Agha Shahid Ali


Agha Shahid Ali was an Indian-American Kashmiri poet. 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, 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 a celebrated poet and beloved teacher."

Early life and education

Agha Shahid Ali was born in the illustrious and highly educated Agha family of Srinagar, Kashmir. He was raised in Kashmir but left for the United States in 1976. Shahid's father Agha Ashraf Ali was a renowned educationist of Jammu and Kashmir. Shahid's grandmother Begum Zaffar Ali, an educationist, was the first woman matriculate of Kashmir. Shahid was educated at the Burn Hall School, later University of Kashmir and the Hindu College, University of Delhi. He earned a PhD in English from Pennsylvania State University in 1984, and an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona in 1985. He held teaching positions at nine universities and colleges in India and the United States.
Shahid's upbringing was absolutely secular. He loved the painting of St Veronica's Handkerchief, that Zakir Hussain had gifted to his father, Agha Ashraf Ali. In fact, the first poem that he had written was at the age of 12 about Christ. Shahid, and his brother Iqbal, both studied at an Irish Catholic school and in an interview, he recalled that: "There was never a hint of any kind of parochialism in the home."

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 backdrop. He was a translator of the Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, and the editor for the Middle East and Central Asia segment of Jeffery Paine's Poetry of Our World. He further 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 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 University of Utah, Baruch College, Warren Wilson College, Hamilton College and New York University. He died of brain cancer in December 2001 and was buried in Northampton, in the vicinity of Amherst, a town sacred to his beloved poet Emily Dickinson.

Poetry

Ali was deeply moved by the music of Begum Akhtar. Several niches in his apartment had photos of the people who had deeply influenced his work - Akhtar's photo occupied one of these spaces. 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 —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.

Awards