The city and the beloved witness: Mapping cityscapes of Delhi in Agha Shahid Ali’s poetry

Abstract

The reputation of Agha Shahid Ali, the Kashmiri-American poet, as a poet of exile is well established. Much of his poetry deals with themes of loss, lamentation, and longing where he speaks in a powerful voice about the plight of people of Kashmir. Shahid’s personal memories are not only of Kashmir but also of Delhi, the city where he was born, studied, taught, and published his first collection of poems. In his poems about Delhi he revisits both old Delhi and New Delhi: he roams around the city, listens to Qawwali at Saint Nizamuddin’s mausoleum, meets Muslim butchers, remembers his parents, remembers Shahjahan, and recites Bahadur Shah Zafar’s poem. This article investigates the representations and recollections of Delhi in Agha Shahid Ali’s poems and explores the city’s centrality in understanding socio-cultural history, the importance of particular individuals, and spatial specificity. It studies how the poet explores the city in relation to its languages, histories (the Rebellion of 1857, Partition, post-Partition), and cultures (Mughal and modern). I further investigate how Ali’s literary cartography of Delhi is influenced both by indigenous genres such as Shehr Ashob and the modern English poetic tradition, and how certain Indo-Islamic tropes become central to the poet’s literary memorialization of India’s capital city.

At Okhla where I get off

I pass my parents

strolling by the Jamnuna River

— Agha Shahid Ali, “A Lost Memory of Delhi”

“But, Zauq, who could bear to leave behind the alleyways of Delhi.”

— Zauq, nineteenth-century Urdu Poet

The cityscapes of Delhi have been mapped and remapped, imagined and reimagined in the writings of various travellers, refugees, and settlers who have expressed their love and loathing for the city. Khushwant Singh, the journalist and the novelist, captures the multifaceted metropolis’s splendour and squalour in City Improbable: Writings on Delhi. The book is an anthology of literature on Delhi from Ved Vyas, Ibn Batuta, and Amir Khursro to William Dalrymple and Raza Rumi. Apart from ethnographical accounts, historical records, and fictional narratives, the city has also been the subject of poetry from premodern times onwards. Sunil Sharma demonstrates the association of the city with early Persian poets: “Premodern Persian poetry was largely produced in an urban environment, and poets, whether associated with a royal court or of a mystical bent, had a special relationship with the city in which they practiced their craft” (2004: 73). Sharma studies the tradition of Urdu and Persian topographical poetry and looks at how “the dalliance of the lover and the beloved [is] set in the commercial world of a thriving city” (2004: 73). Saif Mahmood, in his book Beloved Delhi: A Mughal City and Her Greatest Poets (2018), explores the special relationship of eight poets with Mughal Delhi. He studies how the poets of Delhi such as Sauda (1713–1718), Ghalib (1797–1869), Daagh (1831–1905), and others immortalized Delhi through their poetry. With the publication of two recent anthologies: Semeen Ali’s Dilli: An Anthology of Women Poets of Delhi (2014) and Bushra Alvi Razzak’s Dilliwali: Celebrating the Women of Delhi through Poetry (2018), women’s poetry about the city has also found its own place on Delhi’s literary map.

Though Kashmiri-English poet Agha Shahid Ali (1949–2001) has written more than two dozen poems about Delhi, it is extremely rare to come across any mention of his Delhi poems in anthologies of writings on Delhi. One probable reason for the exclusion of Shahid’s poems, from various anthologies on Delhi, could be the greater attention and critical acclaim that Shahid’s poetry on Kashmir has received in comparison to his Delhi poems. Shahid’s reputation as a poet of exile is so firmly established that, often, his poems on topics other than exile get little or no attention. The poet’s name has almost become synonymous with Kashmir, after his collection of poems, The Country Without a Post Office (1997) heralded a new era of Kashmiri writings in English. Akhil Katyal makes a similar point in his article entitled “Agha Shahid Ali’s Delhi Years”. In the piece, which he claims to be a product of his many rendezvous with two of Shahid’s good friends, Indian Saleem Kidwai and Rupendra Guha Mazumdar, Katyal states that Shahid’s name “virtually indexes the keywords ‘Kashmir’ and ‘America’ when he is remembered in memoirs and profile sketches, [but] was never to be recalled in any close association with Delhi” (2011: n.p.). Shahid’s intense love for Kashmir is established but it is a less well-known fact that Shahid, through many of his poems, expresses a profound nostalgia and love for Delhi. Shahid writes about both old and new Delhi. In his portrayal of modern New Delhi, the city becomes a symbol of decadence of volatile urban life. By contrast, in recollections of old Delhi he appears to be more preoccupied with the metropolis’s landscape and history. Shahid’s treatment of the landscapes of both old and New Delhi resonates with his poems about Kashmir. Ananya Jahanara Kabir, while explaining contemporary representations of Kashmir, notes that it is difficult to ignore “the persistence of landscape in the collective meaning of Kashmir” (2009: 17). Shahid’s preoccupation with landscapes continues in his poems about Delhi. In this paper, I argue that Shahid juxtaposes cultures, memories, and histories in the treatment of the secular, sacred, Mughal, and contemporary landscapes of Delhi. In a similar way, Jahan Ramazani’s idea of a “dialectics of indigenisation” (Ramazani, 2009: 105) is valid even for Shahid’s poems on Delhi. Like Shahid’s hybrid English ghazals, his poems on Delhi, too, bring together both the native Urdu/Persian poetry form and the Western literary mode. He braces the native and foreign “together through their homologous conjunctures and fissures” (2009: 105).

My article is divided into three subsections. I begin with analysis of Agha Shahid Ali’s notion of exile to study various intersections that exist between Shahid’s poetry about cities (Srinagar and Delhi) and his own identity as a migrant poet. In the second section, I discuss how Shahid, purposefully, amalgamates both individual memories and communal memories in his literary memorization of Delhi and study how the indigenous traditions of mourning have influenced Shahid’s poems. In the final section, I explore the intrinsic relationship between the Urdu and Delhi’s cityscapes, emphasizing the importance of specificity when it comes to certain locations in both old Delhi and New Delhi.

Echoes of exile

Agha Shahid Ali was son of Agha Ashraf Ali, the famous educationist from Jammu and Kashmir, India. Shahid’s ancestors were from Samarkand (in modern-day Uzbekistan). ¹ After earning his master’s degree in English literature from the University of Delhi and teaching for a brief span of time at the same university, Shahid emigrated to the United States for his doctoral degree at Pennsylvania State University. Shahid gained popularity as an English poet during his stay in the US.

Shahid is, often, considered as a poet of exile in the tradition of Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky and Palestinian poet Mahmood Darwish. However, Shahid’s experience of exile is different as he was not forced to emigrate to America. For Nida Sajid, Shahid’s idea of exile is “temperamental” (2012: 90), whereas for Christine Benvenuto, “On paper, Agha Shahid Ali was a poet of exile” (2002: 261). Both Sajid’s and Benvenuto’s observations problematize Shahid’s notion of exile in relation to the politics and aesthetics of a poetry of exile. While living in America, he longed for his homeland and his real and imagined homeland became part of his existence as well as his poetic imagination. In “Postcard from Kashmir”, he ponders over both his past and future relationship with his home:

Kashmir shrinks into my mailbox;

my home a neat four by six inches.

I always loved neatness. Now I hold

the half-inch Himalayas in my hand.

This is home. (Ali, 2010: 29)

A postcard from Kashmir reminds Shahid of his homeland and he expresses his deep-rooted love and nostalgia through his poem. For the exiled poet, the postcard that he received in his mailbox is a metaphor of home and it persuades him to look back and rethink his association with Kashmir. Shahid’s nostalgia for Kashmir and his attempt to reclaim his home are akin to Rushdie’s notion of creation of home by expatriates and exiles. In his essay “Imaginary Homelands”, Salman Rushdie argues that “exiles or emigrants or expatriates […] are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back” (1991: 10). Thus, the desire to create imaginary home lessens the pain of physical alienation from the real home. Shahid’s nostalgic returns home, brought together in the posthumously published The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems (2009), resonate with Rushdie’s idea of an imaginary homeland. In his poems, Shahid is haunted by memories of Kashmir and by a pervasive sense of loss. Although references to various locations in Kashmir recur in his collection, in the poem “The Blessed Word: A Prologue”, Shahid admits, while writing about Osip Mandelstam, that: “He reinvents Petersburg (I, Srinagar), an imaginary homeland” (Ali, 2010: 171). Shahid not only traces the thematic similarities between his poetry and that of the exiled Russian-Jewish poet Mandelstam, or between Kashmir of the 1990s and Russia of the 1930s, but also demonstrates that memory can act as compensatory agency for exiled writers. Claire Chambers accordingly reads Shahid’s poetry as an attempt to give “an international dimension to the Kashmir situation. As a Kashmiri-American, Shahid wants to look at Kashmir from a broader perspective than the local geopolitics of South Asia” (Chambers, 2011: n.p.). In many of his poems, Shahid sees Kashmir as a mirror image of violence-ridden countries such as Bosnia, Chechnya, or Palestine.

There are intersections that exist between Shahid’s poems about Kashmir and his poems about Delhi. He deliberately brings together memories of both cities in some of his poems such as “I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight” and “New Delhi Airport”. The former poem was published in The Country Without a Post Office (1997) which has inspired authors such as Basharat Peer in his memoir Curfewed Nights (2008), and the playwright Abhishek Majumdar, who adapted the poem in a play entitled Rizwan (2017).In the poem, the poet sees that the valley has turned into a highly sensitive zone where “searchlights” follow the people of Kashmir and interrogation gates are erected at various corners of the city. Lamenting political violence and human tragedy, Shahid presents a disturbing picture of the valley where surveillance and atrocities against Kashmiris have become the new normal. The violence-ridden city of Kashmir is “invisible in its curfewed night” (Ali, 1997: 178) and it has become a “city from where no news come” (1997: 178). The ghost of Rizwan, who was killed in a detention centre, puts Kashmir in the poet’s dream. The poem “New Delhi Airport” from Rooms are Never Finished (2001) expresses Shahid’s concern for the issue of violence in Kashmir. He laments the loss of syncretic culture of Kashmir by referring to the destruction of sacred spaces such as “Kashmiri shrines” and “broken idols in temples” (Ali, 2010: 264). The physical distance from his turbulent home may have ensured safety but it has also become a source of sorrow, as the poet has returned to Delhi and is now hundreds of miles away from Srinagar. In both the poems, violence in Kashmir is not remembered in association with areas of conflict but rather in juxtaposition with a conflict-free city. He does not see Delhi as mirror image of Kashmir and he “scrutinizes the region from relatively peaceful vantage points, such as India’s capital” (Chambers, 2011: n.p.). In order to add a larger dimension to the conflict in Kashmir, “Ali engages in a discursive manoeuvre of reterritorializing the capital city and rehabilitating invisible voices from the margins in the otherwise hermetically sealed borders of the national” (Sajid, 2012: 89). The city of Delhi, in these poems, becomes a site for voicing the plight of the people of Kashmir.

Shahid, in his poems, revisits mountains, plains, and cities, but these are not merely nostalgic returns to the past. There is a sense of place in his poetry, and each place he visits is inextricably tied to a specific memory. In his poems he returns, revisits, and recreates his familiar world through memories. These are memories both of his homeland of Kashmir and also Delhi, a city where he was born, earned his master’s degree, taught English literature, and published Bone Sculpture (1972), his first collection of poems. He joined Hindu College, University of Delhi in 1968 to study English Literature and later joined the same college to teach undergraduates. However, Shahid’s experiences at the university were ambivalent. Amitav Ghosh, the Indian novelist, who attended the same university, recalls the mixed experience that Shahid had at the university:

Shahid’s memories of Delhi University were deeply conflicted: he became something of a campus celebrity but also endured rebuffs and disappointments that may well have come his way only because he was a Muslim and a Kashmiri. Although he developed many close and lasting friendships he also suffered many betrayals and much unhappiness. (2010: 319)

Ghosh’s statement demonstrates the double marginalization that Shahid had to face on account of his religious and regional identity. This hostility and discrimination shows that Muslims in general and Kashmiris Muslims in particular have become the other in post-Independence India. The statement also underscores how in a secular and democratic nation like India Muslims especially Kashmiri-Muslims occupy liminal spaces and they are, often, placed “in the uncomfortable position of national scape-goats” (Kumar, 2008: 177) and they “continue to be defined as refugees, living on borrowed time, always bound for Pakistan — affectively and emotively” (2008: 177). However, in his Delhi poems Shahid does not express any resentment. His love for the city seems to conquer all the betrayal and unhappiness that he probably experienced at the university. The Delhi University years were the formative years in his poetic career. During the same period, Shahid and his friends at the university, such as Rupendra Guha Majumdar, participated in various poetry readings and had their first collection of poems (Shahid’s Bone Sculpture and Mazumdar’s Blunderbuss) published by P. Lal of the Writers Workshop in Calcutta/Kolkata.

Memories, mourning, and lamentation for the city

From the very beginning of his poetic career, Shahid was preoccupied with the theme of memory. The opening poem “Bones” of Bone Sculpture, his first collection of poems, deals with memories. The young poet in his “twenties” is a “mourner in the Muharram Procession” (Ali, 1972: 11) who mixes blood with “mud, memory and memory” (1972: 11). The slaughtered martyrs and the ancestors, including Shahid’s own grandfather, expect to be remembered by the generations but the young poet, in a philosophical tone, finds the ritual of burning oil-lamp at the graveyard futile. For Shahid the memories of “slaughtered martyrs” (1972: 11) and those of “forgotten ancestors” (1972: 11) are similar. The remembrance becomes an act of mourning resonating with Freud’s conception: “the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on” (1957: 243).

The losses, in Shahid’s poems, are mourned at many levels: individual as well as communal, familiar as well as familial, and personal as well as political. In the process of mourning and lamentation, memory occupies a crucial position and the poet amalgamates his personal recollections of the procession and the communal memory of the martyrs of Karbala. Memories and recollections do not just reflect individual consciousness but also incorporate the plight of the people. Thus, the Shia Muslim tradition of collective mourning in the month of Muharram becomes Shahid’s eulogy for his own places and people and helps him in identifying himself with his own community, as Jahan Ramazani argues: “The ritualized, collective commemoration and group mourning of traumatic loss has often played a role in ethnic or national identity” (2009: 75). However, it would reductive to read Shahid’s poetry only from this perspective. In his interviews and poems he was always articulate about his multicultural identity. Ramazani, Ghosh, Chambers and other critics have also emphasized the various beliefs of the poet. Shahid himself acknowledged his secular, liberal, and un-Islamic upbringing in his early poems such as “Note Autobiographical — 1” and “Note Autobiographical — 2”. He writes that his “father mouthed Freud and Marx” (Ali, 1979: 21), “No one taught him Koran” (1979: 21), and the family “ate pork secretly” (1979: 21). “Dreams of Islam crumbled” (1979: 20) for him, so that his “tongue forgot the texture of prayer” (1979: 21). From recollections of the Muharram procession in “Bones” to memories of Hindu rituals and festivals in “Pilgrimage to Amarnath” and “Diwali 1971”, Shahid’s memories are multifaith and wide-ranging. He claimed himself to be a product of amalgamation of various cultures. In an interview with Rehan Ansari and Rajinderpal S. Pal, Shahid declare himself to be a

product of immense historical forces. There is the Muslim in me, there is the Hindu in me, there is the Western in me. It is there because I have grown up in three cultures and various permutations of those cultures. In one way Arabic culture, Persian culture and Urdu culture are available to me. (Ansari and Rajinderpal, 2017: n.p.).

In Rebel’s Silhouette, too, Shahid wrote about his multicultural upbringing. He states: “I was brought up in a bilingual, bicultural (but never rootless) being. The loyalties, which have political, cultural and aesthetic implications, remains entangled in me” (1995: 77). Shahid’s Bone Sculpture (1972) appears to be recognition of the plural influences on Shahid’s personality. It is also a nostalgia for Kashmiriyat, the rich tradition of indigenous secularism in Kashmir. In the collection, Shahid appears to be defending his poetry and politics, as he writes in the poem “You (Fragment V)”: “You do not like my poetry | please mutilate my wounded poetry hands | I will not write again” (Ali, 1972: 29).

It is interesting to note that while Shahid was in Delhi, he wrote poems about cities such as Srinagar and Amarnath but made no direct reference to Delhi in his first collection of poems. The nostalgia for the city in the form of “Delhi as memory” is an integral part of Shahid’s other collections that he published while he was away from Delhi, such as In the Memory of Begum Akhtar (1979) and The Half-Inch Himalayas (1992), while references to the capital city can also be found in The Country Without a Post Office (1996) and Rooms Are Never Finished (2001).

In the Memory of Begum Akhtar (1979), Shahid’s second collection of poems, was published when Shahid was a doctoral candidate at Pennsylvania State University. It commemorates various legendary Indian artists from music and films such as Begum Akhtar, Rasoolan Bai, Satyajit Ray, and K. L. Saigal. In the second section of the opening poem, Shahid laments the death of singer and performer, Begum Akhtar. In the act of commemoration, he remembers the Begum’s mastery of singing Indian classical music. Her harmonious notes were “seasoned | with decades of Ghalib, Mir and Faiz” (Ali, 1979: 10). By mentioning the names of three representative Urdu poets, Shahid gestures towards centuries of the literary history of the language. It is interesting to note that Ghalib, who considered himself a great poet, admired Mir and wrote: Reḳhte ke tumhīñ ustād nahīñ ho “Ghālib” | Kahte haiñ agle zamāne meñ koī “Mīr” bhi thā (You are not only the master of Urdu, Ghalib | It is said that there was Mir in the past). Faiz Ahmed Faiz also admired Ghalib and used to read Ghalib’s Divan (collection of poems) every day. In the same tradition, Shahid admired Faiz, translated his Urdu poems in English, and, as we will see later, has also written a poetic homage for the great progressive poet. In Shahid’s recollections, the legendary figures of the Indo-Muslim world become symbols of a rich Muslim past. While recalling personal memories Shahid evokes collective social memories, and the amalgamation of both in Shahid’s poetry is not merely an act of archiving history. As Sajid argues, the “cartography of nostalgia in Shahid’s writing is not a simple act of historiography” (2012: 87) and his “verses are remnants of a shared past that slowly cross over communal boundaries and national borders in the collective act of remembering” (2012: 87). Apart from these poetic tributes, while still nostalgic about Kashmir Shahid rues the lost glory of old Delhi in various poems.

Themes of lamentation and mourning are recurrent in most of the poems about old and New Delhi. The portrayal of urban Delhi in Shahid’s poetry resonates with Nissim Ezekiel’s poems on Bombay, wherein the new city becomes a symbol of the decadence of volatile urban life, whereas the poems about old Delhi appear to be influenced by the Urdu classical tradition of Shehr Ashob (poems about the city’s misfortune). ² The genre of poetry known as Shehr Ashob is not a recent development but existed before 1857. Rakhshanda Jalil, while discussing the social changes and Urdu literature from the 1850s to the 1920s, explains the characteristics of Shehr Ashob poetry as follows: “much of this genre of poetry was melodramatic, self-pitying and exaggerated with a great deal of rhetoric and play upon words in the best tradition of elegiac poetry such as marsiya, noha and soz”. She explains how in the genre of poetry, the poets write as a witness to their contemporary socio-political changes and how, through their poetry, they paint “graphic and word pictures” (2014: 4) of their first hand experiences. Shehr Ashob has social and historical importance as it offers personal narratives and records the reactions of various poets to the decline of Mughal sovereignty in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is difficult to trace the exact origin of the genre in Urdu but most of the scholars trace the tradition back to Persian poetry of the thirteenth century. The Persian poet Saadi lamented the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in his poetry in 1258, and the very first known Urdu Shehr Ashob by Shah Hatim Dihalvi (1699–1782) is said to have been influenced by Saadi’s work. However, according to the critic and the novelist Shamshur Rehman Farooqi, the first proper Shehr Ashob was written by Mir Jafar Zatalli. The Urdu tradition of Shehr Ashob is different from the Persian tradition. Prominent Urdu poets such as Mir Taqi Mir and Sauda wrote a number of poems deploring the diminishment of the Mughals’ cultural influence as well as their political hold over Delhi. The noted Urdu poet and critic Altaf Husain Hali (1837–1914) lamented the decline of Mughal culture of Delhi in “Marsiya-e-Marhum-e Dehli” (Elegy on a deceased Delhi). In the following poem, the Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir presents a bleak picture of the Mughal capital city:

There once was a fair city

Among cities of the world the first in fame;

It hath been ruined and laid desolate,

To that city I belong, Delhi is its name (Singh, 2004: 35)

Shahid, in a similar tradition, maps old Delhi: he reads the Mughal architectures as emblematic of historical changes and bemoans the downfall of Muslim civilization. The lamentation for old Delhi and its bygone culture is different from his mourning for Kashmir. In his poems on Kashmir, the lamentation is intensified through the use of the Shiite Muslim tradition of lamentation (marsiya, noha, and soz). ³ The metaphor of Karbala is central to many of his poems about Kashmir, ⁴ and they contain abundant references of the slaughtered martyrs of Karbala. Shahid draws parallels between the suffering of the believers at the battle of Karbala and the plight of the people of Kashmir. However, in poems about old Delhi, he paints graphic and word picture of the city and mourns the fate of city in the tradition of Shehr Ashob. The act of remembrance of historical events becomes the central impetus behind the poems. The poet revisits specific locations in old Delhi to create elegies for the downfall of Mughal civilization and the destiny of many Mughal emperors. Each place Shahid visits, in old Delhi, brings back a specific historical memory.

The tragic history of the city is evoked in the poems such as “Chandni Chowk, Delhi” and “After Seeing Kozintsev’s King Lear in Delhi” from The Half-Inch Himalayas (1987). In these two poems, Shahid excavates the city’s historicity by comparing the space and time of the past with the present. The locale of both the poems is Chandni Chowk, and at this particular location the poet is held by a “memory of drought” (Ali, 2010: 51). The locality was, and still is, one of the most important commercial hubs ⁵ of old Delhi. It was designed and established in 1650 CE by Jahanara Begum, Emperor Shah Jahan’s daughter. The royal market of Chandni Chowk, with the passage of time, has turned into a commercial centre for the masses. A film about Shakespeare’s King Lear by the Russian director Griogri Kozinstev at one of the cinema halls near Chandini Chowk, persuades Shahid to reimagine the place’s tragic history. Shahid visualizes both the glory and splendour of the past, when Chandini Chowk was a cosmopolitan space “strewn with jasmine flowers” (2010: 51) and when “royal women” (2010: 51) bought “perfumes from Isfahan | fabrics from Dacca, essence from Kabul, glass bangles from Agra” (2010: 51), and the present’s impoverishment, when the “tombs of unknown nobles and forgotten saints” (2010: 51) have become shelters for “beggars”. In the poem, the tombs of unknown nobles and saints are suggestive of the end of the Muslims’ political and spiritual dominance of the city. The poem is also suggestive of parallels between the tragedy of King Lear and the tragedy of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor, as he was led to witness the execution of his son:

I think of Zafar, poet and Emperor,

being led through this street

by British soldiers, his feet in chains,

to watch his son hanged (Ali, 2010: 51)

The shackled feet of the emperor and his son’s death sentence are emblematic of the last phase of Mughal rule in India.

Toward the end of the poem, Shahid quotes an English translation of couplets from Zafar’s famous ghazal that he wrote during his exile in Rangoon. ⁶ The lines from Zafar’s ghazal convey his pain, agony, and helplessness alongside his desire to be buried in his home city of Delhi. The figure of the last Mughal king, here, ceases to an individual and becomes symbol of a civilization. Shahid captures a historical event that marks the end of an era of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the unfortunate king, who is often remembered for the important role that he played in the evolution of Delhi as a cultural centre of Mughal India. William Dalrymple regards Zafar as an attractive symbol of Islamic civilization at its most tolerant and pluralistic form. He writes in The Last Mughal: “With Zafar’s departure, there was complete collapse of the fragile court culture he had faithfully nourished and exemplified. As Ghalib noted: ‘All these things lasted only so long as the king reigned’” (2007: 5).

Bahadur Shah Zafar himself bewailed the fall of Delhi in his poem, writing: “Delhi was once a paradise | Where Love held sway and reigned; | But its charm lies ravished now | And only Ruins remain” (2006: 80). The specific reference to the last phase of Mughal reign in Delhi resonates with the tragedy that befell Muslims after the fall of Delhi. Many British as well as Indian scholars have portrayed the Rebellion of 1857 as a Mohammedan conspiracy. The first prime minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru, too, documents hostility towards India’s Muslim population. In his autobiography, he comments on British anti-Muslim policies: “After 1857 the heavy hand of the British fell more on the Muslims than on the Hindus. They considered the Muslims more aggressive and militant than the Hindus, possessing memories of recent rule in India and therefore more dangerous” (1955/1936: 406).

Shahid seems to be preoccupied with the aftermath of the Mutiny and the British reconquest of Delhi from the Mutineers in 1857. In “Homage to Faiz Ahmed Faiz”, while paying tribute to one of his favourite Urdu poets, Shahid recalls the horror of the Rebellion’s aftermath. Divided into three sections, the poem is an elegy for the twentieth-century Urdu poet Faiz, who opted for Pakistan after the subcontinent’s partition in 1947. In the poem, Shahid examines India’s and Pakistan’s shared cultural heritage and history in the form of the Urdu language. According to him, when Faiz was away, “the subcontinent spoke to you in Ghalib’s Urdu” (Ali, 2010: 56). Ghalib’s Urdu surpasses the geographical and political divide of the continent, and the city of Delhi, too, rises above its national geography and become a symbolic site of struggle for the people of the subcontinent. The poet recalls the metropolis’s summer of 1857, when 30,000 men were hanged on “trees of Delhi” (2010: 56). In an attempt to archive the past in his poems, Shahid remembers the martyrs and their sacrifices and further evokes the trauma of the cartographic cracking of India and Pakistan. The memory of the past becomes an important aspect of Shahid’s poetry and his recollections are not merely acts of commemoration.

Wandering the alleys and bylanes of the old Delhi, in search of poetry among tombs, Shahid gets “caught in the lanes of history” (Ali, 1979: 29). The cityscape of old Delhi has been used by many Muslim authors to lament the loss of the Mughal past of India. Ahmed Ali’s classic Twilight in Delhi (2007/1940) deals with nostalgia for the glorious past of the Mughal era and envisages the imminent collapse and downfall of Muslim glory in India and Shahid Ahmed Dehlvi’s Dilli ki Bipta (2010/1950) deals with historical trauma and the collapse of the world of old Delhi. However, most Muslim writings about old Delhi deal exclusively with the city’s Muslim past, rather than offering an understanding of its multi-layered history.

The language and culture of the city

There is an intrinsic relationship between Urdu and Delhi, as the city has played an indispensable role in the development of language in the Indian subcontinent. In fact, the word “Urdu” was used for the first time around 1780 by the poet Ghulam Hamdani Musafi. Before that, it was known as “Hindvi” or Delhvi (derived from Dehli, the original name of the city). ⁷ Delhi, along with Deccan and Lucknow, was one of the literary centres of India. The Urdu scholar Frances W. Pritchett categorizes the tradition of Urdu ghazals into two schools: Dabistan-e-Dehli and Dabistan-e-Lucknow. The city, with its rise and falls, has inspired many of its legendary Urdu poets such as Mir Taqi Mir (1722–1810), Ibrahim Zauq (1788–1854), and Ghulam Hamdani “Mushafi” (1750–1824), all of whom have expressed their admiration and love for the city. At the same time, there is a prevalent sense of nostalgia for a lost culture and language that had flourished in Delhi and other parts of India during the Mughal period, and in particular, he crumbling of Mughal culture is lamented via the decline of the language of Delhi. For instance, Mirza Ghalib Mirza Ghalib (1797–1869) dealt with the theme of Urdu language and culture’s decline in the Delhi of his time. In letters written to his acquaintances and admirers, Ghalib expressed his sorrow: “Nowadays, the people of Dihli are either Hindus or common workers or men in Khaki or Panjabis or Goras. Which of these do you intend as the speakers of praiseworthy language?” (Rahbar, 1987: 133). In another letter to his friend, Ghalib demonstrates the changing demography of the city: “This is not the Dihli in which I have lived for the last fifty-one years! Dihli is now a military base. The only Muslims left in the city are either common labourers or else menial servants employed by government officials” (1987: 27). Shahid’s poems are full of references to Urdu poets such as Mir, Ghalib, and Faiz. In his poems about old Delhi, Ghalib and his poetry becomes a symbol for the Urdu language. Shahid reimagines the phases of decline for Muslim culture in India: first the fall of Mughal sovereignty, and later the aftermaths of the Mutiny of 1857 and the 1947 partition.

In his poems about the partition, he decries the current state of the language and culture, and portrays the impact of partition on different communities in India. The poems “Learning Urdu” and “After the Partition of India” (itself a revision of “Learning Urdu”) from In the Memory of Begum Akhtar deal with the changes that the partition has made to the lives of the people living in India. In “Learning Urdu”, Shahid’s friend is the “victim of a continent broken in two in nineteen forty seven” (Ali, 1979: 27) and he has been affected so severely that he “now remembers nothing” (1979: 27). The poet claims that his friend was acquainted with the poetry of Mir and has Divan- e- Ghalib, but now the poet finds “Ghalib at the cross road of language” (1979: 27). Shahid’s Ghalib reflects the precarious position of Urdu after the partition of 1947. The language has survived the partition but has suffered immensely. This point of view is made clearer in the poem “After the Partition of India”, which as mentioned Shahid wrote as a development of the earlier poem “Learning Urdu”. Shahid’s friend “will soon remember nothing | not even Ghalib” (1979: 28). The line is Shahid’s veiled prophecy about the Urdu language, which is decaying in post-partition India and it needs more effort than mere pretence to revive. The tragedy of the language is described in relation to the 1947 partition. Shahid refers to language politics in post-partition India and indicates how the processes of communalization and disintegration have worsened the condition of Urdu language and literature. He depicts how the chances of the language’s survival are becoming increasingly uncertain. ⁸ The migration of a huge swath of the Urdu-speaking Muslim community from India to Pakistan in the wake of the partition was one of the main factors behind the decline of Urdu in India. Since then, the language has become identified with Muslims and the circle of Urdu as a pan-religious language has steadily shrunk. The Indian novelist, Anita Desai captures the decaying of Urdu language in post-partition India in her novel In Custody (1979). In an interview with Magda Costa, she laments the condition of Urdu:

It was very much the voice of North India. But although there is such a reverence for Urdu poetry, the fact that most Muslims left India to go to Pakistan meant that most schools and universities of Urdu were closed. So that it’s a language I don’t think is going to survive in India. There are many Muslims and they do write in Urdu; but it has a kind of very artificial existence. (Desai, qtd in Yaqin, 2005)

Returning to “After the Partition of India”, Shahid imagines Ghalib, the legendary poet of Urdu, masquerading as a beggar at “the crossroads of languages” (Ali, 1979: 28). The Urdu poet is standing at the crossroads and refusing to move to either side of the border. In a related image Shahid, in the poem “A Butcher”, meets a butcher in one of the lanes of Jama Masjid, old Delhi. At the butcher’s shop Shahid realizes that the language’s “script is wet | in his palm” (Ali, 2010: 47) and it has been “polished smooth by knives” (2010: 47). This poem makes veiled reference to the impact of the violence, bloodshed, and aftermath of partition on the Urdu-speaking community. At a time when the language is dwindling in the city, Shahid finds the Jama Masjid butcher speaking Urdu which “is still fine | polished by generations” (2010: 47). The specificity of the location (the Jama Masjid or Friday mosque of old Delhi) in the poem is important from the perspective of Delhi’s post-partition history. After the migration of Muslims from Delhi after the partition, the vicinity of Jama Masjid became one of the few areas of contemporary Delhi where Muslims form the majority of the population. The vicinity is now symbolic of the remnants of this past civilization and in the poem, the butcher acts as the custodian of the Urdu language and Delhi’s intricate culture. The performative and poetic exchange of couplets of Ghalib and Mir between Shahid and the Jama Masjid butcher is redolent of the verbal poetic games of Urdu speakers:

I smile and quote

a Ghalib line; he completes

the couplet, smiles,

quotes a Mir line. I complete

the couplet. (2010: 47)

In the poems about old Delhi, Shahid returns, recollects, and recreates, bit by bit, the antique charm and forgotten Indo-Muslim culture of Mughal Delhi. In a sequence of seven poems titled “Walled City: 7 Poems on Delhi”, he reimagines both the past and the present of the city. The sequence captures the very essence of “the city of refugees” (Ali, 1979: 30). The city has since ancient times witnessed many migrations, and refugees have played a vital role in the literary imaginings and reimaginings of the city. Narratives such as Intizar Hussain’s Dilli tha Jiska Naam (2007) and Khushwant Singh’s Delhi: A Novel (1990) envision the city’s history, showing how various migrations have contributed to the socio-cultural metamorphosis of the city.

In the poem’s second section, Shahid remembers the city in relation to the history of many migrations, including the post-partition migration of Hindus from Lahore to Delhi. This section deals exclusively with the wounds of partition, which are still fresh in the minds of the generation who witnessed the breakup of British India. The first generation of migrants are “hoarder[s] of regret” (Ali, 1979: 30) and they will neither forget the trauma of the partition nor the proponents of the “Two-Nation Theory” (1979: 30). The friend’s grandfather is unable to rebuild his trusts in Muslims, and he warns Shahid’s friend: “Be careful, they stab you in the back. I lost my beloved Lahore” (1979: 30) Meanwhile the generation born after partition are depicted as “simple”, as they “never saw continent divide” (1979: 30). For the first generation of migrants, the city becomes a site of turbulent memories where they will always remember the trains that moved like ghosts. The sequence outlines unpleasant memories of the city, whereby the migrants are haunted by the memories of the trains that brought them to the city and also of the memories of other migrants who were brutally murdered while crossing the borders. The migrants are neither able to get rid of their memories of the actual violence nor the objects relating to this. The haunting memories of trains reveal how trauma becomes an integral part of the victim’s imagination. The description, at this juncture, resonates with portrayals of the violence and madness of partition in such narratives as Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (2009/1956) and Bapsi Sidwa’s Ice Candy Man (1989). In these partition narratives, the image of trains become one of the many icons representing the horrors of 1947’s partition. ⁹

Shahid’s recollections of contemporary Delhi are of a walled city. The reference is to old Shahjahanabad founded by Shahjahan in 1639, but in Shahid’s poetry the geographical vicinity of old “walled Delhi” is broadened. For the poet, even the contemporary metropolis is walled and divided on the basis of social class. Shahid remaps modern Delhi with its spatial uniqueness, which is an important factor in remapping the geohistory of cityscapes. Through his concept of urban spatial specificity, Soja demonstrates how important is to read “the inherent, contingent, and complexly constituted spatiality of social life (and history)” (2000: 8) in reading the modern cityscapes. The remapping of modern Delhi’s cityscape in the poem comes with all its complex urban form of spatial specificities: the fixed built environment in the form of buildings, class differences, and social relations. The privileged class can afford visits to expensive restaurants and bars, whereas the streets of the same city “light […] up | with the smile of beggars” (Ali, 1979: 31) and in Delhi’s “Dome of Sweat” (1979: 33) and “monsoon of steel” (1979: 33), “bootblack brushes” the poet’s shoes (1979: 33). A Marxist reading of the poem transforms the Delhi’s walled city into a site of class struggle between the bare minimum requirements for the survival of life versus a life of luxuries of drinking multiple bottles beer in air-conditioned restaurants and, in this struggle, the beggar with an “ancient beard” (1979: 33) dies at “the dirt corner” (1979: 33) and is taken along with “morning garbage” (1979: 33). Shahid deals with the insensitiveness and indifferent attitude of the city in the tradition of modern Indian English poets such as Ezekiel, Arun Kolatkar, and Adil Jussawalla who have dealt with theme of callousness and indifference in city life.

From Purana Qila to Daryaganj, Shahid takes his readers on a trip to Delhi’s familiar places in the poem “I Dream it is Afternoon When I Return to Delhi”. In the poem, the poet maps cityscapes of both the old and the modern city of Delhi. On his trip from Purana Qila, one of the oldest fort in Delhi to Daryaganj, the poet visits modern structures such as Golcha cinema hall, the Doll museum, and the building of the Times of India. The comfortable lifestyle of Delhi is depicted in contrast to the atrocities committed on marginalized communities in far-off places: “PRISONERS BLINDED IN BIHAR | JAIL HARIJAN VILLAGE BURNED BY LANDLORD” (Ali, 2010: 74). In “The Fate of the Astrologer Sitting on the Pavement outside the Delhi Railway Station”, he depicts the fate of both the astrologer and the the polluted city. The poet, in his poems about Delhi, is never a stagnant speaker but roams about the city. His gaze at the city and its people is not just a cursory visitor’s gaze but a mediating philosopher’s scrutiny: it is the observation of a curious historian and a concerned poet. The metaphor of memories provides the poetic persona with material to reconstruct the past of his city. He exhorts the reader to imagine and rethink the mosque’s history in his poem “At Jama Masjid”:

Imagine once there was nothing here

Now look how minarets camouflage the sunset

Do you hear the call to prayer? (Ali, 1979: 36)

In the poem, the Muslim call for prayer, the azaan, leaves the poet “unwinding scrolls of legend” (1979: 36). The poet travels back in time to the very beginning when “the first brick” (1979: 36) was brought to build the Masjid-i-Jahan-numa (Jama Masjid). In his imagination, Shahid deconstructs the building and then uses its pieces as building blocks for the reconstruction of the past when Shahjahan, the fifth Mughal emperor who built the masjid, is “bent with old age” and “imprisoned | with no controlling ghost” (1979: 36). The poetic representation of ruins as remains of the past and melancholy is fundamental to memory. Recollections of a visit to the shrine of Sufi saint Nizamuddin in the sequence of poems “Qawwali at Dargah of Nizamuddin Aulia” brings back the memory of a “drunk debauched colourful king”, Nasir-ud-Din Muḥammad Shah alias Shah Rangeela, and also of the “dying dynasty” (1979: 36) of the Mughals. In a juxtaposition of the past and the present, Nadir Shah’s sword is remembered in contrast to the present where the poet listens to the saint’s songs, buys flowers for the saint’s shrine, and watches people tying threads of mannat (to make a wish). Historical figures, common characters, and musical memories are followed by narratives of cruelty. At the poem’s end, Shahid walks “through the street calligraphed with blood” (1979: 36). In his poems, the Kashmiri-American writer often offers an alternative version of the past, as Nida Sajid has demonstrated in her reading of Shahid’s poems:

Ali constantly returns to official recordings of events as dream states in order to interrupt their linearity and to rupture the artifice of mainstream history. He revisits places and dates to make his words witnesses of loss and trauma that goes unrecorded in bureaucratic statistics of death. (2012: 90)

In “A Lost Memory of Delhi”, Shahid again returns to Delhi, the city of his birth and imagines the year 1948 when he was “not born” (Ali, 2010: 30) . He visits Okhla (a locality in south Delhi) and finds his parents strolling by the river Jamuna. Shahid sees his past in a way as one looks at a mirror. The past of his family’s familiar world comes alive before of his eyes: his father bicycling and his mother, a recent bride, wearing a sari. The pre-birth past is reconstructed with the use of things that are in a dilapidating state at the present moment. The imagined past home of 1948 is reimagined from faded photographs in the family album and from a broken lamp in the attic. The personal past is recreated in the same manner as the historical past. With his references to the poetic persona’s pre-birth home and the night when he came into being, Shahid attempts to reconnect his umbilical cord with Delhi.

In his poems on Delhi, then, he appears as a rooted native of Delhi who is celebrant of a lost culture, a forgotten history, and a diminishing heritage. His name Shahid, itself, establishes him as the “Beloved Witness”. ¹⁰ True to his name, his Delhi poems are eyewitness narratives. Memory and imagination, for Shahid, are compensatory faculties through which he converts absence into presence. In his “Delhi as memory” recollections, Shahid ponders both the pre-partition and the post-partition capital city, the impact of the partition, and the language of the city. These representations and recollections of the city are Shahid’s poetic trope through which he recreates “Delhi” as one of his imaginary homes.