"Postcard from Kashmir" by Agha Shahid Ali

Agha Shahid Ali "Postcard from Kashmir"

Agha Shahid Ali was born in New Delhi, India in 1949. He grew up in Kashmir, the son of a distinguished and highly educated family in Srinagar. He attended the University of Kashmir, the University of Delhi and, upon arriving in the United States in 1975, Pennsylvania State University and the University of Arizona. Though a Kashmiri Muslim, Ali is best known in the U.S. and identified himself as an American poet writing in English. The recipient of numerous fellowships and awards and a finalist for the National Book Award, he taught at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Princeton College and in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College. At the time of his death in 2001, Ali was noted as a poet uniquely able to blend multiple ethnic influences and ideas in both traditional forms and elegant free-verse. His poetry reflects his Hindu, Muslim, and Western heritages. In Contemporary Poets, critic Bruce King remarked that Ali’s poetry swirls around insecurity and “obsessions [with]…memory, death, history, family ancestors, nostalgia for a past he never knew, dreams, Hindu ceremonies, friendships, and self-consciousness about being a poet.”

SUMMARY OF THE POEM

In Agha Shahid Ali’s poem titled “Postcard from Kashmir,” the speaker describes receiving a postcard from his native land, “Kashmir,” a region of the Indian subcontinent. Parts of Kashmir are controlled by India, Pakistan, and China, and in fact disputes between India and Pakistan about the territory are long-standing and have often led to armed conflict.

In the opening two lines of the poem, the speaker indicates that the postcard contains a photograph of (part of) Kashmir, a place the speaker still considers his “home” (2). Apparently he is very geographically distant from Kashmir, a fact that makes his use of the word “home” ironic. He may have been born in Kashmir and may have lived there for much of his life, but now he is apparently living somewhere else, perhaps even in some Western country such as the United Kingdom or the United States.

In any case, the speaker next mentions that he “always loved neatness” – a trait that emphasizes the irony that he can now hold “the half-inch Himalayas in my hand” (4). The massive mountain range has been reduced to a small, tidy picture, which is surely not the kind of neatness the speaker truly desires. One of the most impressive aspects of his homeland has thus been shrunken and made to seem far less impressive and significant. Although the speaker holds the postcard, he has in more literal ways lost touch with the land he loves.

Perhaps the most intriguing and puzzling lines of the poem are these:

This is home. And this the closest
I'll ever be to home. . . . (5-6)

Does the speaker mean that Kashmir is home? If so, why does he say that “this” is the closest he will ever be to home? One might assume that he means that he is unable to return to Kashmir, and so the postcard must suffice as a poor substitute for an actual visit. In the very next phrase, however, the speaker seems to contemplate an inevitable “return” (6).  Therefore, when he says “This is home,” does he mean the unnamed place where he currently resides, which seems a poor substitute for his actual home of Kashmir? The phrasing of lines 5-6 is not entirely clear and contributes an interesting ambiguity to the poem.

The speaker assumes that when he does actually return to Kashmir (in real life and not simply in his imagination), the real sights of the place will not live up neither to the picture of them presented in the postcard nor to the idealized memory of them in the speaker’s mind. In the poem’s closing lines, the speaker suggests that his memory of Kashmir is unreliable and that Kashmir itself may be like

. . . a giant negative, black
and white, still undeveloped.  (13-14)

These lines – and especially the last word – are suggestive. They may imply that Kashmir is still in the process of development as a place, that it is at present still too polarized to live up either to the speaker’s idealized memory of it or to the postcard’s idealized presentation of its beauty.

Critical Commentary:

Kashmir is the most inflammable part between the India and Pakistan. Due to the dispute many native people of the region migrated from there, Kashmir is the heaven of the earth still there are away from their homeland. Through this poem poet tries to focus on the sentiment of the people of the Kashmir. Nostalgia for the motherland is the central theme of the poem. Poet is seeking the quest for identity.