Agha Shahid Ali's use and manipulation of form in his work, is one of the elements of his writing that gained him world wide acclaim and thus is worth delving into. By combining European form with content that is heavily laden with references to his Kashmiri and Indian background, Ali’s poetry itself becomes a metaphor for the cultural amalgamation of the immigrant. It also serves the integral function of propagating and accentuating the exilic condition that is resonant in his work; the weeping for a lost homeland that provides the thematic skeleton for his entire manoeuvre.
Another mechanism Agha Shahid Ali employed to amalgamate different cultures and worlds into his work - was the combination of the disjunctive couplets of the urdu ghazal with the
language of European and American culture to create something new and exciting. This composite tradition makes the ghazal’s themes of
love, exile and loss particularly resonant. Furthermore, his efforts to popularize the ghazal form in
the English language can be seen as an act of cultural appropriation and resistance literature in a sense.
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His hyphenated identity, transgeographical
background as a Kashmiri-(Indian)-American who was born in Delhi, raised in Srinagar and exiled to America for most of his life, and the multiplicity of his beliefs enabled him to look at Kashmir from a contrapuntal perspective - broader than the local geopolitics of South Asia. He achieves this
by drawing comparisons with conflicts elsewhere in the world — Bosnia,
Chechnya, and Palestine — in an approach that is humanist, but also alert to
the sufferings of Muslim peoples in recent history. Good examples of the English ghazal, in which he straddles two traditions seamlessly and approaches a hybrid, in-between territory can be observed in the follwoing ghazals.
By the Hudson lies Kashmir, brought from Palestine-- It shawls the piano, Bach beguiled by exiles. (28
Hagar, in shards, reflects her shattered Ishmael. Call her the desert Muslim--or Jew--of water. (46)
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