More than any other Kashmiri, Agha Shahid Ali captured the spirit of his land and his people with the power of his writing. Across a life that spanned five decades and ended too soon on 8 December, Agha Shahid transcended imposed identities and wrote with a simple morality about life and love and their various intersections in Kashmir. He died away from his home in an American hospital, but with the comfort of his immediate family.
Born in New Delhi on 4 February 1949, Agha Shahid grew up as a Muslim in Kashmir, and served as a poet-witness to the travails of the troubled land. He was educated at the University of Kashmir, Srinagar, and the University of Delhi, before earning a Ph.D. in English from Pennsylvania State University (1984) and an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona (1985). A prolific writer, Agha Shahid published hundreds of poems in his lifetime, including such wellregarded collections as Rooms Are Never Finished (2001), The Country Without a Post Office (1997), The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems (1992), A Nostalgist's Map of America (1991), A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987), The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987), In Memory of Begum Akhtar and Other Poems (1979), and Bone Sculpture (1972). In addition to his creative work, Agha Shahid was also a celebrated scholar who specialised in the works of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. In 1986, he published T. S. Eliot as Editor, and later translated Faiz Ahmed Faiz's The Rebel's Silhouette: Selected Poems (1992), and edited Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English (2000).
A popular professor and friend to his students, Agha Shahid made a reputation early on for his knowledge of Hindustani music, Urdu verse, and the Modernist movement in Anglo-American poetry. While teaching at Hindu College in Delhi, he was much in demand throughout the Subcontinent, and he frequently visited other institutions to share his ideas and writings. He held teaching positions at the University of Delhi and, later, at many of the most prestigious universities in the United States.
In remembering him, his friend, the editor and publisher Rukun Advani, wrote, "We are all narcissists in some way, but Shahid had perfected the art of narcissism. He displayed it unashamedly and was universally loved for the abandon with which he could be so unabashedly and coyly full of himself. He was just so disconcertingly free of pretence in this respect, so entirely unique just for this reason." Advani recalls a conversation with Agha Shahid in which the poet faced the inevitability of death. "I don't want immortality through my works," Agha Shahid said. "I want immortality by not dying."
Agha Shahid published many fine works, but he wrote no truer words than in his 1987 poem "Stationary," which was published in his volume, The Half-Inch Himalayas:
The moon did not become the sun.
It just fell on the desert
in great sheets, reams
of silver handmade by you.
The night is your cottage industry now,
the day is your brisk emporium.
The world is full of paper.
Write to me.
SNOWMEN
My ancestor, a man
of Himalayan snow,
came to Kashmir from Samarkand,
carrying a bag
of whale bones:
heirlooms from sea funerals.
His skeleton
carved from glaciers, his breath
arctic,
he froze women in his embrace.
His wife thawed into stony water,
her old age a clear
evaporation.
This heirloom,
his skeleton under my skin, passed
from son to grandson,
generations of snowmen on my back.
They tap every year on my window,
their voices hushed to ice.
No, they won't let me out of winter,
and I've promised myself,
even if I'm the last snowman,
that I'll ride into spring
on their melting shoulders.
From an interview with Agha Shaid Ali conducted by Rehan Ansari and Rajinderpal S. Pal, carried in Himal in March 1998:
"I approached the poem "Snowmen", from which these lines are taken as an immediate sensuous apprehension. It was later that I thought of its feminist implications. There are two things hidden in that poem. One is a poem by Wallace Stevens called "The Snowmen". If you read it you won't see the connection but it is there for me. The other is a scene that has haunted me for a long time from Wuthering Heights. The narrator is staying at Heathcliff's house because there has been a terrible storm and the ghost of Katherine knocks on the window. She says, "I'm cold. Let me in". He opens the window and the glass breaks somehow. He takes the hand of the ghost and rubs it against the glass and there is blood. It's an amazing scene. Talk about magical realism. People think about that novel and they want neat answers. [Bronte's] whole enterprise is that there are no neat answers. But to provide you with a neat answer: I'm thinking about my ancestry and the lost women in this ancestry who we never hear about. I know everything about my father, his father, his father's father and so on for nine generations. But I know nothing before my grandmother. So I'm trying to find these lost women. These are difficult questions, there are no neat answers. You carn have a feminist construct when you read that poem."
From the same interview:
"Rain has had a profound impact on me, as I'm sure it has had on many people. My mother is from Lucknow. Kashmir, as one of my poems says, has four clearly defined seasons. They truly have a three months' winter, a three-month spring, summer and autumn. On the first of September you can really sense a nip in the air. You can start to see the elements of change, that autumn is coming.
"I had heard a lot of classical ragas that revolve around the monsoons. When I would hear these ragas and my mother would talk about the monsoons, and the romance of it, I had no way of knowing what that was about. That the rain [could be] such a positive feature, that people long for the rain to cool the atmosphere, and that that's the season lovers can't bear separation. Also this incredible music, these ragas that deal with the monsoons.
"We have rain in Kashmir, which sometimes leads to floods, but it does not have quite the same feeling as rain in Delhi has. When I went to Delhi for the first time in summer, in July, and I saw these rains, I [saw] a very romantic season and could see why you would want to be in the arms of your lover. Then when I went to Arizona there was this flood. I arrived and there was rain for two weeks. It was unusual in the desert and they called it monsoons. There were some deaths that occurred during that time. When I was putting this book together, I had this image of three women. I had this painting someone had given me which had these three women of the desert holding chili peppers. The idea of three women, three sisters, seems so central to various myths. Strangely enough I haven't found it in Hindu myth. You have it in Greek, in Scandinavian myth, you have it in Chekhov and Shakespeare and so on.
"The concept of the trinity occurs in so many cultures. Rushdie's Shame has it, but he surely got it from Western myth. He Pakistanised or Indianised it. The three sisters, when asked "Who's my father?" by the child they have raised, assume the shape of the three monkeys: see no evil, speak no evil, and hear no evil. Wonderfully funny stuff. At a personal level the rain brings so much memory back to me, especially of some very important love relationships I have had. The rain is also very important culturally, mythically, anthro-pologically, ecologically. It is the rain that brings a city back to memory, and makes it memorable, and these three women are the preservers of memory."