Agha Shahid Ali Biography
Agha Shahid Ali:- He was born in New Delhi on February 4, 1949 and died at America on December 8, 2001. He was fondly known as ‘Bhaiyya’ to his family members and friends. His ancestors came from Central Asia. He was the third of the four children of Agha Ashraf Ali and Sufia Nomani. Ashraf Ali- a Ph D from USA and his wife Sufia Nomani a well voiced woman of Persian where the primary influences on the juvenile mind of Shahid Ali. He taught at Jamia Millia University. He grew up in a culturally and linguistically rich environment where the entire family read and appreciated poetry and literature in Persian, Urdu and English. He considers Urdu his ‘mother tongue’ and English his ‘first language’. He was sent to Irish Catholic School, an elite institution in Kashmir, where he was taught by Irish priests. His parents went to America for their doctoral studies, and he was with them and he studied for three years at a school in Muncie Indiana. He spent his childhood in Kashmir, and completed his studies from Presentation Convent, Burn Hall School. He graduated in B.A. from the University of Kashmir in Srinagar and joined his masters in English literature at Hindu College, Delhi University in 1986. He passed with a distinction and became a lecturer at the same college. From there he moved to U.S. In 1984 he had completed his Ph. D degree in English from Pennsylvania State University USA; also in 1985 he had done an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona. His life and work were similarly affected by his state of being an exile. He moved from Kashmir to Delhi and from Delhi to Pennsylvania. He died on December 8, 2001, at an early age of 52 years enacting out the paradoxical nature of his verse to lend him immortality. The passing away of Aga Shahid Ali was a collective loss to Kashmir. He was the most eloquent Kashmiri-English poet, a writer of unmatched elegance and virtuosity, a chronicler of pain. His poetry is the very stuff of beauty, loss and salvation. In short, Agha Shahid Ali, besides being an emotionally moving politically active poet, was also an inspiring, demanding, caring, sharp and charismatic teacher.
Agha Shahid Ali had spent his life in exile from his childhood. He had started writing poetry from his childhood and ever since he started writing poetry it has been recorded. He wrote his first poem at the age of twelve. He always felt excited about his ability to write poetry. From his early age he used to send his poems not only to national but also to international journals without being any care of their rejections. He never takes it serious if his poems where rejected so many times and does not bother about the humiliation of the publishers. He published his first collection “Bone Sculpture” when he was twenty three. Most of his poems are marked by the sense of sorrow and that of loss. As it is in the nature of man that he likes his motherland with the core of heart and any type of exile is not liked by any human being and same is the case with Shahid Ali. Human beings like to live within their family and hates away from their homeland and from their loved ones; but he went to Delhi for his higher education, to do his post-graduation. And since that time, all the poems that he composed, most of them bear a sense of sorrow and also a sense of loss in them. Thus, we see that to him 'exile' causes 'grief’. His collections of poetry that he published in his life time are: “Bone Sculpture “ (1972), “In Memory Of Begum Akther and Other Poems” (1979), “A Walk Through the Yellow Pages” (1987), “The Half-Inch Himalayas” (1987), “A Nostalgist’s Map of America” (1991), “The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems” (1992) , “The Country Without a Post Office” (1997), and “Rooms Are Never Finished” (2001). His collection of ghazals “Call Me Ishmael Tonight” posthumously published in 2003. He has firstly published his poem “The Country without a Post Office” as ‘Kashmir without a Post Office’ in the ‘Graham House Review’. Ali revised it and changed its name when he included it in the collection “The Country Without a Post Office” in 1997. Also he has written “The Rebel’s Silhouette”: Selected Poems and edited book of ghazals “Ravishing DisUnities”: Real Ghazals in English. To his credit Ali has eight books of poetry, one work of translation, the editor of an anthology of ghazals, and his Ph D thesis, “T.S. Eliot as Editor”, published in 1989. He received fellowships from The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation and was awarded a pushcart Prize. In 2001 his famous book “Rooms Are Never Finished” was a national book award finalist. He had taught at different universities such as the University of Delhi, Penn State, SUNY Bringhamton, Princeton University, Hamilton College, Baruch College, University of Utah, and Warren Wilson College. He was a regular member of Amitav Ghosh’s writer’s “Adda” in New York in the years before he died. In honour of his life and work, the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry, sponsored by the University of Utah Press and The University of Utah Department of English, is awarded annually.
His first collection of poetry “Bone- Sculpture” was published in 1972. It has only 14- poems. This collection revolves round the theme of love, loss, memory, death, cultural dislocation, and nostalgia. The first poem is “Bones” which deals with mourning of Shia and Sufi of Islam. In the poem “Dear Editor” the poet declares his identity as a poet. The title of second volume is “In Memory of Begum Akhtar” published in 1979. The volume contains 25- poems. The theme of this collection is same that of the first one i.e. theme of love, loss, memory, death, culture dislocation, nostalgia etc. The opening poem “In Memory of Begum Akthar” shows the love of poet for music and films. This collection like the first one deals with the theme of love, loss, memory, death, cultural dislocation and nostalgia. The third book “The Half- Inch Himalayas” came out in 1987; it was the first book of Shahid Ali to be published in America. The volume contains 32 poems, with a prologue followed by four sections. The fourth book “A Nostalgist’s Map of America” published in 1991. The main themes of this book are nostalgia, melancholy, transnational poetics and condition of exile. The book starts with a prologue poem “Eurydice”. The book has four sections. The fifth book “The Country Without a Post Office” published in 1993. The theme of this book is about the nostalgic feelings of the poet about his homeland, Kashmir and its people. This book has a prologue “The Blessed Word: A Prologue”, and has been divided into five small sections and at the end with notes. “Rooms Are Never Finished” is the last collection of poetry that was published, 2001, during Shahid’s lifetime. The volume is divided into four sections, prefixed with a prologue poem “Lenox Hill” which is written in the classical form, canzone. “From Amherst to Kashmir”, which divided into twelve subsections constitutes the first section of the volume. The second section contains ten poems including the eponymous poem, “Rooms Are Never Finished”, two one-line poems and three ghazals. The third section contains poems written after Mahmoud Darwish’s poems titled “Eleven Stars Over Andalusia” which is sub-divided into eleven sub-sections. The fourth section contains one long poem, “I Dream I Am at the Ghat of the Only World”. He has also composed a book of translations which is named as “The Rebel's Silhouette”: Translation of Verses By Faiz Ahmad Faiz, which was published in the year 1992 by Peregrine Smith Books. This book included important Ghazals of Faiz, such as: "Tanhai" (Solitude), "Khatm Hui Barish-e-Sang" (The Rain of Stones is Finished) etc. The Veiled Suite, published in 2009, includes six volumes of poems Ali finished in the US, poems that compulsively discover the suffering of dislocation through remembrance, times past, representation, and a distinctive merge of European and Urdu poetic traditions.
Agha Shahid Ali was renowned as a poet outstandingly talented to merge numerous racial influences and thoughts in both conventional forms and well-designed blank verse. He has been influenced by an amalgam of different cultures and traditions of Hinduism, Muslim, and Western influences which is reflected by his poetry. He was such a poet who through his poetry imagines home and asserts an identity which is trans-national, fluid and exclusively his own. He expresses the feelings of diaspora and states of emotions such as loss, nostalgia, unrootedness, memory and themes of joys, fears, incongruities and surprises. His poetry mostly reflects his own experiences of life; and also his personal opinion on the delicate political circumstances in his motherland Kashmir which has become bone of contention among India, Pakistan and even China. He was a talented poet who wrote his poetry in free blank verse along with the pantoum, sestinas, and many other forms; also he was the initiator of Ghazal writing in English. Well versed with Urdu, Persian and Arabic, Ali took the Ghazal farm and experimented and perfected it for the English readers. Quite interestingly as he started writing only in ‘exile’, the sense of loss always pervades his literary world. He talks about torture, disappearances, killings, and whatever happened not only in the dead silence of nights but also in the full light of the day across Kashmir. He speaks of pain, anguish, longing, internal conflict, frustration but also of optimism and hope in a truly lyrical voice. His poetry is a dazzling display of a gallery of emotions attached to Kashmir, depicting pain, suffering, social dissent, political turmoil, and tragedies that have remained unsaid and unheard. He speaks from the bottom of the marginality and gives a reverberating strong voice to the hapless plight of Kashmir, stirring hearts and minds, far across the oceans together.
The poet begins with telling us how thin the material was. He calls it “woven air, running water, evening dew.” The art of weaving such cloth was no more, a “dead art now, dead over a hundred years.” He remembers a sari that his grandmother once wore. He recalls how all of it could be pulled through a ring and when it tore, it was cut into small handkerchiefs. The poet is distressed about the historical fact that the British amputated the hands of Bengali weavers and shipped the fabric to England. Since then, no one has been able to produce a cloth parallel in quality to the Dacca gauzes.
This poem by Agha Shahid Ali is about the Dacca Gauze, a cloth so fine and thin that he describes it as woven air. It is a story of the poet’s understandings of the ‘dead art’ of weaving and how his grandmother grieves over the loss of the beautiful fabric.
Ali writes the poem “The Dacca Gauzes” which revolves around his grandmother, its theme is about condition of female in general and in specific about the Indian female. The Indian women spend life in simple manner and they are not after clothes like the Western counterpart. In this poem the poet depicts how the Indian women share clothes without the difference on the basis of age.
The poet begins with telling us how thin the material was. He calls it “woven air, running water, evening dew.” The art of weaving such cloth was no more, a “dead art now, dead over a hundred years.” He remembers a sari that his grandmother once wore. He recalls how all of it could be pulled through a ring and when it tore, it was cut into small handkerchiefs. The poet is distressed about the historical fact that the British amputated the hands of Bengali weavers and shipped the fabric to England. Since then, no one has been able to produce a cloth parallel in quality to the Dacca gauzes.
The word Diaspora have so many synonyms such as dispersion, dissemination, migration, displacement, scattering etc. and its antonym is return. The word ‘diasporic’ is used as an adjective for ‘diaspora’ and its plural is ‘diasporas’. Diasporas are recognized as exiles, refugees, guest workers, expatriates, immigrants, and transnational’s. Thus Diaspora communication is replete with the words, concepts, and terms such as emigrant, expatriate, immigrant, migrant and transnational. It seems that the expressions: migration, emigration and immigration are identical in meaning i.e. to move from one country to other, but these words have different meanings. ‘Migration’ means the movement of man from one place to another place or from one country to another country. The migrants who go through journey, longing, homesickness, nostalgia and experience rootlessness, unbelongingness, isolation, double consciousness, are called expatriate. While as the term ‘immigration’ means, to settle permanently into another country than that of birth place. So, ‘Immigrant’ is someone who comes to live in a country from another country. While as emigration means leaving ones country so as to inhabit in another country. So, ‘Emigrant’ is somebody who leaves his country in order to live in another foreign country. Immigrant is one who tries to reroot, enhouse, reconstruct the home, incorporate or acculturate, and replant himself in the new soil. Expatriate is somebody who lives ‘abroad’ for a long period or who is debarred or moved from his inhabitant country or who departs ‘himself’ from its nationality. The transnational is capable to survive and integrate in the countries of source and target; and is the man of the whole globe. He considers - ‘one world, one people.’ There are different reasons for migration; it may be expulsion or attraction. In view of the fact that the immigratted countries are famous and fertile for their profit and social system, so people prefer to go in these countries for earning more. The migration has different reasons; they may be willing or unwilling and push or pull type etc. Migration has played an important role in the mobility of man from one place to another place. Man as the mover of civilizing possessions transports it into new civilizing environment where he arranges out his knowledge and becomes familiar himself in a new country. As such the word diaspora has become multiple in its dimensions and includes brain drainage and as well as loss and dispersion as the result of a powerful displacement of peoples from countries or regions diverse as their civilizing and historical centers. The importance of the word has very much changed depending on situation, and extends to do so. Recent researchers have proved that diaspora entrepreneurship can help in the development of the original mother land of diasporic persons by creating businesses and jobs, using innovation, and transferring the political and financial capital. Diaspora shares the culture and tradition of his country of origin through different ways such as: art, music, films, literature, crafts, etc. These can be used as tools by the diaspora people in the form of cultural diplomacy. When the culture and tradition of the diaspra ones are known in the host country they help the motherland in broader sense.
The word ‘diaspora’ has been originally came from an ancient Greek word ‘diasperien’, which is amalgamation of two words ‘dia— across’ and ‘sperien— to sow or scatter seeds’. So, for Greeks diaspora owes its origin to horticulture, as the concept refers to the scattering and dispersal of seeds. This is what actually happens with the diaspora people as they scatter throughout the earth from their motherland. So for the Greeks the concept of diaspora referred to describe the colonization of Asia Minor and the Mediterranean. As in the Archaic period (800-600) people migrated from Ancient Greek to Asia Minor; that type of migration was due to poverty, or war, so it had positive connotation. In Hebrew language it was called Golah or Galut, which means ‘Exile’. Thus, it was used for the banishment of Jews who had been banished from Israel after the Babylonian and Roman conquests of Palestine. The Jewish state comes to an end in 70 AD when Romans drag out the Jews from their motherland. The Jewish Diaspora had its origin before that when the Assyrians conquered Israel in 722. Actually 597 is considered the beginning date of the Jewish Diaspora. So, in the commencement the term ‘diaspora’ was applied by the earliest Greeks to mention to citizens of a majestic city who migrated to the conquered land with the intention of colonization to include the region into the kingdom. The word ‘diaspora’ with Capital ‘D’ like ‘Diaspora’ in the start was used for the Jewish diaspora depicting the dispersion of the Jews from Israel back in the sixth-seventh century B.C. and then in the second century A.D. from Jerusalem. Also the term diaspora mostly not capital letter ‘D’ was used for the scattering or spreading of the people belonging to one country or having same civilization. So, it is clear that the idea of ‘Diaspora’ refers to dispersion of Jews people from the land of Palestine throughout the universe. Since the Jewish people refused to assimilate and were confronted with repression, they moved out of Israel. Thus Diaspora represents those Jews who were expelled from Babylon. As such along with physical scattering of the Jews, the word carries religious suggestion, in as much as a particular relationship is implied to be present between the land of Israel and Jewish people. This connection provides lastly in meeting of the exiles to the classic vision of Reform Judaism. Some of the Jews submerged themselves in non-Jewish environments more completely than the others. Because of adjustment and acculturation, diaspora Jews were the Jews in a religious sense only.
During the contemporary times Diaspora as an expression gained a worldwide currency as it does not remain confined only with the Jewish Diaspora. Thus Diaspora relates with the dispersion or spread of people from their original motherland to other foreign lands. With its etymological meaning, 'to scatter,’ diaspora is defined as any community of people who do not live in their own country of origin, but maintain their heritage in a new land. Many of them can probably relate to this issue, since they have ancestral roots from one country but reside in another country. The model of Jewish Diaspora was followed by the Armenian, Chinese, African (slavery) and Indian communities. The difference with the Jewish Diaspora is that the other communities have been separated due to their selected countries of migration. Thus in the beginning the term ‘diaspora’ suggested the Jewish Diaspora; later from 200 A.D. to 900 A.D. there was great amount of migrations between different countries for job and learning, besides, spreading of religions also occurred as one of the important cause of migration. Colonial period out looked migration due to interior as well as exterior differences; or slavery and colonial repression in the society. Another ancient past indication is the Black African diaspora, in 16th century, with slave employment, which send abroad West Africans out of their inhabitant region and isolated them in the other parts of the earth. Spreading of Africans, Armenians, Irish, Palestinians and the Jews visualized their spreading as starting from a disastrous occurrence that had surprised the group in total. Their scattering was not deliberate, miserable and terrible. After the World War II, the concept of diaspora has become omnipresent to a great extent. One of the most important causes for its development was decolonization. So the term ‘Diaspora’ is now used to refer to any one, either forced or tempted to leave his traditional national homeland; being isolated throughout other parts of the world; and the succeeding developments in their scattering and civilization. Thus the term ‘Diaspora’ has not remained restricted to the Jewish people’s world-wide dispersion outside their homeland; the Land of Israel, but became general concept of migration. So, it is used for any group of people who spend their life outside the land of their ancestors in which they had lived for a long time. In other words ‘diaspora’ is used for a group migration from one country to another country of the people who belongs to one nation or have the common culture and tradition.
