Agha Shahid Ali’s Kashmir

* late submission 

In our class we closely analyzed the rhetorical practice of repetition employed by the author- either used to emphasize a particular word or phrase or to elicit a particular meaning.  In the case of Agha Shahid Ali’s poem, ‘The Blessed Word’ he employs the rhetorical device of Diacope- the uninterrupted repetition of a word to proclaim his homeland, Kashmir. However, here it is critical to note that Kashmir takes various pronouncements, each differing from the one before it.  What purpose do these multiple renditions serve? 

One conclusion, based on our class discussion, is that the multiple names render the place almost meaningless. This interpretation has merit given that this evocation emerges directly out of the dark black velvet void of Mandelstam -“Let me cry in that void, say as I can. Write on that void: Kashmir…Kerseymere?”This intertextuality of juxtaposing Mandelstam’s experience in the Soviet Union with that of Ali’s experience in Kashmir places hope in an unrealistic category and the possibility of a homeland for the exilic figure an inaccessible reality.

However, in my opinion there is another interpretation that renders this multiple evocation of Kashmir significant. In the words of Salman Rushdie, in the case of Indian writers who write from outside of India (about India), “…our physical alienation from India almost inevitable means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely that thing that was lost; that will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind”.

The same follows for Ali, he says, “”He reinvents Petersburg (I, Srinagar),  an imaginary homeland, filling it , closing it, shutting himself (myself) in it”. It is both the impossibility of reclamation and of total recall which makes leads to multiple versions of Kashmir by Ali. Ali’s Kashmir is an imaginary homeland, one to which he has given various names, signaling the multiple reasons for his place attachment with Kashmir.  But like Rushdie’s India, Ali’s Kashmir can only be one to which he belonged. Perhaps then, the question mark at the end of the various names of Kashmir lends this interpretation credit. In this context the multiple names reinforce the idea of place as meaningless- because without deciphering the Kashmir to which he inevitably belonged to the possibility of return is impossible.