Agha Shahid Ali was born in Delhi in 1949 into a well-educated, liberal Shia Muslim family where Urdu, Kashmiri and English were spoken and poetry in these languages was frequently recited. He spent his early childhood in Srinagar and attended an Irish Catholic school there. He obtained his Master’s degree in English from the University of Delhi, following which he migrated to the United States of America and earned his PhD from the Pennsylvania State University in 1984. Subsequently, he also earned a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the University of Arizona and pursued a career in academics, starting at Hamilton College, New York in 1987 and then moving to the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he headed the MFA creative writing programme. He also taught a creative writing programme for poets and writers at the Warren Wilson College and for graduate students at the New York University. He was a visiting professor at Princeton University and held teaching positions at the University of Delhi, SUNY Binghamton, Baruch College, and the University of Utah. During his brief but fruitful career as an academic and poet, Ali received fellowships from several prestigious organisations – the New York Foundation of Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council of Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He was the recipient of the Pushcart Prize and was also a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001. Ali died of brain cancer in 2001, the same ailment to which his mother had succumbed only a few years before him.

As an expatriate Kashmiri forever yearning for home, Ali identified himself as an American poet writing in English who was “imbued with … permutations of Hindu, Muslim and Western cultures” (Benvenuto 267). Ali acknowledged that “a proclivity to mourn historical loss was an inescapable part of his temperament” (Benvenuto 266), but also “resolutely refused to embrace the role of victim that could so easily have been his” (Ghosh 318). Ali’s early collections of poems, A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987), The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987), and A Nostalgist’s Map of America (1991), are marked by the lyricism that informs all of his work. They also reveal a culturally hybrid poetic persona as adept at invoking figures like Medusa and Eurydice from Greek mythology as at referencing Begum Akhtar and Emily Dickinson. Ali’s cosmopolitanism as an artist is evident from the fact that he translated the Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s Urdu poems into English in The Rebel’s Silhouette (1991), and edited Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English (2000). He experimented with Western poetic forms such as sestinas, villanelles and canzones, as well as wrote original ghazals in English in his last collection of poems, Call Me Ishmael Tonight (2003).

One of the major themes in Ali’s poetry is nostalgia for an irreversibly altered homeland. Ali treads the tightrope between sentimental longing and resigned awareness in capturing through his poetry the sense of loss caused by the state of being in permanent exile. This is evident in one of his best known poems, “Postcard from Kashmir”, in which Kashmir becomes both the site and the product of re-presentation, available to the speaker only in and as a picture postcard. The sublime beauty of its landscape “shrinks” to a “neat four by six inches”, and his “home” becomes commercially marketable as a souvenir that can be posted to him by mail. The poem sets up a series of contrasts that suggest the impossible contradictions that thwart any possibility of ever returning to Kashmir in its prelapsarian state, untouched by violence: thus, the speaker holds “the half-inch Himalayas” in his hand and wryly observes that when he revisits Kashmir “the colors won’t be so brilliant, / the Jhelum’s waters so clean, / so ultramarine”. The interplay between vastness and smallness, darkness and light, familiarity and strangeness, proximity and distance, reality and image, is distilled into the final metaphor of the poem:

And my memory will be a little

out of focus, in it

a giant negative, black

and white, still undeveloped. (29)

The poem employs a spatial imaginary that operates on the principle of inversion – while the mighty Himalayas are scaled down to mere inches that can be held in the palm, reductively situating the sublime landscape of Kashmir within an easily measurable, two-dimensional postcard, the negative acquires a disproportionately large dimension within the abstract, subjective domain of memory and defies any attempt at containment or translation. Ali deftly uses the central image of the picture postcard to suggest how memory itself is ultimately only a story one chooses to re-construct in certain ways; in this instance,  his memory of Kashmir, based on his own personal association with the land as his “home”, is fundamentally ruptured by the socio-political turmoil that lies beneath the surface of the “overexposed” beauty of the place, beyond the frame of the photograph, so to speak. The fact that Kashmir is, and will continue to be, accessible only as a text – and a generic one at that, if one considers the predictable, replicable format of the picture postcard – points to the paradox of “belonging” to it. In his analysis of the poem, Matthew Nelson draws attention to the effect of double estrangement achieved through the premise of receiving a picture postcard of “home” from a tourist: “The receipt of such a postcard alienates further, even as it evokes whatever alienation already preceded it. Loss of home is thus figured … as a form of failed sociality” (938). Thus, while the speaker does not shy away from declaring his “love” for Kashmir, he is also painfully aware that this is “the closest [he will] ever be to home”. What is notable about Ali’s poetic craft is that he manages to defamiliarise a popular “sign” of Kashmir – the stock image of its iconic mountains and rivers captured in a picture postcard – and traces it back to an unattainable origin (the “giant negative” that is still “undeveloped”), thus suggesting the inadequacy of both personal memory and popular representation, and offering what Joseph Donahue calls “a psychologically acute anatomy of loss”. The openness of the postcard as a text that can be “read” by anyone en route to its intended recipient also points to the nature of this loss: it is a loss of meaning, since the visual signs with/through which Kashmir becomes identified in the popular imagination also, paradoxically, signal the erosion of “homeliness” from its territory in the psyche of the expatriate subject.

The emotional truth of the disruptive violence experienced by native Kashmiris is often captured by Ali through his use of imagery, at once appropriate for its fidelity to the natural setting and cultural milieu of his poems and striking for its ability to invoke sensory perceptions in unsettling ways. For instance, in “A Dream of Glass Bangles”, the speaker recounts the scene of a midnight raid on his house (which, in the context of Kashmir, could be any household), wherein the comfort and safety of the parents sleeping “warm in a quilt studded / with pieces of mirrors” (32) is suddenly intruded upon by the army surrounding the house. The elemental nature of the imagery employed here – the bangles on the mother’s arms as “waves of frozen rivers”, the army “pulling icicles for torches / off the roofs” and “set[ting] the tips of water on fire”, the air into which the father steps out “a quicksand of snow”, and ultimately the sound of “a widow smashing the rivers / on her arms” (32-33) – combines paradoxical ideas of heat and cold, solidity and fluidity, and thus not only coveys the traumatic impact of the incident on the speaker’s psyche, but also suggests the vulnerability of the interior space of “home” to the precarious environment outside. The deliberate lack of specificity in the poem in terms of where, when, and why this incident took place, points to the pervasiveness and normalisation of violence, while the encoding of such violence in terms of elemental imagery draws attention to the essential unnaturalness of such an order of things. In a sense, both the speaker (presumably a child at the time of the “action” of the poem) and the reader bear witness to the subjective trauma caused by the violent breach of the sanctity of “home”, while simultaneously also recognising the symptomatic nature of such trauma, since this could be any Kashmiri family in any house.

The Kashmir of Ali’s poems is imbued with an atmosphere of pervasive uncertainty and melancholy, its social order rendered fragile by the tremendous stress imposed by state-sponsored violence on fundamental human relationships. For instance, “The Floating Post Office” opens with a suspenseful scene where the local residents of Srinagar anxiously await the arrival of the shikara (a kind of gondola) that functions as a kind of postal service. The speaker voices the collective anticipation of the assembled crowd:

Has he been kept from us? Portents
of rain, rumors, ambushed letters . . .
Curtained palanquin, fetch our word,
bring us word: Who has died? Who’ll live? (207)

The spectre of fear and detection – conveyed suggestively through the setting of a scene where rain jostles with rumor and letters may be ambushed – turns civilians into potential criminals and letter-writing into almost an illicit activity subject to state surveillance. Survival hinges upon a word here and is beyond the will and control of the recipients of the letters, the grammatical tense of the verbs (“has died”, “will live”) indicating the degree of helplessness experienced by these people as they wait in the present moment. As the “postman” emerges from the “fog of death” engulfing the city, we register the habitual, ritualistic nature of the unfolding scene. This is not an aberrational, temporary state of emergency; it is an established order where oppression has been routinised and the restriction of communication is recognised as part of “the sentence / passed on [the] city”. In the context of Kashmir, the governmental authority to monitor and punish civilians through the exercise of constitutional measures  such as the infamous Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) has resulted in the breach of fundamental rights of privacy, life, and justice; both here and in “A Dream of Glass Bangles”, Ali presents human suffering within what Giorgio Agamben calls a state of exception, one that operates through “a suspension of the juridical order itself” (4) and creates “a zone of indifference” (23) where the distinction between the legal and the extra-legal, the norm and its abrogation, the inside and the outside is blurred. Within such a system, precarity becomes endemic to everyday life, as is evident from the dramatic tension built into this tacit, covert form of communication is conveyed through the staccato rhythm and tenuous syntax of the lines:

It came close
to reveal smudged black-ink letters
which the postman—he was alive—
gave us, like signs, without a word,

and we took them, without a word. (207)

What we witness here is a situation in which life and hope are reduced to mere chance (the letter can, after all, only guarantee that the writer “was alive” at the time of writing it), where the seemingly tranquil romance of the natural surroundings (falling autumn leaves, approaching rain, the sound of a “cymbaled prayer” from a nearby temple) belies the precarious existence of the residents of Kashmir in the near total absence of basic human rights. Typical of his style, Ali uses the letter both as a prop and as a symbol, as a precious material means and as proof of survival in a police state, as well as an emblem of the quotidian forms of repression to which its bearers are subjected. Thus, the code or the language necessitated by such a form of communication (wherein the recipients are periodically given “a new password” by the postman) is described by the speaker as “blood shaken into letters, / [a] cruel primitive script” (207); the imagery combines notions of filial ties, danger, sacrifice, and violence, and thereby contextualises the subjective experience of anguish and loss in terms of a shared “saffron link to the past” (207). Such interweaving of personal feeling with political reality is Ali’s characteristic method of developing a poetic idiom that is aesthetically and culturally rooted in Kashmir, while also being invested with allusions to the extreme order of affairs that make Kashmir an extended “graveyard”. What sustains this “order” – keeps the post office afloat, as it were – is the speaker’s quiet determination to continue to write letters “alive / with love” (208), even as he recognises the mortal risks involved in such communication:

…our each word

in the fog awaits a sentence:

[…]

Our letters will be rowed through olive

canals, tense waters no one can close. (208)

While the remoteness and fragility of “home” is experienced by Ali as an intensely personal feeling, he does make oblique connections with the more specific political circumstances that have caused a violent rupture between the natives of Kashmir and their homeland. Thus, in another poem, “The Correspondent”, Ali employs the device of a dialogue between the speaker and a news reporter who has just returned from Sarajevo with “footage … priceless with sympathy” (209). The dual meanings of “correspondence” – as communication between two characters as well as analogy in terms of the conditions of civic unrest and state oppression that exist in both Bosnia and Kashmir – offer the reader a geopolitical framework to locate and interpret contemporary history. Yet, we are also told at the very outset that the titular correspondent, for whom “the world [is] his schedule”, is eager to leave. It is the construction of Sarajevo and Kashmir as newsworthy stories – where “exploding grenades” serve as the parenthetical “soundtrack”, images of burning wheelchairs and barbed-wire camps can be conveniently fast-forwarded, and the gaze of the dead is “fractured white with subtitles” – that the poem foregrounds (209-10). For the correspondent, Kashmir is a “dream” to which he “wants exclusive rights”; in the pursuit of this dream, he will, the speaker surmises, “erase/ Bosnia” and “rewind to zero” (210). Thus, both Kashmir and Bosnia emerge as substitutable signs in a global language of terrorism and trauma, even as the speaker yearns to have his “aubades” for Kashmir transmitted via satellites. What we as readers realise with the speaker is that Kashmir’s currency is only one of many “stories” vying for visibility in a mediated, networked world, one that the correspondent will need to “revamp” and “reincarnadine” as he “bypass[es] graves that in blacks and whites/ climb ever up the hills” (210). Resonating with the blood imagery used in “The Floating Post Office”, the poem reveals, perhaps with a hint of self-reflexive irony, the violence implicit in the act of imagining and consuming Kashmir as a text and its residents as characters whose “shadow[s]” can be strategically slow-motioned, fast-forwarded, zoomed into, subtitled or erased at will. Each of these poems marks Ali’s engagement with the cultural imaginary about Kashmir, rendered through modes ranging from “landscape photography’s pervasive ironies to the more radical superimposition of the body’s traces on the landscape” (Kabir 55).

Another recurrent theme in Ali’s poetry is migration and exile. Ali explores these themes via history as well as personal experience, often tracing a lineage of physical and cultural movement across borders through the merging of his poetic persona with the lingering “presence” of other characters who are imaginatively reconstructed. In “Snowmen”, the speaker traces a genealogy back into the geological past, his ancestor “a man / of Himalayan snow” who traversed from Samarkand to Kashmir with “a bag / of whale bones: / heirlooms from sea funerals” (34). The natural elements of the landscape become organically integrated into the human body and transform it into one of several components that constitute the poet’s own history. Thus, the ancestor’s breath is “arctic” and his skeleton, “carved from glaciers”, is passed down by “generations of snowmen” to the speaker himself who feels it under his own skin and promises to “ride into spring / on their melting shoulders” (34). In another poem, “The Dacca Gauzes”, the speaker refers to another heirloom his grandmother fondly remembers – the famed muslin of colonial Bengal that she once wore as part of her bridal trousseau and which was subsequently cut into embroidered handkerchiefs and given away to nieces and grand-daughters. The speaker recounts the legendary “texture” of the Dacca gauzes – known as “woven air, running / water, evening dew” – to create a text about its lingering presence-in-absence in the grandmother’s imagination (42). Thus, the speaker deliberately ends the poem with an anecdote about how one autumn morning, when “the air / was dew-starched”, his grandmother pulled her (now lost) six yards “absently through her ring” (43). The speaker also situates this familial tale within the institutionalised discourse of history, through which he has learned how during the colonial period in India “the hands / of weavers were amputated, /  the looms of Bengal silenced” to make way for British textiles (42-43). Here, memory itself becomes part of a cultural inheritance based on the verbal transmission of popular stories rather than personal experience, the material object having irrevocably disappeared and becoming only a matter of mythic vernacular narrativisation. The implicit play on the etymological connection between text, texture, and textile is suggestive of the implication of the personal in the political, of the oral and the anecdotal in the documentary and archival forms of history. Ali’s “mapping of personal and collective memories onto different geographical landscapes,” observes Nida Sajid, complicates the “official recording of events … in order to interrupt their linearity and to rupture the artifice of mainstream history” (90).

It is a similar strategy of reviewing history from the margins through the lens of memory and inheritance that Ali  employs in “Leaving Sonora”, where the poet of the desert must turn “deep inside himself for shade”, for “[o]nly there do the perished tribes live” (116).

Similarly, in “Poets on Bathroom Walls”, the addressee returns from the toilet “having memorized someone’s graffiti”, the anonymous red scrawls on the bathroom walls serving as a furtive code of communication between two women who, the speaker declares, should meet “despite all the world” (95). If such overlapping identities are imagined in and through the construction of a poetic “self” that is composite, derivative, and representative of a lineage, then Ali also explores the theme of alienation in poems like “Survivor”, where the speaker observes himself from a position of apparent neutrality, as a separate entity resembling him in every aspect of his daily life: opening the refrigerator at night, listening to news from Kashmir on the radio, practising his signature and answering his mail. The schizophrenic projection of his own “self” as a distinct character within the poem signals the speaker’s troubled perspective on, and the consequent lack of identification with, his own existence as the titular survivor of traumatic experience, even as he identifies the likeness between the two:

The mirror gives up

my face to him

 

He calls to my mother in my voice

 

She turns

 

He is breathless to tell her tales

in which I was never found (72-73)

It could be argued that the ambivalence Ali builds into the relation between his poetic “self” and its environment (comprising both human characters and setting) is a manifestation of a deep-seated sense of loneliness that makes it imperative for both the poet and the reader to recognise the necessity as well as the limitations of establishing links with the “other”. The recurrent use of images of mirrors, reflections, photographs, and dreams in these poems suggests the ephemeral nature of recorded history and personal memory, re-membered from shifting perspectives that blur the lines between the two; it also constitutes a poetic rendering of how Ali, as a Kashmiri expatriate, experiences othering both as a political phenomenon and as personal trauma that leads to a questioning of the very ideas of definite origins and singular identities.

In fact, Ali’s poetry abounds in images of desolate landscapes, offering the artistic premise to the poetic speaker to document what he perceives as significant details, but simultaneously also serving as the ground for an imaginative reconstruction of silenced histories. Thus, in “A Wrong Turn”, the speaker encounters “a massacred town” in his dream, one that has been “erased from maps” and contains only signs of abandonment – broken idols at altars, dry wells piled up with bones, cobwebbed booths, and rusted railway tracks. The possibility of “walking among the atrocities” that such a landscape might have witnessed leaves the interpretation of its history open to the speaker’s – and by extension, the reader’s – interpretation within the poetic framework of the dream setting. The fact that it is “[o]nly a wrong turn” (emphasis added) that leads the speaker to this landscape is offset by his confession that this is a recurrent detour in his dreams, implying that what he (and we, as readers) witness here is significant precisely because the poem itself exists in defiance of the “curfew on ghosts” (60).

We find a similar oblique voicing of the absent “other” in poems like “Vacating an Apartment” and “The Previous Occupant”–companion pieces, as it were, that extend the themes of migration, home and exile into the humdrum business of moving houses. In the former, the speaker imagines himself as the “ghost” who moves out “holding tombstones in … [his] hands” as the cleaners wipe away signs of his existence from the house – his smile, “his voicestains”, his posters on the walls, and his “crossed-out lines” at the corner-table – and the landlord gives the new tenants his (the speaker’s) “autopsy”, the new lease agreement (61-62). The contrast between the “efficient” ease of physical movement and the difficulty of a neat emotional disconnect with one’s habitat underlies the seemingly objective account of what is otherwise an unremarkable feature of urban living. If the speaker sees himself as the “other” in this poem, he imagines the eponymous previous occupant of the house he moves into as a lingering presence – another ghost, as it were – whose identity becomes the subject of his compulsive conjecture. It is the little things the previous tenant has left behind – a half-torn horoscope, a half-empty bottle of Flexol – that trigger the speaker’s imagination about who he might have been: “There’s enough missing / for me to know him”. In the speaker’s imagination, his thoughts “cling / in phrases to the frost on the windows” and he stares back through the mirror with “his brown eyes” (63). The mirroring of the “self” in the “other”, which is a technique Ali commonly uses, establishes an affiliation between the two strangers even as we recognise the fact that within the larger cultural code of urban mobility, they are merely replaceable “signs”; it is only through an active act of imaginative identification of/with the “other” that the speaker locates his own “self”:

Now that he’s found me,

my body casts his shadow everywhere.

He’ll  never, never move out of here. (64)

The poems discussed so far adequately reveal Ali’s flair for transmuting inherited memory and personal experience into art through the deft use of images and symbols that are not only apposite to his own socio-cultural milieu but also effective in situating his poetry within a larger historical context of migration and loss. While this results in an overwhelming sense of melancholy in a bulk of his poems, there are instances in his oeuvre where Ali opts for wry observation, bordering on humour, rather than the sombre reflection we encounter in his more popular poems. For instance, in “The Fate of the Astrologer / Sitting on the Pavement Outside / the Delhi Railway Station”, the poet offers no more than a pithy verbal snapshot of the titular character by way of nudging the reader to meditate on what it means to live busy, self-absorbed lives in a modern city:

“Pay, pay attention to the sky,”

he shouts to passers-by.

 

The planets gather dust

from passing trucks. (49)

The irony built into the use of the word “fate” in the title – the astrologer’s own fate, regardless of his supposed professional expertise in predicting the future for others, seems grim in the face of public indifference to his shouts – and the symbolism of dust gathering on his planetary charts mirroring the contrast between vehicular movement and cosmic motion aptly suggest the insular human obsession with immediate concerns. The title of this short piece, written with line breaks like the stanzas themselves, thus functions as much as art as social commentary without resorting to elaboration or overt didacticism. Similarly, in “At the Museum”, Ali uses the iconic bronze figurine of the Harappan dancing girl to speculate about the position of marginalised sections of the population (“servant girl[s]”, “soldiers and slaves”), even in a society as advanced as the Indus Valley civilisation. Thus, he wonders playfully if the sculptor deliberately polished “the ache // off her fingers stiff / from washing the walls //  and scrubbing the floors, / from stirring the meat // and the crushed asafoetida / in the bitter gourd” (217). In expressing his gratitude to this “child who had to play woman” and smile at the sculptor, Ali adopts a mock-serious tone that alerts us, the readers of the history this icon embodies, to the politics of labour, its transformation into art and its appropriation into cultural discourse.

It is the same playful engagement with institutionalised history that we also witness in Ali’s revisionary poems featuring characters already well known within the canon of Western literature and culture. In “An Interview with Red Riding Hood, Now No Longer Little”, the eponymous heroine of the much-translated folktale relates how her father was “no ordinary woodsman” and how he became the owner of a timber industry – and she an heiress – by cutting down the forest and combing it for wolves, some of whom “escaped, / like guerrillas, into / the mountains” (98). The obvious possibilities of ecocritical and postcolonial readings of this account of the tale aside, Ali also re-casts Red Riding Hood as a more self-aware and candid agent of her own narrative, one who admits to getting sick of lisping “”Grandma, what big eyes you have!’” (98) and regretfully confesses:

I lied when I said it was dark.

Now I drive through the city,

hearing wolves at every turn.

How warm it was inside the wolf! (99)

The companion piece to this dark but delightful re-telling of the famous tale is “The Wolf’s Postscript to ‘Little Red Riding Hood’”, where the wolf as speaker demands acknowledgement of his “sense of history”, clarifying that he “did it for posterity, / for kindergarten teachers / and a clear moral” (100). He also claims that he, “a forest-dweller”, knew all along where the old grandmother lived, and could have “gobbled her up” years ago if he wanted, that he knew when his belly was being filled with garbage and stones by the huntsman and ran with their weight “simply so children could laugh”; in fact, it was his “generous sense of plot”, his “perfect sense of timing” that made him act as he did (100-101). In this reversal of narrative and moral agency, Ali makes the reader revise the Western hegemonic cultural codes that have traditionally served as the interpretative framework to understand and define the category of the “human” in exclusionary, oppositional terms.

In the third piece belonging to this group, “Hansel’s Game”, Ali introduces sinister themes of sexual exploitation, violence, and murder, while retaining the same casual lightness of tone as in the previous poems. Here we encounter Hansel remembering those “happily ever after” years when he “played with every Gretel in town / including Gretel, my sister”. He, “a big boy now” already knew that the witch “had to be somewhere near” and that “she would end badly”. This familiar tale of a journey “from the womb to the grave” is given a chilling twist when Hansel reveals that he only “played innocent”:

And Gretel and I lived

happily ever after. And still do:

 

We have a big ice-box

in our basement

where we keep the witch.

 

Now and then we take portions of her

to serve on special occasions.

 

And our old father washes

her blood from the dishes. (102-103)

This self-conscious subversion of binaries – the child and the adult, the innocent and the wicked, the victim and the victimiser –leads to an interrogation of the ways in which we have been culturally trained to “read” stories, and prompts us to reconsider the power dynamics underlying such categories. As readers we recognise the postmodernist tendencies of such retellings (similar to those of Angela Carter and A.S. Byatt) in their capacity to draw attention to the constructed nature of such “stories”, the artifice underlying the art, even as we locate them in Eurocentric pedagogic, literary, and cultural traditions.

If Ali’s posthumous reputation rests on his ability to successfully distil his multilingual, multicultural heritage and experience into poetry that easily transcends national borders, the persistent theme of the desire to “return” to an imagined “home” – so common amongst diasporic writers of the late twentieth century as to risk becoming a sociological cliché – turns in his hands not merely into a literary theme but also an instrument of formal innovation. Malcolm Woodland reads in Ali’s practice of the ghazal as a transnational poetic form (originating in Persia, coming to India via Urdu, translated from Arabic, and finally composed in English) in his final years “a radically divided stance toward nativist nostalgia and hybridist innovation” (267). If Ali’s faithful use of the technique of the refrain at the end of every couplet of a ghazal is, as Woodland contends, a linguistic mirroring of the desire to return (as repeated phrase/text) to a point of “origin” but always in an altered context (253), one might also propose that this reflects a poststructuralist move toward the use of a sign whose meanings shift with every iteration, and a corresponding awareness on the part of the poet of the provisional, inconclusive nature of any quest for identity. It is a testament to Ali’s genius as a poet that he achieves this degree of (self-)recognition by adhering to many of the original formal tenets of the ghazal even as he articulates them in a novel (Western) context. It is fitting, therefore, that Ali should end one of his last ghazals, “In Arabic” with a reference to his own name (another convention of the form), employing a poetic persona that translates, as it were, himself into a language that he shares with his English reader:

They ask me to tell them what Shahid means: Listen, listen:

It means “The Belovéd” in Persian, “witness” in Arabic. (373)

It is this cosmopolitan artistic sensibility that imbues Ali’s work and takes it beyond the context of parochial identity politics. Resistant to the very idea of being typecast as a victim or hailed as a “nationalist” poet (Ghosh 318-19), Ali mapped his writing on a global canvas whose coordinates were not determined by his own ethnicity or physical location. Thus, we find within his oeuvre numerous poems with epigraphs and dedications to writers and texts dispersed across historical periods, cultural locations and genres, ranging from William Wordsworth, Oscar Wilde, G.M. Hopkins and W.B. Yeats to Emily Dickinson, James Merrill and Hart Crane, from Ghalib to Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Begum Akhtar, Mahmoud Darwish to Alexander Pushkin, Edward Gibbon to Saleem Kidwai, and from Gilgamesh to the Bible and the Koran. Ali displays an acumen for seamlessly weaving these myriad influences into an intertextual web, wherein the “universal” and the “local” coexist in an imaginative spatio-temporal contiguity. Thus, in “After Seeing Kozinstev’s King Lear in Delhi”, the poet casually reflects on the history of Chandni Chowk as a globalized marketplace (where “perfumes from Isfahan,/ fabrics from Dacca, essence from Kabul,/ glass bangles from Agra” were sold) as well as its present status as a commercial hub (where beggars occupy the tombs of “unknown nobles and foreign saints”, “hawkers sell combs and mirrors”, and a “Bombay spectacular” is screened across the road from a Sikh temple). The resonance between the (post)colonial legacy of a specific locality in the city – the street through which Zafar, the poet-Emperor was led (“his feet in chains”) by the British to witness his sons’ hanging and subsequently exiled and buried in Burma – and the fate of the tragic protagonist of the much adapted Shakespearean play, extends and expands the scope of the “literary” without reproducing the privilege of the Western “canon” over its the colonial “other”. This corresponds to what Baidik Bhattacharya identifies as a characteristic of Anglophonic postcolonial writing – the impulse “to carry signs and traces of other languages under its own skin and to accommodate disparate histories, conflicting temporalities and discreet territories within its being” (26-27).

While most of his poetry is marked by lyrical brevity, there is a persistent tendency in Ali towards an imaginative telescoping of multiple histories that suggests a trans-national, epic frame of consciousness. It is useful in this context to refer to Sneharika Roy’s definition of the “postcolonial epic” as a genre that employs “a poetics of migration to articulate a politics of migrating identities irreducible to a single national form” (19). Such a “poetics of migration” manifests both as form and theme in Ali’s poetry as he foregrounds, in the context of a globalized world where migration is the accepted norm, the emotional immediacy of individual experience and memory typical of the lyric and locates it alongside the epic concern with the larger context of collective histories. For instance, in “I See Chile in My Rearview Mirror”, Ali employs the central conceit of a “mirrored continent” (Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Colombia, Brazil “without forests”, and Peru “without rain”) that he visualizes as he journeys across the desert towards Utah, “passing skeletal/ figures carved in 700 B.C.” (161-63). References to “blindfolded men”, “drunk soldiers” and a “wounded republic” allude to the state of civil war and environmental crisis in many of these countries even as the elusive images, mere reflections on glass and water surfaces, ultimately vanish. Ali’s awareness of the realities of the contemporary world order is thus transformed into personal(ized) “reflections” that retain an essential lyricism as well as demand a politically engaged reading. Though Ali’s poetry does not feature grand characters and actions that can be readily identified as belonging to the traditional generic category of the epic, we do find in his writing a compulsive desire to cross borders that separate the here and the elsewhere, the now and the then, even as it is marked by a perennial (and perennially unfulfilled) urge to belong. Not surprisingly, many of Ali’s poems feature airports, thresholds that rigorously mark nationalist identities but also facilitate the crossing of borders between nations. In one of such poems, “Barcelona Airport”, the speaker declares at the security gate that he carries with him only his heart, the “first terrorist” (284). In this act of self-declaration, Ali defines the migrant poet as an emblematic figure whose art defies confinement within the material and ideological limits imposed by nation-states, and it is perhaps in this respect that Ali’s contribution to contemporary English poetry is the greatest.

Works Cited

Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005.

Ali, Agha Shahid. The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems. Norton, 2009.

Benvenuto, Christine. “Agha Shahid Ali”, The Massachusetts Review, vol. 43, no.2, 2002, pp. 261-273.

Bhattacharya, Baidik. Postcolonial Writing in the Era of World Literature: Texts, Territories, Globalization. London: Routledge, 2018.

Donahue, Joseph. “Exile Returned”, Bookforum <Agha Shahid Ali’s poems are charmed whispers that can console and devastate – Joseph Donahue – Bookforum Magazine> Accessed on 29 June, 2022.

Ghosh, Amitav. “‘The Ghat of the Only World’: Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn”, Postcolonial Studies: Culture, Politics, Economy, vol. 5, no.3,2002, pp. 311-323.

Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. Territory of Desire: Representing the Valley of Kashmir. U of Minnesota P, 2009.

Nelson. Matthew. “Agha Shahid Ali and the Phenomenology of Postcolonial Nostalgia”, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 22, no.7,2020, pp. 933-950.

Roy, Sneharika. The Postcolonial Epic: From Melville to Walcott and Ghosh. London: Routledge, 2018.

Sajid, Nida. “The Transnational Cartography of Agha Shahid Ali’s Poetry,” Rocky Mountain Review 66 (2012), pp. 85-92.

Woodland, Malcolm. “Memory’s Homeland: Agha Shahid Ali and the Hybrid Ghazal”, ESC: English Studies in Canada, vol. 32, nos. 2-3, 2005, pp. 249-272.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Poetry

Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals (2003)
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)
Bone Sculpture (1972)

Translations
The Rebel’s Silhouette: Selected Poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1992)

Others
Editor, Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English (2000)
T. S. Eliot as Editor (1986)

Published on 11 July 2022.

Rajagopal Parthasarathy (b. 1934), better known as R. Parthasarathy, was born in Thirupparaithurai, a village in the Tiruchirappalli district of Tamil Nadu, and educated at Don Bosco High School and Siddarth College, both in Bombay (now Mumbai), where he subsequently taught at various colleges. In 1962, as a member of Mithibai College’s English Department (headed by Nissim Ezekiel), he was part of a small group of Indian poets who met Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, and Gary Snyder during their visit to India, attended a reading of their poetry, read their own in front of them, and mulled over the Beats’ notoriously dismissive reactions (i.e., Orlovsky’s statement, “If we were gangster poets, we’d shoot you,” and Ginsberg’s remarks on Indian writing in English as being “literary and derivative”). In 1963-64 he was a British Council scholar at the University of Leeds, at the time a vibrant poetry scene with John Glover, Tony Harrison, Geoffrey Hill, Peter Redgrove, Jon Silkin, Ken Smith, and Jeffrey Wainwright among its main protagonists (Smith and Wainwright would be included in one of Parthasarathy’s first publications, the five-poet, sixteen-page booklet Poetry from Leeds, co-edited with J.J. Healy and published by Writers Workshop in 1968). Nevertheless, the year spent in England was an eye-opener. As it happened to other Indians before (and after) him, the direct experience of English society, English life, even English weather, proved a traumatic corrective to the largely literary and colonial education he had received in India.

Upon his return to India with a postgraduate degree in English Studies, Parthasarathy held more teaching jobs before joining Oxford University Press, for which he worked as literary editor, first in Madras (now Chennai) (1971-82) and then in Delhi (1978-82). During this time, he was also a participant in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa (1978-79), and a member of the advisory board for English at the Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Letters (1978-82).

While in Madras, Parthasarathy published the two books that would grant him a place in the canon of Indian poetry in English: the anthology Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets (1976) and the long poem Rough Passage (1977). In 1982 he joined the English department at the University of Texas at Austin, working as assistant instructor in English (1982-86) while pursuing a doctoral degree. There he found a mentor and a friend in the novelist Raja Rao (1908-2006), one of the authors he had edited at Oxford University Press, who was teaching in the Philosophy department. Parthasarathy then spent his entire academic career, from 1986 until his retirement in 2009, at Skidmore College, a private liberal arts college in Saratoga Springs, New York, where he taught courses on poetry and translation, focusing on Non-Western literatures and the South Asian region, and was director of the program in Asian Studies (1994-98). In 1993 he published a translation of the Tamil epic The Tale of an Anklet: The Cilappatikāram of Iḷaṅkō Aṭikaḷ, which he had started at the University of Texas and for which he was awarded the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Citation (1994) and the first A. K. Ramanujan Book Prize for Translation (1996), established by the South Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies to recognise the work of the late poet, folklorist, and translator. Over the years, his own poetry as well as his translations of classical and contemporary poetry in Hindi, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Urdu have appeared in literary periodicals in India and the United States, including the Chicago Review, Indian Literature (Delhi), Poetry (Chicago), Salmagundi, and World Literature Today. More recently he edited and translated a selection of Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit (2017) and contributed translations to The Bloomsbury Book of Great Indian Love Poems (2020). As for the publications that have been repeatedly announced as forthcoming (a new collection of poems, a book of essays, and translations of the sixth-century Tamil epic Maṇimēkalai, and of modern Tamil poetry), none of them has appeared at the time of this writing (2022).

Parthasarathy’s relationship with India’s former colonial ruler went through the familiar (and, to some extent, predictable) phases of anglophilia, cultural shock, and disenchantment. What turned his juvenile enthusiasm into critical disillusionment was primarily his direct experience of English life and society during the year he spent in Leeds, as mentioned above. He voiced such a change of heart (and the corresponding change of attitude towards India, from “hypercritical” to receptive and empathetic) in the poems that would form his debut collection, published more than a decade after his return to India and on the eve of another departure and a more permanent residence abroad. Rough Passage is a long poem divided into three parts and thirty seven shorter poems in three-line stanzas. The three parts represent the successive stages of expatriation (“Exile”), estrangement (“Trial”), and repatriation (“Homecoming”), while the triadic arrangement allows for short phrasal units and sharp, staccato statements:

Through holes in a wall, as it were,

lamps burned in the fog.

In a basement flat, conversation, etc.

(“Exile 2”)

We live our lives forever taking leave.

Our world, love, moves within

the familiar poles of eye, hand,

 

is eclipsed by the word.

(“Trial 11”)

 

I see him now sitting at his desk.

The door is open. It is evening.

On the lawns the children play.

(“Homecoming 12”)

Chronologically, the book covers ten years of the poet’s life, starting almost programmatically– “As a man approaches thirty he may / take stock of himself.” (“Exile 1”)–and ending on a much more subdued statement: “Later, I watched my forty years / swim effortlessly ashore in a glass of beer.” (“Homecoming 13”). At both ends of this minor existential spectrum, the poet is scrutinising himself–self-consciously and rather affectedly–as he balances the mixed bag of past achievement against the low expectations of an uncommitted future: “Hereafter, I should be content, / I think, to go through life / with the small change of uncertainties.” (“Homecoming 14”). All too often, however, this supposed self-analysis is spoiled by such platitudes as “Experience doesn’t always make for knowledge” (“Exile 1”), “There is something to be said for exile: // you learn roots are deep,” and, a few lines later, “the most assuring thing // about the past is that it happened” (“Exile 2”). Perhaps the most famous and enduring of these “gnomic utterances” (as the scholar Homi Bhabha called them in his review of the book in the Times Literary Supplement of February 3, 1978) are the two couplets, placed at the beginning and the end of the book, that are meant to encapsulate the poet’s experience of cultural idolatry and subjugation. Over the years, they have been quoted often enough to become emblematic of the modern anglophone Indian’s divided identity. Parthasarathy used the first one, “He had spent his youth whoring / after English gods” (forming the beginning of the third stanza of “Exile 2”), as the title of a semi-autobiographical account originally published in 1970 and reprinted in 1982. “Whoring after English Gods” traces the evolution of Parthasarathy’s attitude towards England and the English language–from his first introduction in high school until his actual encounter with England–which, he would realise, “existed nowhere, except in my mind” (“Whoring after English Gods,” 66). According to this account, it was this realisation that prompted him to write the poem with the “whoring couplet” in early 1964. At the same time, if living in England helped the once obsessive anglophile to get England “out of [his] system once and for all,” it also gave him “a new understanding” of himself and his once deprecated native country, so that, when he finally returned to India, he felt “strangely at home” (”Whoring”, 70). The latter is a more revealing expression than Parthasarathy perhaps realised, as it seems to conflate the titles of two works in which another Indian English poet, Dom Moraes (1938-2004), addressed his own relationship with India: the 1970 television episode Return as a Stranger, and the third volume of his autobiography, Never at Home. Disenchantment with England also meant realising that “English will always remain a foreign language to us,” and consequently, that “I could never function as a poet in English” (67). For someone who had been “exposed … to English ideas and attitudes” (66), had read English literature in college, and even before going to England had seen one of his poems published in the Times Literary Supplement, such a realisation must have been difficult to accept. Nevertheless Parthasarthy, borrowing the old ‘mistress versus wife’ metaphor, was eager to state that “The affair with the English language had been prolonged and tempestuous. It is over now, and I have, as the phrase goes, settled down with Tamil. She is still a shy, obstinate bride; but, like all brides, she will, I am sure, come round. The relationship will then, perhaps, mature into love” (71). The bride’s shy and obstinate behavior refers presumably to the fact that Parthasarthy did not learn Tamil until after his English interlude, as he mentions earlier in the same essay (65). Read in this context, the second signature couplet, “My tongue in English chains, / I return, after a generation, to you” (which opens “Homecoming 1”), describes the poet’s linguistic repatriation, while hinting at the bride’s potential for freeing the poet’s tongue from English chains, or at least loosening them enough to allow him to be “at home in two languages” (71). As Parthasarathy explains in the next paragraph,

Ever since I moved to Madras in 1971, my poems have become, increasingly, a sort of overture made with the aim of starting a dialogue between myself and my Tamil past. Though written in English, they are closer in style and content to Tamil verse…. (72)

However,

The problem of the Tamil poet today is to invent afresh an idiom free from the stylistic and prosodic conventions of a language with a two-thousand-year-old literary history (72).

By calling “My tongue in English chains” a “theoretical statement of this problem” (72), Parthasarathy hints at the possibility that these chains may be inevitable, at least for the time being, and to the extent that his proficiency in English provides him with a more effective tool to voice his “emotional, psychic make-up” (73), whose roots lie deep in Tamil language and culture. This leaves him poetically in a limbo, of which the third part of Rough Passage, “Homecoming,” represents an exploration of sorts. If “Exile”–allegedly written “over four years between 1963 and 1966” (70), that is, during Parthasarathy’s stay in England and immediately after–charts the author’s disenchantment with India and his own unfulfilled self, and “Trial” explores the resulting ennui through the opaque and distorting lens of love (and the metaphoric mesh of ancient and medieval Indian poetry), in “Homecoming” Parthasarathy confronts his own predicament as man and poet. The section begins with “My tongue in English chains” followed by a seemingly programmatic statement:“How long can foreign poets // provide the staple for your lines? / Turn inward. Scrape the bottom of your past. Ransack the cupboard // for skeletons of your Brahmin childhood,” (“Homecoming 2”); proceeds through a taut fabric of familial and cultural landscapes; then ends with a crumbling self-portrait at forty—deflated, disillusioned, and dejected.

The second half of “Whoring after English Gods” is an appreciation of the poetry of A.K. Ramanujan, culminating in the statement

Ramanujan’s repossession, through his poetry, of the past of his family, and of his sense of himself as a distillation of the past, is to me a signal achievement, and one that was to be of value to other poets who were looking for a kind of poetry to teach them the use of their own voice. I know of poems which, if I had not come across The Striders or Relations, I should perhaps have written differently. (78)

Rough Passage provides a few examples of such poems, most notably “Homecoming 6,” where the alienating experience of facing a mirror in the bath (“Silent, / eyes saccadic, I stare at himself. // Often confront a stranger / in the scratched glass, older perhaps, who resembles my father”) is a direct reference to Ramanujan’s “Self Portrait” in The Striders (1966). Other, unacknowledged (and possibly unconscious) references are to the poetry of Srinivas Rayaprol (1925-1998), notably in a line like “We live our lives forever taking leave” (from “Trial 11”), which paraphrases, in a concise, more “poetic” form, the dispiritedness of Rayaprol’s “the impotent / Excitement / Of our normal lives / Lies in seeking / Them elsewhere” (from “Les Saltimbanques,” in the 1968 collection Bones and Distances), as well as in the somber self-assessment that concludes “Homecoming,” which is remindful of Rayaprol’s pessimistic Weltanschauung in Married Love and Other Poems (1972).

In the absence of a further collection, Parthasarathy’s poetry since Rough Passage is represented by contributions to various literary periodicals and anthologies, both in India and the United States. If they show a natural and predictable evolution of the themes explored in his debut collection–especially the “dialogue between himself and [his] Tamil past,” (“Whoring,” 72)– these poems also reflect the developments that have shaped Parthasarathy’s life and creative work since the late 1980s, particularly his relocation to the United States, where a successful academic career allowed him to bury his “English gods” without actually freeing his tongue from “English chains.” Instead, these chains were repurposed for broader creative ends. “For me, translating a poem is as much a creative act as writing an original poem”: such a statement, made in a 2003 lecture on “The Politics and Poetics of Translation” (175), was both supported and justified by Parthasarathy’s teaching as well as by his scholarly and creative work since the early 1990s, which had focused increasingly on Indian literature in translation and, in the years following his monumental engagement with the Cilappatikāram, had produced English versions of Hindi, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Tamil, and Urdu poetry, as well as articles on Tamil literature and the practice of translation.

This creative shift is reflected in Parthasarathy’s own poetry from the early 1990s on, which fed on his parallel work as translator (“Kannaki” and Kannagi” are both poems inspired by the heroine of the Cilappatikāram), or wrestled with its ambiguous condition (“Your country is not a suitcase: / you are not a traveler shuffling, with tongue in cheek, // the loose change of words. / For twenty years you have tried / to pry this book open,” from “The Attar of Tamil”), or meanders into the poet’s—and India’s—“divided house” (“Srirangam,” “At Ghalib’s Tomb,” “Remembered Village”) from a suburban backyard in Upstate New York (“Snow Country,” “Salem Drive”).

At the same time, the emphasis on translation distinguishes Parthasarathy’s two editorial selections of contemporary Indian poetry. Although three decades separate the anthology Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets (1976) from the “Indian Poetry Portfolio” he guest-edited for Poetry magazine in 2007, the difference between them is not only chronological or typological, but also, more significantly, one of content, which signals a substantial change in the editor’s perspective on his subject.

Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets (1976) was one of the first six titles in the New Poetry in India series, which Oxford University Press launched in 1976-77 with Parthasarathy’s editorial input (the other five were individual collections by Keki Daruwalla, Nissim Ezekiel, Shiv K. Kumar, A.K. Ramunajan, and Parthasarathy’s Rough Passage). Over the years, it became one of the most successful and widely read anthologies of its kind. Featuring fifty odd poems by only ten poets (the most exclusive selection to date), it is representative of the canonical status of Indian poetry in English at the time of its publication (except for the glaring absence of Adil Jussawalla; apparently, Ezekiel had recommended to include Jussawalla, but Parthasarathy, for unexplained reasons, decided not to). The introduction is an attempt to account for the “phenomenon of Indian verse in English,” which paradoxically “did not seriously begin to exist till after the withdrawal of the British from India” (3) and apparently is affected by two interdependent problems. One is the “quality of experience” that a poet “would like to express in English,” but from which he or she is alienated by the language itself as both communication tool and symbol/legacy of historical circumstances. The other is the lack of any “special Indian-English idiom”,i.e., compared to “the liveliness and idiosyncrasy of usage one finds in African or West Indian writing” (3), that would enable such a poet to express the quality of Indian experience in a culturally distinct if not unique way. Unlike “two outstanding exceptions in fiction” (7), namely Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938) and G.V. Desani’s All About H. Hatterr (1948), Indian poets have been mostly unable to “extend the resources of the English language or even to Indianize it” (7).  The few who “have been successful” (but only to some extent) are supposedly featured in the selection.

Less canonical and contemporary than the anthology, the “Indian Poetry Portfolio” features a personal selection of thirteen poems by thirteen poets in “thirteen of the twenty-four languages … recognized by India’s National Academy of Letters (Sahitya Akademi)” (407), namely Assamese, Bengali, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. Parthasarathy’s own contribution consists of one English-language poem and five translations or co-translations from the Hindi, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu ad Urdu. Linguistically, the 2007 portfolio matches almost entirely Poetry’s 1959 “Indian Issue,” edited by the expatriate Tamil poet M.J.T. Tambimuttu and featuring thirty-eight poems, thirty of which translated from twelve regional languages. In an afterword entitled “Indian Poetry Today” (a puzzling choice, given the scope of its content and the fact that it draws largely from a 1994 article on “Tamil Literature”), Parthasarathy laments the fact that

Bogged down in tradition, Indian poetry has not been successful in reinventing the past. Nor have there been systematic attempts to translate, over a period of time, poetry from other countries that might have offered new directions to poetry in the Indian languages. Even within the country, attempts to translate the great body of poetry in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and Tamil into the modern Indian languages have been infrequent. On the other hand, English poetry … has served as a model to be imitated, often with unhappy results. (“Indian Poetry Today”, 407)

With this statement (arguable and partly outdated), and especially with his “position portfolio,” Partharathy seems to indicate translation as a way—perhaps the only possible way—of “reinventing the [Indian] past” by creating a “robust, contemporary English idiom” (407), thus finally breaking the impasse created by historical circumstances and their problematic legacy (i.e., the iconic English chains). In fact, translation has often contributed, and continues to contribute, to linguistic modernisation and poetic renewal around the world. What Parthasarathy does not seem to realise (or prefers to neglect) is that anglophone poetry in post-Independence India has found its voice—or one of its many voices—in and through translation from both Indian and non-Indian languages, but also, most subtly and significantly, from British and American English. This creative process was started by such canonical figures as Dilip Chitre, Adil Jussawalla, Arun Kolatkar, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Gieve Patel, A.K. Ramanujan and others, and continues with the work of younger poets writing in India as well as in the many charted and uncharted territories of the Indian diaspora.

Today, it is difficult to see how any of these younger Indian poets would consider Parthasarathy an influence, quote his work (as they often do with some of the poets mentioned above), or refer to either of his catchphrases to describe their experience as Indians writing in English. If, after the publication of Rough Passage, “My tongue in English chains” became a familiar line, its popularity and resilience say more about the state of Indian literary criticism at the time than they do about Parthasarathy’s role within the canon of postcolonial Indian poetry. Many of the poems in Rough Passage were originally published in anthologies of “Commonwealth poetry” and “New Poetry from India,” and their relevance and value are defined by the brighter lights of a bygone era.

Bibliography

POETRY

Rough Passage. New Poetry in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1977.

TRANSLATION

The Tale of an Anklet: An Epic of South India – The Cilappatikāram of Iḷaṅkō Aṭikaḷ. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit: An Anthology. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.

Edited anthologies

Poetry from Leeds [Ken Smith, D.W. Debby, Jeffrey Wainwright, Sheila Mann, John Comer]. Edited by J.J. Healy and R. Parthasarathy. Calcutta: Writers Workshop, 1968.

Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets. New Poetry in India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1976.

“Indian Poetry Portfolio.” Poetry (Chicago) 190, no. 5 (September 2007): 389-418.

Articles

“Meeting Allen Ginsberg.” Writers Workshop Miscellany 11 (1968): 65-66.

“Whoring After English Gods.” In Perspectives: A Collection of Essays by the staff of the SIES College of Arts and Science. Edited by Amritlal B. Shah and S.P. Bhagwat (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1970), 43-60.

“The Chessmaster and His Moves: The Novel as Metaphysics.” World Literature Today 62, no. 4, Raja Rao: 1988 Neustadt Laureate (Autumn,1988): 561-566.

“The Exile as Writer: On Being an Indian Writer in English.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 24, no. 1 (1989): 1-11.

“Tamil Literature.” World Literature Today 68, no. 2, Indian Literatures: In the Fifth Decade of Independence (Spring 1994): 253-259.

“Writing Between the Lines: The Politics and Poetics of Translation.” Indian Literature 51, no. 1 (237) (January February 2007): 168-186. Originally delivered as the 2002-2003 Edwin M. Moseley Lecture at Skidmore College.

“Indian Poetry Today.” Poetry (Chicago) 190, no. 5 (Sep., 2007): 407-418.

Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is a British writer of Indian origin, born in Mumbai, then called Bombay, in British India, on 19th June 1947. His schooling was initially in Cathedral and John Connon, Mumbai, and thereafter at Rugby School in the United Kingdom. Later he attended King’s College in Cambridge, where he majored in History.

Literary Output

Salman Rushdie is an author of fourteen novels and a short-story collection. He has also written five non-fiction books, and co-edited two anthologies. His career as a fiction-writer began with Grimus, followed by Midnight’s Children, the book that he is best known for. He won the Booker Prize (1981), the Booker of Bookers (1993), and the Best of the Booker (2008) for Midnight’s Children. He subsequently published Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown, The Enchantress of Florence, Luka and the Fire of Life, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, The Golden House and Quichotte, the last having made it to the Booker Prize shortlist in 2019.

East, West is his only short story collection. Joseph Anton: A Memoir, Imaginary Homelands, The Jaguar Smile, Step Across This Line, and Languages of Truth comprise his non-fiction writing; Mirrorwork, a collection of contemporary Indian writing, and 2008 Best American Short Stories were anthologies co-edited by him.

Other Genres

Midnight’s Children was made into a play as well as a film. Rushdie adapted it for the theatre, and the Royal Shakespeare Company performed the play in London and New York. In 2012, Deepa Mehta adapted this book into a film, and Rushdie had written the screenplay.  Both Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and Shalimar the Clown had operas adapted from them. The Ground Beneath Her Feet was adapted into a song and Rushdie penned down the lyrics.

Awards

Booker Prizes aside, Salman Rushdie has received several honours and awards for his writing. The more significant of these are as follows: he is Fellow of the British Royal Society of Literature, and Commandeur in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He has been awarded the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel twice; the Writers Guild Award; the James Tait Black Prize; ‘Author of the Year’ prizes in Britain and Germany; the Crossword Book Award in India; the European Union’s Aristeion Prize for Literature; the Premio Grinzane Cavour from Italy; Golden PEN Award; PEN Pinter Prize; Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award; and the James Joyce Award of University College, Dublin. This is more a representative than a comprehensive list.

Rushdie has also been conferred with doctorates and fellowships by a dozen universities, European as well as American, and an honorary Humanities Professorship in MIT. He was conferred knighthood in 2007 in the Queen’s Birthday Honours.

The Writer of Fiction

Salman Rushdie’s career as a world-renowned writer began curiously enough with a copy-writing job for Ogilvy and Mather; and it may not be a stretch to trace his ingenuity of language-use to his first job. He shot to fame with his novel Midnight’s Children (henceforth MC), which was published in 1981, and won the Booker prize in the same year. He had already published one novel prior to MC in 1975 called Grimus, which, in his own words, “bombed” (Imaginary Homelands, 1); but it is of historical interest in any biography of the author, since it displays the pivotal characteristics of his fiction like magic, myth-making, and allusions.

MC arguably remains the novel that he is best known for, especially after it went on to win the Booker of Bookers Prize in 1993, and the Best of the Booker in 2008. BBC listed it on the Big Read poll of the ‘best-loved novels’ of the United Kingdom.

MC was an ambitious essai for an aspiring creative writer. Aiming to tell the story of Indian nationalist history from about the time of the Jallianwala Bagh tragedy to beyond Independence in 1947; to the Emergency in 1975, it is a palimpsestic narrative teeming with multiple generic conventions, and remarkable linguistic inventiveness. Ranging from the epic to postmodern unreliability; from the cinematic idiom to the motif and metaphor of fragmentation; and from the discourses of rumour and gossip to spice the narrator’s fallible memory, it juggles these multiple trajectories to make one point with repeated emphasis: the value of pluralism.

Its postmodern element replaces a single unilateral historical record with multiple and subaltern versions of history, each as authentic as any of the others for the one who believes in it; it also introduces the element of farce into history, thereby bringing irreverence into traditional subjects of awe such as nationalism, patriotism and religion. These institutions are mercilessly debunked in particular in the portrayal of Pakistan, and in the India-Pakistan war.

Symbolism looms large over MC: its easy and effortless allegorical structure was to set the tone for many of his later novels.

This novel also established Rushdie firmly within the magical realist tradition, so that he became a raconteur of a uniquely Indian world-view in MC, much as Marquez had of Colombia in 1967, with One Hundred Years of Solitude. A characteristic of this world-view is that reality is a matter of belief, and belief is not curbed by reason or logic: the world envisaged in this way can easily accommodate fantasy.

Framed within such a context, fantasy has huge subversive potential. It gives shape to what is repressed and suppressed by disguising it as fiction. This technique of narration was something that he would go on to make his trademark style of writing historical/political fiction.

In MC, magic realism in the depiction of India is used to showcase an ideal democratic nation’s tolerance of multiple viewpoints, or what Rushdie would call multiple realities. India’s neighbour, Pakistan is presented with a stark contrast: “where the truth is what it is instructed to be” (453). This has been Rushdie’s constant ideological centre in his oeuvre: an endorsement of the value of democracy, characterised by a spirit of accommodating difference and otherness.

Shame was published in 1983, two years after MC. It was an incisive political allegory of Pakistan. Once again, the ‘story’ of Pakistan was narrated in a magical realist mode. Take the opening sentence of the novel:

“In the remote border town of Q., which when seen from the air resembles nothing so much as an ill-proportioned dumb-bell, there once lived three lovely, and loving sisters” (Shame 11, emphasis added). It bears comparison with the equally fairy-tale incipit of MC: “I was born in the city of Bombay…once upon a time” (MC 3, emphasis added).

Reading and Reception

Despite borrowing liberally from fantasy, Rushdie’s political fiction has often been read with disastrous literalness by readers and decision-makers. This has arguably been facilitated by his novels’ tendency to become provocative in their representation of public figures, whether in the reference to Indira Gandhi as the Widow in MC, or of Benazir Bhutto as Virgin Ironpants in Shame. In May 2015, Rushdie tweets characteristically about the latter: “[p]roof that the character was NOT based on Benazir Bhutto is that she was called the Virgin Ironpants”, which of course only reinforced, where his readers were concerned, that the character was Benazir Bhutto indeed. For Rushdie and his readers, the limits of fiction expanded to include even denial as a form of assertion.

MC in fact drew Rushdie into a lawsuit with the then Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi, for a detail that amounted to but one sentence in the novel. She brought an action against the book in the British courts for defamation, and the matter was settled out of court with Rushdie agreeing to remove the sentence that caused offence.

Fatwa

Rushdie’s misfortune in courting controversy however reached life-threatening proportions with his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988). This novel was also set firmly within the genre that Rushdie had become a master of: magical realism. Yet this did not protect the novel from being subjected to literalist inferences. His depiction of the character Mahound in this novel was seen as a close resemblance of the Prophet Muhammad. The novel was judged as mocking the aspects of Islam.

It generated protests amongst the Muslim community from Britain all the way to Pakistan, causing the book to be banned in several Muslim countries. This collective outrage culminated in a fatwa (a judgement or ruling by a religious scholar) against Rushdie pronounced by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of Iran, calling on ‘all brave Muslims’ to kill Rushdie as well as his publishers. This fatwa, declared in 1989, remained in force for about a decade until in, 1998, the government of Iran announced, in a temporising fashion, that it would neither ‘support nor hinder’ Rushdie’s assassination.

It speaks volumes for the compulsive passionate writer that Salman Rushdie has shown himself to be, that despite having had to go into hiding over the threat to his life, he continued to write during this period. Haroun and the Sea of Stories came out in 1990, a genre of fiction (sheer fantasy or magic) that he was to venture into for the first time, yet with consummate skill; so did Imaginary Homelands (1991), a collection of thought-provoking critical essays; East, West in 1994, a collection of short stories; and a novel in 1995 called The Moor’s Last Sigh.

Rushdie emerged unharmed by the fatwa, with protection afforded by Scotland Yard as well as his own measures in restricting his movements.

But the conflicts generated by the clashes between the religious fanatics and the supporters of free speech consumed many lives across the globe. The three notable events in this regard being the death of his Japanese translator from stabbing injuries, the critical wounding of his Italian translator, both in 1991; and the shooting of his Norwegian publisher in 1993. The most remarkable political fallout was the severing of diplomatic ties by Iran with Britain in 1989.

As a response to the fatwa, Rushdie offered an apology both to the Ayatollah and to Muslims around the world in 1990, but the protests and violence continued, and the fatwa remained. Years later Rushdie publicly regretted the apology.

In his article in The Guardian of 10 January 2019, “How one book ignited a culture war”, Andrew Anthony noted: “[t]hose sections that have caused the greatest controversy are contained within the dreams or nightmares of a character who is in the grip of psychosis. Which is to say that, even buried in the fevered subconscious of a disturbed character inside a work of fiction…there is no escape from literalist tyranny”.

It becomes educative, therefore, to see Rushdie’s career as contesting the frequent critical assertion that the novel is dead. The novel, if it did die, has risen like a phoenix out of its ashes in Rushdie’s hands. The popular belief that fiction has nothing to do with the ‘real’ world is challenged both by the narrative technique that Rushdie deploys again and again, as well as by the predominant responses and even reactions to his tales, which evince his readers’ imaginative ability to see connections between fantasy and the ‘real’, though mostly in ways that transcend the literal.

The fatwa dramatised the scenario by challenging Rushdie’s ideology of plural perspectives, even while endorsing the nightmare that Rushdie was satirising and cautioning against in his writing.

In his reading from Shalimar the Clown as part of the Queens College Evening Readings (available on C-SPAN. Org as a video), Rushdie speaks of the importance of freedom of speech, without which, in his opinion, there are no other freedoms. A spirit of generosity is necessary for this vision to survive, to believe, as he does, that moral choices are not black –and white.

Living with the experience of the fatwa generated a book, a memoir, written understandably enough in the third person, striving for distance, titled Joseph Anton, published in 2012. The eponymous title harks back to the name he had taken for himself while in hiding.

Haroun is a tale of pure fantasy. In Languages of Truth, Rushdie remarks: “]w]hen I finished my memoir, Joseph Anton, I felt a deep hunger for fiction. And not just any old fiction, but fiction as wildly fantastic as the memoir had been determinedly realistic” (15).

The Moor’s Last Sigh, called “phantasmagorical”, “fierce”, “sprawling” and “exuberant” by the New York Times, was also TIME Magazine’s Best Book of the Year. It traverses with equal ease a family saga on the one hand and a wide historical and geographical canvas on the other, whether the Portuguese colonial expansion or the spice trade between Europe and India, or closer home, the political events in India in the twentieth century. Reminiscent of MC is his return to the myth-making potential of the Indian imagination, as well as his nostalgic evoking of Bombay in this book. And his enduring ideological position, the value of pluralism also makes a comeback.

After the Fatwa

In 1999 came The Ground Beneath Her Feet. It retells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice from a postmodern narrative technique, with rock music substituted for Orpheus’ music. Expectably for such a theme, the novel is replete with intertextual references ranging from myth to music. It also found another avatar as a music piece whose lyrics were written by Rushdie.

Two years later came Fury, in 2001. John Sutherland, reviewing the book, noted echoes from MC, with autobiographical references to Bombay, its fictional Methwold’s Estate, and Warden Road. This novel was written at a time when Rushdie had decided to leave Britain, with which he had become disenchanted, for the United States, and reflects his own fury with the times by presenting a protagonist who is the same age as his author, and whose anger reflects the fury of the times. It is generally seen as one of Rushdie’s darkest novels.

Shalimar the Clown (2005) combines the political and the personal and is inspired by Kashmir. Inter-connectedness, a recurring theme in Rushdie’s writings, is evinced here in the insidious ways in which events in Kashmir can have consequences reaching all the way to far-off California. The inextricable connection between love and politics becomes an anchoring feature of Shalimar the Clown.

The Enchantress of Florence (2008) ventures into history and fable, and brings Akbar the Emperor and Niccolo Machiavelli to life, amidst enchanting women and the enchantress of the title. In the final analysis, though, this novel is about “story itself, the power of history and fable, and why it is that we can seldom be sure which is which” (Ursula Le Guin), a meta-point that is never far from Rushdie’s writing, at any time.

This novel was followed by a loose sequel or companion to Haroun, called Luka and the Fire of Life, in 2010. The earlier book was written for his older son, Zafar, and this for his younger, Milan. Interestingly enough, Rushdie has claimed that he was inspired by video games in his writing of this book of magical elements, where the gaming culture becomes a model for the quest, an age-old literary motif.

Rushdie’s return to the genre of fantasy continued with Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights in 2015, an exploration of magic and folklore, signaled by the title which is a rephrasing of a thousand and one nights, more popularly known as the Arabian Nights. The book is gigantic in its scope, containing a proliferation of stories and characters. It is not difficult to find resemblances between Rushdie and the fictional storyteller recounting tales under the threat of death, Scheherazade.

Rushdie’s writing has thus been uninterrupted: his most recent publications include The Golden House in 2017, and Quichotte, inspired by Don Quixote, in 2019. The former novel is not in his usual magical realist style, but is set in America, and fairly satiric in its representation. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2019.

Non fiction

Imaginary Homelands, the first of his two non-fiction compilations, raises issues that were to preoccupy him in his writings well into the future. “Censorship”, for instance, aptly points out, in what may well be the thesis statement of Rushdie’s professional life, that “the worst, most insidious effect of censorship is that, in the end, it can deaden the imagination of the people. Where there is no debate, it is hard to go on remembering, every day, that there is a suppressed side to every argument” (39). And this is why, as the essay of the title remarks, literature is valuable because it “can, and perhaps must, give the lie to official facts” (14). The essay also wonders about the role and responsibility of writers of the diaspora, of whom Rushdie has been, and continues to be, among the foremost. This book has essays on the authors whom Rushdie engages with, from Anita Desai, Rudyard Kipling, Nadine Gordimer and Graham Greene to Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa among others.

The value that Rushdie attaches to the genre of fantasy is eloquently articulated in “Wonder Tales”, the first essay in Languages of Truth (2001), where growing into adulthood entails regrettable disillusionment with stories. Expectably, Rushdie makes an ideological observation out of this. Children fall in love with stories, and their imagination helps them to inhabit the worlds of their loved stories, and then create some. But as children grow up, their relationship with stories gets strained, and eventually, non-existent.  “I believe that the books and stories we fall in love with make us who we are…the act of falling in love with a book or story changes us in some way, and the beloved tale becomes a part of our picture of the world, a part of the way in which we understand things and make judgements and choices in our daily lives” (4).

This profound insight may well be read as Rushdie’s manifesto of fiction. Stories are not apart from the lived world; they constitute the lived world. This collection also has essays on some of the other writers he admires, from Kurt Vonnegut to Philip Roth to Harold Pinter to Cervantes and Shakespeare. A piece on his personal engagement with the coronavirus pandemic brings the collection up-to-date.

Last word: Fiction

Fiction is valuable, especially “tales full of beautiful impossibility” (Languages of Truth 15), which perpetrated not lies, after the Platonic point-of-view, but told instead a profounder truth. This observation brings Rushdie in line with other great writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gunter Grass, and Jorge Luis Borges, all of whose influences are easy to detect in his writing, as well as with Neil Gaiman. Articulating his concern over the times, Rushdie makes a case for literature: “[i]t’s a beleaguered time for those of us who believe in the right of artists, intellectuals and ordinary, affronted citizens to push boundaries and take risks and so, at times, to change the way we see the world” (219).

References

Anthony, Andrew. “How one book ignited a culture war”. The Guardian. 11 Jan 2009. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/11/salman-rushdie-satanic-verses

Kakutani, Michiko. “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Rushdie On India: Serious, Crammed Yet Light”. The New York Times. Dec 28, 1995. https://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/28/books/books-of-the-times-rushdie-on-india-serious-crammed-yet-light.html

Le Guin, Ursula K. “The real uses of enchantment”. The Guardian. 29 Mar 2008. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/mar/29/fiction.salmanrushdie

Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. One Hundred Years of Solitude. 1967. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. Penguin, 1972.

Queens College Evening Readings Series, Nov 1, 2005. [Shalimar the Clown: A Novel] | C-SPAN.org https://www.c-span.org/video/?189891-1

Nair, Rukmini Bhaya. “Text and Pre-Text: History as Gossip in Rushdie’s Novels”. Economic and Political Weekly. Vol. 24, No.18, 1989, pp. 994-1000

Rushdie, Salman, and Elizabeth West. Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing, 1947-1997. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997.

Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. 1981. London: Vintage Books, 2010.

—. Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020. Penguin, 2021.

—. Midnight’s Children. 1981. London: Vintage Books, 2013.

—. Shame. 1983. London: Vintage, 1995.

Sutherland, John. “The Sound and the Fury”. The Guardian. 25 Aug 2001. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/aug/25/fiction.salmanrushdie