The Ghazal ‘Tonight’ : Defeating Religion in Kashmir

Agha Shahid Ali’s ghazals follow carefully the traditional ghazal form, except for the fact that the contemporary English Ghazal is more thematic than just a poem on unrequited love and longing. In his ghazal, ‘Tonight’ – The maqta of which eventually forms the title of his book, “Call me Ishmael tonight’ - the poem enforces among others the idea of a religious failure. At its most critical level, the ghazal then automatically empowers the poet as it reinforces its historical literary use: where it has continually gone against traditional Shariah to depict religious fanaticism, intoxication, or love for the beloved and its final equivalence with God, something along the lines of Nizam’s Laili Majnun.   

In his poem ‘Tonight’, Ali takes the epigraph off Lawrence Hope’s ‘The Kashmiri Song’-  

Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar,

Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell?

Whom do you lead on Rapture's roadway, far,

Before you agonise them in farewell?

Oh, pale dispensers of my Joys and Pains,

Holding the doors of Heaven and of Hell,

How the hot blood rushed wildly through the veins,

Beneath your touch, until you waved farewell.

Pale hands, pink tipped, like Lotus buds that float

On those cool waters where we used to dwell,

I would have rather felt you round my throat,

Crushing out life, than waving me farewell!

Ali starts ‘Tonight’ with ‘Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar’ perhaps to mock the Kashmir song which seems like an attempt to depict Kashmir wholly romantically. Using the first line of it as the epigraph, he hopes to recondition the outlook towards Kashmir – he focuses more on the idea of pain, exclusion, agony and confusion. While most of it usually lands with questions, it leaves the ghazal form intact. Perhaps making it more sub continental and Muslim. In the exilic context, questions allow for both remembrance and memory but at the same time, are emotional. In its form of questioning, the narrator/ poet describes the possibilities of experience or changed/ altered experience that one can imagine. In ‘Men in the Sun’, the last guilt ridden lines of driver say ‘Why didn’t they bang on the walls of the tank?’.  Questions then become a hope for a changed consequence and depict some rationality with memory. In Agha Shahid Ali’s work then colludes to both memory and representation together which comes out remarkably in his poem: ‘A Footnote to History’ which really tries to construct the call of memory, history and understanding together in the light of a defeated people, exilic literature and religious fanaticism. These ideas are expressed in words  like ‘half-torn’ and the imagery of the sea that ‘demands’ that he ‘memorize’ both the ‘ancient and recent’ workings of time. These ideas of historical relevance in the present of the exilic figure have been seen in all the works we have studied uptil now. The function of memory is hardly as romantic here; it is frustrating, and nonlinear. He describes the movement of the sea in the fluidity that he designs his poetry in. He refers to history as ‘journeys’ and at the same time, makes them Islamic a symbol by introducing the idea of the ‘caravans’.

Half- torn by the wind,

Their words reach

The shore, demanding

I memorize their

Ancient and recent

Journeys in

Caravans ambushed by

Forests on fire.

While this poem remains free style, the ghazal ‘Tonight’ with its poetic form constraints taps into themes larger than just historical ambush and weight. In fact, he rages a rebellion against Islamic dogma, becoming the ‘refugee from Belief’ who ‘seeks a cell tonight’. Written at the time of Indian army’s takeover of Kashmir, the couplet reflects the departure of the exile’s faith - all things Islamic and Godly. He is sure to insert clarity of religion by using capital letters for ‘Belief’ and ‘Prisons’ and the ‘Sacred Well’. This then becomes the real Kashmir Song, as the poet includes national and international concerns in the poem. Religious allusions of ‘execution’, ‘blessing’ and damnation occur together with the ‘loneliness of God’. These become a pointer towards Ali’s attempt to place himself (but at the same time, displace himself) somewhere in the religious orthodoxies of the time. In doing so, he uses the ghazal form to his highest advantage because it has long been associated with the explicit distance from dogmatic Islamic Shariah that comes with intoxication in Sufi poetry and the ideas of love and wooing in the general Ghazal form.

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

Only we can convert the infidel tonight’

Referring both to the Hindu idea of idol worshipping and the Indian usurpation of Kashmir, Agha Shahid Ali, moves across national exiles by employing alternate religious impieties as the solution to the Islamic displacement and homelessness. It is a violent misuse but smart representation of religious traditions to defeat the universal idea of divine help and the consequential hope one derives from it.  He thinks he has ‘escaped to tell thee’, a biographical reference to his ‘temperamental exile’ which makes him lucky and saves him from the atrocities in Kashmir. He depicts God as lonely, helpless and says, ‘God sobs in my arms. Call me Ishmael tonight.’ He manages to make the Muslim position in Kashmir both unguided and pathetic by implying the weakness of religion. The absence of God, rather, the humanization of God from the narrative points towards the provocative and apathetic outlook on Kashmir and Kashmiris.  In fact, in many of his other poems, for example in ‘The Country without the Post Office’ which previously was ‘Kashmir without the Post Office’ portrays ‘entombed minarets’ and the ‘muezzin who died’  eventually moving towards the death of religion saying ‘there is no sun here’ and ‘Call to Prayer is to deaf worlds across continents’.