Agha Shahid Ali
Born
Agha Shahid Ali

(1949-02-04)4 February 1949
New Delhi, India[1]
Died8 December 2001(2001-12-08) (aged 52)
Resting placeBridge Street Cemetery Northampton, Hampshire County, Amherst, Massachusetts, USA
Alma mater
Occupation(s)Poet, Professor
Known forNational Book Award 2001, Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, US & Canada (1996)
Notable credit(s)The Country Without a Post Office, Rooms Are Never Finished and The Rebel's Silhouette
RelativesAgha Ashraf Ali (Father)
Prof. Agha Iqbal Ali (brother)
Prof. Hena Ahmad , Prof. Sameetah Agha (Sisters) Agha Shaukat Ali (Uncle) Begum Zaffar Ali (Grandmother)
AwardsPushcart Prize
Signature

Agha Shahid Ali (4 February 1949 – 8 December 2001) was an Indian-American[1] poet who immigrated to the United States[2][3][4] and became affiliated with the literary movement known as New Formalism in American poetry. His collections include A Walk Through the Yellow Pages, The Half-Inch Himalayas, A Nostalgist's Map of America, The Country Without a Post Office, and Rooms Are Never Finished, the latter a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001.

The University of Utah Press awards the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize annually in memory of this "celebrated poet and beloved teacher."[5]

Early life and education

Agha Shahid Ali was born on February 4, 1949, in New Delhi in the Union of India,[1] into an illustrious Qizilbashi Agha family from Srinagar, Kashmir, tracing their roots back to Kandahar, Afghanistan.[6][7] He grew up in India's Kashmir Valley, and left for the United States in 1976.[8] Shahid's father Agha Ashraf Ali was a renowned educationist. His grandmother Begum Zaffar Ali was the first woman matriculate of Kashmir.[9] Shahid was educated at the Burn Hall School, later University of Kashmir and Hindu College, University of Delhi.[2] He earned a PhD in English from Pennsylvania State University in 1984, and an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona in 1985.[2] He held teaching positions at nine universities and colleges in India and the United States.[2]

Shahid was born a Shia Muslim, but his upbringing was secular. Shahid and his brother Iqbal both studied at an Irish Catholic parochial school and, in an interview, he recalled that: "There was never a hint of any kind of parochialism in the home."[10]

Literary work

Ali expressed his love and concern for his people in In Memory of Begum Akhtar and The Country Without a Post Office, which was written with the Kashmir conflict as a backdrop.[9] He was a translator of Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz (The Rebel's Silhouette; Selected Poems),[11] and editor for the Middle East and Central Asia segment of Jeffery Paine's Poetry of Our World.[12] He also compiled the volume Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English. His last book was Call Me Ishmael Tonight, a collection of English ghazals, and his poems are featured in American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets (2006) and other anthologies.

Ali taught at the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at University of Massachusetts Amherst, at the MFA Writing Seminars at Bennington College as well as at creative writing programs at SUNY-Binghamton, University of Utah, Baruch College, Warren Wilson College, Hamilton College and New York University.

J&K authorities have removed three poems – Postcard from Kashmir, In Arabic and The Last Saffron from the curriculum of University of Kashmir and two poems, I see Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight and Call me Ishmael Tonight from the Cluster University. Education advisors in Delhi/Srinagar have maintained that such “Resistance Literature” sustains “secessionist mindset, aspiration & narrative” among students.[13][14][15]

Personal life and death

Ali never married.[16] He was gay.[17][18] He died of brain cancer in December 2001 and was buried in Northampton, Massachusetts, in the vicinity of Amherst, a town sacred to his beloved poet Emily Dickinson.

Bibliography

This list represents the published output of Ali, arranged in chronological order and sorted by the manner in which he contributed to the work in question.

Poetry

  • Bone Sculpture (1972),
  • In Memory of Begum Akhtar and Other Poems (1979),
  • The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987),
  • A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987),
  • A Nostalgist's Map of America (1991),
  • The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems (1992),
  • The Country Without a Post Office (1997),
  • Rooms Are Never Finished (2001),
  • Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals (2003).

Translations and edited volumes

  • Translator, The Rebel's Silhouette: Selected Poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1992),
  • Editor, Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English (2000).[19]

Influences

Ali was deeply moved by the music of Begum Akhtar. The two had met through a friend of Akhtar's when Ali was a teenager and her music became a lasting presence in his life. Features of her ghazal rendition—such as wit, wordplay and nakhra (affectation)—were present in Ali's poetry as well. However, Amitav Ghosh suspects that the strongest connection between the two rose from the idea that "sorrow has no finer mask than a studied lightness of manner"—traces of which were seen in Ali's and Akhtar's demeanor in their respective lives.[20][21]

Awards

Notes

    References

    1. 1 2 3 Benvenuto, Christine (2002). "Agha Shahid Ali". The Massachusetts Review. 43 (2): 261–273. JSTOR 25091852. Archived from the original on 20 October 2022. Retrieved 20 October 2022. He was born in New Delhi in 1949
    2. 1 2 3 4 "A Tribute to Agha Shahid Ali". Jacket Magazine. Retrieved 2 January 2010.
    3. ↑ An interethnic companion to Asian American literature. Cambridge University Press. 1997. ISBN 9780521447904. Retrieved 2 January 2010. Contemporary South Asian American writers belong primarily to this middle and upper class: Kashmiri-American Agha Shahid Ali, Meena Alexander, Bharati Mukherjee, Vikram Seth, Pakistani American Sara Suleria, Javaid Qazi, Indo-Canadian Rohinton Mistry, Uma Parameswaran, Sri Lankan Canadian Michael Ondaatje, and Indo-Guyanese Canadian Cyril Dabydeen, among others.
    4. ↑ Manan Kapoor, Sahapedia. "How the legendary Begum Akhtar influenced the life and poetry of Agha Shahid Ali". Scroll.in. Retrieved 5 August 2020.
    5. ↑ "Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize". uofupress.com. Retrieved 18 January 2015.
    6. ↑ "Kandahar's Qizilbash". 30 November 2017.
    7. ↑ "Agha Family of Srinagar Kashmir".
    8. ↑ Sarah Wetzel-Fishman (10 June 2009). "The veiled suite, the collected poems by agha shahid ali". Rattle.
    9. 1 2 "'The Ghat of the Only World': Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn". Outlook. Retrieved 2 January 2010.
    10. ↑ "'I Write on that Void: Kashmir, Kaschmir, Cashmere, Qashmir' – Remembering Agha Shahid Ali".
    11. ↑ Book Excerptise:Rebel's Silhouette (extended extracts and literary history)
    12. ↑ Poetry of Our World (excerpts)
    13. ↑ Snelson, Danny (29 March 2022), "on Jackson Mac Low, "Call me Ishmael" (1960)", The Difference Is Spreading, University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc., pp. 78–81, retrieved 23 July 2023
    14. ↑ "'Curfewed Night', Agha Shahid Ali's poetry to be removed from curriculum at KU". The Kashmiriyat. 19 July 2023. Retrieved 23 July 2023.
    15. ↑ "Curfewed Night, Agha Shahid Ali's poetry to be removed from KU curriculum". The Kashmir Walla. 19 July 2023. Retrieved 23 July 2023.
    16. ↑ Mattoo, Neerja (2002). "Agha Shahid Ali as I Know Him". Indian Literature. Sahitya Akademi. 46 (1): 175–179. JSTOR 23344550.
    17. ↑ Modi, Chintan Girish (11 June 2021). "Interview: Manan Kapoor, author, A Map of Longings; The Life and Works of Agha Shahid Ali". Hindustan Times.
    18. ↑ Mongia, Padmini (27 November 2021). "'All routes to death': A personal essay of friendship with Agha Shahid Ali in the early 1980s in USA". Scroll.in.
    19. ↑ Parveen, Rasheda (2014). "Agha Shahid Ali's English Ghazals and the Transnational Politics of Literary Subversion" (PDF). The Challenge. 23 (1). Archived from the original (PDF) on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 26 April 2015.
    20. ↑ Ghosh, Amitav. "The Ghat of The Only World". Amitav Ghosh. Archived from the original on 30 October 2019. Retrieved 2 May 2015.
    21. ↑ "How the legendary Begum Akhtar influenced the life and poetry of Agha Shahid Ali".
    22. 1 2 3 4 Poets, Academy of American. "About Agha Shahid Ali | Academy of American Poets". poets.org. Retrieved 4 December 2019.
    23. ↑ "John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation - Fellows". 22 June 2011. Archived from the original on 22 June 2011. Retrieved 4 December 2019.

    Further reading

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