was retired in 1960 by the military government of Ayub Khan. He had learnt Chinese and written a study titled Muslim China (1949).

Ever-inventive as a writer, he welded Chinese, English and Urdu poetic traditions in his slim,
but stylised collection of English poetry The Purple Gold Mountain (1960).

In 1963 Ali's wife, the painter and writer Bilquees Jehan Begum translated Twilight in Delhi into Urdu as Dilli ki Ek Sham to widespread praise. Some claimed the she had transposed the novel into its 'natural language'; others disagreed and said that the English original had its own unique quality.

Over the years, Ali received teaching fellowships from prestigious American universities, an honorary doctorate from Karachi University and in 1980 the Sitara-i-Imtiaz. He wrote two more novels, The Ocean of the Night (1964) and Rats and Diplomats (1985). His centenary commemorates the extraordinary life of a literary pioneer, translator and forefather to all Pakistani English fiction.