Themes in ‘I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight’

Celebrated poet Agha Shahid Ali uses his time spent in New Delhi as a lens to view his homeland, Kashmir. His literary works express his love and concern for his people, with The Country without a Post Office being one of the highlights. He pens this book of poems with the conflict of Kashmir as the backdrop. One of the poems ‘I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight’ is embedded with a variety of themes and ideas that paint the situation of this disputed territory and the implications of the war being waged there.

Agha Shahid Ali repeatedly uses references to the cold in a multitude of ways to elucidate the notion of isolation. At the very beginning, ‘ice’ sets the mood for the poem (Line 1). The distance of ‘five hundred miles’ from Delhi to Srinagar (Line 18) and the yearning for the home is amplified by the wind blowing ‘sheer ice’ (Line 23), the hands ‘crusted with snow’ (Line 29) and the complaint of cold by Rizwan, the dead Kashmiri boy ( Line 30). The paradoxical comparison of ‘snow’ to ‘ash’ (Line 36) seems to seek to illustrate how the chilly weather is not cold enough to cool the fires that have destroyed the lives and homes of millions of Kashmiris  (line 37-40). The loneliness of the exilic figure is also exacerbated by the gloom and despair of the chilly weather which forces people to stay indoors (Lines 35-36). The emptied Srinagar is another point to note in relation to the notion of isolation (Line 18).

Another trope is that of the lost identity of the exilic figure. This notion is first depicted through the shadow which has lost the body it identifies itself with. (Lines  7-8). The ‘searchlights’ further emphasize the idea of the quest for regaining the sense of self. (Line 7).The torture in the prison and the removal of clothes is in a broader sense read as the invasion of the privacy of the individual person, also interpreted as an attack on the essential identity of a person, the stripping away of what makes us human. The moonlight is another symbol to illustrate how the exilic person may feel he has no identity of his own and is forced to resort to reflecting another being’s identity,  much like the moon has no light of its own and depends on the sun for its radiance. (Line 18). The allusion to the end of Gupkar Road and shrinking into nothing is yet another indication of the crises of identity that Kashmiris are going through (Lines 8-9).

The idea of ignorance as bliss is depicted through how the city comes into prominence when it is under attack and news of the terrible happenings there travel across borders. (Line 5).  Rizwan’s plea of not telling his father of his death also speaks volumes about peoples’ desires to protect their families from the psychological and emotional damage that results from the news of the death of loved ones from war (Line31).

Agha Shahid Ali refers to specific places in Kashmir to invoke empathy in the reader is especially interesting. No blog post can do justice to all the themes, motifs and symbols he has employed to express his anxiousness and love for his homeland. Many of his ideas are reminiscent of several other stories we have studied in the course.