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Indian Writing in English Glimpses of Indian Writing in English Dr. Bindu Ann Philip Module-16 Introduction to Agha Shahid Ali Agha Shahid Ali was a Kashmiri-American poet. He was born on February 4, 1949 in New Delh...

Indian Writing in English Glimpses of Indian Writing in English Dr. Bindu Ann Philip Module-16 Introduction to Agha Shahid Ali Agha Shahid Ali was a Kashmiri-American poet. He was born on February 4, 1949 in New Delhi. He was born to the educated Agha family in Srinagar. His father Agha Ashraf Ali was a leading educator and his grandmother Begum Zaffar Ali was the first woman matriculate of Kashmir. He was raised in Kashmir and did his schooling in Burn Hall School. He completed his education from University of Kashmir and Hindu College, University of Delhi later. He migrated to the United States of America in 1976. He received his PhD from Pennsylvania State University and did MFA from the University of Arizona. His started teaching at Hamilton College, New York in 1987. Later he moved to University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He was the director of the MFA creative writing program there. He also taught at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and was a visiting professor at Princeton University and in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University. He had an admirable academic career, where he held nine teaching positions in India and US. He held teaching positions at the University of Delhi, Penn State, , Princeton University, Hamilton College, and a few others. Agha Shahid Ali died of brain cancer on December 8, 2001 in Amherst, Massachusetts. Awards and Acheivements Ali was honoured with numerous awards and fellowships. He was a recipient of fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Ingram- Merrill Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts. Literary Career Ali’s literary career began at the age of 12, reflecting his secular upbringing, the poem was centered on the narrative of Jesus Christ. He wrote poetry in free verse as well as traditional forms. Ali’s instigation and popularization of Ghazal form in American poetry attributes him remarkable position among Indian American writers. Ali’s poetry is often identified as autobiographical where he alludes exile to his Kashmiri identity. Ali’s poems are embedded in vibrant images of landscapes of Kashmir and America. His narratives represent irreconcilable emotions of exile, immigration and in his later works, loss, illness and mortality. Ali’s voice is lyrical, reflective and at the same time elegant, enhanced by the repetition of words, half rhymes and culturally specific imagery. On close reading of Ali’s poems, one find a sense of intricacy in language and thought and his poetic artistry to lay hold of emotions and frame them into focus, giving his poems an embroidered ornateness. Ali began publishing his poems in the early 1970s but they were out in the cold. He received widespread recognition with the publication of A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987). Bruce King characterized the book as “a surreal world of nightmare, fantasy, incongruity, wild humor, and the grotesque. Although the existential anxieties have their source in problems of growing up, leaving home, being a migrant, and the meeting of cultures, the idiom is American and contemporary.” His following book titled, A Nostalgist’s Map of America (1991), unveils his diasporic identity which is represented as a series of travels through landscapes often blurred between his current American home and memories of his boyhood in Kashmir. His early poems represent his most powerful literary influences: British colonization, through which he learnt English language, and Eastern poetry (especially ghazals From his first poetry collection Bone-Sculpture, in the poem Dear Editor, Ali writes, they call this my alien language i am a dealer in words that mix cultures and leave me rootless. He further adds in The Editor Revisited A language must measure up to one’s native dust.’ Divided between two cultures, I spoke a language foreign even to my ears. Later, in his introduction to The Rebel’s Silhouette, Ali comments on Dear Editor, “Rootless? Certainly not. I was merely subscribing to an inherent dominative mode that insisted one should not write in English because it was not an Indian language.... But it was mine, ours.” Ali through his unique poetry blends both his Eastern and Western cultural and linguistic influences. Ali’s succeeding poetry collection received wide recognition. In The Country Without a Post Office (1997) ,the poem originally called Kashmir Without a Post Office was published as the title poem. Ali wrote the poem taking stimulus from the 1990 Kashmiri uprising against India, which resulted in political violence leading to the closure of country’s post offices for seven months. The poem is considered as one among Ali’s masterpiece. The poem is assembled on association and repetition instead of straightforward narrative logic, The Country Without a Post Office is infused with recurring phrases and images. The poem was dedicated by Ali to his life-long friend James Merrill. Poet Mark Doty described Merrill’s influence on Ali’s poems “not only in terms of their formal elegance but in the way that a resonant, emotional ambiguity allows the poet to simultaneously celebrate love and lament a landscape of personal and public losses.” In 2001 he published another work titled Rooms Are Never Finished is a long poem that tyrannizes political and personal tragedy. Ali borrowed a line from Emily Dickinson as the title for Amherst to Kashmir which he wrote on the loss of his mother. The poem unveils his grief at his mother’s death and his alienation from his motherland and culture. Ali was deeply influenced by the poetic form Ghazal. He wrote a number of ghazals. As editor of Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English (2000), he described the long history of Western writers’ fascination with ghazals, as well as offering a succinct, theoretical reading of the form itself. In his introduction he wrote, “The ghazal is made up of couplets, each autonomous, thematically and emotionally complete in itself… once a poet establishes the scheme—with total freedom, I might add—she or he becomes its slave. What results in the rest of the poem is the alluring tension of a slave trying to master the master.” Ali in his book of ghazals, Call Me Ishmael Tonight (2003), often touch on American poets and other poems, moulding a further layer of allusive tension. Most of his poems are not abstract considerations of love and longing but rather concrete accounts of events of personal importance (and sometimes political importance). Ali’s poetry is noted for its multifarious themes revealing the breadth of his reading and his numerous sources of influence. His scholarship and knowledge of the literatures, religions, and cultures of several continents nurtures his poetry and language. This becomes apparent in his references, implicit and explicit, where pop culture meets the masters of the Urdu ghazal, and allusions to Sufism rhyme with images from urban life in New York and with Hindu mythology. His erudite scholarship in poetry is revealed with his allusion of the mythical love story of Layla and Majnoon – a beloved topic in Arabic as well as Persian and Urdu – by melting old images associated with it (the desert, caravans, sand, Majnoon’s madness) into his own new creations: Her star-cold palanquin goes with the caravan. Majnoon, now she’ll be news – out of the blue – of water. Mixing allusions to older poetic traditions into his own world to create something new – often in a very cryptic and elusive way – is part of Ali’s play with language. Ali’s poems are often attributed as complex in a different sense.This is often inferred as the outcome of his literary heritage and his reference to his fellow poets with both direct and implied citations. And yet, his sensibility to language and his agility with words prevent his work from becoming too inaccessible to his readers, not all of whom may be as well-read as him. Ali’s poetry is appreciated for its rhythm and melodious lyrical quality that situates the reader in a transfixed state. Like his predecessors, Ali plays with the ambiguity in the nature of love — between earthly, human love and a mystical, divine love. This mystical dimension of love is very present in the later poetic traditions around the story of Layla and Majnoon, as well as in its interpretations. The tragic story of lovers belonging to different tribes has served to illustrate several concepts of Sufism, These aspects are also present in the work of many Urdu poets, with whom Ali was familiar. In his own work the mystical dimension is apparent in majority of verses on love. Ali’s choice of words and use of the name Beloved with a capital letter clearly suggest it: The Beloved will leave you behind from the start. Light is difficult: one must be blind from the start. Ali likes to twist the expected meanings or word-associations of the reader with the theme, he alludes to, as is the case in this couplet, with the notion that the Beloved leaves one behind. However, this can be interpreted to express another major theme of Sufi and Bhakti poetry: the absence of the Beloved, and longing for the ultimate reunion. While using these themes, here or in longer poems such as From another Desert, Ali constantly plays with double-meanings, thus opening up the interpretation of his work. Several of his early poems are embedded in a given context – rewriting Layla Majnoon, or recreating his own family history. Beyond this game of quoting directly or indirectly, of rewriting lines and borrowing, he brings together in his verses all the complexity of his own life experience and interests. This tendency would accentuate itself in his later poems. In the ghazal As Ever , for example, written ‘after Ahmed Faraz’, the famous Urdu poet, Ali combines his own translations of couplets of Faraz with allusions to the play and movie A Streetcar Named Desire, the story of a lost love, and his outrage at violence – the allusion remains covered and vague, but Ali was certainly thinking here of the violence of the ongoing Kashmir conflict. Ali produces his own new literary world in a language that is vivid, sometimes tragic, but also extremely witty and always subtle. In his early works, he mostly wrote free verse. Free verse seemed to offer him great freedom to explore his poetical universe. With time, however, he moved towards coded forms of poetry, with a notable predilection for the ghazal. He became one of the most prominent proponent of this poetic form in English. Ali’s ghazals evolved towards a much more rigorous application of the rules, as seen in his last ghazal collection, Call Me Ishmael Tonight. Here rhythm and rhyme pattern correspond, with rare exceptions, to the classical Urdu ghazal. Adapting the form to English happened through quite a long process of poetic research, culminating in masterpieces like Even the Rain or Tonight. Reinventing the ghazal in English also became a way for Ali to re-explore one of his cultural ‘homes’. The ghazal seemed to provide him with something like a ‘literary home’, a place where he could explore all the facets of his identity, and refer to writers and thinkers from the four corners of the world. Choosing English as the language of expression and the ghazal as a form, Ali created a beautiful body of literature which reflects his existence between several worlds, and enables him to reflect on it. Reducing Ali’s poetry to a few topics would not do justice to its thematic diversity. Nevertheless, life ‘between the worlds’ and exile are recurring features in his poems. For Ali, who inhabited several cultural realities and searched for his own form of expression, it is not surprising that the ghazal, with its challenging stringency, should be so appealing. It is in this form that the main topics of his poetry found their most perfect expression. The ghazal allows for the inclusion of a multiplicity of topics in one single work, because of the independence of the couplets. This enables Ali to make indirect associations between ideas, play with words and elaborate on quotes (sometimes hidden quotes) from other poets through variations on their themes. The ghazal becomes thus a space where being an exile and belonging to several ‘homes’ can be fully expressed. Majority of his poems are centered on the theme of exile. His poem The Half-Inch Himalayas, which profoundly narrates the theme of exile which begins with an epigraph from Virginia Woolf ,... for wherever I seat myself, I die in exile. This collection also includes the widely anthologized poems Postcard from Kashmir, and SnowmenIn Homage to Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Ali writes, Your lines were measured so carefully to become in our veins the blood of prisoners. In the free verse of another language I imprisoned each line—but I touched my own exile. In A Darkly Defense of Dead White Males Ali states, A multiple exile, I celebrate myself. Émigré and expatriate describe me better. He continues, But as an exile in my own country... I use the word for its poetic resonance, for its metaphoric power—I must use the site for the privilege of self-reflection. Strictly speaking, Ali is not an exile because he moved voluntarily. However, as a postcolonial subject, a native of a disputed and unstable territory (Kashmir), and an immigrant, he has experienced enough loss and displacement to be able to lament after and have a desire for “home.” Agha Shahid Ali was an exile, physically: after 1976, he settled in America. However, this exile, so present in his work, was also partly an existential exile. The feeling of nostalgia for a lost home resonates in his works, but his physical exile was not forced, and Ali did at times visit Kashmir even after definitely moving to the USA. In truth, he was at home ‘on both sides of the globe’ – and this felt at times like belonging nowhere. Ali’s nostalgia for Kashmir is intertwined with his outrage and his sadness towards the region’s situation. The collection of poems The Country Without a Post Office illustrates this particularly well, by making Kashmir, the relationships between the Kashmiri Pandits and the Kashmiri Muslims, the ongoing violence, and the human rights violations committed by the Indian military and paramilitary forces its main topics. However, the poet seems to know that the Kashmir he longs for is not only lost due to the conflict, but that through the lenses of time and exile, it has also partially become an imaginary place. It is in this knowledge, perhaps, where lies all the tragedy of his situation of exile. In Postcard from Kashmir Ali gives very subtle expression to this idea. Home seems inaccessible because it is in some ways a place of the past. Longing for this place pervades Ali’s work. This feeling finds a voice in his language. Through a multiplicity of references he creates or recreates a world where the plurality of his experience, of his reality, can exist and thrive. Ali’s world certainly became more complicated, more intricate, intertwining a multiplicity of ideas and frames of references. And in this complexity, the nostalgia for a place where to belong wholly and completely intensified. Agha Shahid Ali didn’t find this place, but in the ghazal he certainly found a space in which to question and seek freely.