Agha Shahid Ali

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
OccupationsPoet, Professor
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,
National Book Award 2001,
Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, US & Canada (1996)
Signature

Agha Shahid Ali Qizilbash (4 February 1949 – 8 December 2001) was an Indian-born American poet.[1][2] Born in New Delhi into a Shia Muslim family from Kashmir, Ali lived between India and the United States before permanently moving to the United States in his mid-twenties,[3] where he became affiliated with the literary movement known as New Formalism in American poetry.[4][5][6] 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."[7]

Early life and education

Agha Shahid Ali was born on 4 February 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.[8][9] He grew up in Jammu and Kashmir, where his family was from, and in Indiana, where his parents studied.[3] Shahid's father Agha Ashraf Ali was a renowned educationist. His grandmother Begum Zaffar Ali was the first woman matriculate of Kashmir.[10] Shahid was educated at the Burn Hall School, later University of Kashmir and Hindu College, University of Delhi.[4] He permanently moved to the United States in 1976.[11][3] He earned a PhD in English from Pennsylvania State University in 1984, and an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona in 1985.[4] He held teaching positions at nine universities and colleges in India and the United States.[4]

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."[12]

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.[10] He was a translator of Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz (The Rebel's Silhouette; Selected Poems),[13] and editor for the Middle East and Central Asia segment of Jeffery Paine's Poetry of Our World.[14] 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.[15][16][17]

Personal life and death

Ali never married. 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.[18]

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), ASIN B0DLT6ZQB9
  • The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987), ISBN 9780819511324
  • A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987), ISBN 9780933313071
  • A Nostalgist's Map of America (1991), ISBN 9780393309249
  • The Beloved Witness: Selected Poems (1992), ISBN 9780670845248
  • The Country Without a Post Office (1997), ISBN 9780393317619
  • Rooms Are Never Finished (2001), ISBN 9780393324167
  • Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals (2003), ISBN 9780393326123
  • The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems, (2009) ISBN 9780393068047
  • Final Collections. (2004) ISBN 9788178240916

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] ISBN 9780819564375

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. ^ a b c 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. ^ "Agha Shahid Ali". Poetry Foundation.
  3. ^ a b c Pace, Eric (26 December 2001). "Agha Shahid Ali, 52, a Poet Who Had Roots in Kashmir". The New York Times. Retrieved 29 July 2025.
  4. ^ a b c d "A Tribute to Agha Shahid Ali". Jacket Magazine. Retrieved 2 January 2010.
  5. ^ 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: Indo-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.
  6. ^ Manan Kapoor, Sahapedia (12 May 2019). "How the legendary Begum Akhtar influenced the life and poetry of Agha Shahid Ali". Scroll.in. Retrieved 5 August 2020.
  7. ^ "Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize". uofupress.com. Retrieved 18 January 2015.
  8. ^ "Kandahar's Qizilbash". 30 November 2017.
  9. ^ "Agha Family of Srinagar Kashmir".
  10. ^ a b "'The Ghat of the Only World': Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn". Outlook. Retrieved 2 January 2010.
  11. ^ Sarah Wetzel-Fishman (10 June 2009). "The veiled suite, the collected poems by agha shahid ali". Rattle.
  12. ^ "'I Write on that Void: Kashmir, Kaschmir, Cashmere, Qashmir' – Remembering Agha Shahid Ali".
  13. ^ Book Excerptise:Rebel's Silhouette (extended extracts and literary history)
  14. ^ Poetry of Our World (excerpts)
  15. ^ 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, doi:10.2307/j.ctv1q6bnkg.21, retrieved 23 July 2023
  16. ^ "'Curfewed Night', Agha Shahid Ali's poetry to be removed from curriculum at KU". The Kashmiriyat. 19 July 2023. Retrieved 23 July 2023.
  17. ^ "Curfewed Night, Agha Shahid Ali's poetry to be removed from KU curriculum". The Kashmir Walla. 19 July 2023. Archived from the original on 19 July 2023. Retrieved 23 July 2023.
  18. ^ "'The Ghat of the Only World': Agha Shahid Ali in Brooklyn – Amitav Ghosh". amitavghosh.com. Retrieved 6 July 2024.
  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". 12 May 2019.
  22. ^ a b c d 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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