Subject:

Modern Poetry

Assignment topic:

Agha Shahid Alis Use of Indian

poetic themes and Structures

Submitted to:

Salman Rafique

Submitted by:

Intzar Ahmad

Program:

M. Phil English

Roll Number

14142020

GIFT University Gujranwala

Agha Shahid Alis use of Indian poetic themes and structures in English and American
conditions
Agha Shahid Ali was born in New Delhi, on February 4, 1949. Raised in
prominent Muslim family in Srinagar, Kashmir, he earned his degrees in English literature at the
University of Kashmir, Srinagar and the University of Delhi, before completing a Ph.D. in
English from Pennsylvania State University and an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona. .Ali
lived in Brooklyn, New York, but taught at various educational institutions across the U.S. like
the University of Utah, University of Massachusetts-Amherst etc. He is the author, translator and
editor of several publications which include Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals, A
Walk Through the Yellow Pages, The Half-Inch Himalayas, A Nostalgist's Map of America, The
Rebel's Silhouette; Selected Poems, The Country Without a Post Office, and Rooms Are Never
Finished.
Agha Shahid Ali wrote poetry in both free verse and traditional forms, experimenting with verse
forms such as the sestina and canzone. He is credited with introducing and popularizing the
Ghazal form in American poetry. Alis poetry is autobiographical. His work melds the landscapes
of Kashmir and America, along with the conflicted emotions of exile, immigration and in his
later works, loss, illness and mortality. Alis voice is lyrical, and elegant, enhanced by the
repetition of words, half rhymes and culturally specific imagery.
From a mother who quoted Ghalib (the Shakespeare of Urdu verse) and Faiz (the most famous
Urdu poet of the twentieth century from South Asia) to a father who quoted Plato and Aristotle,
from a grandmother who quoted Hafiz (a great Persian poet) and Mir (a great Urdu poet) to a
grandfather who quoted Keats and Shakespeare, from Hindu mythology to Indian cinema, from
stories of Laila-Majnoon to Heer-Ranjha (doomed lovers in Arab and North Indian legends,
respectively), all these helped lay a foundation that finds expression in some of his poems.
Agha shahid Ali defines his unique perspective towards the diasporic space he occupied, an
indian-american, a kashmiri- indian, a shiite-muslim, the hyphenated existence to agha shahid ali
did not entail an existence on the fringes Instead of succumbing to the status of a refugee, he
became the cultural ambassador of his country. He introduced the culture of the suppressed to the

powerful. This is best exemplified in Agha Shahid Alis use of the ghazal form in English works
as a bridge between the two civilizations.
W.S. Merwin wrote: Agha Shahid Alis Kashmir, in his poems, is our own lost but inalienable
homeland. With the prevalence of war and homelessness in the post-cold war era, and the
increasing displacement of people in our time, Agha Shahid Alis voice represents that of all
exiles. Because both countries (India and Pakistan) are nuclear powers now, Kashmir is feared
to be the flashpoint of a nuclear war. The ongoing catastrophe provides the backdrop to The
Country Without a Post Office. The attachment to Kashmir-the homeland-is poignantly summed
up in the poem Postcard from Kashmir: The country of the mind, cherished in exile, is
ironically reduced to
News from home: Kashmir sinks into my mailbox/ my home a neat four by six inches.
The pangs of separation from home are rendered thus:
This is home/ And this is the closest /Ill ever be to home.
Agha Shahid Ali wrote Dacca Gauzes, a very beautiful poem about nostalgia, his sense of
history, his grace, a sensibility as fine as the gauze fabrics he describes here. Grandmothers and
their stories, the amazing woven air, the texture of morning air in autumn and of course the
tragic end of these muslins and their weavers. It is near impossible to grow up in India, without
having heard about them the fabled weave from Dacca. Throughout the poem Agha Shahid Ali
uses some images typical to the sub-continental context. Moreover, the poem reminds the
tyranny of colonial era. In history we learned: the hands of weavers were amputated,/ the looms
of Bengal silenced.
The Ghazal Form
The ghazal form, Agha Shahid Ali informs us, can be traced back to seventh-century Arabic
literature. In its canonical Persian form, it is composed of autonomous or semiautonomous
couplets (called beit [bait] in Arabic meaning house and sher [sher] in Persian and Urdu
tradition, that are united by a strict scheme of rhyme (qafia) [qfiya], refrain (radif) [radf] and
line length (bahar) [bah r]. The opening couplet (matla) [mala] sets the scheme by having it in
both lines (misra) [mis ra] and then the scheme occurs only in the second line of every

succeeding couplet (2003, 19). In Urdu prosody, the phonetic length of syllables is taken into
account, while in English; stress is the criterion, the long and short syllables of the former
corresponding to the stressed and unstressed syllables of the latter. A ghazal must have a
minimum of five shers; there is no maximum limit. There is a paradoxical unity in disunity in
the ghazal form. Formally, each sher of a ghazal is connected by bah ar, qfiya and radf, but
thematically each one stands independently as an autonomous unit.
In fact, in the world of ghazal, there is no concept of a poem. Ghazal consists of a number of
individual verses, most often unconnected with each other by theme or mood. But there is an
overarching unity that envelops the ghazal universe founded on the figure of the passionate lover
longing for his inaccessible (human) beloved or (divine)
Many problems are involved with the production of ghazals in English at the level of lexicon,
syntax, semantics and the cultural context. Thus Urdu words such as sq (tavern keeper), sharb
(wine), mai (wine), maikhna (wine-cellar), paimna (cask), etc., can be used symbolically in
multiple contexts to invoke multiple meanings such as divine blessing, beloved favors, and so
on. The lack of such a tradition of diction in English handicaps the poet. Similarly, cultural
contexts metaphorically represented by this lexicon also facilitate the precision. Hence, to think
of writing ghazals in English involves the risk of using form for form sake.
Ghazals by Agha Shahid Ali
In Persian, ghazal literally means talking to/of the beloved. In one of his couplets Agha Shahid
Ali explains the meaning of his name: They ask me to tell them what Shahid means / Listen: it
means The Beloved in Persian, witness in Arabic (2003, 25). This overlap of the two meanings
must have drawn this Beloved Witness to the ghazal form.
Agha Shahid Ali wrote many ghazals in English which were later put together in the volume
titled Call Me Ishmael Tonight. The thematic concerns of these ghazals are no different than the
thematic concerns in the rest of his poetry, namely, love, longing, loss, separation and searching
for home, for lost relationships, for life, for identity, and even for death.
However, what stands out in these ghazals is the completely new idiom of poetry drawn from
Indo-Persian tradition, which Ali introduces into English poetry. The texture of his language is

rooted in eastern poetic traditions more so than it is in English. Some of the themes in his ghazals
are very close to the themes used in Urdu and Persian poetry.
Translations by Agha Shahid Ali
Besides writing ghazals himself, Agha Shahid Ali also translated ghazals by masters such as
Mirza Ghalib, Ahmad Faraz and Faiz Ahmed Faiz. In his introduction to Ravishing DisUnities,
Ali explains that it is not possible to stick to formal ghazal restrictions in translations because it
would be impossible to sustain a convincing qafia given the radif when translating couplet after
couplet (2000, 11). In translations, the constraints of language force the poet to introduce lexical
nodes that are not there in the original in order to make the poem work in the target language. He
must invert the order of lines to create some semblance of rhymes, etc.
The casualties in all this are the suspense/resolution schema, which the two-line ghazals have.
For example: Ahmad Farazs lines:
kis kis k batg jud k sabab ham
t muj s khaf hai t zamn k liy
(Who all will I explain the reasons for separation
You may be angry with me, come back for the worlds sake)
Not for mine but for the worlds sake come back.
They ask why you left? To whom all must I explain? (ibid. 48)
Here the sequence of lines has been reversed, again impacting the suspense/resolution schema.
However, if these translations are read as independent pieces, no one can deny their poetic worth
and beauty.
While his paradise on earth had turned to hell, in the poem, Summers of Translation, he
strikingly weaves words and images that draw upon Faiz Ahmed Faiz, bhajans (Hindu devotional
singing) harking back to Krishna and Radha, Begum Akhtar, Muharram, Zainab, Karbala, black
and white Hindi films and their haunting songs, and of course his Mother!

Elegies (Marsia)
The ghazal is best suited to portray the saga of religious martyrdom. A Shia Muslim, Shahid Ali
alludes to the martyrs of Karbala, and its survivors who were left to tell the tale of atrocities
meted out to them in the battlefield. After the battle of Karbala, Zainab, the sister of Hussain,
addressed people and narrated the cruelty committed at Karbala by Yazid. The invocation they
carry for the slain sonsof Karbala in actuality and in Shahid Ali its purview includes the sons
of Kashmir remains an indicator of the grand tale of exile. Zainab thus sings and mourns in
Shahid Ali: So weep now, you who of passion never made a holocaust, for I saw his children
slain in the desert, crying for water.
Here me. Remember Hussain, what he gave in Karbala, he the severed heart, the very heart of
Muhammad, left there bleeding, unburied. (256)
Memorializing the battle through story telling or the performance of the marsia becomes a
phenomenon essential to existence in all ages and centuries. Shahid Ali intends to transgress the
bloodcurdling incident by narrating devastation in Kashmir parallel to it, personalizing it and
thereby universalizing it.
Agha Shahid Alis verse is deeply imbued with the romance and cadences of Urdu poetry; he
brings to his work an inventive formalness acquired from his extensive knowledge of western
literatures. Shahid worked assiduously to establish a place in American literature for the formal
discipline of the ghazal.
It is perhaps not surprising then that the story of Ishmael in the Koran made an indelible
impression on him. In the Foreword, there is an explanation of the story of Ishmael, which
runs briefly as follows: Directed by God, Abraham says to his son, Ishmael, I see in a vision
that I offer thee in sacrifice. Ishmaels willingness to be sacrificed Agha Shahid Alis personal
life amounted to such a trial.
His experiments with the ghazal form in depicting the very human trial he underwent will remain
his lasting contribution to the world of English poetry.