Agha Shahid Ali died in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 2001. He succumbed to cancer of the brain, which had taken his mother from him just a few years earlier. He was a few months shy of his 53rd birthday. All manner of people whose lives he had touched produced testimonials to the enormous loss they had experienced.             

In my own case, the encounters were few and brief: once at a poetry reading that he did in a café  on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and, the second time, uptown at Columbia University in the company of Edward Said. On that second occasion we made jokes back and forth, in the manner of desis far from home taking each other’s measure.             

And yet, despite this brief encounter, I have always felt his passing as a personal loss — as the disappearance of someone I could have, and should have, known. It feels like a failure that I didn’t.            

This is evidence of the force of his writing as of the life he commented on very publicly in his verse. (W. W. Norton has recently published his collected poems under the title The Veiled Suite.)            

Shahid was born in Delhi and raised and educated there and in Srinagar. In the American phase of his life he came to refer to himself as a ‘Kashmiri-American.’ This period of course coincided with the emergence of the Kashmiri struggle for azadi in the 1990s, with the callous and stupid manipulation of that struggle by the Pakistani state, and with the Indian state’s savage and on-going repression. His poetry registers his anger, his despair, and his insistent hope in response to all these developments.             

But by no means was he primarily a political poet. Shahid’s poetry paints a vast emotional canvas. Loss, distance, recuperation, grief, love and luminous perceptions of both the inner and outer worlds — these are the elements of his poetic universe.            

The results are not all equally successful, but especially powerful is ‘From Amherst to Kashmir,’ a cycle of poems that together constitute a record of the psychic journey while accompanying his mother’s body back home from the US.            

The cultural references of Shahid’s verse are widely ecumenical, ranging from western literatures to Arabic, Persian and subcontinental ones, above all Urdu. He was a profound lover of Urdu poetry and is among the best translators of Faiz Ahmed Faiz, his versions attempting far more than literal correspondence between words or lines. (The translations appeared in The Rebel’s Silhouette and unfortunately have not been included in the Norton collection.) They should be considered poems in their own right, in conversation with the Urdu originals.            

As with many individuals, especially those given a colonial education in English, his exposure to Urdu poetry came through song. In an elegy for Faiz, he writes of his discovery:

      When I learned of her,

      I was no longer a boy, and Urdu

      a silhouette traced by the voices of singers,

      by Begum Akhtar, who wove your couplets

      into ragas: both language and music were sharpened.            

He also wrote a poem in memory of Begum Akhtar, arguably the greatest ghazal singer of the 20th century, who had single-handedly reinvented ghazal singing for the modern age, the age of recorded music:

      Do your fingers still scale the hungry

      Bhairavi, or simply the muddy shroud?

      Ghazal, that death-sustaining widow,

      sobs in dingy archives, hooked to you.

      She wears her grief, a moon-soaked white,

      corners the sky into disbelief.

With great delicacy, Shahid manages to convey his affection for the arc of the singer’s life — the transformation of Akhtaribai Faizabadi into Begum Akhtar, the doyenne of semi-classical singing and a revered national treasure.            

There is a tender fascination in him with the lives women live in our civilisation—as wives, mothers, grandmothers, sisters, daughters and lovers — with their daily vulnerabilities but also their resilience and strength. And his own far from unambiguous expressions of love and desire mirror the sexual ambiguity of the ghazal itself.            

A preoccupation with the ghazal thus runs like a leitmotif throughout his work. And his most remarkable achievement may be the attention he directed to the possibility of writing in the form in English. Not only did he himself turn to this notoriously difficult genre — think merely of the strict requirements of qafia and radif — he also collected together a large number of ghazal-like poems by American poets, many of them trying their hand at it for the first time at his invitation. (This wonderful book is called Ravishing Disunities.)            

He forcefully rejected the casual dallying with such ‘exotic’ forms that was fashionable in some American circles and insisted that its strict rules of composition be observed in English. The results are sometimes stunningly beautiful:

      Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell tonight?

      Whom else from rapture’s road will you expel tonight?

      ….

      I beg for haven: Prisons, let open your gates—

      A refugee from Belief seeks a cell tonight.

      ….

      Lord, cried out the idols, Don’t let us be broken;

      Only we can convert the infidel tonight.

      ….

      And I, Shahid, only am escaped to tell thee—

      God sobs in my arms. Call me Ishmael tonight.            

The second and third couplets I have quoted sound like they could originally have been written in Urdu, so faithful is their replication of rhythms and attitudes that are characteristic of its poetry. It is not uncommon for Shahid’s western readers to wonder if they are reading translations from some other language. And the ghazal ends by invoking perhaps the most famous opening line in American literature — from Moby Dick — but it is simultaneously, of course, an Islamic reference as well.             

This cultural crisscrossing is a typical feature of his poems, which often weave a complex passage across civilisations. No language, no civilisation, no cultural ethos is to be left alone in peace with its own internal values, symbols and presuppositions:

      No language is old — or young — beyond English.

      So what of a common tongue beyond English? 

      I know some words for war, all of them sharp,

      but the sharpest one is jung — beyond English!

      …

      Go all the way through jungle from aleph to zenith

      to see English, like monkeys, swung beyond English.

      ….

      If someone asks where Shahid has disappeared,

      he’s waging a war (no, jung) beyond English.            

This is not a set of multicultural clichés about the mutual coexistence of diverse cultures. Urdu — its rhythm, sounds and mood — is poured into English, so that we are left just a little bit uncertain about which language we are in. In the age of its global dominance, Anglophone writing, the poem suggests, has the ethical responsibility to look beyond itself. The mere repetition of the radif in each couplet produces an insistence, to be open to other worlds, to look ‘beyond English.’            

In many of his ghazals, and in fact in quite a bit of his poetry, Shahid seems to have attempted the impossible: writing Urdu poetry in English. It is evidence of his remarkable talent that to a measurable extent he seems to have succeeded.             

And of course this mixing of languages recalls the birth many centuries ago of Urdu itself, the quintessential mixed language, created when Persian and Arabic rhythms, sounds and moods were poured into Hindi, the vernacular of north India. An early name for Urdu is of course simply that — rekhta (poured, spilled or mixed).            

Shahid’s writing should be far better known in Pakistan than it is at present. His loving embrace of Urdu and its culture should be a challenge to our emerging Anglophone writers. Publishers should look into issuing local editions of his work. The poems should be included in school and college curricula. (How lovely would it be for Pakistani schoolchildren to discover an English ghazal?)             

Given the depth and range of his engagement with elements of Indo-Muslim culture, above all with the ghazal as a form of verse and as an entire cultural ethos, Pakistanis ought to be among his most discerning readers.            

We might be allowed to hope that little steps such as these could lead to a more meaningful orientation toward Kashmir and Kashmiris than we can claim to have at present — something beyond the easy and often ill-informed expressions of solidarity with violent militancy and secessionism in the Valley that seem to be an automatic reflex in this country.

The writer teaches comparative literature at the UCLA
 

The Veiled Suite

By Agha Shahid Ali

Penguin Books, India

ISBN 978-0-143-06863-1

393pp. Indian Rs350

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Tags: Agha Shahid Ali Urdu Urdu language Urdu poetry