Postcard from Kashmir

“Postcard from Kashmir” (1989) is a 14-line lyric poem written in unrhymed, unmetered verse. Despite its contemporary structure, the poem nevertheless pays homage to two traditional forms: the Western sonnet and the Indo-Persian ghazal. While its 14-line-structure is reminiscent of a sonnet, its themes of loss and longing are typical of a ghazal. The melding of influences reflects the multiculturalism of the poet Agha Shahid Ali, who was born in India, identified as Kashmiri, and emigrated to the United States as a young man. Published in Ali’s second poetry collection The Half-Inch Himalayas (1989), the poem is about the longing for a home the exile has left behind. The poem’s speaker worries that their memories of this home are becoming idealized and faded. Since they no longer reside at home, its reality is becoming distant for them.

The tone of the poem is restrained and elegiac, with its themes of nostalgia and loss dominating. Ali balances these with understated irony, giving the poem an ambiguous edge. The poem’s conclusion is open-ended, mirroring the speaker’s uncertainty about the future of Kashmir, their homeland. The speaker suggests their memory of Kashmir is now forever imperfect, perhaps because of the conflict in the region. Kashmir is a dominant motif in Ali’s poems, and the loss of his homeland colors his poetic sensibility through and through. “Postcard from Kashmir” is considered an early poem in the poet’s canon and prefigures the worsening of the violence in Kashmir. At the time the poem was composed, India and Pakistan had fought wars over the disputed territory, but the conditions on the ground were still not at their nadir. After 1989, the violence in Kashmir began to escalate significantly. In “Postcard from Kashmir,” Ali alludes to the loss of a peaceful idyll but makes no direct references to violence. This changed in his later poems on Kashmir.

Poet Biography

Agha Shahid Ali was born in New Delhi, India in 1949 into a family of highly educated Kashmiri Muslims. His grandmother Begum Zaffar Ali was said to be the first Kashmiri Muslim woman to graduate school, while his father, Agha Ashraf Ali, was a well-known teacher and reformer. “Agha” is an honorific, “Sir” being a very rough approximation. Ali’s family were Shia Muslims, a minority in Sunni-dominated Kashmir. When he was still an infant, Ali moved to Srinagar, in India-administered Kashmir. He was educated at the missionary-run Burn Hall School in Srinagar, and later at Hindu College at the University of Delhi. Ali grew up speaking Kashmiri, English, and Urdu and received a secular education. However, like many upper-class South Asians of his generation, the language he wrote in was English.

During his university days in Delhi, Ali formed an intense but platonic relationship with the great Indian ghazal singer, Begum Akhtar, his senior by decades. It was through Akhtar that Ali learned the musical potential of Urdu, which, like Italian, is a language that lends itself to rhyme. Akhtar’s death in 1974 was a major blow to Ali. Soon after, he moved to the United States to pursue a higher education in literature, earning a doctorate from Pennsylvania State University and a Master of Arts from the University of Arizona. In 1987, Ali began teaching at Hamilton College in New York, continuing to write poetry throughout his academic career. His first collection of poems, A Walk Through the Yellow Pages (1987), won him major recognition, and The Half-Inch Himalayas (1989) sealed his reputation as an important poetic voice. Some of his greatest influences were Modernist American poets such as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Another significant influence was American poet James Merrill, a close friend of Ali’s.

Although he is sometimes referred to as an Indo-American poet, according to scholar Amardeep Singh Ali considered himself an American poet and identified as Kashmiri rather than Indian. Ali was proud of all his literary traditions—Hindi, Urdu, Persian, and English—and mined them to produce his unique poems. He was also known for giving the ghazal in English the dignity it was due, preserving the constraints of the form and its new language. He went onto publish the highly acclaimed collections The Country Without a Post Office (1997), Rooms Are Never Finished (2001), and Call Me Ishmael Tonight (published posthumously in 2003). In the late 1990s, Ali developed brain cancer, the same disease that had claimed his beloved mother a few years earlier. He passed away from brain cancer on December 8, 2001. Ali never married. Till the end of his life, he maintained an open adda or salon in Brooklyn, cooking Indian and Kashmiri dishes for friends and discussing poems.

Poem Text

Ali, Agha Shahid. “Postcard from Kashmir.” 1989. Poetry Nook.

Summary

The poem is structured as a dramatic monologue, where the speaker expresses their innermost thoughts to an invisible audience. The speaker of the poem looks at a postcard from Kashmir, which bears a picture of a Himalayan landscape. As they look at the postcard, they are flooded by nostalgia and a yearning for the homeland they left behind. They use a series of images to describe their relationship with Kashmir. The first image is the postcard itself, which is in the fashion of a travel souvenir, such as travelers often send back home. However, in the case of the speaker, someone from Kashmir—the speaker’s homeland—has sent them the postcard. This suggests that the speaker is not in Kashmir right now, but in another, distant geography—a suggestion the American term “mailbox” (Line 1) reinforces. The postcard fits into the speaker’s small mailbox. To the speaker, it seems the great land of Kashmir has shrunk to the size of a postcard. They think it is ironic that they have always loved order and tidiness, and now Kashmir itself is presented to them in a “neat” (Line 2) postcard measuring four inches by six inches.

As the speaker’s gaze zooms in on the details of the postcard’s image, they notice that the Himalayas in it measure only half-an-inch. It seems the speaker is holding the “half-inch” (Line 4) Himalayas in their hand, which is ironic since the Himalayas are actually the tallest mountain range in the world. In the next line, the speaker says the postcard is what home means to them now, alluding to the fact that they are no longer a resident of Kashmir. What’s more, it is the Kashmir of the postcard—an idealized representation of the actual Kashmir—that is now home to the speaker; this image is the closest the speaker will now be to Kashmir. The real Kashmir is lost to the speaker. When they return to their homeland, the real Kashmir will pale in comparison to the artificial perfection of the postcard: The waters of the Jhelum River will not be as blue as in the picture, nor will the colors of the actual Kashmir be as vivid. Even the speaker’s love for Kashmir will be “overexposed” (Line 9), like film left too long in the light. Thus, it will be faded. In other words, the Kashmir of the speaker’s memory and the real Kashmir will not be the same.

The speaker suggests in Stanza 4 that even their memory of Kashmir will change, like a blurred photograph. In this memory, Kashmir will be “out of focus” (Line 11), as if photographed through a malfunctioning lens. There will also be dark patches of undeveloped film in this memory photograph, symbolizing the period of the poet’s exile from Kashmir. In other words, the speaker’s memory of Kashmir is becoming more incomplete, as they no longer experience Kashmir firsthand. The gaps will not be a total blank, since the poet will remember Kashmir even when they are not there. However, they will constitute “a giant negative” (Line 13), since the speaker has not witnessed Kashmir change. Alternatively, Kashmir has changed so much that the Kashmir of real life has diverged from that of the speaker’s memories.