10 Identity/Home/Space
Abdul Mubid Islam
Introducing the poet:
Keki N. Daruwalla (born 1937) is a police officer by profession who has simultaneously managed to pursue the creative art of poetry. He has published twelve volumes of poetry— Under Orion (1970), Apparition in April (1971) and Crossing of Rivers (1976), Winter Poems (1980), The Keeper of the Dead (1982), Landscapes (1987), A Summer of Tigers (1995), Night River (2000), Map Maker (2002), The Scarecrow and the Ghost (2004), Collected Poems 1970-2005 (2006) and The Glass-blower: Selected Poems (2008). He has received the coveted Sahitya Academy Award in 1984 for his anthology The Keeper of the Dead. Daruwalla believes in the subjective response of the poet in producing a work of art and he says that poetry, for him, is first personal, exploratory, at times even therapeutic which helps in coming to terms with one’s interior world. He is also an acclaimed novelist and a short story writer. The striking imaginative power of his verse has established his reputation as a unique poet in the annals of Indian English Literature.
Migrations
Migrations are always difficult:
ask any drought,
any plague;
ask the year 1947.
Ask the chronicles themselves:
if there had been no migrations
would there have been enough
history to munch on?
Going back in time is also tough.
Ask anyone back-trekking to Sargodha
or Jhelum or Mianwali and they’ll tell you.
New faces among old brick;
politeness, sentiment,
dripping from the lips of strangers.
This is still your house, Sir.
And if you meditate on time
that is no longer time –
(the past is frozen, it is stone,
that which doesn’t move
and pulsate is not time) –
if you meditate on that scrap of time,
the mood turns pensive
like the monsoons
gathering in the skies
but not breaking.
Mother used to ask, don’t you remember my mother?
You’d be in the kitchen all the time
and run with the fries she ladled out, still sizzling on the plate.
Don’t you remember her at all?
Mother’s fallen face
would fall further at my impassivity.
Now my dreams ask me
If I remember my mother
And I am not sure how I’ll handle that.
Migrating across years is also difficult.
(Keki Daruwalla)
Critical Appreciation:
In this poem, Daruwalla reflects on the idea of ‘displacement’ that has evolved a new terrain of thought in ascribing identity to a group of people who are categorised as migrants. The poem becomes an interesting read because Daruwalla’s concern is not just to catalogue the factors that engender migration but also to juxtapose public history with the personal. The poem can be said to be drafted in the inductive mode as we find Daruwalla oscillating between two polarities—public and private—by moving from the general to the particular in chronicling the factors of migration. The poem is fused with personal touches that give the idea of “home” which is again a contentious topic within the rubric of displacement.
The poem unfolds in the manner of the speaker’s estimate of a survey of the factors of forced migration. Droughts, plagues and even the infamous year 1947 that saw the Partition of India are considered to be the prime agents of migration. The speaker also reflects upon the possibility of an inconsequential historicity had it not been for migration that have had provided the necessary thrust in carving out a history of the place and its people. The speaker then states the difficulty in retracing the past which indicates that the speaker is not just dealing with spatial displacement as the only condition of migration but is equally broadening the limits of a conceptual migration in time sequence. The politics of adaptation to newer surroundings by the migrants is bolstered in the expression “new faces among old bricks”. However, the speaker intends to amplify the idea of the “homeland” which is always a distant dream, an unachieved never land for the refugees which is highlighted in the irony implicit in the expression “This is your house, Sir”. The speaker assesses the possibility of meditating on time and goes on to engage in a philosophical digression by listing the pensive nature of a past migrant memory.
It is in the last paragraph that the speaker fuses the public with the personal when he uses an instance of his childhood memory as a vantage point to reflect on the more holistic picture of “home” and “identity”. The speaker speaks of the amount of dissatisfaction that spreads on his mother’s face when he shows his inability to remember his grandmother and the fried dishes she used to prepare for him. In fact, the dissatisfaction becomes more painful as the speaker now even fails to remember his own mother. It is here that he states the difficulty of migrating back in time. The early assertion of migration and displacement being the root cause of all historical events gets a new amplification in the recent discovery made by the speaker that even personal memory is steeped in the conditional titbits of migration and that the very act of retracing it makes one eventually experience the idea of migration. In other words, the speaker asserts that geographical displacement shares an ideological corollary with the displacement engendered in an individual’s memory sequence as both are difficult to trek.
Introducing the poet:
Jayanta Mahapatra born in Cuttack, Orissa in 1928 was originally a Professor of Physics at Ravenshaw College. He started writing poetry when he was about forty but this late advent into the creative world further enabled him to inscribe the stoic acceptance of pain and suffering of the Oriya life as part of the cosmic agenda. He has published many volumes of poetry and that too in a rapid rate of which mention may be made of Close the Sky, Ten by Ten (1971), Svayamvara and Other Poems (1971), A Father’s House and A Rain of Rites (both in 1976), Waiting (1979), The False Start and Relationship (both in 1980), Life Signs (1983), Dispossessed Nests (1986), Selected Poems (1987), Burden of Waves and Fruit (1988) and The Temple (1987), A Whiteness of Bone (1992), Shadow Space (1997), Bare Face (2000) and Random Descent (2005). Apart from poetry he has also published a collection of short stories called The Green Gardener and Other Stories along with editing his Journal Chandrabhaga which ceased publication in 1985. Although much of his poetry can be claimed to bear close resemblances with the modernist poetry, yet Mahapatra himself never acknowledged any such influence of the great modernists like Ezra Pound and T.S.Eliot. The early obscurity and ambiguity in his poems arise from the bold juxtaposition of abstract and concrete words and in the syntactic experiments, mostly disjunctions. Nevertheless, the reader finds a challenge in his poems for coherence which makes them more endearing. The surreal world that permeates his poetry along with the conceits and mind boggling imagery are representative of the qualitative merits of his poetic craft. He has earned the honour to be the first Indian English poet to receive the Sahitya Academy Award for Relationship (1981), an epic poem in twelve sections that meditates on Orissa’s mythology and monuments.
The Exile
Land’s distance.
Walking where the mouldy village
rests rawly against the hills
the charred ruins of sun.
Corpses smoulder past my night.
The wind hurls the ashes of the present,
to settle in the corners of my skin.
I walk back,
drugged,
between old, ill parents.
Around me, my squalid town,
the long-haired priest of Kali
who still packs stolen jasmines
In to a goddess’s morning eye;
a father’s symbols:
the door I am afraid to close.
It is an exile.
Between good and evil
where I need the sting of death.
Where a country’s ghosts pull my eyes toward birth.
It is an obscure relative I’ve never seen.
Every time.
The duty of carrying my inconscequences
in Father’s house.
It is there in my son’s eye up the tree.
(Jayanta Mahapatra)
Critical Appreciation:
Jayanta Mahapatra evokes the painful awareness of the search for an identity through this poem. The poem is a brilliant espousal of the discourse of an “in-between” space as Homi Bhabha would have it in his theoretical exposition of the postcolonial condition in his path breaking book Location of Culture. Mahapatra’s prime concern is to validate the propositional base of sharing a space that is both liminal and claustrophobic. The sense of claustrophobia intensifies even further when the individual is a victim of spatial, cultural and political dislocation. The urgency of maintaining one’s cultural roots is what Mahapatra seeks to uphold and it is this urgency that poses serious questions in configuring the migrant diasporic identity which is always in the grip of a perpetual, often self-inflicted exile. The title of the poem justifies the polemics centering on the cultural embeddedness of an exile authenticated either by a deliberate choice or a condition levied by any coercive authority. A deep seated sense of nostalgia seems to pervade the poem which rejuvenates the idea of a cultural renaissance in the form of Mahapatra’s allegiance to a tradition that has been sequestered with identity politics. In a way, Mahapatra seeks to negotiate the cultural disparities in illustrating the attempt of an exile to integrate into the heroic tradition of his/her native land and also to validate the consequences of being stranded in a world torn asunder by politics of identity.
The poem begins with the speaker’s revisiting his place of origin which is characterised by debris suggested from the expression “mouldy village”. The speaker nostalgically reflects upon his village which reminds him of his roots. The distance covered by the speaker while making a cursory survey of his village grants his a vantage point to probe into the deeper recesses of his Indian past both familial and racial. It is intriguing that the speaker adroitly fuses the personal with the impersonal in order to intensify the remoteness of his position as an exile. The speaker states that the hills are the unsullied reservoir of the past as they still stand as mute witness to the ravages of time. The speaker then presents his dilemma on being afflicted by his unconscious affiliation to his land which asserts the poignancy of his exile. That corpses smoulder past his nights is an unfailing testimony to the nightmares which seems to strangle his English-speaking Western identity. In a sense, the speaker tries to assert the complicated nature of his exile as it does not give him the liberty to remain aloof.
The past becomes a fascinating obsession for the speaker as he not only feels the intoxicating presence of his parents but also the liveliness of the squalid ‘town’. It is here that personal memory gains credence and makes the speaker neglectful of the landscape that has hitherto provided him with a sense of ‘home”. The memory of old, ill parents dwarfs the imaginative prowess of the speaker and makes him more privy to the elemental nature of human life. The inner tension of the speaker increases manifold which can be seen in the use of the Kali image that semiotically projects his doldrums. The reference of the Goddess Kali immediately conveys the emotional and mental discomfiture of the speaker and gives the idea of a violent war within. The war is however conceptual; the violence wrecks upon his mind is so immense in proportion that he is now both intimidated and reluctant to begin anew.
The speaker then convincingly states the improbability of him finding a space that he can call “home”. The early detachment gradually subsides and the speaker becomes aware that he is on a self-inflicted exile; no matter what he does, how desperately he tries, he can never reclaim an identity that is instantly native and culturally rooted. The metaphor of “country’s ghost” implies the richness of the native past with which he deludes himself and hopes to provide him with the semblance of a meaningful existence. It is therefore an obscure relative who although remote and distant, seldom or never visited, will cater to his call in dire need. The poem concludes with the speaker’s conviction that his son too would face such an identity threat, a fissure of personality for which he alone is to blame. The gravity of his inconsequential existence dwarfs all prospects of liberation; however, the speaker believes that the new generation will usher forth an era full of possibilities and promise.
Introducing the poet:
Nissim Ezekiel was born in Mumbai (then Bombay) into a Bene-Israeli family in 1924. He was educated at Wilson College, Bombay and went to England to study philosophy at Birkbeck College. After his return from England, he took up teaching as his profession in Mithibhai College of Arts, Mumbai and retires as a Professor of English at the University of Bombay. He has authored several volumes of poetry chief among which are A Time to Change (1952), Sixty Poems (1953), The Third (1959), The Unfinished Man (1960), The Exact Name (1965), Hymns in Darkness (1976), Latter-Day Psalms (1982) and Edinburgh Interlude-Lightly (1983) and Collected Poems (1989). Ezekiel’s uniqueness lies in his attempt to free the Indian English literature form the unconditional influence of British Romanticism and Victorianism. His precise use of the English language and its improvisational standard with the novel use of the Babu English, well crafted imagery and the thematic preoccupation with human sexuality, alienation, identity and the modernist conception of existence have undoubtedly earned him a permanent place. Apart from editing several books and journals, he has also published Three Plays in 1970. He was awarded the Sahitya Academy Award in 1982 for Latter-Day Psalms and also received the Padma Shri in 1988. Suffering from Alzheimer, he passed away on January 9, 2004.
Island
Unsuitable for song as well as sense
the island flowers into slums
and skyscrapers, reflecting
precisely the growth of my mind.
I am here to find my way in it.
Sometimes I cry for help
But mostly keep my own counsel.
I hear distorted echoes
Of my own ambiguous voice
and of dragons claiming to be human.
Bright and tempting breezes
Flow across the island,
Separating past from the future;
Then the air is still again
As I sleep the fragrance of innocence.
How delight the soul with absolute
Sense of salvation, how
hold to a single willed direction?
I cannot leave the island,
I was born here and belong.
Even now a host of miracles,
hurries me a daily business,
minding the ways of the island
as a good native should,
taking calm and clamour in my stride.
(Nissim Ezekiel)
Critical Appreciation:
Ezekiel’s preoccupation with Bombay as a distinctive space that allows the migrant identity with a voice is highlighted in the form of this poem where he microcosmically mirrors the island city in exploring the intricacy of identity politics. The poem is couched in the form of a snide rebuttal of the very condition of being an “outsider” who has deliberately taken up the onus of narrating the metatextural nature of evolving an identity that has underwent serious self-scrutiny. Ezekiel’s own version of the discourse of hybridity becomes evident from his Bene-Israelite background. Much like Jussawalla’s affirmation that Bombay breeds the Parsi community by providing congenial atmosphere, creating a sense of “home” for these dislocated individuals, Ezekiel too portrays the city of Bombay to be the refuge of all migrant communities in India. The same tone gets reflected in his “Minority Poem” which will be discussed later. The poem can be seen as an attempt to explore and reconstruct an identity that is rooted in the Indian ethos. Ezekiel himself acknowledges this condition in an interview with Imtiaz and Anil Dharker as,
The poem unfolds with the speaker’s negation of the island as a space that does not merit any encomium or praise. This is because Bombay is conceived as a barbaric city that “flowers into slums”. This image intensifies the contrast imminent in the succeeding image of the skyscrapers which are unfailing examples of the consequences of a cosmopolitan capitalist culture. This contrasting image also finds a mimetic ‘double’ in the growth of the speaker’s mind. Here, the speaker’s mind represents the collective unconscious (borrowing Carl Gustuav Jung’s phrase) of all the Jews who have had lived in India since 2000years and in turn have not only acclimatised themselves with the island but have also came to believe themselves as a part of it.
This deliberate injunction of a Jewish identity into the mores and mannerisms of an alien country (erstwhile the island city of Bombay) irrespective of the cultural, socio-political and religious difference reveals the ‘neutrality’ of the city in according a place of equality to the migrants. The outsider hence can engage with an insider’s perspective and this becomes evident in Ezekiel’s own stance. Nevertheless, the speaker confesses that he is no stranger to the sudden bouts of despair and frustration that are powerful enough to sway his mind against the city which has given him a semblance of home.
The speaker then analysed the counter effects of his own voice—both poetic and Jewish— and states his inability to comprehend the ambiguity ingrained within. This ambiguity has necessarily emanated from the speaker’s awareness that no matter how the city receives him in all his eccentricities and idiosyncrasies, he will essentially be an ‘outsider’ with a temporary, time bound lease of being an ‘insider’. The expression “distorted echoes” thus projects the modernist angst, the paranoia of modern man in unearthing the manifold significance and therefore ambiguity of his existence. One must however note that, Ezekiel does not engage in projecting an unrestrained emotional catharsis in this poem; he is more of a scientific observer with a deliberate detachment. Bruce King therefore rightly opines that “Like Baudelaire’s Paris or Eliot’s London, his Bombay was archetypical of modern experience in contrast to the spiritualism and peasantry that had been the focus of much Indian writing”.
The negative image of the dragons is immediately undercut by the positive image of the bright and tempting breezes that seems to be the agent of restoration of order nay peace in the troubled mind of the speaker. The breeze can also be the symbolic counterpart of the fluctuating imaginative power of the speaker. This is proved by the following rhetorical question in which the speaker wilfully questions his paradoxical
identification with the barbaric way of life:
As I sleep the fragrance of ignorance
How delight the soul with absolute
sense of salvation, how
hold to a single willed direction?
The speaker’s reluctance to leave the island is a confirmation that he now shares an umbilical relation with the island. Bombay becomes the epitome of India in all her minutiae. Bombay is his home as it is the home to millions of ‘homeless” people. This feeling of reluctance is an assertion of the fact that the island has embedded itself into the speaker’s psyche so much so that he now conceives himself as a part of it. The sense of belongingness is powerfully expressed when the speaker states,
I cannot leave the island,
I was born here and belong.
The speaker concludes his monologue with the prospects of playing the role of an indifferent citizen oblivious to the infernal mechanics of the capital city. He accepts the island in all its variegated aspects and nuances and is hopefully determined to forge an identity which will ultimately provide him with an insider’s perspective.
Minority Poem
In my room, I talk
to my invisible guests;
they do not argue, but wait
Till I am exhausted,
then they slip away
with inscrutable faces.
I lack the means to change
their amiable ways,
although I love their gods.
It’s the language really
separates, whatever else
is shared. On the other hand,
Everyone understands
Mother Teresa; her guests
Die visibly in her arms.
It’s not the mythology
or the marriage customs
that you need to know,
It’s the will to pass
Through the eye of a needle
To self-forgetfulness.
The guests depart, dissatisfied;
they will never give up
their mantras, old or new.
And you, uneasy
orphan of their racial
memories, merely
Polish up your alien
techniques of observation,
while the city burns.
(Nissim Ezekiel)
Critical Appreciation:
The poignancy of the migrant condition along with the political impasse that arises with the notion of identity is one the central issues that Ezekiel takes up in giving an account of the displaced migrant in the form of this poem. In a sense, Ezekiel’s identification of Bombay as a refuge or a secure dugout of the migrant communities often verging on self-obsession is neatly crafted in terms of his sceptical view of the city. One must note that the tone is not of denigration or denunciation; it is rather one of understanding and forgiveness. The poem is a coming to terms of an individual with the strangeness of an alien country. The minority question permeates the entire text of the poem ranging from differences in belief system to mythological, historical, racial and political differences.
The poem begins with the speaker’s conjuring an esoteric picture of some “invisible guests” who have come to join the speaker in a leisurely fashion. The idea of invisibility of the guests brings out numerous interpretations such as the schizophrenic disposition of the speaker, his unstable mental equipoise, the craving need to people his immediate surroundings in order to get rid of the claustrophobic nature of his existence, the severity of his delusion as well as his unconscious apprehensiveness while in the midst of company. Come what come may, the reader does get a fleeting glimpse of the troubled consciousness of the speaker which is bolstered further in the speaker’s inability to faithfully delineate the facial contours of his guests as indicated by the expression “inscrutable faces”. This expression may also suggest
the dissatisfaction of the guests in communicating with the host speaker. The theme or subject of discussion is rather unknown but one can easily summarise it from the subtle remark of the speaker’s favouring the gods of the guests. The idea is that the talk might have ended in an aggressive reaction when the speaker tried to win the favour of his guests by highlighting the qualitative superiority of his gods or his religion. The speaker fails to comprehend the logical specificity of their religious view; yet he does not “hate” their gods which reveals an openness of his mind. One must note that it is the same openness that gets reflected as one of the hallmarks of the city of Bombay which spreads and expands to incorporate the migrants. Therefore, the speaker says,
I lack the means to change
their amiable ways,
although I love their gods.
The minority question burgeons when the speaker realizes that it is the language that serves to be the chief agent of “difference” and that separates the host from his guests. The language factor seems to be the crux of the minority question as it not only dislocates the speaker but also deprives him of the privilege of being an insider.
The speaker then cites the case of Mother Theresa who in spite of being a foreigner got the privilege of being an Indian and came to be held in great esteem by the Indians. The use of Mother Theresa is basically to speed up his argument of why the Indians find it difficult to ascribe an insider’s identity to a person having different religious and cultural affiliation. The question remains—does one have to be a paragon of virtue to win such an identity? The speaker states that one does not have to share a mythological similarity or familiarity with the indigenous marriage customs as a prerequisite for claiming an Indian identity. On the contrary, the speaker considers the prospects of a total dismissal of selfhood, an extinction of personal identity if such be the standard requirements. The suggestiveness of the expression that the speaker is ready to pass through the eyes of a needle to self-forgetfulness is an instance in point.
The speaker believes that the rigidity of the Indians in upholding the integrity of their tradition and cultural heritage is too heavy and strong and that he cannot shake off the traces of it from the palimpsest of the Indian psyche. The idea that the guests departs with the conviction that they would never give up their old mantras suggests the conservatism of the Indians. The image of the orphan which the speaker now considers himself to have become is quite poignant because the Indians would never care to know the origin of the orphan and that the racial memory of the orphan could never rise from the private to the public. It heightens the minority factor making the speaker a victim of marginalisation. Thus, the speaker concludes that no matter how polished his manners are, no matter how novel his technical observation is, he will always be an outsider and have to live as a marginalised minority.
Introducing the poet:
Imtiaz Dharker was born in 1954 in Lahore who has carved a niche in the edifice of the Indian English Literature by the sheer power of her poetic composition which is both politically viable as well as artistically delightful. She considers herself as a Scottish Calvinist Muslim and this conception gets reflected in the confluence of three divergent cultures in her poetry. Her poetry is a convincing assurance of the fact that irrespective of geographical disparities, the female condition is universal. Her poetry unfolds new vistas of considering the essential identity of the female as the most marginalised of identities in society. Her anthologies include Purdah and Other Poems (1988), Postcards from God (1997), I Speak for the Devil (2001) and The Terrorist at my Table (2006). Apart from being a poet, she is an accomplished documentary filmmaker and an artist.
Purdah 2
The call breaks its back
across the tenements: ‘Allah-u-Akbar’.
Your mind throws black shadows
on marble cooled by centuries of dead.
A familiar script racks the walls.
The pages of the Koran
turn, smooth as old bones
in your prodigal hands.
In the tin box of your memory
a coin of comfort rattles
against the strangeness of a foreign land.
Years of sun were concentrated
into Maulvi’s fat dark finger
hustling across the page,
nudging words into your head;
words unsoiled by sense,
pure rhythm on the tongue.
The body, rocked in time
with twenty others, was lulled
into thinking it had found a home.
The new Hajji, just fifteen,
had cheeks quite pink with knowledge
and eyes a startling blue.
He snapped a flower off his garland
and looked to you.
There was nothing holy in his look.
Hands that had prayed at Mecca
dropped a sly flower on
your book. You had been chosen.
Your dreams were full of him for days.
Making pilgrimages to his cheeks, You were scorched,
long before the judgement,
by the blaze.
Your breasts, still tiny, grew an inch.
The cracked voice calls again.
A change of place and time.
Much of the colour drains away.
The brightest shades are in your dreams,
A picture-book, a strip of film.
The rest forget to sing.
Evelyn, the medium from Brighton,
said, ‘I see you quite different in my head,
not dressed in this cold blue.
I see your mother bringing you
a stretch of brilliant fabric, red.
Yes, crimson red, patterned through
with golden thread.’
There she goes, your mother,
still plotting at your wedding
long after she is dead.
They have all been sold and bought,
the girls I knew,
unwilling virgins who had been taught,
especially in this strangers’ land, to bind
their brightness tightly round,
whatever they might wear,
in the purdah of the mind.
They veiled their eyes
with heavy lids.
They hid their breasts,
but not the fullness of their lips.
The men you knew
were in your history, striding proud
with heavy feet across a fertile land.
A horde of dead men
held up your head,
above the mean temptations
of those alien hands.
You answered to your race.
Night after virtuous night
you performed for them.
They warmed your bed.
A coin of comfort in the mosque
clatters down the years of loss
You never met those men
with burnt-out eyes, blood
dripping from their beards.
You remember the sun
pouring out of Maulvi’s hands.
It was to save the child
the lamb was sacrificed;
to save the man,
the scourge and stones. God was
justice. Justice could be dread.
But woman. Woman,
you have learnt
that when God comes
you hide your head.
There are so many of me.
I have met them, meet them every day,
recognise their shadows on the streets.
I know their past and future
in cautious way they place their feet.
I can see behind their veils,
and before they speak
I know their tongues, thick
with the burr of Birmingham
or Leeds.
Break cover.
Break cover and let the girls with tell-tale lips.
We’ll blindfold the spies. Tell me
what you did when the new moon
sliced you out of purdah,
your body shimmering through the lies.
Saleema of the swan neck
and tragic eyes, knew from films
that the heroine was always pure,
untouched; nevertheless
poured out her breasts to fill the cup of his white hands
(the mad old artist with the pigeon chest)
and marvelled at her own strange wickedness.
Bought and sold, and worse,
grown old. She married back home,
as good girls do,
in a flurry of red the cousin –
hers or mine, I cannot know –
had annual babies, then rebelled at last.
At last a sign, behind the veil,
of life;
found another man, became another wife,
and sank into the mould
of her mother’s flesh
and mind, begging approval from the rest.
Her neck is bowed as if she wears a hood.
Eyes still tragic, when you meet her
on the high street,
and watchful as any creature
that lifts its head and sniffs the air
only to scent its own small trail of blood.
Naseem, you ran away
and your mother burned with shame.
Whatever we did,
the trail was the same:
the tear-stained mother, the gossip aunts
looking for shoots to smother
inside all our cracks.
The table is laden
and you are remembered
among the dead. No going back.
The prayer’s said.
And there you are with your English boy
who was going to set you free,
trying to smile and be accepted,
always on your knees.
There you are, I can see you all now
in the tenements up north.
In or out of purdah. Tied, or bound.
Shaking your box to
hear how freedom rattles…
one coin, one sound.
(Imtiaz Dharker)
Critical Appreciation:
In this poem, Imtiaz Dharker explores the essential notion of conceiving a gendered identity by making a kaleidoscopic depiction of the condition of a veiled Muslim woman speaker who is enmeshed in an alien country with the stultifying prescriptions of religion. The poem is also a bold scrutiny of the lot of the Muslim women fraught with the jaded fundamentalist discourse of the traditional veil that goes on to ascribe an identity that is always suppressed and that negates all possibilities of emancipation and self-expression. In a sense, Dharker’s concern is not just to highlight the rigorous demands of the male-chauvinist culture but also to critique the very ideology which accords such a nefarious position to the individual if the one is supposedly a female. The poem is quite dialogical as the reader will find a polyphony of voices which clamour together for the liberation of one essential identity—a Muslim purdah-clad female—from the Muslim patriarchal conception.
The sense of voicelessness along with the fear of losing one’s identity serves as a fitting corollary to the gendered discourse of the Other and Dharker tries to make vocal her stance in the form of this long and rather rambling poem. The marginalised space of the female as an identity which is completely voiceless within the ramification of a patriarchal fundamentalist culture is what Dharker seeks to elaborate and in doing so engages in challenging the ideological apparatus that guaranteed the authenticity of such a practice and to even break free for the stereotypical conception of the female as the unsullied reservoir of tradition. Dharker in this poem is however not trying to envision the idea of a “home” in terms of the binaries of home and away (Ghar/bahir as Partha Chatterjee seems to stress in his critique of Indian nationalism) as the overarching paradigm of culture along with the linguistic fecundity in an alien country which does not give the liberty to engage on such politics. The enveloping sense of alienation becomes more poignant in the case of the speaker as she is fraught within the clutches of cultural alienation, spatial dislocation, linguistic difference and identity politics. Therefore, the poem must be seen as a complex negotiation—cultural, social, physiological, psychological and political—that is conceived to assert a distinctive space for the gendered female identity. Thus, Abin Chakraborty in his influential essay “Beyond the ‘Purdah of the Mind’: Gender, Religion and Diasporic Imaginings in the Poetry of Imtiaz Dharker” asserts,
Imtiaz Dharker’s poetry maps this precarious ground as her speakers struggle against the ‘purdah of the mind’ and the ‘drought’ brought forth by the ‘blazing eye of faith’ in search of their own identities which are further imperilled by the dislocation of migrancy that often reduce the coloured immigrant to nothing more than an ‘untidy shape’ subjected to the ‘whiplashes’ of looks of those who simply consider them as ‘a scribble leaked/out of a colonial notebook.’
And it is this essentialist imposition of a binary-laden identity that consequently victimises the female which serves to be the vantage point for Dharker in making a clarion call to all women never to succumb to such fulsome and parochial terrain of thought.
The poem begins with the speaker’s familiar recognition of the ajaan (Allah-u-Akbar) that call all Muslims to attend prayers (Namaaz). This is indeed a deliberate ploy adopted by Dharker as she too is engaged in making a clarion call to all the purdahnasheen for the sake of their emancipation. The speaker finds the scripts of the Holy Qur’an as the only solace as it reboots a sense of belongingness in the mind of the speaker and reassures her identity as a Muslim women pitted in a distant foreign land. A deep sense of nostalgia holds sway in the mere memory of the speaker’s first rite of initiation into the religion as it is a natural compulsion for all practicing Muslims to give and render Islamic education to their children so much so that they are able to read the Qur’an in the Arabic language irrespective of the unintelligibility of the tongue. The expression “In the tin box of your memory/a coin of comfort rattles/against the strangeness of a foreign land” is a vindication of physical and psychological displacement of the migrant condition which is somewhat mitigated by the ricocheting familiar sound from the tenements. In other words, the tenet of Islamic faith “Allah-u-Akbar” (Allah is the Greatest) comes as a respite and a reassurance to the speaker in a biased world characterised by excommunication and cultural difference.
The second paragraph becomes a bold assertion on Dharker’s part as she sets out to criticise the traditional Muslim elementary education as shallow and baseless with no light of knowledge and therefore illogical. The speaker voices Dharker’s concern in picturizing the graphic memory of her past where a group of twenty girls overhear the mechanical recitation of the verses from the pages of the Holy Qur’an. It is significant to note that the Maulvi becomes the signature sign of traditional authority who nudges the verses or suraas into the tender minds of these girls with a rhythm so immaculate that compels them to rock their bodies to the rhythmic sound in a kind of genuflection. And it is this memory which the speaker believes to have provided her with the least vestige of relief in envisioning the idea of “home” in an alien country.
Dharker deliberately tries to juxtapose the sacred with the profane in giving the image of the teenage Hajji (as indicated by the pink cheeks) who offers a flower to the girl that brought about a drastic physical and psychological change in her. The vulnerability of the Hajji who is the symbol of the sacred and the pious for having prayed at Mecca in falling prey to his instinctive desires not only pinpoints the human element but also reduces the sanctity of the pilgrim by highlighting his gullibility to base human desires of the flesh. The act of throwing flower to the girl is a turning point in her life as she begins to concoct and predict a potential passionate future for herself and becomes oblivious to the punishment on the Judgement day i.e. the Qaayamat. The sexual imagery adopted by Dharker is quite serious and powerful as it faithfully delineates the condition of the female. The expression “Your breast, still tiny, grew an inch.” is a reminder of the idea of growth in the girl as well as to convey the idea of the readiness of the female body to understand and experience the sexual urge.
The fantastic celebration of the newly dawned femininity by the girl is nipped in the bud when a girl from Brighton named Evelyn informs her about her mother’s concern for her marriage. This reveals the paranoid nature of the mothers at the prospect of disposing their daughters in marriage. The statement is rather universal as the reader finds a fitting example in Jane Austen’s character of Mrs. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice where she too devises elaborate plans to get her daughters married to rich families. The expression “unwilling virgins” which equates the female condition to sacrificial lambs pinpoints the psychological impact of such repression in the girls. The veil is not just a concealing garment but a purdah of the mind which suggests the amount of pressure that goes with its enforcement on the female. The buying and selling of the female in marriage and the veiling of the body parts in the purdah are enforced through the registers of cultural norms which however cannot substantially reduce the desires of the female and this becomes affirmed in the expression “but not the fullness of their lips”.
The speaker seeks to convey the grand narrative (ur-narrative) of the female plight by stating the coerciveness exerted on the females to delight their male counterparts in bed. The notion of sexual commitment to the male partner irrespective of the resistant voice brewing within her is quite poignant and it is here that Dharker seems to urge the afflicted female to bank upon the “coin of comfort” from the donations made in the mosque. The metanarratives of religion and sexuality are fused with the politics of asserting a microscopic individuality which makes the poem more intriguing.
The speaker highlights the all-pervasive sense of claustrophobia by asserting the women’s dilemma when they begin to conceive God as the replicating symbol of patriarchal authority. The expression “God comes/you hide your head” illustrates the ironical implication that the women have to observe Purdah even from God. The speaker strives for a oneness of identity which is evident in her anticipating a mirror image of the female indicated by the expression “there are so many of me./I have met them, meet them every day,/recognise their shadows on the streets”. The clamour for establishing an identity becomes important as the speaker makes herself too privy to the female question pitted in an alien land with traditional proscriptions of a rigid conventional culture.
There are two rebel personas in the poem named Saleema and Naseem with which the speaker try to convey the resistant voice. Their mutual understanding of the “female” like the chaste and untouched heroines from the films is steeped in gender politics as it upholds the ‘angel in the house” stereotype. Saleema’s forays into the licentious world of the old painter for whom she might have posed as a nude model suggested by the expression “marvelled at her own wickedness” does not liberate her nor does Naseem who had eloped with an English boy and brought down infernal shame on her family. The rebellious spirit of Saleema lost its force with her eventual marriage followed by a divorce which eventually made her an aberrant in the normal world. Likewise, Naseem too found herself enmeshed in a similar fate after the Nikaah (“The prayer’s said). The predicament of both these personas intensifies the anguish and brandishes the infernal fetters that have long subjected the women. The poem concludes with the speaker’s identification of a forced literal silence maintained by the women who are projected as prisoners in a cage. The women years for freedom, for a coin of comfort which is almost a distant dream and so the ricocheting sound from the tenement seems so familiar; it provides them succour although ephemeral and transitory. The failure of these personas or for that matter the women kind to seek a liberated identity confirms the malevolent nature of masculine authoritarianism which has subjugated the woman to such an extent that she finds no refuge elsewhere but to perpetuate an existence of self-abnegation and dominance.
Introducing the poet:
Agha Shahid Ali was born in Kashmir in February 4, 1949. He was educated in the University of Kashmir, University of Delhi and upon arrival in the United States in 1975, in the Universities of Arizona and Pennsylvania. It was in the University of Delhi that Shahid Ali befriended the noted Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh and the bond of friendship grew so strong that in his parting moments Shahid Ali entrusted Ghosh to remember him through the ‘living records of memory’. Hence, to commemorate the eternal bond of their friendship, Ghosh wrote a moving essay “The Ghat of the Only World” which is now prescribed as a text in the Indian high schools. Shahid Ali was a poet known for the pure lyricism that beautified his poetry. Being greatly influenced by Mirza Ghalib, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Begum Akhtar and Firdausi, one finds a true blend of Urdu and Persian poetry in his work. It was in fact Shahid Ali who made an honest attempt to introduce the Urdu genre of the Ghazal as a significant creative genre in English poetry. In a sense, Shahid Ali’s poetry breathes the finer air of the quintessential artistic expression that goes on to the making of an aesthetic experience of reading world literature. His published works include Bone Sculptor (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) and The Veiled Suit: Collected Poems (2009). He passed away leaving a void in the artistic world on December 8, 2001 after being diagnosed as suffering from brain tumour.
Snowmen
My ancestor, a man
Of Himalayan snow,
came to Kashmir from Samarkand,
carrying a bag
of whale bones:
heirlooms from sea funerals.
His skeleton
carved from glaciers, his breath arctic,
he froze women in his embrace.
His wife thawed into stony water,
her old age a clear
evaporation.
This heirloom,
his skeleton under my skin, passed
from son to grandson,
generations of snowmen on my back.
They tap every year on my window,
their voices hushed to ice.
No, they won’t let me out of winter,
and I’ve promised myself,
even if I’m the last snowman,
that I’ll ride into spring
on their melting shoulders.
(Agha Shahid Ali)
Critical Appreciation:
Agha Shahid Ali’s exceptional brilliance in turning the most banal and earthly into a poetic delight gets vindicated in the form of this poem which is crafted in the manner of tracing one’s identity by going back in time to examine and critically evaluate the roots of one’s identity. The poem is an attempt at redefining the politics of identity formation by enumerating the lineage of a chequered history of a particular section of people that has thrived on a perpetual self-reflexive existence in search of a “space” which they can call as “home”. The idea of a homeland which is always a constructed space along with the challenges arising out of the political trajectory of engendering an identity are issues that Shahid Ali tries to delineate in the form of this poem. The poem becomes all the more intriguing because Shahid Ali seeks to open up a personal history in order to critique a more holistic picture of the dubious nature of configuring the idea of a “homeland” that not only guarantees the true worth of a communal harmony but also ascribes merit to the envisioning of an identity based on the politics of a nation’s historiography.
The poem begins with the speaker’s tracing the genealogy of his family in ascertaining the migrant nature of seeking a secure home in the form of his ancestors who had originally treaded from the Himalayan snow covered tracks of Samarkand and lands in Kashmir. The professional nature of the ancestor is indicated in his carrying of a bag full of whale bones. The expression “heirlooms from sea funerals” is quite significant because the speaker does not want the reader to configure the profession of his ancestor as whale hunting or of sea- faring mercenary. The physiology of the ancestor is exaggerated in some sense when the speaker goes on to give a graphic image of his skeleton as being carved from glaciers and that his breath constitutive of the arctic air. The hyperbolical nature of the description heightens further when the speaker states that the ancestor could even froze women in his cold embrace.
One must note that the speaker is not just glorifying the credentials of his nameless ancestor but also critiquing him by portraying him as a person embracing the “women” which implicitly highlights his sexual vigour. Again, the term “women” is used, quite deliberately enough, which is the plural form of “woman”. This goes on to attribute the immense sexual potential of the ancestor perhaps in satisfying women folk. This sexual innuendo gets even more bolstered in the next line when the speaker says,
His wife thawed into stony water,
This is a clear cut contrast because while the ancestor can freeze other women in his embrace, his own wife thaws into stony waters. This idea of melting of the wife encapsulates the possibility of the sexual indifference adopted by the ancestor towards his wife. That her old age is a clear evaporation testifies the neglectful stance adopted by the ancestor as he is bent upon experiencing the elixir of life (erstwhile sexual gratification) in the form of his numerous amorous quests and adventures along the way. And it is this typical personality and the promiscuous genetic legacy of the ancestor that the speaker now feels ashamed to have inherited. The skeleton will be the same but the speaker longs to make an exception of himself. This craving gets reflected in the speaker’s wish to estrange himself from his kinsmen as he finds this legacy to be abominably shrouded in the code of a transgressive sexual impulsiveness.
Nevertheless, the speaker does feel the uncanny pull of his roots when he hears generations of his ancestors tapping his window. The metaphorical association of tapping at the window is meant to suggest the invisible cord of “oneness”; a kind of umbilical relation which the speaker strives hard to extricate from. However, the poem concludes with the speaker’s stoic fortitude and determination not to fall a prey to that obnoxious call of origin which he believes will ultimately submerge him too in that abysmal pit of tradition that is nothing less dignified than uncontrolled lust. This is finally vindicated in the speaker’s resolve that he would carve out a new identity for himself as a snowman that had the potential as well as the courage to defy tradition and the call of his roots. That the speaker values his reasoning faculty and is keen on presenting himself as one of his kind is affirmed in the last lines of the poem in his authoritative challenge and vehement dismissal of being clubbed as a demented sexual imbecile. Therefore he says,
and I’ve promised myself,
even if I’m the last snowman,
that I’ll ride into spring
on their melting shoulders.
Keki N. Daruwalla: Life and Works
- Keki N. Daruwalla (born 1937) is a police officer by profession.
- Received the prestigious Sahitya Academy Award in 1984 for his anthology The Keeper of the Dead.
- He has published twelve volumes of poetry—Under Orion (1970), Apparition in April (1971) and Crossing of Rivers (1976), Winter Poems (1980), The Keeper of the Dead (1982), Landscapes (1987), A Summer of Tigers (1995), Night River (2000), Map Maker (2002), The Scarecrow and the Ghost (2004), Collected Poems 1970-2005 (2006) and The Glass-blower: Selected Poems (2008).
- Poetry, for him, is first personal, exploratory, at times even therapeutic which helps in coming to terms with one’s interior world.
Themes and Issues explored in the Poem: Migrations
- Daruwalla reflects on the idea of ‘displacement’ that has evolved a new terrain of thought in ascribing identity to a group of people who are categorised as migrants.
- Daruwalla’s concern is not just to catalogue the factors that engender migration but also to juxtapose public history with the personal.
- Droughts, plagues and even the infamous year 1947 that saw the Partition of India are considered to be the prime agents of migration.
- Reflects upon the possibility of an inconsequential historicity had it not been for migration that have had provided the necessary thrust in carving out a history of the place and its people.
- The politics of adaptation to newer surroundings by the migrants is bolstered in the expression “new faces among old bricks”.
- Uses an instance of his childhood memory as a vantage point to reflect on the more holistic picture of “home” and “identity”.
- The speaker asserts that geographical displacement shares an ideological corollary with the displacement engendered in an individual’s memory sequence as both are difficult to trek.
Jayanta Mahapatra: Life and Works
- Jayanta Mahapatra born in Cuttack, Orissa in 1928 was originally a Professor of Physics at Ravenshaw College. He started writing poetry when he was about forty.
- •e has published many volumes of poetry and that too in a rapid rate of which mention may be made of Close the Sky, Ten by Ten (1971), Svayamvara and Other Poems (1971), A Father’s House and A Rain of Rites (both in 1976), Waiting (1979), The False Start and Relationship (both in 1980), Life Signs (1983), Dispossessed Nests (1986), Selected Poems (1987), Burden of Waves and Fruit (1988) and The Temple (1987), A Whiteness of Bone (1992), Shadow Space (1997), Bare Face (2000) and Random Descent (2005).
- Published a collection of short stories called The Green Gardener and Other Stories along with editing his Journal Chandrabhaga which ceased publication in 1985.
- The surreal world that permeates his poetry along with the conceits and mind boggling imagery are representative of the qualitative merits of his poetic craft.
- He has earned the honour to be the first Indian English poet to receive the Sahitya Academy Award for Relationship (1981), an epic poem in twelve sections that meditates on Orissa’s mythology and monuments.
- Themes and Issues explored in the Poem: The Exile
- Jayanta Mahapatra evokes the painful awareness of the search for an identity through this poem. The poem is a brilliant espousal of the discourse of an “in-between” space as Homi Bhabha would have it in his theoretical exposition of the postcolonial condition in his path breaking book Location of Culture.
- Mahapatra’s prime concern is to validate the propositional base of sharing a space that is both liminal and claustrophobic.
- The title of the poem justifies the polemics centering on the cultural embeddedness of an exile authenticated either by a deliberate choice or a condition levied by any coercive authority.
- A deep seated sense of nostalgia seems to pervade the poem which rejuvenates the idea of a cultural renaissance in the form of Mahapatra’s allegiance to a tradition that has been sequestered with identity politics.
- The distance covered by the speaker while making a cursory survey of his village grants his a vantage point to probe into the deeper recesses of his Indian past both familial and racial.
- The speaker states that the hills are the unsullied reservoir of the past as they still stand as mute witness to the ravages of time.
- The past becomes a fascinating obsession for the speaker as he not only feels the intoxicating presence of his parents but also the liveliness of the squalid ‘town’.
- The speaker then convincingly states the improbability of him finding a space that he can call “home”.
- The speaker becomes aware that he is on a self-inflicted exile; no matter what he does, how desperately he tries, he can never reclaim an identity that is instantly native and culturally rooted.
- The poem concludes with the speaker’s conviction that his son too would face such an identity threat, a fissure of personality for which he alone is to blame.
Nissim Ezekiel: Life and Works
- Nissim Ezekiel was born in Mumbai (then Bombay) into a Bene-Israeli family in 1924.
- He was educated at Wilson College, Bombay and went to England to study philosophy at Birkbeck College.
- He took up teaching as his profession in Mithibhai College of Arts, Mumbai and retires as a Professor of English at the University of Bombay.
- He has authored several volumes of poetry chief among which are A Time to Change (1952), Sixty Poems (1953), The Third (1959), The Unfinished Man (1960), The Exact Name (1965), Hymns in Darkness (1976), Latter-Day Psalms (1982) and Edinburgh Interlude-Lightly (1983) and Collected Poems (1989).
- His uniqueness lies in the attempt to free the Indian English literature form the unconditional influence of British Romanticism and Victorianism.
- His precise use of the English language and its improvisational standard with the novel use of the Babu English, well crafted imagery and the thematic preoccupation with human sexuality, alienation, identity and the modernist conception of existence have undoubtedly earned him a permanent place.
- He has also published Three Plays in 1970.
- He was awarded the Sahitya Academy Award in 1982 for Latter-Day Psalms and also received the Padma Shri in 1988. Suffering from Alzheimer, he passed away on January 9, 2004.
Themes and Issues explored in the Poems: Island
- Ezekiel’s preoccupation with Bombay as a distinctive space that allows the migrant identity with a voice.
- In the poem, he microcosmically mirrors the island city in exploring the intricacy of identity politics.
- The poem is couched in the form of a snide rebuttal of the very condition of being an “outsider” who has deliberately taken up the onus of narrating the metatextural nature of evolving an identity that has underwent serious self-scrutiny.
- The discourse of hybridity becomes evident from his Bene-Israelite background.
- Ezekiel portrays the city of Bombay to be the refuge of all migrant communities in India.
- The deliberate injunction of a Jewish identity into the mores and mannerisms of an alien country (erstwhile the island city of Bombay) irrespective of the cultural, socio-political and religious difference reveals the ‘neutrality’ of the city in according a place of equality to the migrants.
- The speaker then analysed the counter effects of his own voice—both poetic and Jewish— and states his inability to comprehend the ambiguity ingrained within.
- The expression “distorted echoes” thus projects the modernist angst, the paranoia of modern man in unearthing the manifold significance and therefore ambiguity of his existence.
- Bombay becomes the epitome of India in all her minutiae. Bombay is his home as it is the home to millions of ‘homeless” people.
- The speaker concludes his monologue with the prospects of playing the role of an indifferent citizen oblivious to the infernal mechanics of the capital city.
Minority Poem
- The poignancy of the migrant condition along with the political impasse that arises with the notion of identity is one the central issues that Ezekiel takes up.
- The poem is a coming to terms of an individual with the strangeness of an alien country.
- The poem begins with the speaker’s conjuring an esoteric picture of some “invisible guests” who have come to join the speaker in a leisurely fashion.
- The reader does get a fleeting glimpse of the troubled consciousness of the speaker which is bolstered further in the speaker’s inability to faithfully delineate the facial contours of his guests as indicated by the expression “inscrutable faces”.
- The speaker fails to comprehend the logical specificity of their religious view; yet he does not “hate” their gods which reveals an openness of his mind.
- It is language that serves to be the chief agent of “difference” that separates the host from his guests.
- The crux of the minority question is that it not only dislocates the speaker but also deprives him of the privilege of being an insider.
- The idea that the guests departs with the conviction that they would never give up their old mantras suggests the conservatism of the Indians.
- The speaker concludes that no matter how polished his manners are, no matter how novel his technical observation is, he will always be an outsider and have to live as a marginalised minority.
Imtiaz Dharker: Life and Works
- Imtiaz Dharker was born in 1954 in Lahore.
- She considers herself as a Scottish Calvinist Muslim and this conception gets reflected in the confluence of three divergent cultures in her poetry.
- The female condition is universal; the essential identity of the female as the most marginalised of identities in society.
- Her anthologies include Purdah and Other Poems (1988), Postcards from God (1997), I Speak for the Devil (2001) and The Terrorist at my Table (2006).
- Apart from being a poet, she is an accomplished documentary filmmaker and an artist.
Themes and Issues explored in the Poem: PurdahII
- Imtiaz Dharker explores the essential notion of conceiving a gendered identity by making a kaleidoscopic depiction of the condition of a veiled Muslim woman speaker who is enmeshed in an alien country with the stultifying prescriptions of religion.
- A bold scrutiny of the lot of the Muslim women fraught with the jaded fundamentalist discourse of the traditional veil that goes on to ascribe an identity that is always suppressed and that negates all possibilities of emancipation and self-expression.
- The marginalised space of the female as an identity which is completely voiceless within the ramification of a patriarchal fundamentalist culture.
- Dharker engages in challenging the ideological apparatus that guaranteed the authenticity of such a practice and to even break free for the stereotypical conception of the female as the unsullied reservoir of tradition.
- The enveloping sense of alienation becomes more poignant in the case of the speaker as she is fraught within the clutches of cultural alienation, spatial dislocation, linguistic difference and identity politics.
- The poem must be seen as a complex negotiation—cultural, social, physiological, psychological and political—that is conceived to assert a distinctive space for the gendered female identity.
- The speaker finds the scripts of the Holy Qur’an as the only solace as it reboots a sense of belongingness in the mind of the speaker and reassures her identity as a Muslim women pitted in a distant foreign land.
- The expression “In the tin box of your memory/a coin of comfort rattles/against the strangeness of a foreign land” is a vindication of physical and psychological displacement of the migrant condition which is somewhat mitigated by the ricocheting familiar sound from the tenements.
- The expression “unwilling virgins” which equates the female condition to sacrificial lambs pinpoints the psychological impact of such repression in the girls.
- The veil is not just a concealing garment but a purdah of the mind which suggests the amount of pressure that goes with its enforcement on the female.
- The metanarratives of religion and sexuality are fused with the politics of asserting a microscopic individuality which makes the poem more intriguing.
- The failure of these personas or for that matter the women kind to seek a liberated identity confirms the malevolent nature of masculine authoritarianism which has subjugated the woman to such an extent that she finds no refuge elsewhere but to perpetuate an existence of self-abnegation and dominance.
Agha Shahid Ali: Life and Works
- Agha Shahid Ali was born in Kashmir in February 4, 1949. He was educated in the University of Kashmir and University of Delhi.
- Shahid Ali was a poet known for the pure lyricism that beautified his poetry. Being greatly influenced by Mirza Ghalib, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Begum Akhtar and Firdausi, one finds a true blend of Urdu and Persian poetry in his work.
- In a sense, Shahid Ali’s poetry breathes the finer air of the quintessential artistic expression that goes on to the making of an aesthetic experience of reading world literature.
- His published works include Bone Sculptor (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) and The Veiled Suit: Collected Poems (2009).
- He passed away leaving a void in the artistic world on December 8, 2001 after being diagnosed as suffering from brain tumour.
Themes and Issues explored in the Poem: Snowmen
- The poem is an attempt at redefining the politics of identity formation by enumerating the lineage of a chequered history of a particular section of people that has thrived on a perpetual self-reflexive existence in search of a “space” which they can call as “home”.
- The idea of a homeland which is always a constructed space along with the challenges arising out of the political trajectory of engendering an identity are issues that Shahid Ali tries to delineate in the form of this poem.
- Ali seeks to open up a personal history in order to critique a more holistic picture of the dubious nature of configuring the idea of a “homeland” that not only guarantees the true worth of a communal harmony but also ascribes merit to the envisioning of an identity based on the politics of a nation’s historiography.
- The poem begins with the speaker’s tracing the genealogy of his family in ascertaining the migrant nature of seeking a secure home in the form of his ancestors who had originally treaded from the Himalayan snow covered tracks of Samarkand and lands in Kashmir.
- The physiology of the ancestor is exaggerated in some sense when the speaker goes on to give a graphic image of his skeleton as being carved from glaciers and that his breath constitutive of the arctic air.
- One must note that the speaker is not just glorifying the credentials of his nameless ancestor but also critiquing him by portraying him as a person embracing the “women” which implicitly highlights his sexual vigour.
- This idea of melting of the wife encapsulates the possibility of the sexual indifference adopted by the ancestor towards his wife.
- The poem concludes with the speaker’s stoic fortitude and determination not to fall a prey to that obnoxious call of origin which he believes will ultimately submerge him too in that abysmal pit of tradition that is nothing less dignified than uncontrolled lust.
Poetic Devices/Structure/Stylistic Features:
- The poem can be said to be drafted in the inductive mode as we find Daruwalla oscillating between two polarities—public and private—by moving from the general to the particular in chronicling the factors of migration.
- It is in the last paragraph that the speaker fuses the public with the personal when he uses an instance of his childhood memory as a vantage point to reflect on the more holistic picture of “home” and “identity”.
- The speaker adroitly fuses the personal with the impersonal in order to intensify the remoteness of his position as an exile.
- That corpses smoulder past his nights is an unfailing testimony to the nightmares which seems to strangle his English-speaking Western identity.
- The memory of old, ill parents dwarfs the imaginative prowess of the speaker and makes him more privy to the elemental nature of human life.
- The reference of the Goddess Kali immediately conveys the emotional and mental discomfiture of the speaker and gives the idea of a violent war within.
- Bombay is conceived as a barbaric city that “flowers into slums”. This image intensifies the contrast imminent in the succeeding image of the skyscrapers which are unfailing examples of the consequences of a cosmopolitan capitalist culture.
- Ezekiel does not engage in projecting an unrestrained emotional catharsis in this poem; he is more of a scientific observer with a deliberate detachment.
- The negative image of the dragons is immediately undercut by the positive image of the bright and tempting breezes that seems to be the agent of restoration of order nay peace in the troubled mind of the speaker.
- The breeze can also be the symbolic counterpart of the fluctuating imaginative power of the speaker.
- The tone in Minority Poem is not of denigration or denunciation; it is rather one of understanding and forgiveness.
- The use of Mother Theresa is basically to speed up his argument of why the Indians find it difficult to ascribe an insider’s identity to a person having different religious and cultural affiliation.
- The speaker considers the prospects of a total dismissal of selfhood, an extinction of personal identity if such be the standard requirements.
- The suggestiveness of the expression that the speaker is ready to pass through the eyes of a needle to self-forgetfulness is an instance in point.
- The poem Purdah II is quite dialogical as the reader will find a polyphony of voices which clamour together for the liberation of one essential identity—a Muslim purdah-clad female— from the Muslim patriarchal conception.
- The Maulvi becomes the signature sign of traditional authority who nudges the verses or suraas into the tender minds of these girls with a rhythm so immaculate that compels them to rock their bodies to the rhythmic sound in a kind of genuflection.
- The vulnerability of the Hajji who is the symbol of the sacred and the pious for having prayed at Mecca in falling prey to his instinctive desires not only pinpoints the human element but also reduces the sanctity of the pilgrim by highlighting his gullibility to base human desires of the flesh.
- The sexual imagery adopted by Dharker is quite serious and powerful as it faithfully delineates the condition of the female.
- The hyperbolical nature of the description heightens further when the speaker states that the ancestor could even froze women in his cold embrace.
- The speaker wishes to estrange himself from his kinsmen as he finds this legacy to be abominably shrouded in the code of a transgressive sexual impulsiveness.
- The metaphorical association of tapping at the window is meant to suggest the invisible cord of “oneness”; a kind of umbilical relation which the speaker strives hard to extricate from.
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Reference
- Chakraborty, Abin. “Beyond the ‘Purdah of the Mind’: Gender, Religion and Diasporic Imaginings in the poetry of Imtiaz Dharker”. Journal of postcolonial Cultures and Societies, V.4, No. 3, 2013, pp. 72-86
- Ezekiel, Nissim. “The Cultural Vacuum” in Havovi Anklesaria (eds.) Nissim Ezekiel Remembered. Sahitya Academy: New Delhi, 2008
- King, Bruce. Modern Indian Poetry in English. Revised Edition. Oxford University Press:
- New Delhi, (1987) 2001rpt
- _________. Three Indian Poets, Oxford University Press: New Delhi, 2005
- Maqbool, Iffat “If There Is a Poet, It Is This, It IS This: Agha Shahid Ali—Chronicler of Pain” The Criterion: An International Journal in English. Vol. III, No. I, March 2012
- Nabar, Vrinda. Keki N. Daruwalla: Poetry and a National Culture in V.A.Sahane (eds.) Indian Poetry: A Critical Assessment, Macmillan: New Delhi, 1984
- Naik, M.K. The History of Indian English Literature, Sahitya Academy: New Delhi, (1982), 2004 rpt
- Prasad, Madhusudan. (ed.) The Poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra: A Critical Study. Sterling: New Delhi, 1986
- Tiwari, Kanak Lata. “The real feminists in Indian English Writing: Kamala Das and Imtiaz Dharker” International Journal of English and Literature, V. 4, No. 10, 2013, pp. 542-548.
- Zaidi, Nishat “Center/Margin Dialectics and the Poetic Form: The Ghazals of Agha Shahid Ali” The Annual of Urdu Studies. University of Rajasthan, 2008
- https://books.google.co.in/books?isbn=8126908440
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