Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001)

• Kashmiri Indian-American poet

& poetry translator
• Studied in Delhi University
before moving to the USA for
higher studies
• Studied at the University of
Arizona (MFA) & Pennsylvania
State University (Ph.D.)
• Taught at the University of
Massachusetts Amherst
• Competent in both traditional
forms & free-verse
• Multiethnic influences in his
poetry that combined Muslim,
Hindu & Western cultural and
literary heritages
• Credited with introducing the
ghazal form in English poetry
 The Dacca Gauzes
. . . for a whole year he sought to accumulate the most exquisite Dacca gauzes.
– Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Those transparent Dacca gauzes In history we learned: the hands

known as woven air, running of weavers were amputated,
water, evening dew: the looms of Bengal silenced,

a dead art now, dead over and the cotton shipped raw
a hundred years. "No one by the British to England.
now knows," my grandmother says, History of little use to her,

"what it was to wear my grandmother just says

or touch that cloth." She wore how the muslins of today
it once, an heirloom sari from seem so coarse and that only

her mother's dowry, proved in autumn, should one wake up

genuine when it was pulled, all at dawn to pray, can one
six yards, through a ring. feel that same texture again.

Years later when it tore, One morning, she says, the air
many handkerchiefs embroidered was dew-starched: she pulled
with gold-thread paisleys it absently through her ring.

were distributed among

the nieces and daughters-in-law.
Those too now lost.
 Some Analysis
• The poem works as a tool to connect memory & history
• Family/personal story merges with the nation’s cultural, economic
and political past
• The poem records the past-ness of the object and the events
surrounding it
• Heirloom sari passed to the next generations
• Family heirlooms: sentimental value, nostalgic yearning
• Loss of the sari / loss of a treasured possession / loss for the family
& community
• Loss for the nation / lost in history / lost to history / loss of history
/ loss for history
• The poet’s loss of native country: America as new home
• Refuses to give up his own complex and varied past
• American “melting pot” encounters Indian “melting pot”
• “Melting pot” does not mean dissolution of past identity
• Postcolonial & postmodern condition